WLODZIMIERZ BORODZIEJ began his academic career with a doctorate presented at the University of Warsaw in 1984. Now vice-president of his alma mater and co-chairman of the Polish-German Schoolbook Commission, he is one of the leading lights of modern Polish history. Terror und Politik is the German translation of his first book, the fruit of that doctorate.

Terror und Politik is an examination of the interdependency between the National Socialist 'terror' regime in occupied Poland and the Polish resistance movement. It states that, though at first sight that relationship was a simple causal one - where a repressive regime spawned an active resistance - further examination reveals a far more complex scenario, where resistance in turn had an effect on the occupation regime. It is that inter-relationship which Borodziej sets out to chart by examining, for example, the extent to which the German security organisations were able to change their tactics in Poland and the degree of success of their efforts to recruit collaborators and agents amongst the Polish populace.

In his research, Borodziej concentrates on the region of Radom, one of the five administrative districts of the Generalgouvernement, and the only one for which a majority of the archive is still extant. His approach is analytical, detailing the organisation of the security apparatus, its spheres of competence, its methods and its successes and failures. In the process he gives a fascinating outline of the nature of the Polish "underground" - a shadowy world of spies, infiltrators, pseudonyms and intrigue.

Borodziej's conclusions are convincing. He contends that the German security apparatus in occupied Poland was, on one level at least, relatively successful. Its primary problem was not a shortage of information, but rather a surfeit of it, and very few underground initiatives and operations escaped detection. But beyond that, he suggests that it suffered from a number of ideological and structural obstacles, which affected its ability to respond effectively. Firstly, it bore an outdated stereotype of the leadership cadre of the Polish underground, believing it to come primarily from religious and aristocratic circles, when in fact it was drawn from a broad spectrum of society. Secondly, the ideological obsessions of the Nazi leadership prevented any evolution towards a more subtle and even consensual occupation regime in Poland. The result of this ossification was that policy rarely graduated beyond the brutal and the repressive, and collaboration was only given serious consideration in Berlin at a time when it was no longer an option for the vast majority of Poles. Thirdly, the failure of the mooted 'change of course', which had even been advocated by Hans Frank, was to significantly strengthen the resistance, whilst leaving the security apparatus less able to combat underground activity. Tellingly in this regard, Nazi intelligence knew in advance about the plan for the Warsaw Rising of August 1944, but lacked the manpower to do anything about it.

Despite being written during under the Polish People's Republic and being subjected to the dead hand of Communist censorship, Terror und Politik stands the test of time. It is clearly well researched and the author's mastery of German archival sources is impressive. It is also well written and thankfully free of the ideological jargon and posturing of previous decades. There are a couple of caveats however. There is a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms and pseudonyms. More seriously, the bibliography would benefit from a revision to reflect the political and historiographical changes of the last fifteen years, and the same criticism could be levelled at the text. The author states in his introduction that only "minor changes…less than ½ of 1% of the work" (p. vii) had to be made in preparation for the German edition. This may be so. But given that a rival Polish historian has recently claimed that the period in question should be completely rewritten in the wake of 1989, Borodziej's assertion sounds a touch optimistic.

Beyond that, Terror und Politik is an excellent book, which deserves a place, alongside those of Jan Gross, Czeslaw Madajczyk and Martin Broszat, as an important addition to the still slim corpus of non-Polish language work on German occupation policy in Poland.