UBC: Hitler's Empire
Jan. 7th, 2012 08:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyMazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. 2008. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Short version: Nazis. Most incompetent Evil Overlords in the history of ever.
Exactly as the subtitle says, this book is about how the Nazis ran occupied Europe: how they dealt with the fact of administering an empire which, as Mazower shows, they spared no thought for even when they were in the middle of planning to invade Poland. Mazower is a functionalist rather than an intentionalist when it comes to the Holocaust, and that position arises naturally from the demonstration, in conquered country after conquered country, that the Nazis could not plan their way out of a paper bag.
Millions of people--Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Romanians ... Millions upon millions of people died because the Nazis didn't know what else to do with them and didn't, to be vulgar, give a fuck. They were determined to get rid of the Jews (and I've explained elsewhere my sense of how that determination evolved over the course of the Third Reich's inglorious career) and they were determined that Germany and the German Volk would expand and prosper and not suffer a moment's deprivation, and those two ends justified any means that happened to come along.
Mazower is occasionally a little cavalier--in particular, he throws around the word "psychopath" as if it excuses him from having to explain war atrocities and the Einsatzgruppen and the institutionalized brutality of the concentration camps--but aside from that quibble, this is a very good book, very thorough, very thoguhtful, and very useful particularly in its discussion of how the various conquered countries reacted to their new overlords and the different shades of "collaboration"--and genocide--that emerged.
Also useful and illuminating was the discussion of the aftermath of the Nazis' accidental empire and the choices the Allies made about returning to--and enforcing violently when necessary--the pre-war status quo. Once again, the more I learn about Winston Churchill, the more compromised my admiration of him becomes. This book takes apart a lot of the myths about World War II and about the "good guys"--while providing more evidence than ever that the "bad guys" really were just that. Bad. Evil, crazy, incompetent--and there's your hat trick.
Short version: Nazis. Most incompetent Evil Overlords in the history of ever.
Exactly as the subtitle says, this book is about how the Nazis ran occupied Europe: how they dealt with the fact of administering an empire which, as Mazower shows, they spared no thought for even when they were in the middle of planning to invade Poland. Mazower is a functionalist rather than an intentionalist when it comes to the Holocaust, and that position arises naturally from the demonstration, in conquered country after conquered country, that the Nazis could not plan their way out of a paper bag.
Millions of people--Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Romanians ... Millions upon millions of people died because the Nazis didn't know what else to do with them and didn't, to be vulgar, give a fuck. They were determined to get rid of the Jews (and I've explained elsewhere my sense of how that determination evolved over the course of the Third Reich's inglorious career) and they were determined that Germany and the German Volk would expand and prosper and not suffer a moment's deprivation, and those two ends justified any means that happened to come along.
Mazower is occasionally a little cavalier--in particular, he throws around the word "psychopath" as if it excuses him from having to explain war atrocities and the Einsatzgruppen and the institutionalized brutality of the concentration camps--but aside from that quibble, this is a very good book, very thorough, very thoguhtful, and very useful particularly in its discussion of how the various conquered countries reacted to their new overlords and the different shades of "collaboration"--and genocide--that emerged.
Also useful and illuminating was the discussion of the aftermath of the Nazis' accidental empire and the choices the Allies made about returning to--and enforcing violently when necessary--the pre-war status quo. Once again, the more I learn about Winston Churchill, the more compromised my admiration of him becomes. This book takes apart a lot of the myths about World War II and about the "good guys"--while providing more evidence than ever that the "bad guys" really were just that. Bad. Evil, crazy, incompetent--and there's your hat trick.
