The Dark Heart of Hitler’s Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government
by Martin Winstone
Even amidst the horrors of Nazi rule in Europe, the tragic history of the General Government – the Nazi colony created out of the historic core of Poland, including Warsaw and Krakow, following the German and Soviet invasion of 1939 – stands out. Separate from but ruled by Germany through a brutal and corrupt regime headed by the vain and callous Hans Frank, this was indeed the dark heart of Hitler’s empire. As the principal ‘racial laboratory’ of the Third Reich, the General Government was the site of Aktion Reinhard, the largest killing operation of the Holocaust, and of a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing against Poles which was intended to be a template for the rest of eastern Europe.
Utjiua Muinjangue is the chairperson of the Ovaherero and Ovambanderu Genocide Foundation. Ms. Muinjangue spoke on behalf of the school of Social Work at the University of Minnesota on the genocide of the Herero on November 10, 2014.
CHGS is pleased to welcome Jennifer Hammer, new program associate in the Institute for Global Studies with special responsibility to support the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Center for Austrian Studies. Jennifer completed her degree at the University of Minnesota in Anthropology and Japanese, and has done graduate work in the history of design. Jennifer comes to us from the Department of Communication Studies and has programming and management experience at a number of non-profit organizations including JSTOR, Artstor, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
In his acclaimed book Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recounts a recurring dream he and other inmates had in the Nazi death camp: that he returned home to his family and told them about it, but nobody listened. “The person standing in front of me doesn’t stay to hear, turns around and goes away,” he writes.