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Peter D. Stachura, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland, German History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 669–670, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr003
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In the execrable pantheon of Nazi villainy, Arthur Karl Greiser has a secure niche. As Nazi party boss (Gauleiter) and Governor (Reichsstatthalter) of the Wartheland Gau (region) in German-occupied western Poland from autumn 1939 until he fled the advancing Red Army in early 1945, he was the principal driving force behind an inexorably brutal and all-encompassing programme of Germanization (Eindeutschung) directed against the 4.2 million Poles and 400,000 Jews. Both groups suffered random murder, deportation as slave labour to the Reich, wholesale confiscation of property and business, and blanket discrimination; the Jews were subsequently ghettoized and, from late 1941, exterminated in the notorious Chełmno camp. Almost half a million ethnic Germans from the Baltic States, Eastern Poland, Romania and Germany itself filled the void. Greiser, aspiring to the status of an exemplary Nazi, also aimed to make his Gau a model for others to emulate. Virtually all manifestations of Polishness and Jewishness were consequently obliterated within a wider Nazi policy in Poland and eastern Europe; the fundamental impulse for this emanated from the concepts of eastward expansion (Drang nach Osten) and the quest to acquire territory in the East (Lebensraum). Despite a certain susceptibility to verbiage and a particularly gratuitous calumny (of Pope Pius XII, p. 331), Catherine Epstein has built on previous, mainly Polish studies of Greiser to produce an interesting and accomplished biography. Incorporating a broad array of German and Polish archival and printed sources, it presents the first in-depth English-language account of him.
