HITLER’S EMPIRE

How the Nazis Ruled Europe

By Mark Mazower

Illustrated. 725 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95

“If Berlin were to meet the fate of Rome,” Hitler wrote in 1925, only “the department stores of some Jews, and the hotels of some corporations” would be left for future generations to admire. These tawdry commercial buildings, he believed, accurately reflected the Weimar Republic’s political corruption and social disintegration. One day, the Führer was determined, Germany would have a capital worthy of its imperial destiny; when distant generations visited the remains of his Thousand-Year Reich, they would find ruins to rival Rome’s. Of course Hitler’s empire lasted only a fewyears, not a thousand; it left behind only piles of rubble. In this important book, Mark Mazower provides the best available survey of the Nazi empire’s precipitous rise and violent demise.

Hitler never imagined Germany as one sovereign state among others, but rather as the center of an empire, extending across Europe and including the resource-rich colonies of central Africa. The heart of this empire was the territory on Germany’s eastern frontier; some would be annexed to the Reich, the rest settled by German colonists, its Slavic population enslaved, its Jews and other inferior races exterminated. About the future of western and northern Europe Hitler was less certain; here some states might continue to exist, but they would be subordinated economically, politically and militarily to German interests. Aside from the abiding goal of racial mastery, the Nazis left the character of their empire purposefully vague and unsettled. “If anyone asks how you conceive the new Europe,” Goebbels told German journalists in April 1940, “we have to reply that we don’t know. . . . When the time comes we will know very well what we want.”

As Mazower explains in “Hitler’s Empire,” there was often something improvised and disorganized about the Nazis’ rule: they wildly underestimated, for example, the demographic and logistical challenges involved in Germanizing the conquered lands of Eastern Europe. Even the murderous answer to the “Jewish question,” the empire’s most persistent and pervasive goal, emerged slowly and unevenly.

Like the rest of the Nazi system, the empire was the site of bitter rivalries: among individuals and institutions, party bosses and civil servants, regular army and SS, businessmen and ideologues. Nothing is more misleading than the Nazis’ carefully cultivated image of disciplined cohesion. As the French collaborator Pierre Laval remarked when someone described Nazi Germany as an authoritarian state, “Yes, and what a lot of authorities.”

The quality of life in Hitler’s Europe varied enormously, most obviously between east and west. In the west, the occupiers’ hand was, at least until the final stages of the war, relatively light. Denmark held free elections in 1943 (the Nazis got just 2 percent of the vote). Paris remained a relatively peaceful city, a popular destination for visiting intellectuals like the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who lectured at the German cultural institute and enjoyed the company of much of the French capital’s intellectual elite. In the east, rule was harsh, rations short, repression close to the surface. But even in the east, there were profound differences, for instance between the General Government of the formerly Polish territories (Poland had ceased to exist) and the Czech protectorate. When Hans Frank, the General Government’s brutal chief, visited Prague and saw a poster announcing that seven Czechs had been shot, he thought that if he were to put up a poster every time he shot seven Poles, “all the forests in Poland would not suffice in order to produce the paper.”

The Third Reich was a national enterprise, run by and for a racially defined German Volk. But the empire, Mazower makes clear, could not have functioned without swarms of international collaborators, who supported the Germans because of conviction or self-interest or some complex combination of the two. When they were winning the war, the Nazis could set the terms for this collaboration, encouraging or discouraging it to suit their ideological inclinations and immediate advantage. As the tide of battle turned, people’s willingness to collaborate with the Germans ebbed, until at the end there was no one left but the deluded and desperate, like those members of the French SS unit who died fighting the Red Army in the streets of Berlin.

One of the most striking themes in “Hitler’s Empire” is the contrast between the Nazis’ military prowess and their political incompetence. Hitler was simply not interested in developing a program that might appeal to potential allies, for whose national interests and aspirations he had little sympathy. He left the political direction of his Eastern European regime to Alfred Rosenberg, who — as Hitler expected — wasted his time on elaborate but irrelevant programs and pronouncements. Nazi diplomacy, since 1938 directed by the monumentally inept Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an oxymoron. In 1942, when officials in the foreign office pleaded with Hitler to issue a statement about the future, he tersely replied, “No such preparations for peace are necessary.”

As so often happens, repressive violence rushed into this political vacuum, its instruments in the hands of Germany’s most energetic and talented servants. It began with the Polish campaign in 1939, gradually spreading throughout the empire, with a brutality that challenges the imagination. Resistance was met with immediate and disproportionate retaliation: according to their own estimates, the German military killed 73 Belarussians for every dead German. Among Mazower’s most depressing conclusions is that the policy worked. Terror, when applied without hesitation or remorse, was usually sufficient to prevent or eradicate effective opposition. Resistance movements turned out to be extremely important for Europe’s political future, but in most places, for most of the time, they did not seriously weaken the German war effort.

The empire brought out the worst in those caught in it. There were, to be sure, acts of courage and humanity, but these scattered points of light merely accentuate the surrounding darkness. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia and the author of a number of important books, including a splendid study of the German occupation of Greece, tells this somber story with great skill. He captures the diversity of Europeans’ experience without getting lost in detail; he maintains narrative momentum without losing sight of major themes. By describing a carefully selected set of individuals and events, he gives the experience of war a human face, bringing to life an extended cast of villains and victims. While his focus is on the Germans, he makes a number of illuminating comparisons with other regimes. In a stimulating and provocative final chapter, he explores the war’s meaning for world history. The war was not, he writes, the end of Europe, but “it was the end of Europe as the maker of norms and world policeman. . . . Henceforth, international order would emerge on a different basis, guided by different hands.”

“Hitler’s Empire” is a useful antidote to the argument — most recently advanced in Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke” — that World War II was neither necessary nor just. While we should never underestimate or forget the appalling cost, Mazower’s eloquent and instructive book reminds us what the world would have been like if Hitler’s enemies had been unwilling or unable to pay the price of defeating him.

James J. Sheehan’s most recent book is “Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe.”