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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who Was to Blame?, December 16, 2008
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, their 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.
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34 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent documentary and close analysis, but..., September 30, 2008
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 the fundamental sense of urgency'. I like the implication of that: as if the major reason why the Brits didn't try to recycle the population of India into lampshades was that they didn't have a good management consultant on the job (I somehow get the impression that Mazower doesn't like management consultants either). It is hard to square Mazower's basic argument with, for instance, Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings; that Burke could do this, even if he eventually failed, suggests a whole bunch of moral and legal assumptions about what you could do out in the colonies that didn't apply in the Nazi case. How - why? - would anybody have impeached Erich Koch? There is also the secondary point that, in the end, Warren Hastings was no Erich Koch.
The reality is that Hitler (together with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other lovables) was a phenomenon unique to the 20th C. and Mazower, in spite of his ambition otherwise, convincingly shows this. It's more than enough of an achievement.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Enormously Important Contribution To Popular Understanding, January 19, 2009
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.
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