The Nazis’ use of bureaucracy to achieve their genocidal aims comes through clearly in this historical tour de force. The Nazis attempted to “re-engineer” the Polish city of Lódz, home to more than 230,000 Jews (one-third of the city’s population) before the war, into a model—and Judenfrei
—German city embodying health and beauty they called Litzmannstadt. This required forcing the Jews into a ghetto with the help of Jewish leaders, especially the arrogant, dictatorial and reportedly lascivious industrialist Chaim Rumkowski. With a graceful style rare in academic history, Horwitz, an associate professor of history at Illinois Wesleyan University, marshals a host of primary sources to highlight the gradual destruction of the ghetto. Rumkowski and many ghetto residents hoped that by providing labor for the Nazi war effort, the Lódz Jews would be kept alive until the defeat of the Germans. At the same time, Horwitz employs eyewitness accounts to show how the Jewish community coped with starvation and disease, and tried to make sense of its terrible conditions. Horwitz’s understated prose helps put into relief the full horror of these events. 20 color and 12 b&w illus., 2 maps. (May)
