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The German invasion in September 1939 marked the beginning of a brutal occupation that lasted 2,078 days for Polish society. In just over five years, approximately three million Polish Jews and one million ethnic Poles perished under German rule – largely the result of mass atrocities, widespread abuse, and the ruthless exploitation of occupied resources. As Daniel Brewing notes in his impressive and informative study, “Violence was undoubtedly the constitutive medium of Nazi rule in Poland” (p. 273). However, the true extent of Nazi brutality remains largely unacknowledged and misunderstood beyond Poland's borders. Brewing contends that the Nazi genocide of Jews has cast a shadow over the persecution of ethnic Poles, occluding Polish suffering both in scholarly literature and in the broader public consciousness of World War II. This oversight has inadvertently been exacerbated by pioneering studies in Holocaust historiography, which have exposed the widespread complicity of Polish “neighbors” during the genocide. Consequently, many discussions about Polish civilians often depict them solely as violent protagonists, overlooking their mutual experiences as victims. Brewing's book seeks to redress this imbalance by placing the mass killing of Polish civilians under German occupation at “center stage” of his analysis (p. 298).In the Shadow of Auschwitz, a translation of Daniel Brewing's award-winning dissertation, offers a meticulous reconstruction of the history of German perpetrators and Nazi policies in occupied Poland. The book draws extensively from contemporary German records and postwar testimonies but does not seek to document every act of cruelty against the Polish population. Rather, it zeroes in on the circumstances, conditions, and configurations of Nazi massacres. These atrocities served as the bedrock of German rule, enabling the conquest of Poland, exploitation of its resources, and establishment of a new racial order. Brewing consciously eschews conventional categories such as “terror” and “genocide,” which can potentially oversimplify the motives and intentions of the perpetrators. Adopting a processual approach to understanding massacres, he defines them as “locally bound excesses of violence with their own special dynamics” (p. 6), shaped by both upper and lower echelons of authority.The book, with its well-structured and articulate presentation, is divided into three sections. The first section explores the history of anti-Polish sentiment within German society and the intertwined belief in a “civilizing mission” along Germany's eastern frontier. Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long before Nazi racial ideology gained prominence, German nationalists harbored disdain and apprehension toward Polish society. This sentiment intensified after World War I, driven by accounts of German Freikorps fighters and a popular sense of unjust territorial loss to the newly independent Polish state. By the Weimar Republic era, a consensus had emerged within German society, viewing Poles as “culturally alien hordes with a propensity for cruelty and ruthlessness” (p. 45). However, a national conflict between Germany and Poland was not inevitable, given the political rapprochement in the mid-1930s and Hitler's initial willingness to include Poland as a junior partner in his colonial ambitions. Yet, following Poland's rejection of German territorial demands and Hitler's subsequent decision to invade, Nazi propagandists effectively leveraged preexisting motifs to popularize and legitimize their war through narratives of Polish atrocities and depravity. This propaganda also served to diminish moral and legal restraints on permissible violence within the framework of a Volkstumskampf. Ultimately, the prevailing sense of superiority and fear of barbaric Poles provided German occupiers with a de facto “license to kill” (p. 68).The second part of the book painstakingly analyzes massacres committed by Nazi police and military units in the General Government, the rump of occupied Poland, across various stages of the war. Despite their swift military victory and lack of significant partisan resistance for several years, German personnel harbored a deep-seated fear and apprehension of the occupied society. This was particularly the case in rural areas, where Germans felt isolated and perceived an omnipresent threat from Polish society. To restore their confidence and sense of control, German units frequently resorted to massacres, initially during the September 1939 invasion and increasingly thereafter in response to mounting partisan activity. The book traces this escalating cycle of violence across German anti-pacification efforts in the Radom and Lublin districts between 1940 and 1944, initially orchestrated by the SS but later spearheaded by the Wehrmacht. Brewing details how the scope of permissible violence in pacification operations grew over time, with larger numbers of men, women, and children being targeted as “bandits,” “accomplices,” and “accessories.” The section culminates with the German suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, which witnessed the transference of anti-partisan practices and personnel from a rural to urban environment, resulting in an unprecedented level of victimization. In total, Brewing estimates that 250,000 Polish civilians fell victim to German anti-partisan massacres, primarily during the destruction of Warsaw.The final part of the book outlines postwar efforts in Poland and West Germany to punish German perpetrators of massacres. Despite the brevity of these chapters, Brewing adeptly highlights the denial of justice for Polish victims. Cold War tensions thwarted Polish attempts to bring German suspects before Polish courts, while West German prosecutors often displayed sluggishness and reluctance in pursuing potential criminals. In some cases, suspects accused of murdering Polish civilians even received sympathetic adjudications regarding the perceived necessity of cruelties in their battle against alleged partisans, thus reflecting the continuation of an anti-Polish construct in postwar German society.Brewing's study foregrounds the history of Nazi perpetrators and yields several key insights, including the Germans’ perpetual anxiety over their security in Poland, inter-agency conflicts among occupational institutions, and command techniques employed in pacification operations. Less explored are the social dynamics and perspectives among occupied society, although here the book still contributes valuable information. The discussions on the Volksdeutsche stand out in this regard, as Brewing skillfully captures the complex interplay between state invitations and popular involvement in the Nazi project, chiefly through personal denunciations and organized recruitment into Selbstschutz police units. Some sections briefly touch on the broader social history of the occupation, including the fissures created between previously coexisting Polish and ethnic German residents in the Lublin District (p. 82), the experiences of Polish women in a village purged of its male residents (pp. 173–174), and the German reliance on Polish informers and Blue Police in anti-partisan operations (pp. 196–202), but the richness of these sections leave the reader wanting more. Moreover, there is a relative lack of Polish accounts and recollections of Nazi security operations compared to German testimonies and documents throughout the book. Expanding on these aspects and perspectives could have provided a more comprehensive and multi-dimensional understanding of German atrocities.There is also a missed opportunity to delve deeper into the connection between German massacres of Polish civilians and the Holocaust. While the book acknowledges some of the entanglements between German anti-partisan operations and the Final Solution (p. 193–194), it largely omits Jewish experiences from its analysis of occupied Poland. For instance, the book fails to underscore how captured Jews were often summarily executed during Nazi security operations, even though this occurred in most of the provided case studies. Similarly, discussions of anti-Polish prejudice are not related to antisemitism, which could have provided a broader examination of German wartime ideology and attitudes. And aside from a brief overview of the relevant historiography, the book does not incorporate Polish complicity and participation in the murder of Jews into its analysis, despite the preponderance of archival sources. In this manner, the book reproduces a history of Polish victimization set apart from the Holocaust, omitting key context and furthering a historiographical rift explicitly lamented by the author.Notwithstanding these limitations, Brewing delivers a compelling and praiseworthy study that fills a significant research gap in the realm of World War II history. It provides a deeper understanding of German atrocities against Polish civilians, richly illuminating the historical context, Nazi logic, and situational pressures that gave rise to countless massacres. Students and scholars of mass violence, German history, and Polish history all stand to benefit from its insights.