Warthegau: Deník z let 1941-1942

The author of the Warthegau Diary, who at the request of his heirs remains hidden to this day under the pseudonym Alexander Hohenstein, secretly kept detailed records of his activities as mayor of an administrative district in occupied Poland from the beginning of 1941 until mid-1942. He conceived the diary as a kind of private report on his work vigour, militantly devoted to the cultivation of the "virginally challenging region of the German East". In it, he provides countless valuable insights into the author's talent for observation and psychological intuition from everyday life in a territory where the law sanctioned the domination of the German minority over the purposefully decimated Poles and where the large Jewish population was the victim of systematic genocide. Not questioning the German "claim" to the occupied territories in the slightest, but at the same time a selfless and humanistically-minded official attempted to cushion the impact of Nazi directives on his fellow Poles and Jews; he therefore soon became the target of criticism by his party superiors and an object of interest to the Gestapo. Gradually, he increasingly turned to diary entries as a tool in his struggle to defend and uphold his moral integrity. The resulting text can thus be read today as a unique historical testimony and as a timeless account of a conflict of conscience.

Czech edition