Mark Mazower - Hitler's Empire

I fully admit that this is a somewhat heavy book to be kicking off a blog with, but Mazower's latest opus on Occupied Europe is for any student of this period essential reading. I remember reading "Dark Continent" some years ago, but Mazower has turned to a more localized subject this time within a set geographical and era-restricted boundary that makes for more compelling reading than that.

When reading a history book, it's often the case that one is presented with maps of the area discussed beforehand. To illustrate the far-reaching impact and rapid spread of Nazi Germany in the early years of the Second World War, we're often presented with a diagram of Europe virtually covered in black, with the odd speck of white to denote neutral countries like Spain, Switzerland and Sweden. It's easy to forget that under this dark web lay a number of countries under occupation, and of course those who had come into the nocturnal fold of the Axis treaty. For 4 years most of Europe lay under the iron fist of the Nazis, and Mazower's book uncovers life under it.

Like most of his books, he shies away from colouring in a biographical nature the more detailed aspects of the men that shaped this period, and it is a slight fault that we rarely get an insight into characters like Himmler, who would play a major role in the shaping of German policy as head of the SS in countries under occupied rule. The Nazi party itself was an unusual combination of sadistic thugs and nationalistic short-sighted intellectuals that were driven along by the ruthless careerism of a particularly effective strata of bureaucrats who took onboard on the creative opportunities given to them by the plunder afforded from the remarkable gains made by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940.

Mazower illustrates with great skill that whilst Hitler was soaked in the idealism of "Lebensraum" for the East, the fact was that once Germany had conquered Poland within a month in October 1939, the incoming administration had little or no idea on how to rule the land, dividing their time between grotesque annihilation of the Polish elite and ransacking the economic wealth of the country. Put simply, they were making it as they went along, leaving great swathes of land to be ruled by Gauleiters who carved out petty kingdoms for themselves, revelling in plunder and atrocities.

One of the central themes of the Nazi occupation is the Jewish question, and naturally the emergence of the Final Solution. Again, this seems to have been drawn up with no great plan beforehand as to what to do with the great populations of European Jewry that the Nazis conquered with their occupation of Poland and after the launch of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The decision to attack the Soviet Union gave precedent to a "war of annihilation" against the European Jews, as Hitler envisaged their extinction on the continent, whereas before he had been concerned with their expulsion only from the Reich.

The Nazi's attitude towards the Jews set a precedent for racial purity, and this strand of thought amongst their party, the SS and the Wehrmacht would set it on a collision course. Himmler's SS was only concerned with the idea of removing any sort of ethnic impurity for German settlers in the East was precisely the sort of grossly idiotic policy that would hamper any chance of the German occupation having a chance of gaining the trust and benevolence of the populations they would so ruthlessly exploit. Hitler's Blitzkreig in the West in 1940 was a chymera; in the East he gambled all in 1941 on a similar military policy against the Red Army and came unstuck in the Winter of 1941 outside Moscow. By the summer of 1942, arguably the "high point" of the Wehrmacht's achievements in the War, most of the top generals knew that the War against the Russians was now only a matter of time before Stalin's armies would attack with punishing consequence, as they did at Stalingrad at the end of the year. Hitler's decision to declare war on America as well meant that the demand for much-needed resources came to the fore. And it's here that Mazower demonstrates with great clarity that the twin-pronged assaults of racial purity and imperial domination were never going to work. By destroying with such abhorrent brutality the populations of Poland and the Ukraine, they also vanquished any chance of extracting with any real abundance any of the vital resources required for Germany to keep fighting on what was to become a number of different fronts after the Italians capitulated in 1943. It would be left to the technocrat Albert Speer to revolutionise the German war effort, but by then it was just a matter of time before the Wehrmacht were pushed out of the Soviet Union.

Germany wasn't the only aggressor in this conflict, and the depictions of Romanian and Croatian atrocities carried out by mindless murderers like Marshall Antonescu and Ante Pavelic show that death and destruction wasn't restricted to the Einsaztgruppen and SS. Sanctioned by Hitler to show "the utmost brutality" these modern day barbarians ran amok across central and south-eastern Europe, reducing the region to something out of a medieval Bosch painting. The sheer numbers of deaths rolled out by Mazower over the course of the book seems to work more effectively than other historians' usage of first hand accounts to describe such scenes.

Of course, outside of the cauldron of annihilation and sheer terror that was Eastern Europe, the occupation of France seems a world away. Until 1942 when the Germans took over the whole country in response to the Allied landings in North Africa, despite Hitler's relative dislike of the French, Mareschal Petain played a relatively skilful hand in maintaining probing German eyes at a distance from the country. The removal of the administration to Vichy away from Paris was a relatively good move for the long-term interests of the French, given the hot-bed of right-wing and Ultra movements that laced the country. Indeed, given the abject state of the country during the 30's, many welcomed the Occupation and Mazower points out markedly that foreign occupation often galvanised the economy in unusual ways. He also points out that the Romanian occupation of Transnistria created a free-market zone where the blackmarket ran free, and Odessa for some period was the only place in the whole of continental Europe outside of Germany where one could buy with ease items such as meat and dairy produce. Many chose to collaborate, but with a view to creating order rather than helping the Germans directly, and Mazower illustrates the example of intelligent Police chief Rene Bousquet, who would create a deal with SS leader Karl Oberg in 1942 whereby the Gendarmerie were not compelled to provide hostages to the Nazis, and therefore created a fragile sort of autonomy for them. Although tried by the Haute Cour in 1949, Bousquet was eventually pardoned in 1958 and grew to be a faithful ally to Francois Mitterand, but was shot dead in 1993 shortly before going on trial for deporting children during the conflict.

As the war turned against Germany, many countries and individuals, not least high-ranking Nazi party officials and Generals realised that only some sort of "European" crusade might stop the Bolshevik menace. Yet despite many efforts, and the reality that by 1944 the Wehrmacht was populated by many non-German divisions, Hitler refused outright at all times. His twisted logic was understandable from his perspective - those who fought with him would turn against him when the tide changed, and in this aspect he was right - but ultimately the reality was that by 1943 Nazi Europe was doomed, and it was left for them to carry out their killing as quickly as possible before the inevitable Götterdämmerung arrived. These attempts at a European-wide coalition contain elements of what would come later in Western Europe, not least in the high-level communication and co-operation between France and Germany, which would launch the careers of many technocrats a decade later.

Like Adam Tooze's superb analysis of the Nazi economy in "Wages of Destruction", Mazower's book is an essential reference for our understanding of the Second World War. Whilst most books on the period tend to focus on the military consequences of Hitler's assault on Europe and the mass murder of the Holocaust, this is an enlightening text on the grotesque policies of the Nazi party and the pathetic idiocy of their economic plunder throughout the continent.