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Soviet counterparts, were trying to categorize people, fix (and in some cases unfix) national

identities, and impose “order” upon everyday behaviors and physical environments. While the value

that Poles assigned to this region was distinct—Polish elites saw Volhynia as fundamental part of

their historical-national space in ways that differed from the attitudes of their Nazi and Soviet

counterparts—they too saw a semi-European area that needed to be guided by the strong hand of a

modernizing European state. Of course, both before and during the war, Nazi officials and experts

argued that Poles, as racially inferior Slavs, were incapable of modernizing their own eastern

borderlands. They criticized Poland as a state that was “not equal to the task of eastern colonization”

and highlighted that it was the Germans, and not the Poles, who constituted “the only bearers of

9
culture in the East.” But even if the Second Republic had neither the strength nor the genocidal
ideology of its Nazi counterpart, Poles still attempted to create a “civilized” space in ways that had

worrying implications for the region’s Jews, in particular. This realization helps us to explain how

Nazi experts cited the work of their prewar Polish counterparts when it came to racial divisions, even

10
as they denigrated Poles as racially inferior Slavs themselves.
The second general conclusion about the relationship between the prewar and wartime

periods is that the second-tier personnel with whom this book has been concerned singularly failed to

either create stable state structures or foster bonds between diverse local people in the borderlands

that could withstand the pressures of war and occupation. As I have attempted to show, this was

neither a place of ancient ethnic hatreds nor one on the verge of state-led Polish genocide in 1939.

And yet the occupying forces—first, the socially and nationally transformative Soviet state and then

its racially transformative successor—were able, sometimes quite easily, to mobilize elements within

local society against representatives of the prewar Polish state. Any bonds that had existed between

9 The first quotation is from Blackbourn, Conquest of Nature, 247; the second quotation is cited in John Connelly,
“Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice,” Central European History 32, no. 1 (1999), 13.
10 Connelly, “Nazis and Slavs,” 18.

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