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Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

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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.

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 the 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 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.

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.

Hitler's Empire is a fascinating read about the Nazi occupation of Europe in World War II. The popular perception of Nazi Germany is challenged at length, showing the Nazis as incompetent, short-sighted ideologues, with a grand plan for Europe but little idea of how to implement it. A reader may quibble with many of Mark Mazower's conclusions, but his book is definitely a fascinating, important and eye-opening work.

Mazower thoroughly discredits the old William Shirer "Nuremburg Thesis," that Hitler was an evil genius, with a pre-determined plan for conquering Europe and disposing of the Jews. Other writers, namely Christopher Browning, have shown that the Holocaust evolved haphazardly over time, due largely to the demands and urgency of outside events and internal pressure. Mazower goes a step further and applies this to Nazi foreign policy as a whole. Many of Hitler's military campaigns - Norway, North Africa, the Balkans - were launched out of strategic necessity and disrupted Hitler's plans, stretching forces and resources thinner than anticipated. Mazower's Hitler is more a victim of his own success than an evil mastermind, achieving far more than he ever dreamed possible in too short a time. The goal - a European Order dominated by Germany - was clear, but the methods of achieving this were hastily improvised, inadequate and even bumbling.

Further, there was little or no consistency in Nazi occupation policy. In the USSR and Eastern Europe, the Nazis were horribly brutal and genocidal; in Western Europe and Scandinavia, Nazi rule was fairly benign, with collaborationist regimes ready and waiting. Overlapping territorial and political jurisdictions, and constant infighting between Nazi officials, hampered efforts at coordinating administration and policy; Hans Frank, Poland's Governor-General, constantly clashed with the Wehrmacht and SS, and the running spat between SS chiefs Reinhard Heydrich and Werner Best prevented the Final Solution, and resettlement of Eastern Europe, from taking a definite shape for years. And of course, Hitler had to worry about Axis "partners" - Italy, Romania and Hungary in particular - who proved just as big a headache as the Allied powers, with their own ambitions, tactics and interpretation of the new European order.

Mazower dispells not only the myth of a super-efficient and organized Germany, but he also shows Occupied Europe as far more complex than is generally thought. Aside from the Balkans and the USSR, where Nazi race hatred made atrocities inevitable, resistance was marginal. Occasional spurts of resistance - most famously, the Czech assassination of Heydrich in May 1942 - were met with disproportionate retaliation, discourging further violence. Further, life under Nazi occupation was tolerable, if not comfortable, for most French, Danish and Dutch citizens, with homegrown fascists and collaborators making the transition more bearable. These chapters make discomforting reading for those who picture World War II as a united struggle against Nazism, when most Europeans had reason - whether ideological solidarity or simple self-preservation - to cooperate with their occupiers.

The problem, as other reviewers have mentioned, comes when Mazower ventures to advance a thesis. A principle idea is that Nazi Germany was simply following the lead of other colonial powers: namely, that Nazi activities in Europe were no different from, say, British rule in India. Aside from the inherent racism of empire-building, this is a huge reach: in scant few cases did Europeans in Africa and elsewhere engage in whole-scale extermination of the Natives, individual atrocities notwithstanding. A few comparable instances come to mind, but even the Belgian Congo wasn't devoted to exterminating native Congolese. Mazower advances other conceits - for instance, that the Nazi "Order" was a forerunner of the EU - that strike a false note.

On the whole, though, Hitler's Empire is definitely a worthwhile read. Layreaders, and even WWII/Nazi buffs will find a lot of interesting material to digest, showing that what you may have thought you knew about Nazi Germany isn't completely correct.

Prof. Mazower's "Hitler's Empire" (softcover edition) is an excellent overview of 'how' the Nazis came to do what they did. His attention to detail is remarkable and his presentation is lucid and engaging. I found this to be a better read than Burleigh's book on the Nazis. Given this, however, as some of the reviews posted earlier have mentioned, I found that the book would probably have been even better if some of the key bureaucratic personalities would have been discussed in some detail. This would have allowed us an insight into not only the 'management' of the Nazi enterprise, but also an insight into the 'managers' of that enterprise. Of course, one can get this information piecemeal from various other sources, but in the overall context of this book, I think it would have been a good idea to include this.

All this being given, however, I do have some issues with Prof. Mazower's approach. While he does build a strong case for considering the Nazi 'enterprise' as a colonial exercise, I think that there is an equally valid arguement to be made for considering this colonial exercise not in geo-political terms, but in biopolitical terms. Let me explain.

For those of you who may have read Foucault's "Society Must be Defended", you will know that Foucault, among others, considered the Nazis as engaging in what Foucault refers to as 'race politics'. I happen to disagree with this notion. Contrarily, I consider the Nazi effort as being the first crude experiment at a biopolitical configuration of what the Nazis referred to as the Greater Germania. Biopolitics is, if you follow the Foucaudian argument, supposed to be empowerment. In other words, it is an exercise in 'empowering life', rather than in the 'dispensation of death'. Given the track record of the Nazis, especially in light of their 'final solution' and the consequent industrialization of death, one may be tempted to consider the Nazis as NOT being biopolitically driven. However, if you take a closer look, you will find that the core thread that tied the Nazi effort together was to empower Germans (the Nazis 'wanted' to consider all Germans Nazis) - thus the rigid insistence on the purification of the bloodline theme. Further, you will also note that the Nazis insisted on classifying their victims - the Jews, the Gypsies, the Slavs and almost everyone else who did not fit their eugenically-determined 'ideal' as 'not human'. There are numerous references to these groups as being 'vermin', 'bacterial' and 'infectious', which needed to be purged from what they considered to be their 'ideal' body-politic. Considered in this way then, Nazi 'enterprise' could be seen as a colonizing effort, but one which was more biopolitically driven that geopolitically. Of course, this biopolitical exercise was played out on and within a geopolitical space. Naturally, the question that begs to be asked here is - who were the Nazis empowering, if indeed their project was biopolitical? The answer is deceptively simple - they were empowering their 'ideal', which as Himmler and even Hitler put it, may have taken a few generations. The most common mistake - in my opinion - that we make is that we consider the Nazi extermination program as being targeted towards 'unworthy' life. But this is not actually true. The target was towards groups who were already considered as being 'non-human' - thus virus, bacilli, infectious etc. Based on this I would say that while the Nazi enterprise may indeed be considered as being a colonizing one, it was so in quite a different way to the colonialism prevalent during the late 19th Century. In this sense, and quite perversely, the Nazis were at the forefront of Modernity, which is what makes their actions, retrospectively, both baffling and horrifying.

If this thesis is to be pursued, then Prof. Mazower's book provides the first (as far as I know) ground from which such a case may be built and that is enough for the book, aside from its other laudatory features and obvious high scholarship, to merit 4 stars from me.

This book has been reviewed quite extensively so I wanted to add the personal note of why I spent the time to read it. The book is fact-packed as it shows multitude of problems from the perspective of those who need to solve them. The author shows economic domination and Germanization as one would look at a business objectives and it allows to concentrate on people as business managers. You could visualize board-room like discussions and political strugge. Despite of seemigly impersonal style of the book we do have clear description of difference of opinions between party, military and other officials who are tasked with the most horrible things in the human history. I thought Germans managed to be very consistent; the book shows that consistency was not always the case and things did depend on personalities. So I'd not call it impersonal.

The book is very captivating in the beginning as it shows the scope of the problems the Reich dealt with while dominating occupied countries and the difference of the approach in the West vs. the East. I would not call it a slow read. Towards the end, however, different chapters, while having a common theme, read more like series of separate articles on the subject.

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

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

"Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rule Europe" by Mark Mazower is quite an achievement. The archival research that underlies the book is phenomenal and makes the author's arguments and conclusions as persuasive as they are sometimes surprising.

As a non-academic, with just a passing interest in the history of early 20th Century Europe, the book's chapters that I find most telling are those that document the fanatical preoccupation by the political leadership of the Third Reich iwith the Nazi theories of race that led to the unspeakable and irrational war against European Jews and the wholesale persecution of nationalities and social minorities that were deemed inferior to the Germanic/Teutonic ideal. It is incredible that such crackpot ideas would lead any modern country into mass murder and continent-wide alienation that ran totally against its economic and political objectives and interests.

Also of some surprise to this reader was the extent of political turf battles that plagued the Germans from the beginning of their military adventures and continued to intensify as WWII dragged on.

This book has been well reviewed, so I would just offer the final observation that there are lessons in Mazower's work that we could well learn from at this time. Certainly when a state or government interacts with another state without acknowledging and taking into account the latter's predictable nationalism and cultural habits, failure and conflict are somewhere close on the horizon.

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