The Role of the Mayors in the General Government of German-occupied Poland during the Second World War

Lecture co-sponsored by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies from Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe of the Free University of Berlin based on his recent book. 

The General Government was a German-occupied zone in central, southern, and southeastern Poland (1939–1945), established after the German attack on Poland in September 1939. It served as a "racial dumping ground" and a source of slave labor, where Poles were treated as serfs and Jews were confined to ghettos before being sent to extermination camps. Polish mayors were an important group of officials in the administrative apparatus of the General Government. Alongside German county governors and city governors, they shaped local policies and played an important role in the persecution of Polish and European Jews, as well as in the exploitation of the General Government. Based on extensive archival research, the speaker presents carefully chosen Polish mayors and shows how they behaved in towns such as Otwock, medium-sized cities such as Częstochowa, and metropolises such as Warsaw. He offers ground-breaking insights into the role of local government in occupied Poland.

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe is a historian at the Freie Universität Berlin. He specializes in the history of the Holocaust, European and East Central European history, and the history of antisemitism, violence and transnational fascism. Beyond several edited volumes and numerous articles, Rossoliński-Liebe published Stepan Bandera: The life and afterlife of a Ukrainian nationalist. Fascism, genocide, and cult (2014), the first scholarly biography of the Ukrainian politician.  He has held numerous research fellowships including from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the German Historical Institute Warsaw, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies. He is Honorary Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and currently serves as Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin.