Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

Hitler was a person who believed in the notion of eugenics. That is that races of people exist and some are better than others. On gaining power his primary aim was to re-arm Germany and to destroy the settlement which had been imposed following the First World War. He wanted to regain Alcace and Lorraine, to re-partition Poland and to absorb ethnic German minorities into an expanded Germany. Racial purity would be achieved by expelling the Jews. Inferior races like the Poles would be reduced to slavery. Their elites killed and the survivors banned from higher education. This he achieved by 1940. However he then decided that Germany should acquire a vast empire at the expense of the Soviet Union. This created a problem as it meant that Germany would then have a subject population of 150 million racial inferiors. A departure from his earlier aims of creating a state based on racial purity. The Germans however developed a plan to use starvation to reduce the Soviet population to a more manageable 30 million. The war against the Soviets was characterised by the utmost brutality. In the first twelve months of the war Hitler starved 2 million Soviet prisoners to death. As his forces advanced murder squads followed the army killing Jews and Communist Officials. This is a history of the period. On reading the book one is reminded of the magnitude of the crimes. However one strong theme is the absolute lunacy of the program. Germany conquered Europe but was hardly able to use its resources to fight the war. Japan on the other hand was able to use race in a positive way to develop a widespread anti colonial movement and to get its empire to cooperate. The Germans simply had to rely on murder as the key weapon of control. In the West they were able to elicit a level of sullen cooperation from the French, Danes and Belgians. There were no plans afoot for slaughter and slavery for those "races". However Germany was not even able to motivate rightist regimes in France and Spain to join them. One of the themes of the book is how ad-hock the decision making was. One year a expanded racially based Germany. The next year a huge eastern empire with murder on a scale not imagined by man.

This well written book is an overview and analysis of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Mazower's thoughtful discussions emphasize a number of important and familiar themes - the importance of Nazi ideology, the centrality of the Holocaust, the polyocratic nature and inefficiency of the Nazi state, the deep complicity of the German Army in the crimes of the Nazis, the fundamental economic weakness of the Nazi state, the incredible brutality of the occupation of Eastern Europe, and the wiling collaboration of the governments of many occupied western European states. Several aspects, however, of Mazower's analysis give this book a distinctive and useful character. One is Mazower's careful attention to the diversity of experiences under the occupation. Mazower shows well the differences not only between eastern and western Europe, but also between individual states. Mazower shows the differences, for example, between the Czech and Danish experiences, and those of France or Belgium. Mazower is very good also on the nature and role of Nazi diplomacy with its client states, showing the diversity of experiences among different nations like Italy, Hungary, and Finland. There is a lot of fine analysis of how the Nazi domination of Europe affected German society, for example, the enormous influx of foreign workers, many of them slave laborers, into Germany. Mazower emphasizes the contradictions between the pragmatic needs of the Nazi war machine and the consequences of Nazi racist ideology. The latter played a major role in preventing the Nazis from effectively exploiting the economic resources of Eastern Europe. Finally, Mazower does a particularly nice job of placing the Nazi occupation in larger historic context by discussing the continuity between the Nazi ideology and its roots in European imperialism-colonialism. Well organized and with a fine bibliography, this is a very fine synthesis.

Mark Mazower's treatise on the supposed European Empire of Hitler's Nazi Germany introduced a new hypothesis of Germany's occupation of Europe. This hypothesis states the fact that Germany could never have sustained an Empire for any length of time. The plain fact of it all is that they never really had a plan. So much for the vaunted Teutonic ideal of structure and intellectual order. Mazower goes into detail of the beginnings of World War II with the invasion of Poland. His findings of the subsequent settlements of territories in Poland and Belorussia along with all the Slavic countries tells the story of brutal "ethnic cleansing" and mass murders. The supposed empire to create lebensraum for the German people never materialized. Lebensraum was a German word signifying "living space" which was long sought after for well over a century in the German political psyche. The Author points out the multitude of mistakes made by the Nazis during their short term of administering a European Empire. The mistakes include the failure of the Nazis to pacify their conquered territories in Eastern Europe. Instead of acting as liberators of Bolshevik tyranny, the Nazis brought only "ethnic cleansing" and terror. Instead of making the Eastern Countries administer their own governments, they were completely dismantled. Doing these self inflicted brutalities only further disabled the Nazi war efforts. Administering their conquered territories in the East as they did so brutally only brought about Germany's defeat that much quicker. As Mazower stated, Germany dealt with Western Europe and the Nordic Countries much more humanely and thus had much less trouble in administering and placating those areas. When one looks back at what the Nazis did, it's a wonder that they even lasted until 1945. Mazower's last 20 pages spells out the essence of what the war in Europe was all about. The old ancient order of Europe vaporized with Germany's surrender. The occupation of land masses has essentially become a moot exercise when considering dominance in the political arena. All the old empires dating back to the beginnings of the British Empire in the 1700's are now all gone. Alas Europe is united in the economic Common Market. In reality it has become a United States of Europe, the very ideal of what Winston Churchill had visions of. Germany is an important cog in this union. And in conclusion lebensraum is but a myth. Excellent study by Mazower looking at the war in Europe with different eyes. Five Stars!!!

So much literature and history related to World War II in Europe passes through the prism of emotionalism that it actually ends up as propaganda either villifying or lionizing groups or individuals. Whether it be the need to praise the heroism of allied troops, establish the obscene nature of the holocaust or chronicle the perfidity of statesmen, it seems that authors are so often in the thrall of their emotions that the literature is on some level or another, tainted. While Mazower does not by any means disregard the incredible immorality of Nazi policy in Europe, he takes a clinical and wide angle approach to his analysis. He sets out to examine why the Nazis did what they did and what they hoped to achieve. He gets to the nub of it by identifying an issue that plagued German policy and self-conception from the time of Bismarck. How should Germany best deal with the problems of mixed ethnic communities containing significant populations of Germans outside the Reich? It is understanding that this question is the infamous "German Question" that Hitler tried so outrageously to "solve" that provides the framework to the book and the entire conflict. The irony is that Hitler's war did indeed end up "solving" this German Question but in a way that was far different from what Hitler intended. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular flavour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact). The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the object, rather than the subject side of the verb 'to colonize' meant, and my impression is that Napoleon's version was probably closer most of the time (though, note - and it is certainly germane - Napoleon's version was not very nice either). Yes, there were times and places that were like the Ukraine (the Belgian Congo, for instance) but not in general. And when Mazower tries to argue otherwise, his prose is littered with the tells characteristic of someone trying to hammer historical facts into an ideologically conditioned prior. For instance he tends to move smoothly from 'there exists' to 'for all' far too easily (minor example that comes to mind: the true observation that some Ukrainian post-war exiles were nasty pieces of work morphs slopily into a remark that vaguely implies that the post-war Ukraininan exile community in the 'States consisted solely of genocidal gangsters imported by the CIA). He writes, in the conclusion, presumably thinking of the British 'if they lacked the ideology and the resources to systematize mass killing on the scale of the New Order, they also lacked