Synopsis
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.
Germany’s 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 Germany’s rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reich’s 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 Europe’s 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 Sea—the new “Greater Germany.” Europe’s 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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À propos de l?auteur
Mark Mazower is the author of numerous books on 20th-century European history, including Inside Hitler’s Greece, Dark Continent, The Balkans and Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950. He is program director of the Center for International History at Columbia University, and he also writes about world affairs for the Financial Times, among other publications.
Commentaires
Columbia University historian Mazower (Inside Hitler's Greece) is a knowledgeable guide to the dynamics of Nazi domination of Europe. His focus is on the ambitions and foibles of the Nazi leaders, who believed that all of Europe could be made to serve German interests. As Mazower shows so well, almost nothing about the occupation had been planned beforehand. The Nazis improvised as their armies raced through Poland, the Soviet Union and the Low Countries, and Nazi generals and old-line bureaucrats fought among themselves for power and spoils. Mazower's most interesting commentary comes at the beginning, when he compares the Nazi imperium to other European empires, and at the end, when he demonstrates its long-lasting consequences. The breadth of Mazower's study is remarkable, but while not diminishing the toll of the Nazi anti-Semitism, he claims, contrary to many scholars, that core of the Nazi worldview was not anti-Semitism, but rather… the quest to unify Germans within a single German state. Pulitzer Prize–winner Saul Friedländer's coinage of redemptive anti-Semitism is far more effective at evoking the realities of Nazi rule than any of Mazower's formulations. Maps. (Sept.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Andrew Nagorski Surveying Nazi Germany's conquests shortly after it invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler's minister of economics boasted: "Never before in the history of the world has there been such an economy to administer." Germany was indeed the master of most of Europe at that point, and its armies were marching quickly into Russia. But in Hitler's Empire, Columbia University historian Mark Mazower spells out how ill-prepared the Germans were for their string of early victories -- and how completely they botched the administration of their empire. Many histories have focused on Hitler's costly military mistakes, particularly on the Eastern Front. Mazower largely ignores the battlefields and focuses instead on the political, racial and economic policies of the Nazi conquerors. While many parts of this story have been told before, he painstakingly examines a huge body of evidence for insights into Nazi misrule. This hardly makes for light reading, but it allows him to present a compelling case, which was best summarized by a German general at the end of the war. Addressing his fellow POWs, Ferdinand Heim argued that the German war effort would have been doomed "even if no military mistakes had been made." The reason: Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn't possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality. Leaving morality aside, the Holocaust made no economic sense at a time when Germany was desperately short of workers. When Victor Brack, one of the officials charged with carrying out the Final Solution, suggested that between 2 and 3 million Jews could be sterilized and put to work rather than killed, Hitler wasn't interested. The German leader's plans for the rest of the people in the East were even more absurd in economic terms, since they involved the majority of the local inhabitants, not just minorities. Under Nazi doctrine, Germanization was the overarching goal, which meant eliminating as many non-Germans as possible and finding and elevating local Germans or bringing in new German settlers. But after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, 90 percent of the inhabitants of German-occupied territory were Poles and only 6 percent ethnic Germans. And as the empire grew, the proportions of ethnic Germans became even smaller. In the midst of a widening conflict, German officials methodically photographed and examined Polish families, discriminating in favor of those who appeared to have "the soundest German blood." All of which was guaranteed to stir resentment. Even Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, one of the German commanders in Poland, noted: "The idea that one can intimidate the Polish population by terrorism and rub their noses in the dirt will certainly prove false." Nowhere was that miscalculation more costly than in the Soviet Union. After Stalin's purges and forced collectivization of the 1930s, some Ukrainians, Lithuanians and even Russians were prepared to view any invaders as possible saviors. Hitler's ruthless policies, directed not just against Jews but also against Soviet POWs and the entire civilian population, quickly disabused them of such notions. That part of the story is fairly well-known. But Mazower goes one step further by demonstrating the hypothetical alternative. He points to the relatively enlightened occupation of southern Ukraine and Odessa. In the port city, locals could open businesses if they offered the right bribes, and visiting Germans were astonished by the thriving shops, restaurants and cafes -- all with plenty of food. "It simply showed what could have happened across the former Soviet territories," Mazower writes, "if the Germans had allowed markets to flourish and not planned to destroy the social order." Ironically, the industrialized economies of Western Europe, where German rule was far less draconian than in the East, contributed more to the German war effort than the Eastern territories did. By deliberately starving their Eastern subjects, the Germans only contributed to the poor performance of the agricultural sector. And yet it was the East that mesmerized Hitler, whose whole notion of Lebensraum was built on the premise that Germany would harvest great riches there, using largely mythic German settlers. There simply weren't anywhere near the number of Germans needed to transform those fantasies into reality. At times, Mazower's sweeping survey feels forced, trying to cover everything -- the origins of Nazism, the Holocaust, collaboration and resistance in all parts of occupied Europe. Inevitably, there are some questionable generalizations. In explaining the Nazi New Order, Mazower asserts, "the quest to unify Germans within a single German state" was more important than anti-Semitism or than the lust for conquest -- as if these are contradictory impulses. But all the way through, Mazower offers incisive details and insights that make Hitler's Empire a fascinating read. He points out, for example, that the United States accounted for 67 percent of the world's oil output in 1943 and the Soviet Union only 10 percent. So here, too, Hitler's basic assumptions about what he would gain by conquering the East were flawed: Even if his armies had taken the oil fields in the Caucasus, he wouldn't have solved his energy problem. Luckily for Germany's opponents, the master race was totally impervious to something as mundane as logic.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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