This short volume explores the millenarian zeal that shaped the Nazi occupation of East Europe. To its adherents, Nazism was not only destructive, but in the words of Christian Ingrao, it “was also a question of hope, of joy, of fervor and Utopia: it involved building a new world, an alternative future—a Nazi future” (xix–xx). That Nazi future promised the recasting of eastern Europe into a German utopia worthy of a thousand-year Reich. This promise, however, was directly tied to wartime successes that allowed for concrete imagining of the German East. For this reason, Ingrao's book covers a very defined period, “the moment of Utopia” (1), precisely 1,399 days, from the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, to July 1, 1943. Ingrao does not explain his exact end date, but by then, it is safe to say, the Nazi military situation precluded any promise that Nazi Germanization schemes could be fulfilled.

In Part I of this study, Ingrao, a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, covers much well-trodden ground. He describes the many short-term and long-term plans for Germanization that culminated in the infamous 1942 General Plan East; the “nebula” (29) of Nazi institutions involved in Germanization efforts; the “parousia” (17) of the roughly 30,000 Nazi men and women who came to the East to secure the Nazi future; and the various network, generational, and proximity-to-borderlands arguments that explain how and why so many Germans found the promise of the East so alluring. Despite his occasional convoluted prose and abstruse argumentation, Ingrao is at his best when he describes the heady emotions or “soteriological dimension” (69) that animated Nazi zeal: through Osteinsatz (service in the East), men and women experienced the forging of Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) in ways that spoke to their desire for mission, liberty, sacrifice, heroism, adventure, and even combat. In Ingrao's words, “The Osteinsatz was truly a militant act, an act of belief … [it] strikes us as an experience of alterity marked by the peculiar seal of the fervent hope for the realization of Utopia” (86, 87).

The second part of this work charts how specific (and phantasmagoric) Germanization plans evolved over time, according to Nazi military fortunes. German ethnocrats considered “population damming, rural cordons, ethnic walls and human bridges,” in order to promote the “insularization of ‘Polishness’ ” (98). Plans involved “penetrating cordons [that] connect the zones of colonization to the old Reich” (100), but as German armies marched deeper into the Soviet Union, the cordons were no longer contiguous; instead, German base settlements were planned hundreds of kilometers apart from one another. Beyond planning on a continental scale, Nazi ethnocrats considered ways to foster what Ingrao calls “Nazi sociability” (127) in new or revitalized population centers: architectural ensembles that included parade grounds; community buildings for political, educational, cultural, and sports activities; and police and other institutions of social control. Finally, Nazi planners reached into the intimate sphere, designing peasant houses that featured multiple rooms for children and modern hygienic conveniences such as indoor plumbing. All these plans, however, were predicated on an absence forged through violence: Germanization presumed the removal of tens of millions of Slavs and Jews.

In Part III, Ingrao focuses on how Germanization played out in practice. His focus is Zamość, “conceived as the laboratory for the Nazi Utopia” (178). Indeed, SS leader Heinrich Himmler determined that this city, located in the General Government, and with a mixed population of 517,000 inhabitants in 1939—Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and (very few) Germans—should become a site of intense Germanization. Under the aegis of Odilo Globocnik, a zealous SS police leader, 50,000 Jews were exterminated, roughly 100,000 Poles were deported, and Poles and Ukrainians engaged in murderous struggle against each other. Meanwhile, Globocnik attempted to settle some 13,000 German colonists, many of whom languished in resettlement camps because it was too dangerous for Germans to live on expropriated farms. Drawing on Nazi instructions given to new settlers, Ingrao outlines some of the more uplifting elements of the desired new German society. Neo-paganism, in the form of Gottgläubigkeit (belief in God), was to underlay a new calendar intended to express “gratitude to nature and omnipotence.” Holidays such as harvest festival and sports days were to foster the “awakening of human beings to their aptitudes, such as courage, boldness, dexterity, bodily robustness, energy …” (197). In Zamość, Germanization included everything from mass murder to a new calendar.

At the risk of sounding churlish as the author of another study of Germanization, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Nazi Occupation of Western Poland (2010), I question Ingrao's notion, repeatedly stated, that Nazi Germanization schemes reached their apogee in Zamość (22, 162, 172, 173, 199). Zamość may indeed have seen more cataclysmic violence among a much smaller population, but Greiser's Wartheland experienced more far-ranging and ambitious Germanization schemes, both in terms of population upheaval and the remaking of the land as “German.” Although Ingrao neglects some American work, he introduces French sources that appear but infrequently in Anglo-American scholarship. Most notably, he draws on the anthropological work of Édouard Conte and Cornelia Essner, La Quěte de la race: Une anthropologie du nazisme—more attention to this and other French sources would surely enhance our understanding of the Nazi regime.

By mid-1943, Nazi hopes gave way to reality and, in turn, to a focus on extermination, which was just one aspect of what had once been a much more ambitious Germanization program. Although beyond the chronological scope of his study, Ingrao argues that Nazi Germanization policies sharpened ethnic tensions throughout the East, leading to paroxysms of violence that prompted what Rogers Brubaker has called the unmixing of peoples during and immediately after World War II. Ingrao's emphasis on zeal and timing offers intriguing new insights into a story largely familiar to historians of the Nazi period.