The story of a small town near Auschwitz and of its local Nazi administrator. An ordinary functionary and family man without whose help, and those of thousands like him, the murderous plans of the Nazi elite could never have been fully realized.

• Preface


• 1: Legacies of Violence


• 2: Bedzin before 1939


• 3: Border Crossings


• 4: The Making of a Nazi Landrat


• 5: An Early Question of Violence


• 6: 'Only administration'


• 7: Means of Survival


• 8: Escalation, 1941-42


• 9: Towards Extermination


• 10: The Deportations of August 1942


• 11: Ghettoization for the 'Final Solution'


• 12: Final Thresholds


• 13: Afterwards and After-words


• Notes


• Index

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She has written widely on modern German history, including A Concise History of Germany (1990); A History of Germany 1918-2000: The Divided Nation; (1991, 2008); German National Identity after the Holocaust (1999); Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR (1995, also published by Oxford University Press); and The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (2005). Her most recent book is Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford University Press, 2011). A fellow of the British Academy, she is former Chair of the German History Society and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Foundation for the former Concentration Camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.