Catherine Epstein justifies her finely crafted and superbly researched biography of Arthur Greiser on two grounds. First, the brutality and radicalism of Nazi rule in the Warthegau exceeded those in other occupied regions in significant ways, and this particularity of the Warthegau cannot be explained by the common features of Nazi ideology on the one hand or the functioning of the Nazi state on the other. “Men like Greiser … mattered in the Nazi regime,” she argues, and he was personally responsible for the distinctive brutality and radicalism of Nazi rule in his bailiwick. Second, her book is an argument for biography not just as essential to historical explanation but also for an appropriate sense of moral consciousness: “this biography has underscored the role of human agency in Nazi Germany,” she writes, which by implication, she suggests, is insufficiently acknowledged in both ideological and functional explanations.

If Greiser is Epstein's explanation for the distinctiveness of the Nazi occupation of the Warthegau, how in turn does she explain Greiser? Basically her interpretation combines ideology, character, and situation. Uprooted from his birthplace in Posen at the end of World War I, Greiser was a virulently anti-Polish German nationalist—a not untypical product of borderlands ethnic strife and grievance. Nonetheless, as he enjoyed increasing prosperity in Danzig in the 1920s, he gravitated away from his initial dalliance with right-wing politics and veterans groups such as the Stahlhelm. The onset of the Great Depression and the abrupt loss of his business in 1929 were the occasion for a suddenly unemployed Greiser to leave his Masonic lodge and join the NSDAP. The need to cultivate a proper Nazi personality brought his otherwise innocuous character deficiencies—a preoccupation with status, a need to be admired, and an appetite for the “good life” in terms of material gratification coupled with chronic insecurity—into play. He reinvented himself as a domineering, aggressive, and abusive Nazi whose political success now compensated for his recent economic failure. But his success was threatened by two factors: vulnerability to accusations about his past that included Masonic membership, relatively late membership in the NSDAP, and petty corruption on the one hand and a dangerous party rival in the form of Albert Forster on the other. In this situation he positioned himself as the “moderate” alternative to Forster in the hothouse of Danzig politics, only to come away from that experience with the determination never again to be outflanked by more radical rivals.

Greiser was given a second chance to make a Nazi career with his appointment as Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of the Warthegau. Here his visceral anti-Polish nationalism, his determination to “work toward the Führer” by meeting Hitler's expectations of his eastern Gauleiter, his ties to Heinrich Himmler as his closest ally among the Nazi bigwigs, and his own personal need to assert himself as bullying master of the Warthegau against all comers combined to create the perfect storm of Nazi radicalism in the form of the most pervasive and lethal program of “Germanization” within the Nazi empire.

While other historians have also focused on Greiser's distinctive role in the Final Solution in the Warthegau, which was the site of the first gassing camp at Chełmno, Epstein emphasizes the interconnection between the murder and exploitation of the Jews and other aspects of “Germanization.” First was the “resettlement” of two waves of ethnic Germans (290,000 in 1939-41 and 242,000 in 1944) in the Warthegau, which was ultimately the recipient of eighty-five percent of all such “resettled” Volksdeutschen during the war. Greiser intentionally positioned himself as the sole Gauleiter who welcomed this vast influx of “settlers.” Second were the policies of expulsion and uprooting, expropriation, forced labor, segregation, cultural and religious repression, kidnapping of children deemed “racially good,” reduction of the birthrate, and selective mass murder against the Polish population. Here again, Greiser was the driving force behind the most extreme package of anti-Polish measures within the Nazi empire, while his rival eastern Gauleiter practiced policies of much broader assimilation. Third was the planned transformation of both the natural landscape and built environment to make Germans feel at home in Greiser's “model” Gau. In the end Greiser's destructive policies of “Germanization” were realized far more than his visions of Aufbau.

Two minor errors are worth mentioning. Early in the book Epstein refers to the 1944 influx of ethnic Germans as coming from the Crimea, but in later chapters she correctly refers to these people as “Black Sea” Germans from the south Ukraine, especially Transnistria. Unfortunately, no editor caught the discrepancy. She also twice claims that the network of Jewish forced labor camps in the Warthegau was the largest in the German empire, as 30-40,000 Jews passed through them. The Organization Schmelt camp system in Silesia, however, peaked at more than 50,000 Jewish laborers, and in Globocnik's Lublin camps more than 42,000 Jews were killed on the two days of Erntefest alone, so clearly an even larger number of Jews entered them at one time or another. Greiser was not always in first place as the most notorious of Nazi satraps.

Epstein ends her book with a telling depiction of Greiser as a broken man who tried to reinvent himself one last time. A notorious persecutor of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the Warthegau, he read the Bible in his prison cell in Warsaw, claimed now to “believe deeply in God and Jesus Christ,” but had not the slightest sense of responsibility, remorse, or guilt for the terrible loss of life and suffering he had caused. Only Pius XII took the bait and urged clemency for Greiser, an act that appalled Catholic Poles. Epstein confesses that she feared that writing a biography of Greiser would either result in too much empathy for her subject or moral numbness. Her fears were groundless. Anyone who reads this book can only come away with both a loathing for Greiser and a greater appreciation for the horrific evil such “weak perpetrators” (in the sense of vulnerable party credentials on the one hand and personal insecurities on the other) like him can create because of what they feel they have to prove.