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Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939-1941. By Phillip T. Rutherford. Modern War Studies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xv, 328 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Map. $34.95, hard bound.

A detailed and innovative analysis, Phillip T. Rutherford's Prelude to the Final Solution traces the development and execution of Nazi Germanization efforts as they related to ethnic Poles in Polish territories annexed by the Third Reich. Focusing on the Reichsgau Wartheland, where Nazi "ethnic cleansing" against Poles was most aggressive, Rutherford guides the reader through the four main deportations between December 1939 and March 1941 that resulted in the brutal evacuations of some 300,000 people from this region to the Generalgouvernement. Under the ambitious leadership of Arthur Greiser, the Wartheland was to become a model of ethnopolitical transformation—a formidable challenge given that in 1939 there were more than ten times as many Poles as Germans in the Wartheland. The Nazi leadership attempted to accomplish this transformation in three ways: deporting hundreds of thousands of Poles to the Generalgouvernement, transferring hundreds of thousands of Germans from eastern and southeastern Europe to the Wartheland, and Germanizing a minority of Poles deemed racially fit for the process. The Germanization of the Wartheland largely failed due to the Reich's growing military and economic demands, but as Rutherford's title suggests, by the advent of the so-called final solution in 1941, the Nazis had become "seasoned practitioners of search, seizure, and transport" (11) and would apply much of what they had learned to the destruction of Europe's Jews.