Between Łódź and Litzmannstadt: German Accounts from 1939-1945

Shaped by the textile industry, the multiethnic and multicultural city of Łódź — where, alongside Poles, Jews, and Russians, a large population of Germans of various backgrounds also lived — was incorporated into Germany in 1939 and experienced the radical Nazi policy of Germanization during the Second World War. The diverse testimonies collected in this volume reflect the “German perspective” on the processes of national and ethnic segregation.
Many of these ego-documents are being published for the first time in the present edition. Made available in Polish translation, they offer a previously unknown insight into the social world and the drastically altered everyday life of Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt, and they reveal the personal attitudes of German population groups toward people of other nationalities — ranging from their exclusion from society to genocide. The collected documents show how the city was perceived by Germans. They also address such topics as careerism, revenge and retaliation, terror and plunder, the settlement of Baltic and Volhynian Germans, and the German People’s List. German voices on the Jews and the ghetto are likewise included.