Hitlers Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
by By Mazower, Mark
Category: History , Europe , Germany

Drawing on an unprecedented range and variety of sources, Hitler's Empire demands that we face the full implications of Hitler's takeover of Europe. Using twentieth-century technology to achieve nineteenth-century goals, Germany's forces achieved, in just a few years, the astounding domination of a landmass and population larger than that of the United States. Control of this vast territory was supposed to provide the basis for Germany's rise to unquestioned world power. Eastern Europe was to be the Reich's Wild West, transformed, pacified and civilized by massacre and colonial settlement. Western Europe was to provide the economic resources that would knit an authoritarian and racially cleansed continent together. But the brutality and short-sightedness of Nazi politics lost what German arms had won and brought their equally rapid downfall.Throughout this book are fascinating, chilling glimpses of the world that might have been. The genocide of the Jews was the harbinger of more killing ahead: Russians, Poles and other ethnic groups would have been slaughtered or enslaved en masse. Germans would have been settled upon now empty lands as far east as the Black Sea-the new "Greater Germany." Europe's treasuries would have been systematically sacked, its great cities ransacked and recast as dormitories for forced laborers when they were not deliberately demolished. As dire as all this sounds, it was no more than the planned extension of what actually happened in Europe under Nazi rule, as recounted in this authoritative, absorbing account.