Inglourious Empire

TITLE: Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
AUTHOR: Mark Mazower
PUBLISHER: Penguin

RATING
5/5 "British"; 4/5 "Mongol"; 3/5 "Roman"; 2/5 "Macedonian"; 1/5 "Records"
SCORE: 4/5

George Santayana famously said "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it". You are unlikely to ever forget reading Mark Mazower's "Hitler's Empire".

I must confess a geeky fascination with war and military history, with the pageantry of uniforms and the dash of arrows on a map. "Hitler's Empire" is the perfect antidote, reality's slap in the face of boys' bloodthirsty fantasies. It offers no happy endings; there are no Schindler Lists or Bielski partisans waiting to rescue the condemned.

Neither is this popular history in the spirit of John Keegan or Anthony Beevor. Instead, it is an exhaustively researched work of scholarship, the kind of account reviewers tend to describe as "weighty" or "definitive" rather than "readable". It's slow going, and the subject matter, the interminable roll-call of stupidity, greed and murder, does not help. You'll be forgiven for putting the book down once a chapter to go hug your family.

Mr Mazower tries to explain the competing visions that lay behind Germany's conquests, and how they played out in real life. The structure wobbles occasionally, as Mr Mazower tries to juggle both a chronological account of the occupation, as well as thematic discussions on topics that traditionally get little airtime in story of World War II, such as the German use of foreign slave labor, and the occupation regimes of Hitler's allies, such as the Romanians. Some interesting ideas, such as the parallels between German rule and the colonial empires of Britain and France, are raised but then abandoned. A "dramatis personae" and perhaps a timeline would have helped anchor the reader against the flood of details. However, this is more than compensated for by Mr Mazower's ability to tell the inside story, how the Nazis conceptualized their mission, by examining their own speeches, papers and journals.

The narrative that emerges is not a comforting one. For us in the West, the defining story of the German occupation has been defined by the unholy trinity of Hitler, the SS and the Holocaust. Would that it were so simple. Mr Mazower takes pains to show it was not only Hitler, not only the SS, and indeed, not only the Germans who engaged in wholesale slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The victims were not only Jews, though they suffered horrifically, but also included millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and others considered "subhuman".

The other leitmotif running through the book is the inability of the Nazis, in the words of Hitler's interpreter Paul Schmidt, to "think ahead for more than five minutes". Mr Mazower shows that the occupation of Europe was a jerry-built (sorry!) amalgamation of regimes wildly different in aims, execution and effectiveness, riven by infighting among the Nazi Party, the SS and the military. The only constant was their desire to ensure the primacy of the German race, and to make Europe serve their war machine. Mr Mazower shows how the first aim invariably undermined the latter, making their rule as shortsighted as it was brutal, and leaving the reader to wonder how such trigger-happy bunglers were ever capable of bringing Europe to its knees. The sobering conclusion is that they succeeded in large part due to the complicity, or at least apathy, of most of those they ruled.

This book will likely only appeal to specialists, which is a shame. The war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda show we have already repeated history. Reading this book will help us to remember, no matter how unpleasant the memory.