The hitherto unknown memoirs of a German official from occupied Poland have been donated to the Pilecki Institute - Instytut Pileckiego

A unique document has been added to the Pilecki Institute’s archives: the previously unpublished and unknown memoirs of a German official who worked in the civil administration of the General Government during the Second World War.

This invaluable text, comprising 132 typewritten pages, was gifted by a private donor on the condition that both the donor and the author of the account remain anonymous. Thus, their personal data will not be disclosed. 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. In future, the memoirs will be made available in the reading room of the Archives of the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw.

A more detailed discussion of the memoir’s contents (including quotes) can be found in a separate text – a file attached to the present press release.

– The Institute’s mission, focused primarily on documenting the experiences of victims of totalitarian regimes and preserving their testimonies, is significantly complemented by the acquisition of sources produced by representatives of the occupation apparatus – says Karol Madaj, the Director of the Pilecki Institute. – The memoirs of a German official from the General Government illustrate precisely this: how violence against the Polish and Jewish populations was organized administratively and normalized by those who applied it. This rare vantage point of a perpetrator reinforces the educational and scholarly aspects of our activities.

In accordance with the donor’s wishes, both their personal data and the identity of the author will remain confidential. However, this does not diminish the value of the source. The memoirs offer a glimpse not so much into the occupier’s official ideology, as into their mental world: they reveal how a sense of civilizational superiority coexisted with participation in a reality built on plunder, violence, terror, murder, and extreme moral indifference. In this sense, the document presents not only everyday life during the occupation, but also the colonial mentality of German officials functioning in the General Government.

– The act of handing over these memoirs holds special significance for me, as it was performed by a private German donor, and specifically through our Berlin branch – emphasizes Director Karol Madaj. – I see this as proof of how important it is to have a permanent Polish research and educational institution in Berlin – the Pilecki Institute’s branch headed by Hanna Radziejowska. I believe that the memory of the German occupation of Poland must also reach Germany, and not as an accusation, but as an invitation to work together on an analysis of the past. In my view, the fact that someone voluntarily gifts a document that is inconvenient for the image of their own national and family history demonstrates genuine trust in the Institute as a scholarly institution: trust expressed not through words, but through action. I see this as proof that our work is needed, and that the social capital we have been building for years is yielding further results, this time in the form of access to rare sources on the painful history of the Second World War, which we would otherwise have been unable to obtain.

The materials are currently being studied by Dr. Joanna Nikel, a historian at the Pilecki Institute who specializes in research into the German civil service in the General Government and the functioning of the German occupation administration in the Polish lands. The analysis is being performed within a broader contextual framework, with a focus on a comparison of the content of the documents with, among others, archival records concerning the author, the administrative structures in which he worked, and the realities of the occupation described in the memoirs.

– The memoirs that have found their way into our collection are an unprecedented and rare document, and their power lies in their ordinariness. Their author was neither an ideological fanatic nor a high-ranking official of the regime. He was a young, well-educated official who consciously and of his own volition chose to work in the civil service of the General Government. And it is precisely this awareness of the choice that he himself made which gives his account its special value as a source – says Dr. Joanna Nikel of the Pilecki Institute. – The picture that emerges from the text shatters the Nazi propaganda image of the German official as a disciplined Kulturträger, involved in bringing German order to the supposedly backward East. Instead, we see the world of the occupiers where drunkenness, debauchery, corruption, and the widespread exploitation of one’s position are part of everyday life rather than exceptions to the rule. We are dealing with a narrative in which knowledge of the mass murder of Jews does not significantly disrupt the author’s daily life. It is accompanied neither by despair nor moral anxiety – only by a continuation of office routine, social life, and small pleasures – adds Dr. Joanna Nikel. – The plight of the Polish people is portrayed similarly: the author sees the poverty, sees children living in extreme deprivation, and the general material degradation – he recognizes all of this, but in the main does not question his own place in the system that helped create such a reality. On the contrary – he draws on it.

The document has survived in the form of a 132-page typescript consisting of 17 chapters, and was compiled after the war had ended. It focuses on the author’s stay, which lasted several months, in the General Government – primarily in the Radom District. Thanks to additional preliminary research conducted, among others, at the Bundesarchiv and the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen by Dr. Joanna Nikel and Rafał Ruciński, it was possible to precisely determine that the author worked in the General Government from October 1943 until June 1944.

The results of their research will be published in a scholarly article that will soon appear in a peer-reviewed journal and will subsequently be made available via open access. Due to the steps involved in the peer-review process, the publication will most likely be released only early next year.

– Primo Levi wrote that there were few true monsters in the system of crime, and they did not pose its greatest threat – ordinary people, willing to carry out the tasks assigned to them without protest, were far more dangerous – comments Dr. Joanna Nikel. – A similar insight resonates in Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil, formulated after the Eichmann trial: evil is banal, as it requires no demonic motivation – rather, it is born from a lack of reflection, from the mindless performance of duties within a bureaucratic machine.

– And that is precisely why these memoirs are so important – adds the researcher – for they show that the German occupation regime in Poland was created and sustained not only by ideological fanatics and the direct perpetrators of terror, but also by ordinary Germans: officials and employees of the occupation institutions, who learned to treat violence, inequality and their own privileged status as normal conditions of their everyday lives.

This newly discovered source is of crucial importance for research into the General Government as a colonial space. Particularly interesting is the clash between the author’s deeply rooted belief in German civilizational superiority and the actual practices of the occupiers, which – as the memoirs demonstrate – were founded in their basest and most primitive instincts: greed, avarice, opportunism, the need for domination, contempt for the weak, brutality, and indifference to the suffering of others. In this sense, the source allows us to grasp something that is much harder to discern in institutional documents: the everyday reality of occupation rule and the psychological mechanisms that allowed its participants to function in a world of violence, plunder and mass crime without perceiving themselves as perpetrators.