<i>A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust</i> by Mary Fulbrook

A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust by Mary Fulbrook. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2012, xviii, 421 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). One of the enduring questions of Holocaust research concerns the level of awareness of Germans regarding the horrifying policies of the Shoah. A well-crafted myth emerged from the ashes of Germany after 1945 that those involved on the periphery of the Nazi genocide simply knew about it. With meticulous research and vivid prose, Mary Fulbrook, in A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, illustrates that the level of participation in the final solution reached deeply within the civilian administration of the Hitler state. In complementing the ground-breaking work of Christopher Browning, she also describes how ordinary these civil servants were in the context of their chosen professions. Her intent is to shed light on this overlooked aspect of the Nazi regime (p. 337-38). She then adds a personal layer to the presentation: the wife of the main focus of the piece was her godmother and she had met the civilian administrator after the war. Fulbrook asserts that, This book is, then, about the fate of the Jews of Bedzin ... it is not about my mother or her best friend (p. 22). Fulbrook then proceeds to give us a lesson in the scholar's craft as she confronts the dilemma of a personal attachment and a historian's distance. Fulbrook centres on Bqdzin (Bendsburg), Poland, a small, primarily Jewish town, only twenty-five miles from and its Landrat (civilian administrator), Dr. Udo Klausa. Klausa was a career civil servant, the son of a civil servant, father, husband, Catholic, and a loyal Nazi party member; an ordinary German. His administration would lead to the deaths of thousands of Jews. In the first part of the book, Fulbrook describes the rather mundane existence of Bedzin before the war. She explains that Polish-Jewish relations should be neither idealized nor demonized (p. 37), although survivors reported instances of Polish anti-Semitism. However, with the Nazi invasion of September, 1939, conditions for Bedzin's Jews quickly deteriorated, beginning with the horrific burning of the Great Synagogue and surrounding homes containing several hundred Jews. Following this introduction, Fulbrook presents Dr. Udo Klausa, the Landrat of the Landkreis, or county of Bqdzin. With access to Dr. Klausa's memoirs as well as personal correspondence between the Landrat's wife and her mother, Fulbrook is able to piece together the atmosphere of the creeping terror awaiting the local Jewish population as well as the attempts to distance the participants from any real responsibility. Frau Klausa's letters are especially enlightening, as they illustrate the extent to which she witnessed the sights and sounds of genocide, for example, while commenting on the lack of food in the stores (p. 299). Dr. Klausa also claimed to nothing about the fate of Bgdzin's Jews, asserting after the war that, At the time I did not know about this function of Auschwitz (p. 256). Fulbrook skillfully contrasts the archival evidence with Klausa's construction of his resistance to the real Nazi policies. …

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