Ordinary clerks or trailblazers of destruction? - the chiefs of civil administrations of the 'First Wave and their implementation of Nazi policy during the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Discusses one group of perpetrators who have remained shrouded in obscurity to this day: the first chiefs of civil administration (CdZ) who entered Poland in the first half of September 1939. This article elucidates not only how this group facilitated frictionless cooperation between the army and the police, but also how they often actively induced mass violence against Poles and Jews in the occupied areas. The CdZ were no ordinary clerks, as their own postwar narratives would have it, but rather ‘willing executioners’ of the Third Reich's extermination program.