Customer Reviews

Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine

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The book does not have much of a narrative flow but it presents almost all new information. The Nazis wanted an eastern empire they just had no idea how to establish or run one. The book underlines how Hitler wanted a system of competitors not cooperation. All the security, intelligence and military forces were operating on their own. Even without their useless brutality they would have had a hard time ruling their subjects. The US started assembling the military occupation government for Japan in 1942 which was wild optimism. The Nazis started assembling theirs after the invasion and it showed.

Combine racial genocide and an obsession with pantheistic worship of the land--blood and soil--and you get a twisted version of the "Greening" of Europe. The myth of returning to an agrarain utopia devoid of urban industrial crowding is still with us. The Nazis simply cast it all in a racial light. The subraces would work in the dirty factories and the master race would labor and play in the sun and bracing air of the countryside. Himmler's view of Southern Ukraine and the Crimea as a virtual Garden of Eden and core of a medievalist lebensraum for the SS knights is both intriguing and terrifying. The simple folk of the Ukraine enslaved as bead-loving peasants or slave laborers--to be treated as the "Red man of the American Plains"--plied with simple bolts of colored cloth like the Africans of the Congo and old German East Africa--have we really made much progress as humanity(?) when you consider the genocide and eugenics that remains amongst us in the modern era. Himmler certainly had the breadth of imagination to put his schemes forward--a perverse and twisted romantic who took a back seat to Hitler but is now being "appreciated" as the mystical technocrat of the Nazi version of a pantheistic New Age of a perfected humanity dwelling in harmony with a harsh Nordic Social Darwinism. But getting back to earth, it is also an expression of a pragmatic German desire to feed itself and not repeat the famine conditions of the World War I blockade. I would like to see more on the role of agriculture and surplus of grain or lack thereof in the Reich. Finally, the picture of Himmler with the cotton boll on the cover is priceless--shades of the Mississippi Delta or the Antebellum South bereft of its hospitality and gentility with the slave culture laid bare.

Totalitarian regimes are usually funny, but it's hard to laugh when thousands and millions of people suffer because of them.

Germany (Third Reich) in Ukraine in WW II was like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. For instance, one of Hitler's cohorts had a title of leader to promote Germanness -- or something to that effect. But these clowns also victimized millions of Ukrainians.

And the ideas these thugs had: building a string of all-German towns east all the way to the Urals. Hitler's dream of expanding the "thousand-year-old Empire." As it turned out he was off by 988 years.

Yes, the book is fun read. It is also a product of good scholarship. I keep it on a shelf in my bedroom and occasionally just reread a few pages for enjoyment.