Nowhere during the Nazi Pax Germanica were the issues of good and evil, human decency and the human will to survive put to such extreme tests as in the killing ground which Nazi Germany made of occupied Poland during the Second World War. It was there that the special Nazi experiment in the racial reordering of human society was attempted. Not only were the annexed parts of the Polish, Republic used as a kind of practical laboratory for Hitler's and Himmler's ideas to repopulate the eastern marches with ethnic German stock, but the Polish population as a whole was seen as nothing more than a slave society in the service of the Nazi ‘New Order’ (although that attitude began to change a little during 1943 after Stalingrad and Katyń). Above all, though, it was in occupied Poland and nowhere else in occupied Europe that the Nazi authorities established their extermination camps, the Vernichtungslagern, in pursuit of their mad dream physically to exterminate European Jewry and other racial groups whom they deemed unworthy of life itself. Furthermore, the special ghettos which the Nazis created for Jews within the larger Polish cities had no parallel elsewhere.

The situation of oppression, terror, and murder thus created raised different problems for the different groups of people at the receiving end of what passed for Nazi civilization. In general, though, two fundamental issues dominated: the physical, need to survive, and in doing so facing up to all the inevitable moral questions involved in the ‘how’ of achieving or attempting that dream. In their different ways these two publications illustrate and underline these and other problems of human behaviour in extreme circumstances. But what especially emerges from the account of the Warsaw ghetto is the point that life is not always so clear cut and straightforward as later history and historians would prefer to have it. Instead, the human dilemma always seems to produce more devils than angels, even though, ideally, all would wish to be on the side of the latter. And nowhere was the human dilemma more pronounced than during the Nazi occupation of Poland.