Hitler’s Empire: How the nazis Ruled Europe
Mark Mazower
726 pages including index and notes
published in 2008
“Germany could have racial purity or imperial domination, but it could not have both.”
That’s the fundamental paradox that Mark Mazower uncovers in Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. On the one hand, there is the Nazi’s obsession with making Germany a pure Aryan state, expelling or murdering the lesser races within its borders. On the other, their equally compelling obsession to rule Europe, or at least “reunite” all those parts of Greater Germany outside the German borders. But with the Anschluss of Austria, the annexation of the Sudetenland, the further invasion of what was left of Czechoslovakia, not to mention the invasion of Poland, it brought not just many more Germans, but also millions of Poles, Czechs, Jews and others under Nazi control. The question was, what to do with them and the somewhat accidental empire Nazi Germany had acquired.
A question that became even harder after Germany had defeated the western allies and ruled France, Norway and the Low Countries, had subjugated Yugoslavia and Greece to come to the aid of Italy, then had invaded Russia and at a stroke added immense new territories to its empire, populated with millions upon millions of those the Reich saw as racial enemies. Nazi ideology wanted a pure state, wanted to get rid of the Jews and the Poles and all those others living in those conquered territories. At the same time the economic realities, not to mention the demands of war meant that at least in the short term these “undesirables” could not be removed. If Nazi Germany wanted to rule an efficient empire and defeat its enemies in the East and West, it could not do so without the support, coerced or not, of those “inferior” people it rather wanted to get rid off.