It is always a little intimidating, after writing a book, to embark on the recognition of the countless debts contracted over the course of its slow gestation. But are they not a kind of bond, do they not form an inextricable network, like the cradle of this book?

This book was built a little obscurely, after a long period of wandering in the desert, a time when history could not involve the writing of a book. It started in 2002 after a summer in America when, with Christian Delage, I dreamed up a first version of this project. Life, painful and hazardous, meant that it was only eleven years later that I could pick up the traces.

Around me then gathered my attentive mentors, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Gerd Krumeich, Henry Rousso and Nicolas Werth; my fellow historians, Ludivine Bantigny, Nicolas Beaupré, Romain Bertrand, Olivier Bouquet, Bruno Cabanes, Quentin Deluermoz, Roman Huret, Anne Kerlan, Roman Krakovsky, Vincent Lemire, Benoît Majerus, Hervé Mazurel, Manon Pignot, Malika Rahal, Mathieu Rey, Anne Rolland, Jehanne Roul, Emmanuel Saint-Uscien and Giusto Traina. Some of them, such as Elisa Claverie, Catherine Hass and Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, are not historians and I am thankful to them for this – as I am to my friends of forever and never, Vincent Liaboeuf, David Ortola and Christophe Raoux.

This book also benefited from readings, encouragement, advice and information and photocopies, photos and books from Johann Chapoutot, a sure friend and a constant reader, but also from Nicolas Patin, Maciej Hamela, Élise Petit, Jean-Yves Potel, David Silberklang and Harrie Teunissen. It grew from the granitic fidelity of the Grand Elder, Olivier Buttner, the discreet and thwarted support of Sophie Hoog, a caring family and the unfailing support of parents, sisters and nieces, the Army of Those who Dream … and, I hope I would never forget, the sagacity of Samuel Castro, who politely but firmly told me one day in September 2012 that I should address myself to his office, which would respond to my importunity.

But let us leave such sibylline remarks there, even if they are the reality: it remains to me to thank a poet, Michaël Batalla, who, sometimes a little silently and involuntarily, works in depth on the writing of what animates me; a journalist, Johan Hufnagel, the gruff companion of my uncertainties and my emotions; a publisher, Séverine Nikel, who found a home at Seuil for this book; and a dozen wonderful teenagers who, during Sunday rhetoric sessions, have given a new meaning to what was becoming obscure. I can assure them that the bonds between us will endure.

And Esteban, Nathan, Gaia and Balian.

At last.

Paris, 21 June 2016

Synoptic table of plans for Germanization, displacements of population, and construction

On 30 March 2010, in a small two-room apartment in a home for the elderly in Stuttgart, a ninety-year-old man by the name of Martin Sandberger passed away.¹ Sandberger had been born into a middle-class family on 17 August 1911, in Swabia; he studied law, and from an early age combined this with militant Nazism. He was endowed with a powerful physique and a charismatic presence, and demonstrated both academic excellence and commitment to the Nazi cause. He enjoyed an exceptional career in the security services of the Third Reich, and was involved in the development of dogma and the in-depth realization of the regime’s most murderous policies. Martin Sandberger – second from the right in the photograph below – was one of those physically attractive ‘action intellectuals’ who cut quite a figure in their SS uniforms designed by Hugo Boss. He was also one of those managers of genocide by firingsquad who were sentenced to death at the end of trial No. 8 held by the United States Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, though in fact the policies dictated by the looming Cold War saved the young SS man’s life and then freed him. His liberty was ensured by the particular nature of the trial, which meant that he could not be brought before a tribunal again.²

In a previous study, I focused in depth on Martin Sandberger and a cohort of his peers in an attempt to explain the connections that might link levels of academic achievement with ideological radicalization and the perpetration of genocidal acts.³ However, my investigation also suggested that Nazism presented itself less as a fixed and monolithic ideology than as a flexible and complex system of beliefs structured by racial determinism. This system of beliefs, once it had been internalized by Nazi militants, provided them with a threefold certainty: a trustworthy interpretation of the past, a strong commitment to the present, and also a hope for the future. And so, in the autumn of 1939, the young twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who had hitherto been accustomed to the offices of the intelligence services and underground activism found himself on the windswept quays of a Baltic port with the evocative name of Gotenhafen (the ‘harbour of the Goths’, now Gdynia) to prepare for the arrival of ships carrying a German-speaking population from the Baltic States to be resettled in Polish territories newly occupied by the Wehrmacht.⁴ Sandberger’s operation seemed to point to the existence of a Nazi racially based humanitarian programme heralding the establishment of a German colonial system in the conquered territories. Did this mean, then, that something betokening the fulfilment of the promised future was now coming into being? Did it suggest that the future implicitly promised in terms of Lebensraum (living space) and the Tausendjähriges Reich (Thousand-Year Reich) was starting to become a reality?

Nazism as a promise: this is to be the subject of my book, as these preliminary remarks indicate. My work has not been based – far from it – on unexplored terrain: several excellent studies dealing with certain aspects of this promise have constituted a valuable source of information,⁵ and the archives, mainly of Nazi institutions, that I have consulted in Berlin, Warsaw, Washington and Ludwigsburg have been complemented by life stories, memoirs and collections of documents⁶ which have provided me with a wide range of valuable material ranging from institutional correspondence to exhibition catalogues, architectural plans, poems, songs and collections of diaries.

This study thus lies at the confluence of several historiographic traditions. The first of these arose in the wake of the upheaval in the human and social sciences following the resurgence of war in people’s awareness, on TV screens and within European horizons of expectation – in this case, the war in the former Yugoslavia. We should be grateful to one of the most insightful of all the historians of Nazism, Götz Aly, for having grasped at that juncture that something important was at stake in the abject images reaching us, and that if we were to find a certain analytical distance to draw breath, we would need to go back to the Second World War and the population policies that sprang up during it. This would enable us to bring a fresh perspective to the columns of newsprint generated by Serbian ethnic cleansing. Published for the first time in 1995, Aly’s book was the first to systematically correlate the policies of Germanization with the evolution of anti-Jewish measures, and the practices of population displacement with the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.⁷

In the introduction to his book, Götz Aly invited his readers to embark on the unpleasant experience of trying to put themselves in the place of Nazi decision-makers, assessing their room for manoeuvre, the range of their possibilities and their practices. Aly thus took a step towards the second historiographical movement, one that was also, in my view, born of the immense shock of the return of war to the European continent. Indeed, Christopher Browning, in his work Ordinary Men (written in that same period), had raised the question of the individual and collective attitudes of actors in the immediate experience of violence. From this book, and from the often empty polemics of Daniel Goldhagen’s work, based as it was on archives identical to those of Christopher Browning, arose a new kind of research called Täterforschung or research into the perpetrators of crimes; this has since flourished as one of the most productive sectors in the historiography of Nazism over the last decade, the period in which the present work was conceived.⁸

Among the promising crossover approaches that draw on these two trends we find Götz Aly’s work on the ‘Nazi Welfare State’ and studies by Michael Wildt and Frank Bajohr on the Volksgemeinschaft, the national ethnic group which was both a theoretical figure and a central framework for the understanding of Nazi horizons of expectation, as well as analyses of the various SS agencies.⁹ And it is not the least of the merits of the work of Wildt and Bajohr that they draw our attention to the aspirations of the German peoples to form a different kind of society within the Volksgemeinschaft, and ponder the question of the attractions of this prospect held out by the Third Reich.¹⁰ On the other hand, Täterforschung tended to focus on the personnel involved in occupation policies in the East, particularly in the occupying and Germanizing institutions, but struggled to show how the Nazi project was related to experiences on the ground.¹¹ So these two historiographical trends opened up paths for future study.

In the first place, by studying Nazism as a utopian promise, by following its embodiment in individuals and cohorts and not just in public policies, I hope to restore the coherence of the actors’ perspectives, their horizons of expectation and their political logics.

Secondly, I will also be setting their discourses, their beliefs and their practices within a social anthropology of individual and collective emotion that alone allows one to understand the allure of the Nazi system of beliefs. The affects and emotions generated by the sense that they were working for the realization of a racial and social Utopia must be taken into account and restored in all their intensity. Nazism – this, at least, is the hypothesis that animates this book – was indeed a matter of hatred and anxiety, the main emotions that led straight to the attempt to exterminate European Jewry, but it was also a question of hope, of joy, of fervour and Utopia: it involved building a new world, an alternative future – a Nazi future.

Attempting to grasp this promise and the extent to which it was realized, and trying to give words to this future, also involves entering a debate with Philip K. Dick. In 2016, viewers of Amazon Instant Video were apparently able to rediscover, thanks to the television series of the same name, Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, where he imagines the life of the American continent in the event of a joint victory of the Japanese and Nazi empires. ‘What if … ?’ Alternative history, which in recent times has definitely attained scholarly legitimacy,¹² has long since tackled the possibility of an Axis victory in the Second World War, as in the Film Fatherland, which narrates a criminal investigation in the Nazi Berlin of the 1960s led by an SS veteran who has joined the KRIPO.¹³ My book, however, is concerned not with alternative history (what in French is known as uchronie), but with Utopia: I seek to show how the Nazis dreamed of their victory and the future that would follow it. But I needed to take as my starting point a hypothesis, one that the image of Sandberger on the quayside of Gotenhafen makes us take quite seriously: the Nazis dreamed of the fulfilment of the promise long before victory was assured. And they set out, in the middle of the war, to realize this Utopia. That is the story which my book tells.

With this in mind, it is divided into three parts.

It tries, firstly, to look at the institutions and the persons who assumed responsibility for these policies and to understand the experience of those who planned them and prepared them, and also, inexorably, tried to make them really come about.

Secondly, it tries to explore the content of hope, to enter into the revolutionary promise which was intended to give a new millennial destiny to a German nationhood that seemed doomed to disappear.

Finally, it was a certain space, on the borders of Poland and Ukraine, around the city of Zamość (pronounced ‘Zamoshch’) and known as Zamojszczyzna (pronounced ‘Zamoitchizna’) to which fell the dubious honour of being the laboratory of the advent of the Nazi Utopia that it was ultimately forced to embrace.

But before we embark on our analysis, let us first try to set it in its temporal framework; to put forward a narrative and a chronology.