Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

by Mark Mazower

Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler?s Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion?and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the Nazis? lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking level of cooperation from the overwhelmed countries. A work as authoritative as it is unique, Hitler?s Empire is a surprising?and controversial? new appraisal of the Third Reich?s rise and ultimate fall.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, Germany, War, European History, Military History

784 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2008

About the author

Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international history. His books include Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize; Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, winner of the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History; and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He is currently the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, and his articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Republic.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Hitler’s Empire, Mark Mazower explores Nazi Germany from a very specific angle. He does not write about the many battles of World War II. There are no discussions of weaponry or tactics. He is not interested in the twisted, pathological personalities that studded the Nazi hierarchies. He is not here to describe Hitler’s rise to power or the domestic politics of his party. Instead, Hitler’s Empire is a thorough (604 pages of text), readable exploration of the way Nazi Germany administered its occupied territories.

We’ve all seen a map of Occupied Europe and marveled at the breadth of Hitler’s cartoonish ambitions. To look at that map, though, is to miss the distinctions in the way that Nazi Germany swallowed its kills. Not all conquests were the same, which made a great deal of difference to the people being conquered. Austria and parts of Poland were incorporated into the Reich. Czechoslovakia became the protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia. Norway and the Netherlands came under German civil administration, while France was divided in two, with one half occupied. Meanwhile, parts of Poland and the Ukraine were administered by the General Government as part of a broader plan to Germanize the area. Whether or not you survived the arrival of Hitler’s minions depended on how Germany administered your country. In the west, Germany generally left civil structures and authority intact. In the east, on the other hand, those same authorities and structures (and the people comprising them) were liquidated.

Mazower breaks his book into three sections. The first is a broad-ranging introduction to the theory, history, and early execution of German expansionist dreams. Mazower begins in 1848 (at the Frankfurt Parliament) and ends in 1942, with Germany fulfilling long-held territorial/racial ambitions by invading the Soviet Union. In between you learn about German goals, centered on that ill-omened word, lebensraum. This ultimate end was bolstered by the twin pillars of nationalism (which embodied the notion of “Greater Germany”, the unification of German-speaking peoples) and anti-Slavism/anti-Semitism (which embodied the German belief in their superiority, in turn justifying their precipitous actions). The strands of this delusion coalesced into substantive complaints following the harsh Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Versailles stripped German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, took from them Alsace and Lorraine (of course, they’d taken that from France in the Franco-Prussian War), and carved up Prussia. The Treaty also ignored Woodrow Wilson’s proposed “self determination” by refusing to allow Austria to join Germany.

The first section starts slowly by developing some of the intellectual underpinnings of German visions. The pace picks up considerably once Hitler starts putting these plans into action by annexing Austria, occupying the Sudetenland, and invading Poland.

The second section is the heart of the book. Whereas the first part proceeded chronologically, the second is arranged topically. There are thematic chapters devoted to subjects such as labor policy, collaborators, and resistance movements. Within each of these chapters, Mazower surveys the various countries that fell under German control.

Several things jump out in these chapters. One is the absolute ad hoc nature of German planning. Despite nurturing these expansionary plans for decades, and despite the supposed Germanic traits of preparation and scheduling, the Nazis were unable to keep up with their own successes. The result was a lot of freelancing, as officials tried to create administrative structures on the fly. This led to competing visions. For instance, Mazower depicts the clashing ideologies of Werner Best and Reinhardt Heydrich. Best proposed a “typology of occupation regimes” based on National Socialist Principles. Certain countries, such as Denmark, could be run through the Foreign Ministry. Similarly, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, might be administered informally, with Germans working through those countries’ own civil service. Both of these options would have qualified as a “light touch” relative to the Nazis. At the other end of the scale, however, you had the “colonial” category, embodied by the General Government of Poland, where German racial views of the inhabitants required higher participation in government. Heydrich opposed Best, because Best’s proposals might seal off the SS from entering many parts of Occupied Europe.

(Relative to other Nazis, Best often sounds almost rational. Mazower makes clear that seeming rational is not difficult when pitted against annihilationist monsters such as Reinhardt Heydrich. Best was a criminal like the rest, who recognized the possibility they might have to “totally destroy” unwanted groups).

Another leitmotif that arises is Hitler’s adamant refusal to centralize functions. Today, bureaucracy gets a bad name. You hear bureaucracy and you think Patty and Selma from The Simpsons issuing one driver’s license an hour at the DMV. Fair enough – the DMV is a wretched place. But bureaucracy has its uses. It can – properly implemented – promote efficiency by streamlining services, avoiding redundancies, and providing consistency. Centralization also keeps power struggles from arising. This is what Hitler wanted to avoid by decentralization. To the end, the Nazis struggled finding the balance between Party politics and governance. Hitler always had one eye on his own authority, his own place within the party. He managed his own risk by pitting various factions and personalities against each other. Sometimes he’d side with the SS over the Interior Ministry; sometimes he’d side with the Interior Ministry over the SS. By forcing them to fight for Hitler’s graces, he kept them from obtaining too much power. (And the Nazis loved power more than anything. It’s almost pathological. Even at the bitter end, with Germany in ruins and the Soviets beating on the door to Hitler’s Bunker, you had Hitler’s sycophants vying for the honor of King of the Ashes).

There is only one chapter devoted solely to the Holocaust. Consistent with other areas of Nazi policy, their genocidal policies moved forward in fits and starts. Over time, they moved from property seizures, ostracizing laws, and forced immigration to shooting people in the back of the head, and burying them in mass graves. Eventually, their murderous impulses culminated in gas chambers and crematoriums.

However, the Holocaust runs through this book like poison in the blood. German administrative policies always had to account for the roundup, incarceration, and slaughter of millions of humans. This, of course, diverted resources away from battling the free world. Moreover, the Germans continually prioritized genocide over larger war aims. (There were minor exceptions, of course; as the Götterdämmerung approached, Himmler made some abortive efforts to exchange hostages). For instance, Germany was constantly beset by manpower shortages and had to conscript workers from the occupied territories. Not to be glib, but Germany had millions of laborers ready at hand. Instead of killing them, or working them to death, the Germans might simply have treated them as property – as an asset. Of course, even this shred of humanity coupled with sense eluded the Germans. In the final analysis, the destruction of Nazi Germany was built into the very DNA of the Nazis. Hate fueled and consumed them.

Mazower ends his book with a short final section giving some perspective to Germany’s failed attempt to rule Europe. He has some interesting observations about how Nazi Germany’s notion of a united Europe morphed into the European Union that we recognize today. For a short, terrible time during the 1940s, Berlin was the dark heart of Europe. That ended long before Hitler's prophesied 1,000 years, but the price was high. In the end, peace finally came to Europe - a tremulous, cold war peace at first; later, something far more lasting. Strangely, it was the countries Hitler most feared – the US and the USSR – that dominated this process.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire offers an ambitious, provocative look at Nazi management of conquered territories and collaborators throughout the Second World War. Mazower examines the underpinnings of Hitler's dream for lebensraum in the broader contexts of German imperial history, racial fears of Russians and Jews, and (reviving an old idea of A.J.P. Taylor) the American and British expansionists whom Hitler professed to admire. Yet Mazower stresses the differences between American Manifest Destiny or Pax Brittanica and Germany's late-stage empire building are more profound than the broad similarities. Neither Hitler nor his henchmen realized than a continental super-state was utterly incompatible with his fantasies of racial purity; each territorial acquisition brought more and more non-Germans into the Reich, without a clear plan how to manage them. Thus administration of territories proceeded ad hoc, less managed by Hitler than the whims of bureaucrats and local military commanders; some countries, particularly the Germanic peoples of Holland and Denmark, enjoyed relatively benign occupations while others (especially in Russia and Poland) suffered unrelenting savagery. Mazower's book emphases this inconstancy while emphasizing the brutality underpinning it; he demonstrates that fascist violence generally dissuaded mass resistance outside of the USSR, that they found many willing collaborators in conquered territories, and yet that political incompetence, economic mismanagement and crude "ersatz diplomacy" towards foreign allies and neutrals constantly undermined their goals. Overall, Mazower portrays a dysfunctional state both intoxicated and confused by its own success, with unworkable policies, unreliable allies and a capricious Fuhrer conspiring to undermine them. A fascinating, thought-provoking look at a well-worn subject.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a scene in the classic Star Trek episode "Patterns of Force" that always comes to mind when I read Nazi-era histories. In the episode, Enterprise is called to the planets Ekos and Zeon to find out what happened to the Federation's cultural observer, John Gill, who's disappeared. They discover Ekos ruled by a Nazi Party identical in every way to Earth's, down to the very uniforms; led by the Fuhrer, John Gill; and embarked on a campaign to finally eradicate the Zeon "scum" (the Zeons all had Jewish names - Star Trek was not known for subtlety, even in her best episodes). The scene in question occurs late in the episode; Kirk and Spock have penetrated Party HQ to confront Gill and Kirk asks him, "Why Nazi Germany?" Gill replies that it was the most efficient state Earth ever knew, and Spock concurs. The historian in me always cringes at that because Nazi Germany was one of the most inefficient and corrupt examples of a modern state one could conceive of. What efficiencies pertained were offset by the feudal structure of the regime; rivalries between Party, civil service & the military; and the personal leadership of the Fuhrer. All this and more is documented in Mark Mazower's look at how the Nazi's ran Germany and their empire.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first 2 focus on Nazi Germany primarily during the war years; there's almost nothing about National Socialism's domestic policies from '33 to '39 (for those interested, see Richard Evan's The Third Reich in Power). The final part, "Perspectives," looks at some of the fallout from the Nazi era.

"For Greater Germany": Chapters 1 and 2 in this section offer a brief overview of German political history from 1848 to 1918. Here, Mazower makes several important points. First, the roots of the Nazi's New Order lay in traditional German aspirations to unify all Germans and become the dominant European power. Aspirations reinforced by Wilson's idealistic (and, in practice, unworkable) notion of self-determination set out at Versailles. A second point is that German society always had strong anti-Slav and anti-Semitic strains. In fact, all of Europe had powerful anti-Semitic movements. Nazism was a particularly psychotic and toxic expression of sentiments very common Europe-wide. A third point is that, while Nazi occupations were lethally brutal they weren't all that moreso than standard Wehrmacht policy as evidenced by Germany's treatment of Belgium and Poland in the Great War (the consequences of this brutality are explored more fully in section 2). Nazi racial ideology played a significant role in the difference. In the East, especially, the Nazi's were far more brutal. Germans felt themselves to be morally and racially superior to the Slavs. In the West, in countries of fellow Aryans, the conquered were treated more leniently and non-Nazi elements were able to retain control till late in the war. Furthermore, in many countries conservative, right-wing parties actually welcomed the chance to eliminate center and leftist opponents. In the West, Germany's primary objective was to keep things quiet so it could focus on the East. A final point Mazower makes is that the Nazi's were caught flat-footed by their successes. The morass of Party fiefdoms and competing ministries emerged because they couldn't plan ahead and all important decisions went through Hitler, who liked to play his people off against each other.

A few thoughts from the later chapters of section 1: Two things stood out to me - The Nazi's drive to create a Greater Germany and weed out the untermenschen who were contaminating it foundered on the fact that their racial ideology was nearly incoherent. Since it had no scientific, cultural or linguistic validity, the Nazi's were unable to define "Germanness," and so, depending upon the gauleiter in question and the exigencies of wartime needs, "Germanness" could mean just about anything.

In the Warthegau, Arthur Greiser maintained a strict regime of racial purity. A policy made easier as this province received the bulk of the German immigres. In West Prussia, Albert Forster kept settlers away and used the SS's racial classifications to "Germanize" large numbers of Poles (even if they didn't want to be "German"). And in Upper Silesia, the administration held the SS off by arguing that economic stability mandated keeping the old population in place (for the time being). Here, as elsewhere, Nazi ideology shipwrecked on the shores of reality. In the first case, uprooting large numbers of people caused such economic turmoil and interfered with the war effort to make it impracticable. In the second case, there simply weren't enough Germans who needed or wanted to settle in all that Lebensraum the early successes of the war made available. (pp. 189-198)

A second facet of Nazi government that I found interesting is Mazower's argument that there were 2 visions of the New Order. The old-time Party hacks preferred what Mazower calls "decentralized chaos" - a mode of governing which had characterized Nazi rule since they had come to power. A second vision, supported by the SS and the civil service, was a "lethal excess of centralized order." It's here that one catches a glimpse of what a Nazified Europe may have looked like - death camps, secret police, the brutally efficient regime mythologized in Star Trek and other venues. As the war progressed and the inadequacies of that first vision became apparent and crippling, Himmler managed to grasp greater and greater power for the SS both inside Germany and in the Occupied Territories.

"The New Order": In section 2, Mazower takes a closer look at aspects of Nazi rule, beginning with "Making Occupation Pay." The driving reason behind all of Germany's decisions regarding policies in the Occupied Territories was how it could benefit the Reich. Absolutely no regard was given to the economic effects on the conquered or even allied nations.

Just as with economic policy, Nazi ideology blinded them to diplomatic opportunities to sow goodwill. It may be hateful to the wartime myths of Europe but many nations before 1945 were quite willing to consider working with Germany. It's the Germans themselves who made it impossible by insisting on a Europe that existed for exploitation by Germany. Fascist movements and other right-wing parties were increasingly alienated by the high-handed and inept diplomacy of the Reich.

Despite that, before it became clear Germany would lose the war, collaboration with the Nazi regime was widespread since it often resulted in the enrichment of private corporations (like L'Oreal, Mercedes, and others), and could be argued as the only sane course in a Europe that looked to be a Nazi garden before 1942.

The opposite of collaboration is opposition and Mazower offers a typically nuanced view of that aspect of the Nazi era, as well. As was true elsewhere, Germany's wartime fortunes generally dictated how opposition developed: Before the great reverses of 1942-43, opposition in the West was almost nonexistent; and when it did arise, the German response against civilians was so vicious that most gave it up as too costly. Over the course of the war, especially after the Allies breached Festung Europa in 1944, the Resistance of myth finally coalesced and began coordinating operations with the Anglo-American command despite continued German reprisals. In the East, the opposition developed earlier, particularly among the Jews and the Poles, both of whom quickly realized that German intentions toward them gave them nothing to lose. Many may remember the destruction of Lidice after Reinhard Heydrich's assassination but this was the typical response to such incidents! After a time, the roll call of slaughtered civilians becomes mind numbing: In Belorussia, upwards of 375,000 died as a result of reprisal actions alone (p. 487); in Yugoslavia, 10,000 were rounded up in retaliation for raid and 2,300 were immediately shot (p. 483); and in the Warsaw Ghetto there remained (at most) 70,000 Jews in 1943 from a 1941 population of 450,000 (p. 494).

Ultimately opposition was more important politically than militarily. It's strategic significance was negligible but it often legitimized the various governments-in-exile. Beyond that, Allied response to resistance movements was often ambivalent. In the East, the Soviets were given carte blanche to make policy and the non-Communists were left to hang (often literally). In Greece and elsewhere, Anglo-American fears of Communism influenced policy. Thus, in Greece, the British bombed ELAS (the Greek communist partisans) positions. (pp. 515-521)

Hitler's Empire goes on for 672 pages of text, notes and sources so it should be obvious that I've only sketched out the roughest thumbnail of Mazower's arguments (despite this review's length), and I have refrained from drawing the obvious parallels with our own recent history, and the fragility of liberal democracy. I can only urge the interested to go out and find a copy of their own to read.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1915, with Europe aflame in what everyone thought would be its worst war, W.E.B. Du Bois published a theory of the belligerents’ motives in the Atlantic Monthly. “The African Roots of War” argued that the proverbial chickens had come home to roost: that imperial competition, especially the “scramble for Africa,” had created the jealousies fueling the war, and had raised the stakes almost to preclude a lasting peace. “The Balkans are convenient for occasions, but the ownership of materials and men in the darker world is the real prize that is setting the nations of Europe at each others’ throats to-day.” Du Bois’ tone is not one of mordant gloating, but rather deep alarm at what the colonizing mindset and respectable, “scientific” racism might do to Europe in the future—and Du Bois knew something of Europe’s ethnic conflicts. David Levering Lewis describes how during vacations of the University of Berlin, in the 1890s, graduate student Du Bois tramped the back roads of the German and Hapsburg dominions, to the gates of Tsardom, once staying in Kraków with a classmate, later a victim of the camps, who had told him that if he really wanted to see a race problem surpassing that of the US, he should come observe German-Polish competition in the borderlands.


I don’t know what Du Bois thought of the Nazis, but given the prophecy of “The African Roots of War,” I doubt he was surprised that the defeated imperial power, stripped of its colonies and shut out of the race for more, tried to colonize Europe itself. Du Bois may have even thought what Mazower quotes the Martinican poet and theorist of Négritude Aimé Césaire as thinking—that Europeans had tolerated “Nazism before it was inflicted on them…they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” The Nazis certainly ruled Eastern Europe confident in colonial precedent. Hitler frequently referred to the peoples in the way of Lebensraum as “redskins,” “Red Indians.” In 1942 one official wrote that the methods being used by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel in his round-ups of slave labor for the Reich’s war plants “probably have their origin in the blackest periods of the slave trade.” Reichskommissar Ukraine Ernst Koch referred to his subjects as “niggers,” and “that nigger people.” Koch’s deputy, Generalkommissar Frauenfeld, said his chief’s policies comprised “points of view and methods used in past centuries against colored slave peoples.” When the army high command recognized the need to cultivate Ukrainian nationalists as allies against the Soviets, the generals agreed “to take ‘no nigger attitude’ [Nicht Negerstandpunkt] towards the Ukrainians.” On the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Mussolini complained to the tiremaker Pirelli: “It is not possible to treat European countries like colonies.” “But this is just what the Germans intended to do.”


Hitler’s Empire is the perfect book to have read on the heels of Lieven’s Empire, in which Hitler’s regime is called “a product of modern pathology, not of traditional imperial thinking”—a regime that “combined all the worst aspects of European colonial empire since its inception, turned them into a policy, and carried them to their logical extreme.” Mazower’s book fleshes out Hitler’s imperial thinking—first and last “a violent fantasy of racial mastery.” Hitler was only half-right. The successful empires he envied had more to teach than “whites up, browns down.” Hitler always dismissed warnings of overreach by invoking British rule of India. That the British were able to control a subcontinent with a modest outlay of men and resources indicated to Hitler that their handful of colonial administrators were of such resplendent whiteness that the mottled masses of Asia could do naught but bow and obey. And so the Slavic Untermensch before the German Herrenvolk or Master Race. Hitler ignored or never learned about India’s co-opted princes, or the native civil service, English-speaking and assimilated, that ran the country day-to-day. The conquest of the American West was another misread precedent. Hitler pointed his generals to Karl May’s Wild West pulp novels for strategic wisdom, referred to the Slavs as “Red Indians,” and rode around Europe in an armored train christened “Amerika”. He mistakenly believed that the US had totally exterminated the Native Americans, and never seems to have seriously considered if any Germans actually wanted to leave their homes and go as pioneers to Ukrainian farmsteads, or to have ever wondered if conquering and ruling the Polish, Czech and Russian nation-states might pose more complex, or even simply different, challenges than those America faced in subduing nomadic tribes of hunger-gatherers. Hitler emerges from Mazower’s pages as the quintessential crackpot pseudointellectual—proud in the discovery of seeming parallels, oblivious to subtle distinctions, and engaged in an alchemiac quest to divine immutable historical laws.


Hitler seems to have read just enough to apply real place-names to his apocalyptic futurology; his comic book grandeurs date from when America was Land of the Future. He thought his empire would rewind history, drawing back to Germany the descendants of those who had immigrated to North and South America in the previous century. He wanted Berlin’s new railway station to be larger than Grand Central Station, the new Elbe bridge modeled on San Francisco’s Golden Gate, but totally, like, bigger and stuff. Hamburg’s regional party headquarters would be housed in a skyscraper—expressly dwarfing the Empire State Building—“that would be visible for miles, with a huge neon swastika to guide shipping.” And with the Allies bombing from above and battering the gates, Hitler continued to mumble about the “wonder weapons” whose deployment would shatter his foes. Hitler is MF Doom’s “Lego-megalomaniac,” giddy over scale models of his sci-fi Berlin, his monumental metropolis, and crouching to gaze a bleary eye down its small triumphal avenues. Bolaño makes science fiction one of the major genres of Nazi Literature in the Americas:

Gustavo Borda was just over five feet tall; he had a swarthy complexion, thick black hair, and enormous very white teeth. His characters, by contrast, are tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. The spaceships that appear in his novels have German names. Their crews are German too. The colonies in space are called New Berlin, New Hamburg, New Frankfurt, and New Koenigsberg. His cosmic police dress like SS officers who have somehow managed to survive into the twenty-second century.

[Jonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

An examination of how the Germans plundered, murdered and stole their way through Europe in the years from 1938 to 1945. Not unsurprisingly, it's a catalogue of lack of planning, graft, genocidal tendencies, outright theft and the insanity of issuing vague instructions to competing individuals. Of particular interest was the way that the definition of "ethnic Germans" shifted depending on the racism of the Gauleiters and the pressure of quotas to Germanise Poland, and the fact that said "ethnic Germans" were often no less Slavic than the populations they were meant to replace - and often had no wish to be resettled anywhere at all.
A very important look at the effect of the Nazi regime on Europe, well worth a look and a good deal of thought.

[Jenny T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the most compelling book I've read this year, Hitler's Empire detailed Germany's domination of Europe from the 1930s to 1950--and the aftermath. From Germany's initial goal of uniting all the "Germanic peoples" in Europe under a single flag, to forced migration, attempted genocide, forced labor, political back-stabbing, and mass murder, this is a sad, scary story.

But it's a fascinating one. Rather than focusing strictly on the political power of a few men (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Stalin, etc), as many history books do, the book focuses on the everyday administration of the Third Reich--how it was expanded and run by ordinary people, some with evil motives, others just doing what they were told. Hitler's regime is presented as a splintered one, with various parties with widely differently philosophies fighting amongst themselves--in particular, the Nazi Party proper and the SS. The Holocaust is covered from a political, as well as an administrative point of view: logistically speaking, *how* was all that horror accomplished? Who collaborated with the Nazis and why? How did comparatively powerless countries fight back, even before the Americans joined the war? And what happened after Hitler's death?

An emotional roller-coaster for me, this book took a long time to get through, but I'm now much more aware of the staggering effects of Nazism on other countries in Europe, especially Italy, Poland, and Greece, and my heart goes out to those in affected countries who struggled to put the pieces back together after so many nations were torn apart.

I'm left with additional questions, and I suspect this book is just the beginning of my forays into World War Two history.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent account of Germany's attempt to administer its conquered territories and of how the Third Reich so haplessly failed to understand both its own economic and military limitations and to coordinate any vision of what a Europe dominated by Greater Germany would look like. Mazower focuses on the utter disjunct between Nazi racial visions and the economic needs of the Reich whether in peace or war and on the sheer venality and incompetence of all-too-many of the new rulers in the conquered East, as well as on Germany's complete inability to develop reliable allies.

Where Mazower is less successful is in his effort to place German efforts from the Anschluss in 1938 through the collapse of the Reich in 1945 into the category of "colonial" rule. While he quite correctly points out the similarities between German territorial goals in 1914-18 and those of the Third Reich, he is less successful in trying to compare German occupation policy with British or French policies overseas. While he points out that the policies of Germany's allies (Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania) in conquered or regained territories were not so very different in levels of brutality or hopes of national purification, he fails to really establish a typology for "colonial" rule.

Mazower does make one very interesting point that I'd love to see fleshed out. He looks at the small cliques of young technocrats in the SD--- the NSDAP's security service ---and the foreign ministry who tried to develop a body of administrative law and a coherent vision of European economic integration and notes in passing that many of them survived the war and de-nazification to become postwar managerial enthusiasts and supporters of the Common Market and European unity. Very much something worth exploring.

"Hitler's Empire" is a very fine introduction to the economic and social effects of German occupation, and a reminder of the costs of ideological rule--- a book worth reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of powerful conquest states.

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-De las funciones de las estructuras creadas y de las planificadas.-

Género. Historia.

Lo que nos cuenta. Relato y análisis de la formación del Reich de Adolf Hitler, desde los sustratos y caldos de cultivo que permitieron la llegada al poder del canciller, sus planes de crecimiento y expansión, su puesta en marcha y desarrollo, algunos detalles de los protagonistas y responsables del proceso, sus desavenencias e improvisaciones y, además, explicación de muchos planes y proyectos que por suerte para todos no llegaron a ponerse en marcha.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in tandem with Fischer's Germany's Aims in the First World War to get a sense of whether there was any continuity between the means and ends of German aggression in the world wars. In short, there definitely was. Mazower provides a detailed and extremely well-written account of 1)Germany's extensive aims, 2)its decided lack of a well thought-out plan for administering the territories it conquered, 3)its failure to coordinate military and civilian organizations in formulating any policies, 4)the different forms of brutality to which the Wehrmacht, SS, and Eastern offices subjected Poland, the Baltic, and occupied Soviet territories, and 5)the similarities between Nazi and Imperial German goals in the two world wars. Mazower has done an excellent job of covering a difficult and oft-neglected subject: what happened in WWII Europe behind (and often as a consequence of) the advancing armies.

[Bas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5/5 stars
This was an exceptionally strong read about what kind of order Nazi Germany hoped to create in Europe. For people who are familiar with this history there might not be that many new facts ( although I for sure learned quite a few new things) but I really appreciated the focus of the book. To summarize some conclusions of the book: The nazi's wanted to create an empire in Europe. It did in the most incompetent, ruthless , anarchic way. And they succeeded in burning every bridge with potential allies they had and to bring fire and blood to the whole European continent.
This doesn't sound too spectacular new but this book actually had some insights I really found refreshing. For example the way how dysfunctional nazi-Germany was and how much infighting and ruthless competetion between different organisations/ministries/personalities there was. The myth of a steamlined totalitarian state should be buried here and it really made me wonder how the Nazi's got anything done at all.
Another aspect that I found very well handled in the book was the incompetent way Hitler and co handled Foreign Relations and potential allies. Considering Europe either as reservoir for plunder or as future German land that should be cleaned of the 'undesirable' elements Germany missed opportunities. Other countries , allies included, had to just do what Germany wanted and otherwise stay clear and shut up. The fact that other countries might have own aspirations was something that was Inconceivable to the nazi leadership.
I also really appreciated that Mazower put the Nazi ideas of empire,... firmly in the context of both German history and European history. And to show how they were different and had things in common with each other. Nobody will be surprised that a book about World War 2 isn't a happy read, even though I devoured this book,so keep that in mind but otherwise if this is a subject that interests you I would certainly recommend it.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Велика книжка про Європу у 1938-1945 роках поза суто військовими діями - про окупацію, колаборацію, дипломатію, геноцид, партизанську боротьбу і так далі. І хоч тут покрито тем на десять книжок, мені сподобалось, що автор додатково фокусується ще й на "історії ідей": як нацисти та їхні противники бачили майбутнє національних меншин, маленьких країн, міжнародної співпраці тощо. Зрозуміло, що в одному томі не розповіси про все це достатньо детально, але цікавого і нового матеріалу я тут знайшов багато.

[Andrewh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and well-written, and long, book about Hitler’s dreams of building a land empire, which mainly means looking at the war in the East – it is not about the conduct of the war itself (though it touches on issues such as partisan warfare), but a study of the way the Nazis occupied its conquered territories and the surrounding issues, including colonial adminstration, economics and collaboration.

The book starts with a short summary of the history of German pan-nationalism and the desire to reunite the German peoples in one state, which started with the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 – the book also notes that the Versailles Treaty left Germans as the largest ethnic minority group in Europe, with 8m people in other nation states, providing a reservoir of resentment for the Nazis to exploit. The Nazi dream of ‘lebensraum’ in the east was also historical in nature, but the book shows that in practice this was not very successful, inasmuch as there were relatively few German emigrants into the occupied territories conquered in the early years of the war, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and they were not very enthusiastic about their new lands either, with many returning to Germany. The idea of ‘Germanization’ of local populations was a prevalent one, and based on complicated racial classifications designed by SS leader Himmler, but did not prove successful or easy to implement and it seems Hitler did not see it as so important in many cases (the Fuhrer was, it seems, less of a racial fanatic than Himmler).
The occupied territories were run by Gauleiters, who were often ex-WWI vets with little government experience or much education (they were not civil servants, whom Hitler distrusted) – their main attribute was loyalty to the Fuhrer and the ability to enforce harsh policies. Hitler’s imaginary ideal was the follow the decentralised approach of the British Empire (which was seen as the model by Hitler), without the overwhelming centralisation favoured by the Interior Ministry. The local administrative corps, and business leaders, were mostly kept in place in countries like France and Denmark, the book notes, but in the East the occupation was more brutal and subject to partisan resistance, and the rule was more direct and violent (more like a 19C colonial administration, such as the Congo, where the locals were not regarded as equals). The SS took an increasing role there, with massive reprisal violence being undertaken against local partisans (with 100 locals being killed for each German death). The general plan was to turn the East into German colonies, to replant German farmers onto the fertile land, and to use the locals as a landless labour force, akin to serfs – food security was a key goal here, the book notes, and it also suggests that this was one extra motivation for the ‘final solution’ extermination policy. There was also the need for raw materials and cheap labour, as with any other colonial expedition.
The book asks whether the occupations paid off? The book seems to imply that for all the rhetoric of lebensraum in the east, it was the Western countries that gave most to the war effort (being richer, industrial economies). A quick victory in 1941 may have enabled Hitler to get energy abroad, but the long drawn-out conflict with USSR/USA made this impossible and caused an energy deficit that hampered the war effort. There was also the ideological issue with Nazi racial policy which hindered their management of the East, with a tension between the administrator intellectuals who wanted to establish a sort of European Customs Union, controlled by Germany, and the radical Nazis, who wanted to conquer and then exterminate ‘inferior’ peoples. This tension was also notable in the issue over forced or slave labour that Germany needed, which was undermined by the SS’s brutal treatment of prisoners which led to an attrition rate as high as 10% per month. The ideology of racial superiority may have made the German army formidable in warfare, the book suggests, but hindered the Nazis in practical terms as they were far less able to mobilize their newly acquired workforce than either the capitalist states or the Soviets (who emptied the gulags and outperformed the German production figures). This issue was also relevant to the Nazis weak wartime diplomacy – they had no actual conception of what Europe would look like after they won (they simply wanted to smash Bolshevism and exterminate the Jews, and dominate). This made it harder for them to keep allies on board, as they only spoke in terms of the Nazi empire and its colonies, not what other allies might expect for their collaboration in the conflict (e.g. Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians and even the Petainist French). The Nazis diplomacy fell apart once the war started to go against them, and the book notes that Italy, its main ally, was often a barrier to the expulsion of Jewish populations to the camps from the lands it controlled, and other alllies also blocked such plans. Gradually, the Nazis coalition fell apart as the Allies and Soviets closed in, essentially destroyed by its own contradictions.
In conclusion, Mazower notes that Hitler’s aim to create a European Empire was undermined by lack of military/economic power and his poor political management and strategy– during the war, Hitler continually refused to take the chance to undermine the French and British Empires by making promises to the colonised peoples in Africa or the Mid East, and similarly did little to promise anything to the peoples of the Soviet ruled peoples, such as Ukraine (who were generally opposed to the Soviet regime). The book also notes that it took a racist war in Europe to make clear the racialised nature of the empires of the Allies themselves (the British and French, who used their colonies to fight, had no intention of granting independence to such ‘uncivilised’ peoples as a quid pro quo, despite the US’s anti-colonial rhetoric). Nazism was not totally dissimilar in its use of race to justify its rule over its new territories (it transplanted colonial techniques to Europe), but the main difference was that it saw extreme, racialised violence as an inherent part of their rule – almost its raison d’etre – and the Final Solution was the result of this philosophy of violence. The colonial powers also had long-term ideas of ‘allowing’ subject peoples their independence in time (although that could be many decades or centuries, when they had been deemed to have developed their civilisation sufficiently), while the Nazis saw no reason to do this for ‘subhuman’ groups, who were to remain almost slaves (though they never had this idea in view for racial equals, such as the Danes or French).

[La pointe de la sauce · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wholesale betrayal of the Jewish people by Europe headed by the third Reich. Systematic. A dishonour to humanity. The murder of millions of women and children on a scale unimaginable.  
Little is sadder in the whole grim story than the accounts of Jewish women and children emerging out of the Polish woods to give themselves up at gendarmerie posts asking to be shot. Their certainty that they were doomed if they relied on local Christians is chilling. The calculated total horror was beyond the comprehension of both Germany's collaborators and it's opponents and yet Europe as a whole has to be blamed for it's treatment of minorities even before 1938 and it's lack of tolerance was evident in it's immediate collaboration with Hitler.  Anti-Semitism, radical nationalism, imperialism and racism did not begin with the Nazis and didn't die of with the third Reich. We still have a long way to go.
-----------------------------------------------------

Notes:
Hitler's Empire

The roots of the Nazi New Order in 1933 lay not in anti-Semitism, nor in the blind lust for conquest, but rather in the quest to unify Germans within a single German state. Under the direction of a self made leader and his mass party, this aimed to succed where the Kaiser had failed, in establishing a permanent dominion in the East over the Slavs and in this way to become powerful enough to exercise mastery over Europe as a whole.

Between 1938 and 1942, Germany had amassed approximately one-third of the European land-mass and ruled nearly half it's inhabitants. 

Ruthlessly brutal operational force combined with Amateur administration of conquered territories. 
Very little importance was attached to administration. 
The period between 1918 - 1926 saw the exodus of the German population from Poland, Prussia and Czechoslovakia due to nationalistic sentiments of the ruling polish/Slavic/czech majorities.

1918 End of WW1. 

1938 - Annexes Austria without firing a shot and decides to administer it not as a seperate country but as a province within Germany. 

Sept. 1938 - Marches into the Czech Republic again with very little confrontation. Signs deal with Slovakia which announces it's independence from Czechoslovakia. Sets up a puppet government in Czech republic and annexes huge swats of land bordering Gemany as the Bohemian Protectorate. 

1939.January. Begins putting pressure on Poland. Poland signs an agreement with France and Britain to come to it's defense in the event of an attack. August 1939. Hitler gives order to occupy Poland and signs an agreement with the Soviets for the partition of Poland.
Order is given to shoot on sight - intellectuals, troublemakers etc. List is made of 100s of intellectuals to shoot. 
The generals are unwilling to sign up to war crimes so the SS is drafted in for massacre. A total destruction of the Polish leadership class. As a result 50,000 Poles and 7,000 Jews were executed during the invasion. 


  

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to offer a straightforward, detailed, and balanced report on the ways and means by which the Nazis administered Europe. But beyond presenting this historical record, Mazower places the whole story inside the wider story of racism and the end of colonialism. As Mazower explains, the main shock in what the Nazis did was that they did it to fellow Europeans. Instead of colonizing Africa, Asia or the Americas, they colonized Europe. And they treated the conquered "races" of Europe much like the USA treated its Native people, the French treated the Indo-Chinese, or the Belgians treated the Congolese. Then, of course, the "crusade" against such abuse only spread to every colonized land across the world, and the whole age of colonial empires teetered toward collapse.

Mazower also raises pointed questions about the future of ethnic nationalism, racism, and superpower status. He shows how the Nazi movement rose out of concern to protect Germany's identity against a tide of Slavic immigrants, and to "liberate" ethnic Germans who were living in Slavic-majority lands. The Nazis' imperialism started as ethnic cleansing, and ethnic cleansing retains its appeal as a means of self-defense, even after the age of colonialism, as we've seen in Eastern Europe following WWII, in Israel, Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, and a globalizing world with a rising refugee crisis.

[Miloš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tolerisali su nacizam dok nije nametnut njima... oslobodili su ga greha, zatvorili oči pred njim, legitimizovali ga, jer je, dotad, primenjivan samo na neevropske narode". (611)

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific book about how the Nazis administered their conquered territories. It is a serious history book, filled with lots of detail, copious citations, and considerable insight. It is also a dense read and not for the timid.

Why is this book so interesting and valuable? It is insufficient to say it is well crafted. One would certainly hope for that, but that sort of quality would not guarantee that the book was interesting or valuable. The answer is more fundamental. It is impossible to read much about the Nazis without wondering how they did it -- how did they "pull it off"? This question gets raised in lots of histories but is seldom a focus. The issue is that Nazi organization was almost intentionally not very organized and even chaotic -- literally an intense storm swirling around the person of Hitler. There are lots of metaphors for the chaos, going at least back to Arendt's vision of an onion getting more intense towards the center.

This book focuses on the order problem in terms of imperial administration. In effect, the Nazi order can be viewed in comparison with other imperial orders - such as those of England and France overseas, with the exception that the Nazis applied their order to other Europeans on their home grounds. Of course the Nazis were extremely violent and genocidal but that does not do away with the need for some organization.

Mazower's account is filled with learning and "takeaways" but some were especially interesting to me. One was that the Nazis did not originally plan for how to administer their conquests but instead found themselves surprised at their success that left them wondering what to do next. A second theme in the book was that Nazi order evolved based on earlier choices. As the empire grew, the Reich instituted new laws and structures - often "on the fly". As conquests piled up, however, choices about administration were based on earlier choices and arrangements. A third theme was that the war in the Soviet Union changed everything due to its vast scale, harsh conditions, and the place within Nazi ideology of the lower races. Once the Wehrmacht started to lose (after Stalingrad), the organization started coming off the rails. This also contributed to the expansion of the final solution - not a new story of course, but fascinating and told well. A final theme that was very interesting concerned economic relations. At various time, the Nazi planners started thinking about the economic organization of Europe under German overlordship. Some of these plans bear a surprising similarity to how the economics of European integration have developed -- without the military conquest and mass murder, of course.

This book too a while to read but it was well worth it.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history of the German administration of subject states during the second world war. A lengthy survey, it isn't, and it couldn't be, thorough within the compass of a single cover. Such emphasis as it does have seems to be with the East, where the greatest crimes were committed, especially with Poland. Coverage of the West is more cursory. However, extensive notes documenting the text suggest further, more focused study.

Most rewarding perhaps are the final chapters which summarize the author's conclusions regarding Nazi Germany's place in history and its continuing influence today, conclusions resting on a firm and broad foundation of scholarship.

[Martin Empson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an exceptionally detailed and informative study, well written and compelling. Despite its scope, Mark Mazower manages to make sure the human context is not forgotten in analyzing the death and destruction caused by war, occupation and genocidal policies.

Full review on the 'blog as ever: http://resolutereader.blogspot.co.uk/...

[Lazarus P Badpenny Esq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent companion to the Richard Evans trilogy, dealing as it does with the effect of Nazism on the protectorates, the occupied territories, palatinates, and client states of the Greater German Reich.

[Cav · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite being excited to start this one, it ultimately did not meet my expectations...

Author Mark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international history. He is currently the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, and his articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Republic.

Mark Mazower:


Mazower opens the book with a preface and intro that were way too long and dry... He should have laid out the scope of the book in a more clear and concise manner. A harbinger of the writing that was to come; the rest of the book followed suit.

This is my second book from the author, after his short 2000 book: The Balkans A Short History, which I liked much more than this one.

Mazower takes a deep dive into the machinations of the Third Reich in these pages. He extensively details Nazi policy and prescription; both at home in Germany, and in their newly-conquered territories.
He drops this quote early on:

"On 22 August, as Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to sign the non-aggression pact, Hitler was at his mountain fastness in Berchtesgaden, giving a speech to his senior military commanders. Notes taken at the time indicate exactly what kind of war he foresaw:
A life and death struggle ... The destruction of Poland has priority. The aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a definite line... I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting or waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness..."

I generally enjoy books about the Second World War, and noticed this book's fairly high aggregate score, indicating that it was generally very well received.
Unfortunately, my experience was not in line with most of the other ratings here. I found Mazower's writing super dry and long-winded. Coupled with the long length of the book (782 pages PDF, and ~27hours audiobook), it made getting through this one an arduous task...

Mazower covers this extensive material in a lacklustre manner, and I found the writing here droned on in a monotonous fashion for the duration. He virtually machine-guns names, dates and places at the reader, ensuring that anyone not already familiar with them will likely be completely lost...
I am not a fan of this type of writing in the books I read, and I always penalize them harshly for it.

**********************

Despite fielding an interesting subject matter, Hitler's Empire just did not do it for me... I kept waiting for the writing to pick up, and the book to get better. It never did.
Mazower's long-winded style and the somewhat jumbled formatting here left much to be desired.
I am always wary of very long books for this exact reason. Sometimes I find shorter books to be more effective at communicating to the reader, as by their very nature they don't have the time to bog the reader down in minutia...
I would not recommend this one.
2 stars.

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1938-1945 Nazi Germany ran a short-lived but large European empire, which at its peak in late 1942 stretched from western France to the Volga, and from northern Norway to Greek islands. It started rather innocuously, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and majority-German border areas of Czechoslovakia, with the consent of most of their citizens. This is what a lot of independent European nations wanted to do since the beginning of the Age of Nationalism: Bulgaria wanted to rule all Bulgarians, including peasants from northern Greece bilingual in Greek and a Slavic idiom Bulgarian linguists classified as Bulgarian; the Marshal of Finland declared that he would not put his sword in its scabbard until Finland annexes the province of Russia the indigenous ethnic group of which is closely related to the Finns; and so on. However, as time went on, Hitler's empire became something like the British, Dutch and other European colonial empires. That a small number of first-class citizens should rule over a large number of second-class subjects was as much a feature of British India and Netherlands East Indies as of Nazi-occupied Poland. That the colonized should be worked to death to benefit the colonizers was as true of the Belgian Congo as of Nazi concentration camps a few decades later. A Nazi official could claim an estate in occupied Poland, evicting Polish farmers or making them work for him; there wasn't a world of difference between him and a Briton who acquired a farm in Kenya. In 1939, George Orwell wrote an essay where he claimed, no doubt based on his experiences as a colonial policeman, that it was quite common for an Indian coolie's leg to be thinner than the average Englishman's arm; Buchenwald had opened just two years before. This had never been done to Europeans before, only by Europeans, but there is a first time for everything. Yet there were some salient differences.

First, Nazis, like any other large movement, were a heterogeneous bunch, but many, including Heinrich Himmler, romantically dreamed of an agricultural neo-Medieval future for Germany as a nation of farmers. This was an absurd future for a country that built the world's first production jet aircraft, ballistic missile and a computer with floating-point arithmetic, and strangely resembling the future Morgenthau Plan for de-industrializing defeated Germany, but no one is saying Nazis were realists. Farmers have large families; there needs to be enough land for them and their children and grandchildren. This land, reasoned the Nazis, was to be found in the East: in Poland, the Czech lands, and especially the Soviet Union. If Germany incorporated all this land, it would create a land empire self-sufficient in food and invulnerable to a naval blockade. What is to be done with the people already living in these countries? Ethnic Germans should be made a part of the Great German nation; the rest should either be reduced to the servitude or killed.

Second, Nazis were obsessed with pseudo-scientific "racial theory". Much like Communists see the world through the glasses of class struggle, Nazis saw it through the glasses of racial struggle: between the Jew and the Aryan and between the Slav and the German. Racism wasn't a Nazi invention; what was specifically Nazi (and Communist) was a sense of urgency; as Lenin put it in a different context, "Who whom?" Shooting and gassing millions of Jews made no economic sense; why not feed them just enough and force them to work for the Reich, and postpone the killings until after the victory? Yet the Nazis did it anyway because they believed it was the right thing to do: ridding the Earth of the vermin that is the Jews as soon as possible. The Nazis did not get a chance, but there are several indications that Slavs would be next; Reinhard Heydrich is quoted as saying that those Czechs who couldn't be assimilated into the German nation would be "sent to Siberia", and obvious euphemism for being killed.

Hitler's empire was destroyed by the force of arms of the Grand Alliance. Germany was reduced in size, and divided; yet instead of a shortage of land she has experienced a shortage of labor, and had to import Turkish guest workers. The Common Agricultural Policy and the Green Revolution ensured that Germany and her neighbors would have enough to eat without killing and enslaving millions. The emphasis of world politics has shifted to protecting human rights; no doubt it has much hypocrisy and double standards, but it is still much preferable to a politics of existential racial struggles. One lesson I draw from this book, however, is how hard it is to meaningfully divide the mass of humanity into distinct ethnic groups. Ever since the French Wars of Religion, Germany has been home to the descendants of Huguenots with French family names; one became the Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture; no one doubted their Germanness. However, when Nazi Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine, the residents were forced to Germanize their names, so a Boulanger became Becker. Many residents of the Czech lands were "amphibians": bilingual in German and Czech; products of mixed marriages; were they Germans, liable to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, or untermenschen Czechs? In parts of Poland so many residents were dragooned onto the List of Ethnic Germans that a "German" stormtroop would march through a town singing Polish national songs. Many "ethnic Germans" resettled from the Balkans into land confiscated from the Poles barely spoke German at all. Mazower says that the closest analogy in the postwar world is Israel, which tries to plant settlements on Arab lands like Germany did on Polish lands, tries to become the home of the world's Jews like Germany tried to become the home of the world's Germans, teaching Hebrew to new arrivals like Germany taught German to Balkan Germans, and has been struggling to define, who is a Jew, like Germany struggled to define, who is a German.

[Ada]

***who sucked me in***
Most of the time if I get interested in a history book written in English Steve Donoghue on YouTube sucked me in.

This time because this book is written about the economy of Nazi-Germany, which isn't something I know a lot about.

But this period of time is really low on my list of time periods I like to learn more about for fun. But maybe my partner will be interested?

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and engaging - I learned a lot and suspect most people reading it would. Relative to how the Third Reich is often discussed, early victories are presented as luck with tremendous mistakes made by those opposing Hitler, with higher-ups having no clear ideas on what a Nazi Empire was meant to look like, about economics being based on mercantile ideas of plunder, and of the basic inability to run the countries of Europe well.

[Dominic Brunaccioni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is all encompassing. It touches every aspect of Nazi Germany, down to even civil administration and the inner workings of fascist bureaucracy.

It taught me many lessons, perhaps the most frightening that European collaboration with the Nazi’s was much more common and embraced than I was familiar with. Hitler’s emphasis on racial science and obsession with land was also not as unique to the times in Europe as I thought I knew.

[Theamazingmeagher]

Didn't avtually read the whole thing but read like 170 pages today ALONE for college so I'm counting it also this is fire

[Ramil Kazımov]

Bu kitabı iki yıl önce bitirdim.. Mark Mazower Hitlerin imparatorluk hülyasını, Lebensraum (yaşam alanı) mücadelesini ve yahudilerden arındırma meselelerini öyle güzel anlatmış ki. Basil Liddell Hart-ın yazdığı İkinci Dünya Savaşı Tarihi çalışmasını da okudum. Ama aradakı fark Liddell Hart-ın stratejik yönden savaşı ele alması iken Mazower olayları sosyal yönden ele almış. Gayet başarılı bir çalışma olmuş. Yeniden okumayı düşünüyorum tabii))

[Helmut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fassungslos...

Ich lasse mich nur selten durch ein Buch aus der Fassung bringen, aber Mark Mazower hat das mit seinem Werk geschafft. Das Panorama, das er in wunderbar lesbarer Prosa vor dem Leser ausbreitet, zeigt das Dritte Reich in seiner ganzen Unfähigkeit: Beginnend bei einer Darstellung der völligen Planlosigkeit des faschistischen Regimes, welche durch den Sturm und Drang zunächst nicht sehr auffiel bis hin zum ständigen aktiven Wunsch, die eroberten Gebiete gegen sich aufzubringen. Dabei geht der Autor sehr detailliert vor und legt in einer schonungslosen Klarheit die Eitelkeiten und Inkompetenz eines Ribbentrops und Görings ebenso offen wie die Machtgeilheit eines Himmler oder den fast religiösen Rassenfanatismus eines Goebbels und Heydrich. Wenn aus bestimmten Kreisen immer wieder die Effizienz des Dritten Reichs gerühmt wird, so zeigt sich während der Lektüre hier ein völlig anderes Bild: Effizienz gab es im Dritten Reich ausschließlich bei der Vernichtung von Menschen (und sogar dabei gab es Probleme). Mazowers These, dass Deutschland ein Kolonialreich in Europa errichten wollte, und die eroberten Gebiete entsprechend behandelte, halte ich anhand der präsentierten Tatsachen für durchaus nachvollziehbar.

Mazowers Portraits der Hauptpersonen Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich und diverser weiterer wichtiger Personen wie Frank, Stuckart, Ribbentrop, Speer und Jeckeln, aber auch ausländischer Führungspersonen wie Mussolini und Antonescu, die ihren Teil in der Geschichte hatten, sind in einer beeindruckenden Klarheit erschreckende Beispiele für den globalen Wahn, der in den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren des 20.Jh. die Welt erfasst hatte, jedwede humanistische Zügel zeriss und dem Wolf im Menschen die Kontrolle über alles gab. Es waren eben nicht nur Hitler und Himmler, sondern Bereitwillige auf allen Ebenen, die erst ermöglichten, Europa in den Untergang zu stürzen.
Die erschreckende Wahrheit, dass die Welt ein Deutsch-Europa durchaus sogar akzeptiert hätte, wenn die Nazis nicht so übermäßig gierig und unkooperativ gewesen wären, bietet genügend Stoff, einmal darüber nachzudenken, wie die Welt dann heute aussähe. Darüberhinaus habe ich persönlich sehr viel über deutsche Geschichte gelernt und sehe nun vieles aus einer informierteren Position.

Das Paperback ist typische Penguin-Qualität mit dünnem Papier. Es enthält einige Fotoseiten, die allerdings meiner Meinung nach zu unspezifisch sind und in dieser Form dem Text keinen Mehrwert liefern. Die 600 Seiten Text werden durch weitere 100 Seiten Endnoten ergänzt.

Ein sehr dicht geschriebenes Buch, das dem Leser einiges abfordert, da jede einzelne Seite vor Informationen fast platzt; der lockere aber nüchterne Schreibstil Mazowers, der sowohl die Absurditäten des Regimes als auch die Schrecken emotionslos kommentiert, hilft dem Leser aber sehr. Akribisch recherchiert, brilliant formuliert: Äußerst empfehlenswert.

[H Wesselius · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent account of how the Nazis ruled Europe.

Mazower develops his ideas and story within the context of German nationalism and European imperialism. The ideas, methods, and organization that governed Europe in WWII did not develop in a vacuum. In most cases, it represented a continuity of Bismark eastern policy and Germany's actions in WWI. Furthermore, Mazower develops a comparison between standard European imperialism abroad and German actions in the east. In this way, we can view the some of the governing actions and methods as not an aberration but as part of the western European mindset. He is of course quick to point out the extremes the Nazis employed were not part of the previous administrations ideas and methods.

Contrary to many people's perceptions, Hitler had no grand plan of conquest and rule. In fact he was caught quite surprised by Germany's military success and had to develop governance on the fly. What developed was a multitude of different methods and strategies often at conflict and frequently counter productive to their war aims. The conflicts between civil administration, the Wehrmacht and the SS are described as are its effect. Race baed policy, personal fiefdoms, labour needs and collaboration did not always interact well and served to make the various occupations more difficult than necessary. Due to race based ideologies of the SS and some civil administrators, the ability to exploit the nationalism of various Eastern Europeans was passed up and instead the population was needlessly turned against them. In other instances labor needs alarmed and upset a previously docile population.

In exploiting the occupied nations for labor and persecuting those deemed subhuman the Nazis created a reaction and various resistance forces were formed. The overly harsh response although ineffective in maintain a co-operative people did actually minimize some resistance.

In sum, Mazower gives a detail description of governing inefficiency, personal rivalries, racist impediments, and repressive coercion. What emerges is a governing failure and a lost opportunity to unite Europe under German rule. It appears 70 years later, the Germans have figured out a more efficient strategy to be on the top.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short version: Nazis. Most incompetent Evil Overlords in the history of ever.

Exactly as the subtitle says, this book is about how the Nazis ran occupied Europe: how they dealt with the fact of administering an empire which, as Mazower shows, they spared no thought for even when they were in the middle of planning to invade Poland. Mazower is a functionalist rather than an intentionalist when it comes to the Holocaust, and that position arises naturally from the demonstration, in conquered country after conquered country, that the Nazis could not plan their way out of a paper bag.

Millions of people--Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Romanians ... Millions upon millions of people died because the Nazis didn't know what else to do with them and didn't, to be vulgar, give a fuck. They were determined to get rid of the Jews, and they were determined that Germany and the German Volk would expand and prosper and not suffer a moment's deprivation, and those two ends justified any means that happened to come along.

Mazower is occasionally a little cavalier--in particular, he throws around the word "psychopath" as if it excuses him from having to explain war atrocities and the Einsatzgruppen and the institutionalized brutality of the concentration camps--but aside from that quibble, this is a very good book, very thorough, very thoughtful, and very useful, particularly in its discussion of how the various conquered countries reacted to their new overlords and the different shades of "collaboration"--and genocide--that emerged.

Also useful and illuminating was the discussion of the aftermath of the Nazis' accidental empire and the choices the Allies made about returning to--and enforcing violently when necessary--the pre-war status quo. Once again, the more I learn about Winston Churchill, the more compromised my admiration of him becomes. This book takes apart a lot of the myths about World War II and about the "good guys"--while providing more evidence than ever that the "bad guys" really were just that. Bad. Evil, crazy, incompetent--and there's your hat trick.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hitler, as we all know, was a dick. But, asks Mazower in this excellent book, how did his dickishness and supreme asshole-ality fit into a greater European context? The Third Reich was an Empire, which took overt and clearly stated cues from other empires (British, French, American vs. First Peoples, etc.) BUT it was a shitty empire predicated on extermination and outright territorial aggrandizement to a level hitherto unknown to the world. The other unique thing about Hitler and Co. was that their Empire was in EUROPE! This book explores all that crap in a fine manner. The most interesting parts of this book are about the lower level functionaries in the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party who were administering conquered lands and kept trying to point out to their higher-ups that killing everybody (Jews, Poles, et. al.) would leave the lands severely understaffed, underfarmed, and underpopulated. Hitler, Himmler, and the other dummies failed to listen. And stupidly attacked the Soviet Union