Phillip T. Rutherford's impressive book deals with four large deportation operations carried out by Nazi Germany from December 1939 to March 1941, which moved inhabitants, mostly non-Jewish Poles, from annexed Polish territory to the General Government. The focus is the Reichsgau Posen, renamed in January 1940 Reichsgau Wartheland and known as the Warthegau. Comprising most of the former Prussian province of Posen, also with territories that used to be in the Russian Empire, the Warthegau was the largest and economically most important incorporated Polish territory. Nearly four million non-Jewish Poles lived there, as well as 366,000 Jews (concentrated in and around the city of Litzmannstadt/Łód͸) and 327,000 Germans. The Nazis aimed to Germanize the region and left hundreds of thousands homeless and impoverished. During its five years of operation there, the Umwandererzentralstelle (Central Emigration Office) of the Security Police was responsible for the eviction and deportation or displacement of almost 905,000 natives, mainly non-Jewish Poles. Many people died along the way.

German propaganda only mentioned allegedly constructive Germanization. Thus SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Greiser, the region's Gauleiter (senior Nazi party leader) and Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor), proclaimed, “As we make the land on the Warta and the Vistula the breadbasket of the Greater German Reich and create Lebensraum for millions of German people, we finally end the unhappy chapter in German history that was characterized by the expression ‘People without Space.’” But to him and the Nazis it was clear, as Rolf-Heinz Höppner put it, that they were carrying out “ethnic and racial cleansing” (p. 157). The Nazis vigorously pursued their vision of a purely German Warthegau for nineteen months. Yet they failed to achieve it. Despite the deportation of 250,000 Poles to the General Government and 260,000 other Poles as forced laborers to the Reich—not to mention the execution of thousands in September and October 1939—by the end of 1941, still only fourteen percent of the population was German, no more than half of whom were immigrants. Poles still comprised eighty percent. Rutherford describes the why and how in great detail.

Christopher Browning has stated that in the summer of 1941, in the campaign to kill the Jews “every step was uncharted, every policy an experiment, every action a trial run.” Rutherford, however, convincingly calls the anti-Polish deportations a prehistory of the Holocaust. “Well before the decision to pursue the Final Solution had been made and well before the first Jewish transports rolled to Chełmno and Beł΀ec in the winter of 1941–1942, the National Socialists had, through trial and error, mastered the ‘science’ of human roundups, the expropriation of property, and the shipment of human cargo en masse to the East” (pp. 11–12). Without this prehistory, the mass murder of the Jews would have been slower and less efficient. This is a major contribution to our knowledge.

Most scholars agree that with regard to the Jews, the Nazis consistently gave less priority to rational economic considerations than to the “Final Solution.” Rutherford wonders whether the same applied to the Polenpolitik, and tentatively finds the opposite. Despite the evident anti-Polish racism of the Nazis, Rutherford believes (with the historian Hans-Erich Volkmann) that in this policy “utilitarian concerns” were and remained primary. That was why the main Polish victims were those with the best properties, and not those considered racially or politically the worst. And he posits that a cumulative de-radicalization took place, so that Polenpolitik and Judenpolitik developed in opposite directions. The Warthegau Nazis began with unrealistic plans to deport eighty percent of the Poles immediately, but they ended in early 1941 with exempting from deportation all Poles who could work, and displaced them to farms and factories within the Warthegau. Greiser had become aware of the incompatibility of his racial and economic missions. Rutherford also argues that ultimately, “widespread Germanization of hundreds of thousands of otherwise ‘racially inferior’ Poles” was allowed (p. 220), although the evidence for the Warthegau, in my view, insufficiently supports this.

Many scholars believe that economic considerations did not compromise anti-Polish and anti-Slavic ideological goals before Germany began losing the war, but Rutherford shows that with regard to the Warthegau Poles, the conflict began earlier, well before any pressing labor shortage and while “the euphoria of victory was intense and the prospects for a Thousand-Year Reich dominating central Europe seemed very real” (pp. 212–213). I know no other monograph that makes this case so clearly.

A revision of a doctoral dissertation defended at Pennsylvania State University, Prelude to the Final Solution uses archival records in Warsaw (the Institute of National Memory), Bydgoszcz, Łód͸, Poznań, College Park in Maryland (the National Archives), and Washington (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). It includes good maps and some vivid photographs. Largely lacking, however, is the Polish perspective, probably because the author does not appear to read Polish. Also somewhat problematic is the absence of a discussion of the concept of “ethnic cleansing,” which is often mentioned in the book (though not in its title). As a whole, however, this well-written book is excellent and required reading for all specialists in the history of the European theater of World War II.