According to Böhler, "self-determination" was an unsuitable recipe for structuring a multi-ethnic region. This becomes particularly clear in his fourth chapter "Violence and Crimes Beyond the Battlefields", in which Böhler draws a panorama where anti-Semitic pogroms, skirmishes, violent oppression of the rural population and death blend into each other. Hunger, disease and other hardships plagued the country. [...] Böhler has presented a differentiated
description of these violence scenarios, largely reconstructed on the base of a variety of sources.
Jochen Boehler is a Research Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, where he teaches courses on the history of early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. His most recent publications include War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (2014) alongside Jurgen Matthäus and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe's First World War (2014) with Joachim von Puttkamer and Wlodzimierz
Borodziej and The Waffen-SS. A European History (2016) with Robert Gerwarth.