Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe » (Bargain)

Mark Mazower is the author of numerous books on twentiethcentury European history, including Inside Hitler's Greece and Salonica and City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950. He is program director of the Center for International History at Columbia University.

Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler's Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion-and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the Nazis' lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking level of cooperation from the overwhelmed countries. A work as authoritative as it is unique, Hitler's Empire is a surprising-and controversial- new appraisal of the Third Reich's rise and ultimate fall.

The Washington Post - Andrew Nagorski

Many histories have focused on Hitler's costly military mistakes, particularly on the Eastern Front. Mazower largely ignores the battlefields and focuses instead on the political, racial and economic policies of the Nazi conquerors. While many parts of this story have been told before, he painstakingly examines a huge body of evidence for insights into Nazi misrule. This hardly makes for light reading, but it allows him to present a compelling case, which was best summarized by a German general at the end of the war. Addressing his fellow POWs, Ferdinand Heim argued that the German war effort would have been doomed "even if no military mistakes had been made"…all the way through, Mazower offers incisive details and insights that make Hitler's Empire a fascinating read.

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Preface: The View from Varzin

Introduction 1

Pt. I For Greater Germany

1 Germans and Slavs: 1848-1918 15

2 Versailles to Vienna 31

3 Expansion and Escalation: 1938-|40 53

4 The Partition of Poland 78

5 Summer 1940 102

6 War of Annihilation: Into the Soviet Union 137

7 Make this Land German for Me Again! 179

8 Organizing Disorder: 1941-2 223

Pt. 2 The New Order

9 Making Occupation Pay 259

10 Workers 294

11 Ersatz Diplomacy 319

12 The Final Solution: the Jewish Question 368

13 Collaboration 416

14 Eastern Helpers 446

15 Opposition 471

16 Hitler Kaputt! 522

Pt. 3 Perspectives

17 We Europeans 553

18 The New Order in World History 576

Notes 605

Bibliography 648

Index 673