IN THE MIDST of the killing, and still worrying about his marriage, Frank found the time to implement another bright idea: he invited the famous Baedeker publishing company to produce a travel guide for the General Government to encourage visitors. In October 1942, Frank wrote a short introduction, which I read in a copy obtained from an antiquarian bookseller in Berlin. The familiar red cover of a book that contained a large pullout map showing the outer limits of Frank’s territory, etched in light blue. Within that border, Lemberg was on the east, Kraków to the west, Warsaw to the north. The borders enclose the camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Sobibor.
“For those coming to the Reich from the East,” Frank wrote in the introduction, “the General Government is the first glimpse of a structure offering a strong impression of home.” For visitors arriving from the west, traveling out of the Reich, his lands offered a “first greeting from an Eastern world.”
Karl Baedeker added a few personal words to thank Frank, the inspiration behind this happy new addition to the Baedeker collection. Preparation was overseen by Oskar Steinheil, who visited the area in the autumn of 1942, with the personal support of the governor-general. What did Herr Steinheil see but decide to leave out as he traveled around by car and rail? Baedeker hoped the book might “convey” an impression of the tremendous work of organization and construction accomplished by Frank “in the difficult wartime conditions of the past 3½ years.”
The visitor would benefit from great improvements, the province and cities having “acquired a different appearance,” German culture and architecture once more accessible. Maps and city plans were modernized, names Germanized, all in accordance with Frank’s decrees. The reader learned that the General Government had an area of 142,000 square kilometers (37 percent of the former Polish territory) and was home to eighteen million people (72 percent Polish, 17 percent Ukrainian [Ruthenian], and 0.7 percent German). A million or more Jews had been erased (“free of Jews” was the formulation used for various towns and cities). The attentive reader might have noted the odd error, including the reference to the fact that Warsaw’s population used to comprise 400,000 Jews, now disappeared.
Lemberg got eight pages (and a two-page map), Żółkiew just one, although it was a town “worth seeing,” for its Germanic seventeenth-century heritage. The Ringplatz (Ring Square) was “characteristically German”; the Baroque Dominican church (dating to 1655) and the Roman Catholic church (rebuilt in 1677) had paintings by a German artist. German tourists would be reassured by the presence of nearby German settlements. The only place of worship in Żółkiew not mentioned in the guide was the seventeenth-century synagogue, gutted by the fire of June 1941. Nor did the guide make any mention of the Żółkiew Jews or the ghetto in which they lived when the guide was published. Within six months of publication, almost all of them had been murdered.
The volume offered no hint as to the uses to which the “densely wooded” areas around Żółkiew were put or any information on the myriad concentration camps dotted around Frank’s territory. The editors offered a passing mention of the connections that Belzec’s train station offers to the rest of Galicia and a fleeting reference to the small town of Auschwitz, located on Reichstrasse No. 391, the main route between Warsaw and Kraków.