Book Review: Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

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Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. By Mark Mazower. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. 726 pages. $39.95. Reviewed by Dr. George H. Quester, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland.

This is an extremely well-researched and fascinating book, albeit one that comes across as somewhat impressionistic in its depiction of what was a very confused and confusing Nazi regime. Mark Mazower in no way revises our normal picture of the Nazi occupations as the most murderous and brutal of experiences. He does, however, bring out a host of contradictions in the way Hitler ran his dictatorship, with a potential blurring of what were the real causes of the misery Europe experienced from 1939 to 1945, amid some possibly controversial and interesting lessons about modes of reprisal and repression, in response to resistance movements.

Consistent with many earlier histories of the period, the author shows how uncoordinated the Nazi regime was, by Hitler's deliberate design. While the Nazi approach was always selfish in putting German material well-being ahead of that of any other ethnic group, one finds numerous policy disagreements and bureaucratic turf contests, with some of the peoples conquered by the Germans (the Czechs and Slovaks, Danes and Norwegians, and West Europeans in general) getting far easier treatment than the Poles and Soviet nationalities. Mazower shows important continuities where Nazi behavior can be linked to earlier German brutality and where German ethnic struggles with the Poles and Czechs had a long history, but he alternates this with repeated references to the differences between Germany's World War I and World War II occupations of Poland.

Relevant to military policy, the book largely debunks the memories of extensive French, Belgian, etc. resistance to the Nazis. The author's sad bottom-line is that policies of harsh reprisals often succeeded in cowing local opposition, with the Danes, French, Dutch, and Czechs being important economic contributors to the German war effort. Even inside the Soviet Union, where Nazi policy was much harsher, the numbers of German forces tied up in keeping the rear areas under control were always surprisingly small.

Mazower gives some fascinating insights into how even Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel (SS) was not monolithic but divided into factions, as well as being at odds with the leadership of the Nazi party, with Hitler tolerating the divisions. A portion of the SS is portrayed as a relatively profound think tank, rather than simply part of a witless commitment to Aryan superiority, with Werner Best, the rival to Reinhard Heydrich, even getting away with some not too subtle public criticisms of Himmler and Hitler.

Also relevant to today's policy choices, the author shows that some of the brutality of German occupations was due to the simple economic costs of Europe being at war, intensified by the very effective British and Allied blockade. The starving victims of the regime we remember from photographs were at times the result of Nazi sadism and hate, and at other times simply the result of there not being enough food. Anyone contemplating "economic warfare" and blockades and sanctions today, as an alternative to more violent warfare, has to be reminded that both World War I and World War II involved very painful applications of such sanctions. Mazower also allows himself to speculate about whether Hitler and the Nazis ever had any vision of a united Europe that would offer their allies and their conquests any hope for the future, noting how a few of the Nazis saw a need for this, but with nothing clear ever being generated.

The book is long and replete with detail, including aggregations of data and anecdotal material that simultaneously support the normal view of Hitler and the Nazis but also often complicates it. The allies of the Germans are sometimes shown as less hateful and genocidal than the Nazis, but in other cases come across as just as brutal, as indeed do the French or the Czechs sometimes after the war. Mazower lays blame on Nazi ideology, but also on more traditional nationalism and its conflicts, and at times simply on the dictates of the situation, where brutal reprisals indeed inhibited resistance, and where resources were short.

The book alternates between conflicting and even opposing generalizations, as in an impressionistic painting, with each clear line being contradicted by other clear lines, but with this explication quite appropriate to the conflicting nature of the Nazi approach.

Given how many corners of history are explored so interestingly and well by the author, there are some surprising gaps. There is a reference to Nazi reprisal policies against partisans in various nations, including Finland. It is hard to fathom what this is referring to. A discussion of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the wartime military governor of Belgium (who applied a relatively relaxed approach and thus experienced relatively little resistance), describes him as a "worldly" former military attaché in Turkey, Japan, and China. But this misses the fact Falkenhausen had indeed been the head of a major German military training mission aiding Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist forces in their struggle against the Japanese, until he and his team were forced in 1938 to come home by Hitler. The very interesting discussion of Werner Best similarly makes no reference to the possibility that Best is one of the people suspected of leaking to the Danes the plans for the arrest of the Danish Jews, plans preempted when most of these people were gotten safely across to Sweden.

If anyone thinks that nothing new can be written on World War II, or that no lessons for the future can be extracted from this experience, this book is surely an antidote.

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