politalX Politics Store - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Allen Lane History)
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List Price: £30.00
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Manufacturer: Allen Lane
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780713996814
ISBN: 0713996811
Label: Allen Lane
Manufacturer: Allen Lane
Number Of Pages: 768
Publication Date: 2008-06-05
Publisher: Allen Lane
Studio: Allen Lane
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: magnificient documentary and close analysis, but...
Comment: 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 favour 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Comment: This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursued in the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominant in the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country and what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.
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Summary: Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine
Comment: It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer and rule the countries they conquered and annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes and struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, and it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene and underground politics, and a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.
It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia and Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map and renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens and had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken place in the civil service, and a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been put in place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering and arresting people for flimsy political reasons.
There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) and the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing and racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate and be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it and instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, and so the Final Solution was mainly carried out in those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.
The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weakness in their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness and impossibility of racial segregation, and that mass murder and forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war and that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.
It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here and there, and didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity and beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something good in being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?
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Summary: It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages
Comment: This book had a really excellent review in the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised and unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemies in 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, and given the subjective nature of racial hatred, and the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service and competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny and racial hatred prevailed over military necessity and pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'
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Summary: Eye-Opening
Comment: Brilliant! This immense and wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before and after.
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