Evil Woven into Everyday Life | Dr Joanna Nikel on the Memoirs of a German Official from His Stay in the General Government - Instytut Pileckiego

"It is rare for a document to find its way into archival collections in which the voice of an official of the occupation apparatus himself – written down without any intention of accusation, and even stressing his own sense of normality – becomes one of the most eloquent testimonies to the criminal nature of the system he served", writes Dr Joanna Nikel in her initial commentary on the materials received by the Pilecki Institute.

A unique document has been added to the Pilecki Institute’s collections: the hitherto unpublished memoirs of a German official who worked in the civil administration of the General Government during the Second World War.

The text was gifted by a private donor on the condition that both the donor and the author of the account remain anonymous. Consequently, their personal data will not be disclosed. However, this limitation does not diminish the value of the source. On the contrary – the memoirs offer a perspective on the German occupation of Poland that is rarely found in the official documentation generated by the aggressor during wartime, namely, from within the milieu of German officials and employees of the occupation institutions, presenting their work, social relationships, social life, and the everyday experience of their privileged position vis-à-vis the persecuted local population. In future, this newly acquired document will be made available in the reading rooms of the Archives of the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw and Berlin.

[We invite you to read the Pilecki Institute’s press release concerning the materials it has received.]

Its author belonged to a generation of Germans who were born during the First World War and entered adulthood under National Socialism. He came from a family with a relatively high social and cultural capital. His father was an economist, and his familial background extended far beyond the local German community: part of the future occupation official’s youth was spent abroad, including in China. After his father's death in 1933, the family returned to Germany, where he received a thorough education. He studied economics and law, in which he later earned a doctorate (1942). Before arriving in occupied Poland, he worked, among others, in the legal department of Deutsche Lufthansa. Thus, he possessed both legal and economic expertise – a skillset that was particularly useful in a system where the state administration was increasingly interfering in the functioning of the economy. His biography was definitely tied to National Socialist structures: in 1933, he joined the SS, while party records confirm his membership of the NSDAP beginning in May 1937. He was also a member of the National Socialist Aviation Corps (NSFK).

The author of the memoirs did not end up in the General Government by chance or as a result of an order from above. Quite the opposite: in the autumn of 1943, he himself sought employment with the German occupation administration of the General Government. When his initial application was rejected due to his unresolved military status, he asked that his request be reconsidered. He eventually found a job at the Trade Division of the Radom District Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Gruppe Handel der Distriktskammer für die Gesamtwirtschaft). The occupied East was therefore a space he consciously chose for his professional activities.

And it is precisely this fact that gives his later account its special value. The memoirs can, indeed, be read as an (unintentional) deconstruction of the official narrative of the German presence in the East. Nazi propaganda presented the German civil servant as inseparably combined with the Prussian ethos of public service, emphasizing the virtues of duty, discipline, integrity, and professionalism. In the occupied East, this figure was transformed into the Kulturträger: a representative of a supposedly superior culture, whose task was to establish German Ordnung in a region portrayed as civilizationally backward. Under the banner of Kulturarbeit im Ostgebiet, occupation rule therefore took on the guise of a modernizational and civilizational mission. The author himself recounts what this “mission” entailed in practice – without a hint of reflection on its true meaning – as he describes the first months of the German presence in Radom:

“When the Germans invaded, Radom was an old, filthy Jewish slum, with no sewer system or sidewalks. “We really got down to business there – sewer lines and sidewalks were laid, and all the Jews were confined to the ghetto”.

(in the original: “Als die Deutschen einrückten, war Radom ein altes, dreckiges Judennest, ohne Kanalisation und Bürgersteige. Hier liessen wir uns mächtig los. Es wurde Kanalisation angelegt nebst Bürgersteigen; die Juden kamen allesamt ins Ghetto”. – from the memoirs, p. 15)

The “modernization” and the establishment of the Radom ghetto are described in a single sentence as two naturally interconnected elements of the same urban reorganization – without any acknowledgment that this entailed the deprivation of rights and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people. It is precisely this lack of reflection, which recurs throughout the book, that makes it a document of exceptional revelatory power.

Meanwhile, the picture of the German occupation authorities that emerges from the author’s account is far less heroic than the propaganda image of the Herrenvolk. Instead of a disciplined civil service elite, we see an environment in which drunkenness among soldiers and government officials, the pervasiveness of prostitution and sexual promiscuity, the trading of favors, the misappropriation of property, corruption, and the abuse of office for personal gain are by no means marginal occurrences. They are part of the everyday life of the German occupation community. In this narrative, alcohol is not an insignificant element of social life: it is a regular feature of daily German life, which brings the civil service milieu together and helps shape the image of a society whose practices stand in stark contrast to its professed ethos of discipline and service. The author himself describes a civil servants’ club where, over a drink, members discuss goods circulating on the black market – goods that come directly from the looting of victims’ property:

“Fur coats and gold (gold teeth from Jews – that’s the method), diamonds and tobacco, liquor in wholesale quantities, leather goods, and gasoline flash past my eyes, which are slightly blurred [from alcohol]”.

(in the original: “Pelze und Gold (Zahngold von Juden, die Masche) Brillianten und Taback, Sprit en gros, Lederwaren und Benzin ziehen an meinen leicht getrübten Augen vorüber”. – from the memoirs, p. 86)

The most poignant parts of the memoirs concern not so much the behavior of the Germans themselves, as their attitude toward violence. During one of his trips, the author meets a Wehrmacht officer who, deeply distraught, tells him about the mass executions of Jews in the East (Minsk, Belarus). This account was recorded in the memoirs with an almost shocking literalness:

“They were part of the execution squad in Minsk and were supposed to exterminate the Jewish population. Jews were transported in trucks to large pits. Once there, they had to strip down to their underwear, because that aids decomposition. Then they were killed with a shot to the back of the head – men, women, and children, entire families. Some couples were shot while embracing; others, especially young girls, cried and begged for their lives. The most terrible thing was that the shot caused muscle spasms, and so the victims jumped into the pit like frogs. The execution squad was under the influence of alcohol. One of his colleagues went mad”.

(in the original: “Sie waren bei einem Erschiessungskommando in Minsk und hatten die jüdische Bevölkerung zu liquidieren. Die Juden wurden mit LKW’s an grosse Gruben gefahren. Dort mussten sie sich nackt ausziehen, weil sie dann besser verwesen. Dann wurden sie durch Genickschuss liquidiert, Männer, Frauen und Kinder, ganze Familien. [...] Das Schrecklichste sei gewesen, dass der Schuss eine Streckung der Muskulatur bewirke, sodass sie wie Frösche in die Grube gehupst seien. Das Kommando habe unter Alkohol gestanden. Ein Kamerad sei wahnsinnig geworden”. – from the memoirs, pp. 59–60)

The author notes his own immediate reaction: “I feel sick. This cannot be true! [...] “If it is true and we lose the war, we’ll all be hanged!” (in the original: “Mir ist todschlecht. Das kann doch nicht wahr sein! [...] Wenn das wahr ist und wir den Krieg verlieren, müssen wir alle baumeln!” – p. 60). This episode is significant not only as evidence of the circulation of information about the “Holocaust by bullets”. Even more important is the way in which knowledge of the mass murder functions within the narrative: as part of a conversation, a wartime experience passed on from one German to another, without fundamentally disrupting the normal course of daily life – and the author’s fear concerns not the crime itself, but the consequences of losing the war. Here, knowledge of the crime and normal life do not belong to two separate worlds. They coexist.

Jews appear in the account as a group towards whom successive stages of violence – exclusion, deportation, and, finally, mass murder – have already been normalized to such an extent that knowledge of them does not bring about a fundamental change in the way reality is perceived. The author passes by the camp in Auschwitz on a train and notes it as one of the many images from his journey:

“I was passing by the camp in Auschwitz. It is a huge complex, visible from the train. The chimneys were belching thick, black smoke. From the train, I can see twenty shaved heads on the flyover, like Buddhas. These are Jewish women in striped prison dress”.

(in the original: “Ich bin in Auschwitz an dem KZ vorbeigefahren. Es ist ein riesiger Komplex. [...] Die Schornsteine rauchten fettschwarz. Vom Zug aus sehe ich auf einer Überführung zwanzig glattrasierte Köpfe, wie Buddhas. Es sind Judenfrauen in gestreiften Kitteln” – from the memoirs, p. 107)

The Polish world and the fate of its oppressed people are portrayed in a similar way. The author sees poverty, sees children living in conditions of extreme deprivation, the unequal provision of food, and the material decline of the population. He recognizes their existence, but in principle does not question his own place in the system that helped shape this reality. On the contrary – he draws on it. The scale of this reality is captured in his own description of Radom, from a chapter titled simply “Es gibt 90,000 Polen in Radom” (There Are 90,000 Poles in Radom):

“There are 90,000 Poles in Radom because we have left such a strong ‘mark’ on the city and forced them into wooden cottages and outbuildings”. They live here in terrible overcrowding, often with an entire, large family in a single room. A red confiscation notice is posted in front of every suitable apartment. The Poles no longer have any hotels, inns, or movie theaters”.

(in the original: “ES GIBT 9oooo POLEN IN RADOM [...] weil wir der Stadt so energisch unseren 'Stempel' aufgedrückt haben und sie in Holzhütten und Hinterhäuser abdrängen. Hier hausen sie in fürchterlicher Enge [...]. Vor jeder annehmbaren Behausung prangt das rote Beschlagnahmeplakat. Die Polen haben kein Hotel, kein Gasthaus, kein Kino mehr.” – from the memoirs, p. 37)

Thus, one of the most important issues raised by this ego-document is the relationship between the normality of life of German officials in the General Government and the violence of the occupation. The memoirs go beyond simply recounting the effects of the violence – they directly cite its ideological justification, as openly stated by a high-ranking party official in a conversation with the author:

“There are far too many Poles, who, as a notoriously inferior race, are destined to die out anyway”. “The party is pursuing its own very specific goals in this matter, and I am to refrain from doing anything that could harm me as a party member”.

(in the original: “Koch meint aber, dass es viel zu viel Polen gäbe, die als notorisch minderwertige Rasse eben auszusterben hätten. Die Partei verfolge da ihre ganz bestimmten Ziele und ich solle mich hüten, in dieser Angelegenheit etwas zu unternehmen, was mir als Parteigenosse übel bekommen könnte”. – from the memoirs, p. 41)

At the same time, however, the greatest value of the text does not lie in its exposure the social or moral condition of the German occupation community. Namely, it reveals the criminal nature of the occupation regime established by the aggressors on the basis of violence, plunder, and “legally” sanctioned inequality – a regime in which national and racial affiliation determined the scope of one’s rights, security, access to resources, and, ultimately, the right to life. The author himself, in passing, records one of the most telling images of this everyday life: the public executions of Poles, observed from the window of a German government office:

“In the past, Poles were publicly hanged from trees as a means of intimidation. You could watch this from the [office] window. Wölfchen did so with tears streaming down her face – out of sympathy for the poor Poles – while eating her sandwich”.

(in the original: “Die Polen wurden früher zur Abschreckung öffentlich an den Bäumen aufgehängt. Man konnte vom Fenster der Kammer aus zusehen. Das tat Wölfchen mit tränenüberströmtem Gesicht – wegen der armen Polen – und ass dazu ihr Frühstücksbrot”. – from the memoirs, p. 54)

It would be hard to find a more vivid illustration of the mechanism at the heart of this document: compassion and everyday life, tears and breakfast, coexisting without contradiction in a single sentence. The memoirs of a German official from the General Government are a chronicle of ordinariness in a world that was anything but ordinary. They show how a person can come to terms with radical evil, enjoy the privileges created by violence, witness the suffering of those under their control, and be aware of the murder of others – and yet still maintain a sense of normalcy in their own life. And perhaps it is precisely here that the mechanisms underpinning the German occupation regime in Poland are most fully revealed: a world was organized around killing, dispossession, and terror, in which thousands of German officials could work, live, receive promotions, and lead social lives, treating the inequality established by force as the natural order of things. Here, evil was administratively organized, socially tamed, and woven into everyday life.

It is rare for a document to find its way into archival collections in which the voice of an official of the occupation apparatus himself – written down without any intention of accusation, and even stressing his own sense of normality – becomes one of the most eloquent testimonies to the criminal nature of the system he served. The memoirs obtained by the Pilecki Institute are exactly such a document: a source of exceptional scholarly value for research into the Holocaust, everyday life under the occupation, and the mechanisms through which society came to accept violence in the General Government.

The author stayed in the General Government from October 1943 to June 1944; he was then drafted into the Wehrmacht, and in January 1946 returned to Germany from captivity in France. He died in 1983. The memoirs were written down after the war.

Dr Joanna Nikel – a historian and researcher of German history, with a particular focus on Nazism and the German occupation of Poland. She works at the Centre for Research on Totalitarianisms at the Pilecki Institute, where her research includes the German occupation from a microhistorical perspective, the functioning of the German terror apparatus, and the perpetrators of Nazi crimes. Her interests also encompass the role and agency of women within the power structures of the Third Reich, as well as the post-war prosecution of Nazi crimes. She is the author of the monograph Terror niemiecki w powiecie mińsko-mazowieckim 1939–1944. Wojna i rozliczenia [German Terror in Mińsk Mazowiecki County, 1939–1944. War and Reckoning] (2025). In 2026, the book received the Homo-Verbum-Locus Award.

The work is currently being analyzed, and the results will soon be published in the form of a comprehensive article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.