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	Books by Mark Mazower

Hitler's Empire

How the Nazis Ruled Europe
Mark Mazower - Author

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Drawing on an unprecedented variety of sources, Mark Mazower reveals how the Nazis designed, maintained, and ultimately lost their European empire and offers a chilling vision of the world Hitler would have made had he won the war.

Germany’s forces achieved, in just a few years, the astounding domination of a landmass and population larger than that of the United States. Control of this vast territory was meant to provide the basis for Germany’s rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reich’s Wild West, transformed by massacre and colonial settlement. Western Europe was to provide the economic resources that would knit an authoritarian and racially cleansed continent together. But the brutality and short-sightedness of Nazi politics lost what German arms had won and brought their equally rapid downfall.

Time and again, the speed of the Germans’ victories caught them unprepared for the economic or psychological intricacies of running such a far-flung dominion. Politically impoverished, they had no idea how to rule the millions of people they suddenly controlled, except by bludgeon.

Mazower forces us to set aside the timeworn notion that the Nazis’ worldview was their own invention. Their desire for land and their racist attitudes toward Slavs and other nationalities emerged from ideas that had driven their Prussian forebears into Poland and beyond. They also drew inspiration on imperial expansion from the Americans and especially the British, whose empire they idolized. Their signal innovation was to exploit Europe’s peoples and resources much as the British or French had done in India and Africa. Crushed and disheartened, many of the peoples they conquered collaborated with them to a degree that we have largely forgotten. Ultimately, the Third Reich would be beaten as much by its own hand as by the enemy.

Throughout this book are fascinating, chilling glimpses of the world that might have been. Russians, Poles, and other ethnic groups would have been slaughtered or enslaved. Germans would have been settled upon now empty lands as far east as the Black Sea—the new “Greater Germany.” Europe’s treasuries would have been sacked, its great cities impoverished and recast as dormitories for forced laborers when they were not deliberately demolished. As dire as all this sounds, it was merely the planned extension of what actually happened in Europe under Nazi rule as recounted in this authoritative, absorbing book.

Hitler's Empire List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Preface: The View from Varzin

Introduction

Part 1: For Greater Germany

1. Germans and Slavs: 1848-1918
2. Versailles to Vienna
3. Expansion and Escalation: 1938-40
4. The Partition of Poland
5. Summer 1940
6. War of Annihilation: Into the Soviet Union
7. Make This Land German for Me Again!
8. Organizing Disorder: 1941-42

Part 2: The New Order

9. Making Occupation Pay
10. Workers
11. Ersatz Diplomacy
12. The Final Solution: the Jewish Question
13. Collaboration
14. Eastern Helpers
15. Opposition
16. Hitler Kaputt!

Part 3: Perspectives

17. We Europeans
18. The New Order in World History

Notes
Bibliography
Index
“Mazower offers new and profound perspectives on Hitler’s rule, its roots and practices, its fleeting, unprecedented success, emphasizing the interplay between intent and improvisation. With stunning command of the historical record, he presents an unsparing view of all aspects of Europe in upheaval, persuasively correcting conventional simplicities. He sketches the many consequences of those short dramatic years on our world today. A masterpiece of the highest intelligence, full of humane insights into Europe’s darkest moments, rendered in elegant, memorable prose.”—Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and author of Five Germanys I have Known