A review by nathanschumer
Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower

medium-paced

4.0

This book is a survey of the governance of non-German territories by the Germans (and then the Nazis) from 1870 through 1945. It is mostly about the Nazis. The book is extremely well researched, provides really good and dense detail on Nazi administration, with a kind of subtheme of the Holocaust, resistance, divisions in experience between Western and Eastern Europe. What comes through is that the reich had no plan for administration, and competing power centers in the Reich were constantly battling to implement their vision. Hitler's governors (gauleiters) were appointed somewhat at random, without much bureaucratic backing, and implemented competing visions of the reich. Himmler is one of the major characters in the book, and it follows the increasing power of the SS, and it's radical racial vision and Himmler's attempts to place this at the core of German imperial politics. Massive racial and population dislocation is implemented, then abandoned; Hitler was constantly standing up new bureaucracies and dismantling them, and the racism of the Nazis makes it impossible for them to play politics in even the most rudimentary ways. Like in Barbarbossa, Hitler makes it impossible for the construction of a Ukranian state, and cannot bring himself to do the bare minimum to bring Ukranians over, instead opting for mass starvation. The reich's labor problems are exacerbated by the failure to feed Soviet pows, and the German economy continues to spin out of control. It's a thoughtful and deliberative book that looks at the interactions of facts on the ground and Nazi ideology, and how the Nazis sought to weave together a new empire. One of the more provocative bits (somewhat similar to Dark Continent) is to root some of the European Union vision in the Nazi era; the businesses of Western Europe were in the process of forming something similar to the coal and steel union that led to the EU during World War II. It is both accessible and scholarly, which is something on an achievement .