11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comment from another non-English speaker, July 1, 2006
This review is from: Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East (Paperback)
I have written another English-language biography about Odilo Globocnik and collaborated with Joe Poprzeczny for years while he wrote his book. I therefore feel that I can vouch for his character in this impromptu forum.
First of all: Joe's Globocnik biography was no slap-dash job, but instead an extensive research in archives spanning almost twenty years. You see, Globocnik to Joe was the nemesis of a lifetime, because the "SS-Gruppenführer" deported Joe's mother in 1943 and put her in a concentration camp.
During the final stage of the war, Joe's mother and other prisoners were shuttled to the Old Reich, and that is how Joe became a German native. He was born in Trier and moved to Australia as a young child. His mother refused to speak about the camp until very late in her life. The search for his roots and the man who caused so much misery for his family was the driving force behind this exceptional work, which has baffled historians with a host of heretofore unknown facts about Globocnik and his entourage.
Joe is not one to rely on secondary sources. He had a host of detailed questions about Globocnik's Carinthian group that stimulated my own work. It was Joe's tenacity and journalistic skill that unearthed Globocnik's second fiance Irmgard Rickheim and made her talk to him.
This is an important book. I know a lot of Holocaust historians and some who have read this book. Nobody found its sources questionable (even though a sensitive editor would have removed the Irving quotes). If you want an inside take on the daily lives of Holocaust perpetrators this is where you get it.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On "Operation Zamosc" and the Successful Polish Guerilla Counteroffensive, July 6, 2008
This review is from: Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East (Paperback)
There are numerous biographical details given about Globocnik, especially his early life, but these are overshadowed by this study of his anti-Jewish and anti-Polish policies. This is probably the best English-language study of GENERALPLAN OST in theory and in action.
The German dream of removing all the indigenous Polish people and the Jews, and replacing them with ethnic Germans, long predated the Nazis: e. g., Adolf Bartels, Heinrich von Class, Paul de Lagarde, and Otto von Bismarck. (p. 144) On August 22, 1939, Hitler said: "Poland will be depopulated and then settled by Germans...Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" (p. 161) "To the Poles, Globocnik was yet another Germanic Margrave set on finally destroying them..." (p. 332)
Poprzeczny hints at why the Germans usually treated Jews and Poles differently: "The administration of Dr. Hans Frank sought quite vigorously to see rural parts of Poland become a productive force in the overall German scheme of things. That administration did not seek to see the Poles tormented to the point of inflaming resistance, which Globocnik and von Mohrenschildt did provoke after November 1942, by launching their cleansing of the Zamosc Lands with Himmler's concurrence." (p. 199)
In "Operation Zamosc", the Germans removed up to 200,000 Poles (p. 237) from nearly 300 villages (p. 182). Most of the Poles were sent to Germany for forced labor, while others were murdered locally or in death camps. Polish guerilla warfare, especially by the BCh (Bataliony Chlopskie: Peasant Battalions) and the AK (Armia Krajowa: Home Army) grew in intensity and became the "Zamosc Uprising". (pp. 182-183). The Germans tried to suppress it with increasing brutality, but eventually the Polish guerillas got the upper hand (p. 190), and this, plus German reverses on the eastern front, put a stop to this operation.
The genocide of Poles in Volhynia in 1943 by the UPA (so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army) is blamed by some Ukrainians on the Poles having first attacked innocent Ukrainian settlements in Hrubieszow in 1942. They were anything but! The Ukrainian officials and "settlers" had been collaborating with the Germans and their de-Polonization actions. (pp. 181-182, 190-191, 317, 320-323, etc.). (In addition, Polish actions against Ukrainian settlements were trivial in scale compared with the UPA's genocide against Poles).
GENERALPLAN OST, of which "Operation Zamosc" had been merely a foretaste, had called for the resettlement of 100 million Slavs (p. 3), including 21 million Poles, to desolate western Siberia. But how could western Siberia, even with expensive development, possibly support so many people? Note that early plans for "Jewish reservations" (e. g., pp. 148-149, 154-155, 217) had to be abandoned as unrealistic, giving way to extermination. So how could the equally-unrealistic Slav-reservation plans fail to eventually follow the same course? For elaboration, see the Peczkis review of
Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Final Solution.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book about a terrible man, March 21, 2006
This review is from: Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East (Paperback)
Globocnik was a Nazi conspirator who became one of the worst of the monsters - amazingly enough, this is the first full-length book in English about him and as such is an essential read for all interested in the period.
One necessary correction. There are some odd comments about the book in the first review, from which it could be assumed David Irving is a major source for this work: he isn't and indeed the author is careful to refer to Irving at the outset as "controversial", as well as only citing Irving on material where his well-known bias is not a potential distorting factor. Yes, there are many secondary sources but the author also includes many primary sources, and indeed uses them wherever possible. This is a work of scholarship, not the instant potboiler implied in the earlier review.
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