Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries to impose its will on Ukraine in the name of national self-determination, denying that Ukrainians are a separate people. The Chinese regime modernizes Tibet while expressing its own sense of national superiority. All of these are imperial policies by essentially nationalist regimes, and all of them spread nationalism around the world. Ukrainian national identity is ever more distinct. Tibetan protests spread from towns to the countryside. The American occupation will build the Iraqi nation, as the inevitable withdrawal creates a heroic myth of resistance to the outsider. In Isaiah Berlin’s famous formulation, a bent twig snaps back.

But what if a nationalist made an empire by exterminating the native populations of conquered lands? As Mark Mazower shows in Hitler’s Empire: Nazi rule in Occupied Europe, this is exactly what Adolf Hitler set out to do. Hitler dreamt of an empire in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia, denuded of its native populations. After 50 million Slavs and Jews were murdered or deported, like (in Hitler’s comparison) the “Red Indians” of North America, free German farmers could claim their “Lebensraum” in the East. (Americans of my generation learned from government-sponsored television that the history of our country was indeed one of the pursuit of “elbow room” in the West.) As German scholarship has recently stressed, and as Mazower skilfully argues, Hitler and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler counted on a quick victory over the Red Army in the East, followed by the elimination of Jews and Slavs – Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. Before and during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, German planners designed agricultural colonies to defend and Germanize the depopulated wasteland.

Mazower’s book treats two empires: the mythical one that Hitler and his collaborators imagined in the East and tried to make by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, and the real one comprised of the lands the Germans annexed and controlled, beginning with the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. In his detailed discussions of the real empire, Mazower is concerned to present a comprehensive account of German aims and local experiences in all of the European countries occupied by German forces. This he achieves to an astonishing degree, by seeking and finding the themes (Germanization, collaboration, resistance, culture) that express the particular realities of occupation by Germany. Although these thematic chapters are full of motion, they convey a sense of stable equilibrium in most of the countries under German power. Mazower does observe that a certain destructive tension builds from 1938 to 1941, as the Germans find that conquest created problems that only further conquest can solve. For example, the destruction of the Polish state in 1939 brought millions of Jews under German dominion. The conquest of France in 1940 suggests a solution to what the Nazis regarded as the “Jewish problem”: deportation to Madagascar, a French possession. But since Britain blocked the sea lanes, this proved impossible. The Final Solution would have to take some other form, in the East, after a quick war to be fought and won in 1940.

The East was the object of the mythical empire, where this tension and all others would be resolved. Even as he describes German policies in the real empire, Mazower illuminates the abominable aspiration that was only very partially achieved, the project to destroy the Soviet Union and Poland and kill the mass of their populations. Poles were indeed deported by the hundreds of thousands, and saw their educated classes murdered and their capital burned to the ground. Soviet citizens were starved to death to ensure the food supply of Germany.

This policy was realized in the siege of Leningrad, the blockade of Kiev, and under the watchtowers of gruesome POW camps. After the war, the survivors were to be deported beyond the Urals or killed. Some would remain to be Germanized or to work as slave labourers, building German settlements and infrastructure. Cities would be razed and the East would be deindustrialized. Proud German farmers would defend their new living space behind impenetrable defence walls and pretty barnyard fences. Himmler was working, as Mazower records, on the landscaping.

In this vision, Germany was to emerge from victory as the third World Power, alongside the British and the Americans. After the easy gains of 1938–40, when Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France all fell, these ambitions seemed attainable. Yet in 1941 Hitler’s luck changed. The British declined to confuse the mythical empire with the real one, and refused to make peace, as Hitler expected, “on the basis of the division of the world”. The Soviets did not surrender after nine to twelve weeks, as the Germans assumed. The Soviet counter-attacks around Moscow began on December 5. The USA declared war on Germany six days later, thus bringing to bear the resources of another continental state before Hitler could consolidate one of his own. By early 1942, the Germans were improvising, at first on the basis of an unexpectedly protracted war, and then in reaction to anticipated reversals.

A prolonged war meant opposition behind the lines to German rule. Soviet resistance inspired opposition to German Occupation all the way from Yugoslavia to France. The Soviets began partisan warfare, which brought horribly bloody German retaliations. The partisan war in Soviet Belarus, in which nearly half a million civilians lost their lives, is an obscure but important episode of the Second World War that Mazower handles with enviable grace. Hitler saw partisan war as the opportunity to destroy “anyone who even looks at us askance”, but in fact it overstretched the German police and helped the Red Army. Yet as the mythical empire receded behind Red Army counter-attacks, some German policies of repression were actually scaled back. Hitler understood that the German men sent to the front would have to be replaced in factories and farms. Beginning in 1942, Soviet prisoners of war were fed and sent to the Reich. By then 2 million of them had already been deliberately starved to death. In the new situation, however, there could be no thought of purposefully killing further tens of millions of Slavs – at least, not for the moment. In a long war, Germany needed labour at home and some measure of support from the populations it controlled. As Mazower shows, an attempt at Zamosc to begin forced transfers of native Poles at this later stage of the war brought enormous resistance, because the victims believed that their fate would be the same as that of the Jews.

For the Jews the new conjuncture indeed meant death. Hitler identified Jews with the Soviet system, and Himmler’s SS killed them right from the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet East, in the summer and autumn of 1941, where everything was permitted, Himmler saw to it that entire Jewish communities, including women and children, were murdered. SS task forces shot Jews in the tens of thousands in front of death pits. The killing of 23,000 Jews in a single action at Kamenets-Podilsk, in late August 1941, revealed the effectiveness of the technology of gathering and gunning down. This inaugurated a policy of unprecedented horror, but in 1941 there was not the attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe. There was not even, in 1941, an attempt to kill all the Jews in the Occupied Soviet Union. As the Soviets held firm and the Americans declared war, Hitler repeated, on December 12, 1941, his “prophecy” of 1939 that a world war would mean the death of all of Europe’s Jews. In 1942, the SS task forces in the USSR moved back from east to west in a massive new sweep, killing surviving Soviet Jews by the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, in what Mazower rightly sees as a distinct step, the German policy of killing Jews en masse was extended westward from the Soviet Union to Poland. Death pits in the Occupied USSR gave way to the new gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec in Occupied Poland. By the end of 1942, the original German war plans were in tatters, but the major centres of Jewish life in Europe had been destroyed.

The Final Solution is the main text in our history of atrocity, but it was only a chapter in the Germans’ original plans. The Jews were a small part of the population between Germany and the Urals that was to perish to make way for empire. The events we call the Holocaust reveal not the heights of Hitler’s malignant ambition, but rather the limits of German power. Even Auschwitz can be understood, as Mazower carefully argues, as an instance of Germany’s waning influence. When Germans killed Jews in Poland and in the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, they were operating in territories that they controlled but would soon lose. They killed in haste and in secrecy, and covered their tracks. When the Germans sought the transfer of Jews from other European states to Auschwitz in 1942–5, they could not count on full cooperation. Regimes that had curried favour with Hitler by deporting Jews sought the friendship of the British and the Americans by keeping Jews alive.

Mazower’s is thus an account of rise and fall, in which both are destructive in their different ways. He is concerned with empire as such rather than the earlier decline and collapse of German democracy. He does note that the early years of the Second World War consolidated Germany as a Führerstaat: Hitler’s personal decrees, rather than law in the traditional sense, determined policy. Mazower shows that the competition for Hitler’s favour coincided with the rapid addition of new lands that had somehow to be ruled. In Poland, Nazi Party leaders were placed in charge of new districts created personally by Hitler, sometimes resisting deportations organized by Himmler and his SS. In the Soviet Union, the priority of destruction gave the SS the upper hand over the Nazi Party and local governors. Mazower pays less attention to Hermann Goering and his Four-Year Plan, although it was this apparatus that planned the starvation of the Soviet Union. As Mazower shows, the Germans administered the western dependencies with incomparably less violence and with much greater reliance on native structures and personnel.

Could the mythical empire in the East have been won? Rather than killing the populations of the USSR, might the Germans have interested Ukrainians, Belarusians and Poles in a war of destruction against the Soviet Union, a “European” crusade against Jews and Bolsheviks? Mazower explores the apparent opportunities the Nazis lost for cooperation from subject populations. He presents the unapologetic race war as a bureaucratic victory of Himmler and his SS over Nazi local governors. Yet Hitler, as Mazower also notes, saw any promise of political cooperation with non-German peoples as a fantasy. The failure to dominate the East was what doomed Hitler’s empire; but the myth of Lebensraum is what made him what he was. It was also his solution to the conundrum of a nationalist empire: the racist elevation of one nation so far above all others that mass extermination seems obviously permissible. Slave labourers, deportees and starvation victims will mount no national resistance to empire. Hitler wanted to avoid the problem of the bent twig by ripping the whole tree from the ground.

This had a certain apparent logic, but it failed in practice. Was Hitler’s failure historical, or conceptual? Isaiah Berlin maintained that the various things we reasonably regard as good can neither be reduced to any one larger good, nor reconciled one with the other. Ethics thus has a tragic character, in that even the best choice can be a choice against some good thing: loyalty sacrifices honesty, for example. Might something similar be said about counter-ethics, the pursuit of evil? Perhaps Hitler’s nationalist imperialism was not only horribly destructive, but contradictory in its conception. Death does set a final limit on human malleability. The desire to murder and the desire to exploit are irreconcilable: dead men till no fields. And life cannot be willed into existence. The production of millions of German racist imperialists to populate the East would have taken time, if it was possible at all; German soldiers who saw the USSR only wanted to return home. Himmler and Hitler had dialectical solutions to these problems: “extermination through labour” and “nation through empire”. But perhaps these were simply irreconcilable evils, impossible to attain in the same moment. Even had Germany destroyed the Soviet Union, it seems unlikely that the mythical empire could have arisen. Yet the attempt to create it was the fulcrum of the European twentieth century; Mark Mazower’s magnificent synthesis, admirably balanced, makes this utterly clear.

Mark Mazower
HITLER’S EMPIRE
Nazi rule in Occupied Europe
768pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 7139 9681 4

Timothy Snyder is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in European and Russian Studies at Yale University.His most recent book, The Red Prince: The secret lives of a Habsburg Archduke, was published earlier this year.

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