Rachel O'Sullivan's new book interrogates how the Germanization of western Poland by Nazi Germany during World War II might best be understood. What, she asks, if we thought of policymaking and on-the-ground behavior there between 1940 and 1943 as colonial, and assessed it in comparison to other colonial policies, especially in non-European spaces? What if it were settler colonial? Her study provides a useful thought experiment on how to reassess these events, considering them alongside other case studies on violence and victimization to draw a nuanced portrait of the region at war. This narrow focus allows O'Sullivan to subtly reassess what we know about Nazi Germany's eastern frontier and when and for what reasons historians do comparative work.

Notably, this is not a Holocaust history (though recent Holocaust literature is a jumping-off point), or on the hot war in Poland or on the Eastern Front, or about the military occupations; this is about police and civilian projects unfolding under the cover of war, and the various sorts of Germans drawn in to them. The focus is not on Jewish inhabitants or escalating antisemitic persecution, and it is not on majority ethnic Poles, who were the victims of violence, displacement, and dispossession across the region. O'Sullivan is interested rather in a microstudy of different kinds of Germans—Reichsdeutsch and Volksdeutsch, Nazi bureaucrats and new “resettlers”—and examining the shifting power dynamics and hierarchies they created. Nazi Germany, she notes, did not implement a civilizing mission on the lands it conquered but generally attempted to remove indigenous peoples entirely, which differentiated it from other colonial regimes. Nevertheless, there was a civilizing mission embedded within the Nazi racial vision, between established Germans and the ethnic German diaspora they resettled: the Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) was deeply hierarchical; ethnic Germans required Germanization, Nazification, and indeed “civilization” even though they were considered superior to Slavs, Jews, and Africans. Following the pathbreaking work of Lora Wildenthal, Elizabeth Harvey, and Wendy Lower, she highlights the crucial agency of young German women from the Third Reich in these “civilizing” endeavors and their enthusiasm for the work. It underscores that even the profiteers of wartime ethnic cleansing and genocide could also themselves be the victims of other Nazi policies and that categories like victim and perpetrator, local and settler, shifted meaning during the occupation.

The book unfolds in five chapters, the first and last of which compare what was happening in western Poland during the war to western European overseas colonial ventures, assessing how the Imperial German expansion eastward into historically Polish territory compared to what was happening simultaneously in Africa and later in the Third Reich. Rejecting the idea that the first projects caused the later ones or that any sort of Sonderweg connects them, she is interested rather in parallels in imperialist discourse and how they became embedded in culture, shaping multiple generations of Germans’ thinking about geography, personal responsibility, farming, vacationing, and who and what was “foreign.” Chapter 2 dissects the treks of eastern Europeans of German origin and their resettlement in Nazi-occupied western Poland, the removal of Poles and Polish Jews, and the limited attempts to assimilate local people into the Nazi German project. It assesses the official Berlin position on these resettlements, their colonization personnel in the region, and the varied perspectives of the new settlers. Chapter 3, “A German Task,” examines the de-Polonization of the new communities: how the new settlers lived, what institutions they built, and how their project was trumpeted to and perpetuated by Reich Germans “slumming” in these still-being-civilized territories. Chapter 4, the most important chapter in the book, breaks down the coercion and violence against the local population, Polish and Jewish, that this project required, and how the settlement of western Poland became entangled with the developing Holocaust and with Generalplan Ost, the wholesale SS-directed ethnic resettlement of eastern Europe.

Throughout, O'Sullivan sketches intriguing comparisons between what happened in Poland during World War II and other colonial projects, including ones in Algeria, Ireland, Namibia, Honduras, Canada, and Zanzibar, noting points of difference, as well as overlapping personnel and discourse. Synthesizing insights from Shelley Baranowski's Nazi Empire: German Imperialism and Colonialism from Bismarck to Hitler (2011) and Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (2009), O'Sullivan assesses what kind of empire Nazi Germany was and how and when and why it was colonial. She integrates the recent German-language literature contextualizing the Holocaust and the crimes of the Third Reich against earlier German imperialism and other episodes of settler colonialism. Paired with work that highlights other aspects of these resettlement and colonization policies, like Phillip T. Rutherford's Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939-1941 (2007), Catherine Epstein's Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (2010), and Jonathan Huener's The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939-1945 (2021), and the robust literature on the Holocaust and the Chełmno (Kulmhof) death camp, O'Sullivan allows us to see that the perpetration and perpetrators of the Third Reich's demographic policies could be as complicated as their victims—and that few of these policies were entirely new.