Udo Klausa was a Landrat-a Nazi administrator-for the Polish town of Bedzin during the German occupation of World War II. While he was not responsible for shaping Nazi policy in the occupied East, he was one of the vital cogs in its implementation. Central to Fulbrook's (German history, University Coll. London; A Concise History of Germany) analysis is the question of how Klausa could regard himself as basically innocent yet play a significant role in ethnic cleansing and genocide. She describes how after 1945 Klausa did not discount his wartime service but rather crafted a new narrative in which he depicted himself as a politically neutral civil servant, although he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1933, and even regarded his Wehrmacht service merely as an indication of his loyalty to Germany. Such reenvisioning of his biography served as a mechanism for distinguishing himself from the "fanatical" Nazis he served with. -VERDICT Klausa was married to Fulbrook's godmother, and the book's personal dimension makes for compelling reading. While the focus is on Klausa the Landrat, the narrative does not lose sight of the victims and their stories. Recommended for all who study Nazi Germany.-Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll., OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Among the growing number of biographies of Nazi perpetrators and case studies of localities under Nazi rule, this book stands out. Fulbrook (German history, Univ. College London) tells the story of Bedzin, a county 25 miles away from Auschwitz, and of its chief civilian administrator, Udo Klausa, an "ordinary Nazi" who managed to avoid getting involved in the actual killing of Jews and Poles. Instead, he wallowed in qualms and doubts while functioning as a cog in the machine of terror and destruction, thus fantasizing himself as a decent man. After the war, he claimed to have known nothing about the gas chambers. Personally acquainted with Klausa's family, Fulbrook was able to use an impressive range of private letters, testimonies, memoirs, interviews, and documents to reconstruct the deeds and doubts of Klausa and his impact on life and death in and beyond Bedzin. Not limited to the perspective of the perpetrators and bystanders, the book illuminates the destiny of the 85,000 Jews who went through the ghettos of the county, thus pioneering an integrative history of the Holocaust. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. T. Kuehne Clark University

Of ordinary Germans, ordinary Poles and ordinary Jews in an ordinary place--one that, with the right provocation, turned into an inferno in 1939. Bedzin was a town like many others in western Poland. Part of Silesia, it was close enough to the border to be home to many ethnic Germans. When Hitler's forces poured over the frontier and annexed the Landkreis, or county, of Bedzin into the Reich, one of those Germans became an administrator supervising the extraordinary violence visited upon the area's Jewish population. A central figure in Fulbrook's (German History/University College London; Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships, 2011, etc.) narrative, Udo Klausa protested after the war that he was only following orders, didn't know of the crimes being committed and never had a hint of the Holocaust. He was merely one of countless "many who held themselves to be decent' people [and who] went along with the Nazi regime for so long." One consequence of this was the fact that, within four years of the German invasion, half the population of his hometown was dead: "Not only the Great Synagogue, but the entire culture and society that it represented, were erased." It is that systematic erasure, carried out by those decent people, that is the heart of Fulbrook's narrative. Toward the end of the book, scrupulous in its naming of names and remembering the dead, the author writes of the administrator, "I cannot help but conclude that, whatever Klausa's perhaps ambivalent inner feelings, the way he actually behaved had horrendous historical consequences." Self-serving, cowardly and drenched in blood, Klausa became a good anti-communist civil servant in the West Germany that rose from the Reich's ashes. Fulbrook's well-crafted book joins other studies of war behind the front lines to remind readers that something unthinkable is nevertheless possible.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Auschwitz is peripheral to this academic but often horrific account of a Polish county, Bedzin, and its German administrator, Udo Klausa, during WWII. Thanks to family connections (he himself knew Klausa for years), Fulbrook, professor of German history at University College, London, was granted access to the Klausa family archive. Using this material, especially the letters of Klausa's wife, and other newly discovered archival materials, Fulbrook explores how a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat went about his duties as unspeakable events occurred under his nose. Klausa arrived at his post in February 1940, five months after invading Nazis had herded hundreds of Jews into the town of Bedzin's synagogue before burning it down. Although not directly responsible, Klausa witnessed public hanging, starvation, expulsion of Jews from jobs and homes, and repeated deportation. He and his wife often expressed discomfort but mostly got on with their lives. Despite Fulbrook's personal motivations for embarking on this project, it remains scholarly: dense with citations, analyses of evidence and motivation, and long summaries of ongoing historical controversies. If general readers don't mind the heaviness of the text, what they will find regarding a man's capacity to dissociate himself from the evil to which he contributes will both captivate and disturb. 15 b&w halftones, 4 maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.