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The annexed areas in Poland became the scene of many machinations in which experts of the "race state" and representative of a traditional Germanization policy confronted each other. Gerhard Wolf pursues the tortuous and inconsistent implementation of National Socialist politics down to the local level, thereby giving much needed clarity to the complex debate about the significant of ideology of National Socialist rule.

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Gerhard Wolf's excellent study illustrates how much National Socialist "ethnic politics" was shaped by traditional notions of belonging and exclusion. In the implementation of Nazi ideology, Wolf shows that politics could be both practical and principled. Here it becomes clear how a dynamic understanding of borders, which separated those who belonged from others who did not, could become a decisive instrument for the consolidation of German rule. This rule was legitimized and shaped by what we now call false nationalization.

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Gerhard Wolf's real contribution is to pick apart the highly conflictual and polycratic process by which Nazi policies were formed, tracking both the long-running turf war between the Reich Interior Ministry and the SS Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin. Well-researched, clear, convincing, with real intellectual verve.