Recent scholarship on Nazi Germany, notably Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience, and Robert N. Proctor's The Nazi War on Cancer, has emphasized what the Nazis felt was the positive side of their worldview. While they tried to hide evidence of mass murder, they proudly trumpeted other closely related aspects of their Aryan demographic megalomania: resettlement of ethnic Germans on conquered territory in the east, broad efforts in public health, support for racial purity. Horwitz's excellent Ghettostadt takes this broader view of Nazi policy by thoroughly examining the contrasting, but integrally connected policies that made Łódź a new “Nazi city”: the expulsion and extermination of all Jews; the expulsion of Poles and Polish influence from the center of the city; the importation of ethnic German settlers from farther east; and the extensive investment in city planning and urban design during wartime. The Holocaust was an end in itself for anti-Semitic Nazi leaders, but it also functioned as one part of their larger scheme to transform vast stretches of eastern Europe by replacing the mix of Slavic and Jewish peoples with Germans.

While the developing Holocaust in one city is his major subject, Horwitz shows how the murder of Jews was connected to the broader racial goals of Nazi leaders. Łódź was Germanized into Litzmannstadt by other means of “cleaning up”: extensive investments in sanitation, building of new apartments, importation of traditional German culture, renaming streets, and putting up signs in German. While Horwitz shows us new examples of the familiar figure of the murderously anti-Semitic Nazi doctor, he introduces another category of anti-Semite, the city planner. Wilhelm Hallbauer, imported from Wilhelmshaven to Germanize Łódź, believed that the modern German city must have both a superior infrastructure and no inferior peoples. The transformation of Łódź into Litzmannstadt occupies only a small part of this book, but enough to make clear how the Nazis could justify mass murder and why millions of Germans blithely ignored the evidence of genocide around them in order to enjoy the better life that the Nazi state provided for them.

Horwitz shows that ghettoization was not merely a step toward annihilation, but offered many advantages to the Nazi state. Ghettoization functioned simultaneously as quarantine, a means to reduce consumption of scarce resources, and a mechanism to murder through “natural causes.” The ghetto made it easier to steal Jewish property and labor; confiscation of possessions could be done without difficulty, while ghetto workshops were a massive “revenue-generating enterprise” (p. 97). As in every phase of the Holocaust, the plunder of Jews was a primary consideration.

Horwitz develops the contrast between building and destruction, between creating playgrounds for German children and killing Jewish children, as both historical interpretation and rhetorical device. He uses selected evidence about the entertainment provided for the new Germanic residents of Litzmannstadt to communicate his outrage about what Nazis did to Jews. His tone remains factual throughout, but his juxtaposition of evidence in each chapter communicates what words alone cannot. The unbelievable cruelty of ghettoization was motivated by the peculiar logic of Nazi humanitarianism: these people deserve to die, so our people can live better.

Horwitz's detailed and broad knowledge allows him to offer a nuanced portrait of the Łódź ghetto's most famous and controversial figure, Chaim Rumkowski. Although he carefully distinguishes between compliance and collaboration, Horwitz also reveals the evidence for Rumkowski's abuse of women. Rumkowski's egocentric response to the Holocaust was mirrored by many less powerful Jews. Horwitz shows the spread of corruption among functionaries of Jewish self-administration, such as firefighters, police, and bureaucrats. Given the life-and-death stakes, it is little wonder that privilege was abused in the interests of survival; Primo Levi's “grey zone” existed in ghettos, too.

Horwitz argues that resistance would have been a courageous and honorable act, even if futile (p. 213). Perhaps more useful would have been a more thorough discussion of why there was so little resistance in Łódź. Was Rumkowski's determination that the best policy was usefulness to the Germans rather than resistance to them able to defeat local attempts to organize resistance? Or were those attempts themselves weak for other reasons?

Horwitz's method is thick description, using his massive basis in the sources to provide a highly detailed portrait of what the ghetto meant to its inmates. He can thus show us the texture of daily life as it eroded over five years, the daily struggle of Łódź's Jews, those with authority and those without, to survive another day.

The same immersion in the sources could also be used here to evaluate them. Horwitz appears to accept and repeat through quotation and citation what the documents say, including many exact numbers, without discussion of their accuracy or possible bias. Do all the sources, Jewish and Nazi, corroborate each other exactly? An opportunity was missed here to advise historians of the Holocaust in the best use of these particular German and Jewish sources.

The two maps are completely inadequate. Despite Horwitz's attention to the evolving structure and architecture of the ghetto and the surrounding Germanized city of Litzmannstadt, the only two maps are hard to read and do not identify the locations that Horwitz mentions most often, because they are simply copied from the Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto. The photographs are very revealing, but their usefulness in helping to visualize the hostile planet that the ghetto became over its brief lifetime is limited by their awkward placement in the center of the book. Our difficulties in creating an image of the previously unimaginable world of the Holocaust make visual aids indispensable.

These are imperfections. Horwitz's Ghettostadt represents the continuing refinement of Holocaust scholarship and demonstrates that it is possible and necessary to communicate on the printed page both what the Nazis did to Jews and how Jews reacted to it.