In the now extensive literature on Holocaust perpetrators, one key figure in the Prussian field administration, the Landrat (chief county executive), has received little to no attention. Had Mary Fulbrook not discovered that Udo Klausa, the husband of her German godmother Alexandra, occupied that position in the Polish and Jewish Upper Silesian town of Będzin, during the Third Reich, we would still remain unaware of the Landrat's role in implementing Nazi policy in the annexed territories. Beginning with the Klausa family's archive, which Udo's and Alexandra's son Ekkehard made available to her, Fulbrook has produced a rich and complex account of a “decent” German who assiduously performed the duties expected of him, despite his unease over the consequences of the measures he imposed. Having escaped postwar denazification, and having survived a Ludwigsburg Central Office investigation into his wartime activities, Klausa became Director of the Rhineland Regional Council in the state of Rhineland-Westphalia, a post that gave him oversight of some 12,000 employees and wide-ranging responsibilities. Having later cast himself as innocent of the Nazi regime's crimes, Klausa becomes for Fulbrook less a case study in individual motives or intentions and more a question of “the conditions under which people could be mobilized in certain ways, whatever their inner qualms; and of the tragic consequences of their behavior” (p. 9).

Born in 1910 to a family with roots in the region where he later served, Udo Klausa aspired to follow his father (himself a Landrat) into the Prussian administration. Handsome, intelligent, well-educated, and ambitious, Klausa's only liability was his Catholicism, an impediment that he overcame through his marriage to an aristocratic Protestant woman and his right-wing politics. Influenced by the tensions of the Silesian borderlands, Klausa signed up with a paramilitary unit as a schoolboy, later joining the SA as a university student. In 1936, he enlisted in a prestigious Prussian infantry regiment that would provide him with status, valuable contacts, and later an alibi. Klausa's ascent in the civil administration was meteoric. He was appointed as the Landrat of the Będzin and its surrounding district at the age of thirty. To be sure, Nazi radicalism troubled Klausa, especially the party's hostility to Christianity. Yet as was typical among conservatives, Klausa valued Nazism's commitment to imposing “order,” reviving the economy, and reestablishing Germany as a great power. In his memoirs and other testimony, Klausa repeatedly asserted that he had kept his distance from Nazi fanatics, especially their lethal antisemitism. Nonetheless, Klausa and his family lived in a spacious house confiscated before his arrival from the “Jew Schein,” a dwelling that stood but a short distance from the sports ground where Jews awaited deportation to their deaths. Neither Klausa's memoirs nor Alexandra's numerous letters confronted the injustice of living in stolen property nor troubled themselves with the misery that they and other Germans visited upon the population of Klausa's district. Indeed, Klausa was no bystander. His deeply ingrained racism and antisemitism, and his reflexive belief in the Nazi colonial project led him to implement without question the tasks that his superiors expected of him: the confiscation of property, the mobilization of forced labor, summary executions, ghettoization, resettlement, and ultimately deportations to Auschwitz, a mere twenty-five miles away. Klausa's superiors could not praise his intelligence, attention to detail, and efficiency enough.

In addition to focusing on Klausa, Fulbrook presents the testimony of Polish and Jewish survivors, uniting perpetrators and victims in one story. By underscoring the limited perspectives of each side (Jews generally experienced the abuse of Klausa's underlings without seeing him behind their actions, while Klausa pushed his victims to the periphery of his consciousness), Fulbrook deepens her analysis of this self-described “decent” German. Although Klausa's service record was exemplary from his superiors' perspective, Alexandra's correspondence revealed how her husband's duties weighed on him. He suffered from hypertension, assorted stomach ailments, and psychological malaise, particularly at moments when the horror that his job entailed became difficult to avoid. Still, rather than resign from a position to which he had aspired his entire life (much less refuse to carry out his superiors' orders), Klausa used military service as a buffer against admitting his complicity. Accordingly, Klausa claimed in his postwar interrogation that he bore no responsibility for the execution of thirty-two innocent Poles by German soldiers and gendarmes in June 1940, shortly after his arrival in Będzin. At the time, he said, he was serving with his infantry unit in France. Yet as Fulbrook discovered, Klausa was not where he said he was. He and his family were relaxing at an estate a mere ten miles away from Będzin so he could improve his fitness, while remaining accessible to his subordinates by phone. Thus it was likely that he gave the execution order, not his deputy as Klausa insisted was the case. To give another, even more serious, example, Klausa claimed to have done nothing more than witness a fraction of the deportations of Jews from Sosnowiec and Będzin to Auschwitz in August 1942 before joining his unit in Russia. In fact, his superiors fought (ultimately in vain) to keep him from military service because they considered him indispensable, and Klausa did not ship out until December. However troubled his conscience, Klausa's actual behavior told the truth about where he stood.

The strength of this book lies first in its range of sources, which in addition to Klausa's (and his wife's) writings, Klausa's testimony to the Ludwigsburg Central Office investigation, and Fulbrook's interviews of survivors, draws deeply from German and Polish archives. In addition to providing a full picture of the devastating impact of Nazi rule on the Poles and Jews of Będzin and its environs, Fulbrook demolishes the distance between Klausa and his victims that he constructed to avoid responsibility for his actions. As the author explains, conflict between local party and state officials was common in the Third Reich, but not in Upper Silesia. Klausa, as his superiors recognized, was crucial to implementing Germanization and the Final Solution, and he fully cooperated with the party and SS. Second, Fulbrook underscores the inseparability of German colonialism and the Holocaust, notwithstanding the latter's murderous extremes. Indeed, Klausa's later attempt to draw the line between the extermination of Jews and what he considered the routine violence of maintaining colonial hierarchies in his district belies the relationship between imposing “order” and genocide. Even before the mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz in late summer 1942, selective deportations of Jews found guilty of offensives ended in their deaths. Lastly, Fulbrook deconstructs Klausa's distinction between “radical” Nazis and conservatives such as himself. However useful it is to appreciate the subtle differences between conservative and Nazi worldviews, they made no difference in the outcome. Like Klausa, thousands of conservatives served the Nazi regime to the bitter end, enabling and carrying out its murderous agenda.