Stephan Lehnstaedt's Alltagsgeschichte compares developments in two large cities under Nazi rule, describing how German occupiers interacted with—while establishing separate societies that largely remained aloof from—the local populations in Warsaw and Minsk. At the same time, he illustrates how some circumvented these restrictions. Providing rich details of their daily lives, he describes a “society of occupiers” that consisted of members of the German military, bureaucrats, and civilians (both male and female), who arrived to administer, live, and work in the “wild East” (148). In so doing, he broadens the field of “perpetrator studies” beyond killers and the act of murder to examine those not directly involved in the killing itself, as well as important moments when perpetrators lived “normal” lives: the popular German football juggernaut FC Schalke 04 playing a game to entertain Wehrmacht soldiers, Nazi occupation officials, and local inhabitants, for example; a German women's group meeting to learn sewing so that they would not always have to “run to the Jews, in order to get something sewn” (113); occupation authorities breaking up a local wedding and then deporting its attendees to Germany as forced laborers; a Schutzstaffel (SS) office issuing its female typist three looted wedding rings to use for her gold fillings.

Lehnstaedt chooses as case studies two significantly different cities: Warsaw and Minsk. The former, a cosmopolitan Polish city, was part of Hans Frank's Generalgouvernment, a territory that functioned as a kind of colonial possession that the Nazis hoped would one day achieve a higher status in German-held Europe. Part of the Reichskommissariat Weissruthenien under the control of Alfred Rosenberg, Minsk, by contrast, was less developed and more battle-damaged, and it contained different ethnic groups. Because it was closer to the front, it also evoked a certain sense of danger that Warsaw did not: Wilhelm Kube, the governor of the Reichskommissariat Weissruthenien, was blown up in his bed by a partisan, thus underscoring the precarious nature of life as an occupier in Minsk.

Lehnstaedt begins his study by describing the nature of the occupation in these two cities, as well as the kinds of people who arrived to administer the occupation. These included members of the Wehrmacht and the SS, as well as Nazi bureaucrats, but also large numbers of civilians, including women and ethnic Germans who had flocked to these capitals for various reasons. Here Lehnstaedt builds on Wendy Lower's work on women as facilitators and perpetrators in their own right (Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields [2013]). At the same time, he explores the spatial repercussions of occupation: the creation of German residential quarters in occupied cities, for example. It is ironic that the occupiers essentially ghettoized themselves, and that the authorities attempted to maintain this separation by generating a fear among Germans of the local population. Lehnstaedt expands on this with a detailed and useful discussion of attempts by the the Nazi administration to keep Germans separate from “racially inferior” locals. He also describes a variety of “carrot and stick” measures designed to reinforce the Volksgemeinschaft, ranging from prohibitions against mingling with locals to the development of German-only cultural activities, such as film nights, concerts, and soccer matches. Lehnstaedt looks as well at transgressions against “accepted” norms, e.g., the unauthorized arrival of wives accompanying their husbands in occupied areas, as well as a thriving black market that involved the sale by Germans of looted goods to Jews.

In his last two chapters, Lehnstaedt looks at the attitudes of the occupiers and at the role of ever-present violence in everyday life. Here he confirms earlier scholarship about the strutting “Golden Pheasants” (i.e., self-important and corrupt Nazi bureaucrats) and their disdainful attitudes toward the local population. He also touches on sexual hierarchies in the East, according to which racial and social status—usually of a male partner—determined the status of his female counterpart. The Holocaust itself is ever-present, if hovering at the margins of this book, but Lehnstaedt does note that that “within the society of occupiers, the massive destruction of the Jews was an open secret about which one also spoke” (248). The story of the typist given stolen wedding bands to use for gold fillings underscores the indirect role that the persecution and murder of Jews played in the daily life of these Germans. Lehnstaedt also points out that much of the communication with the home front took place through letters hand-carried by other Germans going home on leave, thus bypassing the official censorship system and often containing details of the genocide that was taking place. This further undermines claims that ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the Nazi genocidal project in the East. In addition, Lehnstaedt concludes that, “in Warsaw and Minsk, German occupational rule also entailed the near complete extinction of the indigenous culture and way of life” (1). He essentially describes, in effect, a “cultural genocide,” though he does not use that term, and his decision to include anti-Polish and anti-Slavic policy is extremely important.

Lehnstaedt's work makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the occupation of the East, especially with regard to the mentalities of the authorities and ordinary Germans who lived and worked there. Though exhaustively researched in most respects, the book includes some areas, such as sexual violence, that would have benefitted from greater coverage. Lehnstaedt recognizes that such violence occurred, but only provides details from German legal cases, which were highly mediated, usually being brought for vindictive personal reasons or in cases where the image of the regime was threatened. A more general criticism is that the cultural—and actual physical—genocide that took place sometimes gets lost in the richly detailed minutiae of daily life and experience. To be fair, Lehnstaedt is not writing a book about the Holocaust, strictly speaking, yet, as noted, the latter looms large in the background of his analysis. One could perhaps attribute this shortcoming to the chosen approach, Alltagsgeschichte, and to the sources he uses. Lehnstaedt's mastery of the archives is impressive, but he relies almost entirely on German sources, many of which were official. The voices of Jews and of the indigenous populations are thus rarely heard. This is not to suggest that Lehnstaedt should have changed his main focus, which is on the occupiers, but that an inclusion of how these other groups viewed their conquerors and, more important, what they observed them doing—acts that often do not appear in the official (or unofficial) sources created by the Germans themselves—might have enriched the narrative. This book nevertheless expands our knowledge about the daily lived experience of the occupation in the East, and should spur others to write an Alltagsgeschichte of the German occupation in smaller towns and villages. This is clearly a book that scholars of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust should read with interest, not least because of Lehnstaedt's arresting conclusion that the Volksgemeinschaft was not created in the East, in the end, but that “it was possible there to get much closer to the intended goal than [it was] in the Reich” (273).