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Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Mazower
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $23.35
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 9592
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 768
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8
ISBN: 1594201889
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.531
EAN: 9781594201882
ASIN: 1594201889
Publication Date: September 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Drawing on an unprecedented variety of sources, Mark Mazower reveals how the Nazis designed, maintained, and ultimately lost their European empire and offers a chilling vision of the world Hitler would have made had he won the war.
Germanys forces achieved, in just a few years, the astounding domination of a landmass and population larger than that of the United States. Control of this vast territory was meant to provide the basis for Germanys rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reichs Wild West, transformed by massacre and colonial settlement. Western Europe was to provide the economic resources that would knit an authoritarian and racially cleansed continent together. But the brutality and short-sightedness of Nazi politics lost what German arms had won and brought their equally rapid downfall.
Time and again, the speed of the Germans victories caught them unprepared for the economic or psychological intricacies of running such a far-flung dominion. Politically impoverished, they had no idea how to rule the millions of people they suddenly controlled, except by bludgeon.
Mazower forces us to set aside the timeworn notion that the Nazis worldview was their own invention. Their desire for land and their racist attitudes toward Slavs and other nationalities emerged from ideas that had driven their Prussian forebears into Poland and beyond. They also drew inspiration on imperial expansion from the Americans and especially the British, whose empire they idolized. Their signal innovation was to exploit Europes peoples and resources much as the British or French had done in India and Africa. Crushed and disheartened, many of the peoples they conquered collaborated with them to a degree that we have largely forgotten. Ultimately, the Third Reich would be beaten as much by its own hand as by the enemy.
Throughout this book are fascinating, chilling glimpses of the world that might have been. Russians, Poles, and other ethnic groups would have been slaughtered or enslaved. Germans would have been settled upon now empty lands as far east as the Black Seathe new Greater Germany. Europes treasuries would have been sacked, its great cities impoverished and recast as dormitories for forced laborers when they were not deliberately demolished. As dire as all this sounds, it was merely the planned extension of what actually happened in Europe under Nazi rule as recounted in this authoritative, absorbing book.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 The Darkest of the 20th Century December 17, 2008
Following "Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century" that is what I call a History Book by a Historian who cares. Mark does it again this is not just another WW2 History book.
As we get further from WW2 the Interest seems to grow.
Present day youth are still interested in Communism and Nazism long after they are both gone. Communism is mistaken with Socialism. Nazism confused with Nationalism.
Marks book is not just another Picture book that can be miss-used by the reader.
Mark does not try to be "Objective" on such a pain-full subject.
By the way Genocide did not start or end with WW2.
From wikipedia:
"The Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) in 1904-1907 was the first organized state genocide according to the UN Whitaker report (1985), the Herero were also the first ethnic group to be subjected to genocide in the 20th century. Eighty percent of the total Herero population and 50 percent of the total Nama population were killed in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha."
 Who Was to Blame? December 16, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In the years since Nazi Germany fell in 1945, and especially in the last few decades, the history and society of the Third Reich have been explored, analyzed and gone over with a fine-tooth comb until it is hard to find a new way to approach them. Mazower has chosen to do so by looking at the Nazis as a colonial enterprise and comparing the policies they implemented in conquered neighbors to those implemented by those same neighbors in their African and Asian possessions. As several reviewers have pointed out, he sometimes resorts to forcing the evidence a bit to get the results he is aiming for, but his analysis of the mechanisms of ethnic engineering (I use this term rather than "Holocaust" because it relates not only to the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and other "non-people," as Nazis saw them, but to the forced relocation of other inconvenient populations occupying areas meant to be Germanized) is thorough and at times quite chilling.
One point both Mazower and some of his critics seem to miss is that between the fall of Europe's first in-house colonizer, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the rise of Hitler, there had been others whose ambitions were on the European continent. While other European powers focussed on dividing up Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire set its sights close to home, eschewing colonial adventures in Africa and Asia (which it probably could not have afforded anyway) in favor of expansion into Balkans, and carefully not taking any territory to which it did not already have a land connection. In spite of their own incompetence. the Habsburgs proved willing to accede to local desires and tolerant enough that in WWI, its Slavic minorities in Trentino and Venezia Giulia fought heroically against Italians claiming to be their liberators. Likewise, while the Italians made periodic efforts to acquire an African empire, their main gaze was cast on neighboring lands that had been Habsburg for many centuries, and once these territories were seized in 1918, Italian efforts to colonize them were a curious mixture of public relations and brutal coercion. Finally, as Mazower makes clear, some of Germany's subject peoples had colonialist ambitions of their own, with Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Rumania all seizing chunks of their neighbors and trying to some degree to move ethnic groups around to make them ethnically analogous to their new mother countries.
Who was to blame for the fact that Germany's colonialism in Europe was in the end such a miserable failure? I get the feeling that in opposition to some recent works that blame the failure on the whole nature and structure of the Nazi state, Mazower would put the blame on one and only one man, Adolf Hitler, although he also makes the uncomfortable point that the Nazis got away with some of their most appalling deeds because many in the conquered populations as well as in Germany itself chose to avert their eyes. Again and again he brings up cases in which in which lesser Nazi officials (including Heinrich Himmler, who is a monster second only to Hitler in popular opinion) suggested policy shifts that would have made it easier to govern and exploit conquered territory, only to have them shot down by Der Fuehrer himself. Hitler seemed to care only about conquest and more conquest, along with annihilation of the Jews, and repeatedly intervened in favor of Gauleiters who were corrupt and incompetent but were old party members and thus in his confidence. Mazower's thesis seems to be that Nazi theoreticians like Rosenberg, with his dream of a new German East that would provide raw materials at the same time it was being Germanized, and Himmler, with his fantasies of colonies of sturdy SS peasants guarding the frontier, were living in dreamworlds, but that the Nazis probably could have done more to win hearts and minds in places like Ukraine and the Netherlands if Hitler himself had not repeatedly sabotaged their efforts to make tyranny at least efficient, bringing blame for the collapse of the Third Reich right back home to the doorstep of its founder.
A nasty social virus born in Europe's womb December 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Even more horrifying than the conventional wisdom which holds that Nazism's bitter fruit was owing almost exclusively to that of an ingenious megalomaniac, Mazower points to a more deep-seated cause for the ideological epidemic that found a ready host in all sectors of the Europe during the first half of the twentieth. From the Urals stretching to the Atlantic and from Mediterranean all the way up to the Baltic Sea---the intellectual dilatants, from the political left as well as the right, were enthralled by the socially purifying dynamics of Eugenics, the ugly manifestations of which Hitler so ruthlessly unleashed upon the entire world.
Isn't rather ironic, however, to think that the most effective antidotes to the perniciousness known as Nazism arrived in the form of Russian hordes and the 'mutts' from American? Alas, poetic justice at its best does exist, and thank you Dr. Mazower for documenting it so resoundingly and cogently for us!
a thorough review of an evil reign November 25, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Memories of the Nazi horror fade and many remember nothing of Hitler's ghstly regime. If thwe allies had not thoroughly trounce Nazi Germany, what would the world look like today. One shudders to think. Thyis book refreshes our memories on just what the Third Reich stood for and did. Unrelentling tyranny and inflicted death rivaled only by Hitler's earlier ally Soviet Russia which played a huge role in scuttling Hitler's empire irreversibly. A great but sobering read.
An Excellent Analysis of the Weakness of Nazi Rule November 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a relatively new area of study of the Nazi era. We all know the stories about the 'final solution', and the brutalization of those people in the 'occupied countries'. But little has been said about how the average person in these occupied countries was treated. Needless to say that the SS and Police (under Henrich Himmler) felt it was most useful to 'work the Slav to death' and then replace them with 'German settlements', the view as to how to treat those in Western Europe was totally different.
Those areas that were to be incorporated into the "Greater German Reich" were under civilian authorities who were governed by a Gauleiter (usually an old comrade of Hitler's) and were run by local collaborating civil servants. In Denmark, the Netherlands, and (initially) in Vichy France the same was true but without a German in any capacity above 'Advisor'. What is interesting was that with all the planning that went into arming the Wehrmacht and developing logistics to keep them in food and weapons (though this was really an afterthought) once the war began to drag on; little or no planning was done as to how to administer the 'occupied lands'.
Much of what was done was done 'on the fly' or by Ad Hoc committees of the Party. Hitler was vehement that those who could be 'germanisized' should be treated as members of the Reich who later would become citizens. But in those areas that could never be 'reclaimed', the population was either slave labor or fertilizer or both. Those 'unter' menshen (underpeople)' who were kept as servants and slaves would be taught to understand simple commands and to write their names. If they began to 'breed' to fast, the surplus could be sterilized or liquidated.
But no one in the Nazi hierarchy has any idea of how to rule over those people they had conquered and whose land the Wehrmacht occupied. Since all Nazi 'operations' would be of short duration, this problem never came up. The lack of a labor force for industry (after most German men had been conscripted) left a big whole to fill and could not even be filled by conscripting labor from the occupied countries. The four and a half million Russian and Polish POWs that were killed or starved to death could have helped solve this problem. Had the Nazi's used some common sense, these POWs and many of the Ukrainians could have been put into an Army that could have defeated the 'Reds'.
The sadness of the whole war was that at the end no one got what they wanted (except Stalin) and millions (upwards of 30 million) died for an ideal that was ultimately unattainable.
Zeb Kantrowitz
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