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A powerful, character filled narrative history of the Nazi occupation of Europe from the author of "Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century" and "Inside Hitler's Greece". "A brilliant account" "Independent".
Synopsis
Hitler's empire was the largest, most brutal and most ambitious reshaping of Europe in history. Inspired by imperial legacy of those such as British, Third Reich cast its shadow from Channel Islands to Caucasus and ruled hundreds of millions. This title offers an account of the rise and fall of Nazi Europe by one of Britain's leading historians.
Book Details
Publisher:
PENGUIN GROUP
Publication Date:
30-Apr-2009
ISBN:
9780141011929
Guardian review
Hitler's Empire
Ian Pindar the guardian Fri 01 May 2009
It was always a source of puzzlement to the Nazis why the British didn't support their imperial ambitions. After all, as Mark Mazower reveals in this impressive history, the British empire was held up as a model by the Nazis. "Hitler's reading of how the British ruled India showed that what counted for him at bottom was force," says Mazower, adding that "a stance of such crudity was not unknown among the British themselves". Mazower also detects similarities between the "racial authoritarianism" of European colonial administrations of the past and Nazi treatment of the Untermenschen. However, Mazower's greatest achievement is to show how the Nazi project, which ended in a programme of racial extermination, began as an expression of narrowly defined nationalist ambitions. As he puts it, how a war for Germans became a war against Jews; how the concept of a Greater Germany evolved into Hitler's policy of Lebensraum, then was hastily recast - after a run of military successes that surprised even the Nazis - as a plan for a whole New Order for Europe.