The War That Backfired

...Yet even the Soviet Union’s success was not inevitable...

...Hitler's Empire reaches somewhat in arguing that the 1942 food crisis accelerated the decision to kill the Jews of Poland (the Wannsee Conference ofthe previous year had already settled their fate...

...Armed resistance was frequently the response, not only in France but in every European country where the Nazis had a presence...

...Especially as the War began to go against the Third Reich in 1943, partisan bands emerged and tried to attack the occupiers...

...But more often than not the chief result was asymmetrical reprisals against civilians...

...Mazower argues that both men's decisions were largely motivated by their wanting to keep the S S from gaining undue influences in their administrative districts...

...To cite only one, while killing some 30,000 partisans in Belorussia the Nazis also killed some 350,000 civilians (more than a 10-1 ratio...

...Like other historians before him, Mazower maintains that the Nazis could have ensured the loyaltyofthe conqueredpeoplesoftheBaltic statesandUkraine by exploiting their anti-Bolshevik feelings...

...Thus his otherwise substantial treatment of the Holocaust (50 pages) will leave many readers grasping for answers...

...JEWS WERE HARDLY the only Europeans whose fate hung in the balance during the years of Nazi occupation...

...He skillfully argues that the inconsistency of policy (many countries vacillated in surrendering their Jews, deporting some and not others) reflected their mistrust of the occupier...

...Yet, over time, the increasingly punitive tenor of Nazi rule began to backfire...

...Mazower stresses that their brutal treatment of Poland stemmed as much from poor planning as from their racist ideology...

...But the author is ultimately less interested in the origins of the Final Solution than in why the Nazi-occupied nations of Europe participated in it...

...Though the statistics were less severe in Western Europe, infamous massacres, some of which have faded from Western memory, occurred there too...

...Romanians plundered Transnistria, taken from Ukraine...

...Mazower does not mention that bureaucratic bedlam was an endemic feature of the Third Reich's governing structure even in peacetime, as historians like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsenhave long emphasized...

...Mazower supports the view that the Holocaust essentially grew out of Hitler’s desire to racially reorganize Eastern Europe...

...While they were frighteningly efficient at conquering territory, they were incompetent at ruling it...

...Mazower sees this contradiction as a classic example of "imperial overstretch," a concept historian Paul Kennedy introduced in the late 1980s to explain the ultimate demise of imperial regimes...

...But it was with the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in 1939 that the murderous logic underpinning the Nazis’ imperialist vision became fully visible...

...Particularly with respect to the goal of Germanization, Nazi officials did not exactly cooperate with one another...

...The Nazis also received cooperation from police officials like René Bousquet, who helped them round up foreign Jews...

...and Croatians expelled Serbs...

...In seeking the origins of the Nazi effort to establish a “New Order” via military conquest, Mazower identifies important lines of continuity to earlier eras of German history...

...He is the author of Munich in Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich and The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, and coeditor of Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past...

...It did not disappear, however...

...This fails to explain why the Nazis sought out Jews in remote areas (Greece, Norway, the Channel Islands) that lay outside of their targeted zones for colonization...

...With the outbreak of World War I, the yearning for expansion intensified...

...tus was a chronic feature of the occupation regime...

...Indeed, his otherwise incisive analytical approach begins to verge on the tendentious when he laconically equates postwar Israeli settlement strategies with the ideas of SS theorists who helped draft Himmler’s Generalplan Ost colonization plan...

...Unfortunately, things got worse for the population of Eastern Europeans with the invasion of the Soviet Union...

...Mazower goes on to say this untenable situation explains many ofthe Nazis' atrocities against civilians...

...That the Nazis had to increase their "recruitment" (read: kidnapping) of foreign workers to fill the Reich's growing labor shortage—caused by the conscription of most ofthe able-bodied male population—further underscores the contradictions of the Nazis’ imperialistic dreams...

...This resentment was easily exploited by the Nazis, who proceeded to racialize the imperialist dreams of the past in their plans for the future...

...The place of the Holocaust within the Nazis’ broader imperial project is an important, albeit somewhat less satisfying, chapter in Mazower’s analysis...

...Especially following the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s collapse on the Eastern front in 1917, Germany rushed to appropriate wide swaths of Russian territory and engaged in limited population resettlement projects in the Baltic borderlands...

...These examples make clear that the fate of local populations was as often decided by the internal jockeying for power as ideology...

...In trying to run a hastily acquired far-flung empire of people who were regarded as racially inferior they unhesitatingly resorted to brute force...

...After seizing power in 1933, Hitler set about realizing the goal of a Greater Germany through his notorious brand of diplomatic brinkmanship, annexing Austria and the Germaninhabited Czech region called the Sudetenland...

...he conflict within the Nazi administrative appara-M...

...In doing so, he elevates “rational” (if immoral) factors above ideological ones, specifically anti-Semitism...

...He addresses neither the longstanding exchanges between functionalists and intentionalists, nor the more recent German scholarship produced since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern European archives...

...And military historians have outlined numerous scenarios showing that Hitler could have overcome Stalin...

...Rather, it was the Soviet Union’s insurmountable advantages of manpower and materiel (and Stalin’s ability to ruthlessly employ both) that ensured the Nazis’ defeat...

...Nevertheless, its underlying thesis has important allohistorical implications, and it convincingly shows how the very ideological principles that led the Nazis to unleash World War II ultimately torpedoed their chances of winning it...

...Here as well the contradictions of the Nazis' expansionist vision were on full display...

...But because Berlin was unable to persuade a sufficient number of the country’s citizens to settle the largely Polish lands—and the Junker landowning elite remained addicted to cheap Polish labor—the dream had to be deferred...

...The author goes so far as to link these events to the postwar population transfers between India and Pakistan, and, more debatably, to the flight and expulsion of Palestinians from territories in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence...

...Gavriel Rosenfeld, a previous NL contributor, is associate professor of history at Fairfield University...

...Mazower does not merely show that Europeans suffered under the Nazis...

...The fact that nearly 10 million Germans were suddenly living as minorities in newly formed nations (Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine), and that the Western powers refused to allow the new Austria to reunite with Germany, led many Germans to complain bitterly that their national rights were being ignored...

...The fate of the Jews at this time also hung in the balance, with most being gradually confined to what were supposed to be "temporary" ghettos...

...In several chapters, Mazower surveys the complicated history of collaboration and resistance in a range of countries...

...All armchair historians know how close the Soviets came to being crushed in the early weeks of Operation Barbarossa...

...In 1942, the SS approved a monomaniacal scheme known as Generalplan Ost that envisioned the forced expulsion of some 50 million Slavs from Eastern Europe to make way for ethnic Germans...

...Meanwhile, the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia, Albert Forster, subverted the SS' rigid system for classifying Poles with possible German heritage by including a huge number of "mixed Class 3 s" (locals who were most likely of Kashubian background) for Germanization...

...Their cultural diplomacy appealed to intellectuals such as Céline and Jean Cocteau, who displayed enthusiasm for the regime...

...But he convincingly demonstrates that even in the occupied nations of Western Europe, such as France and Belgium, the difficulty of feeding the population led to strikes, declining coal production, Nazi repression, and growing popular disaffection with the occupation...

...Presumably to enhance the readability of his narrative, he largely avoids discussing historiographical debates...

...In the end, Mazower’s compelling analysis of the contradictions underpinning the Nazis’ dream of Lebensraum impressively demonstrates that the Nazis were destined to lose World War II...

...Although it ultimately lost the War in 1918, Mazower shows that defeat only served to further heighten the desire to expand...

...But the Nazis, too, were unable to find enough Germans to settle the area...

...Especially as the War began to shift against the Nazis, the Jews became jealously guarded symbols of national sovereignty...

...The Gauleiter of Lorraine, Josef Bürckel, deported some 60,000 French speakers without first subjecting them to racial screening, thereby angering the SS, which deemed many of the deportees to be potentially worth integrating into the German Volk...

...The policy only shifted the "problem" to the adjacent zone of the General Government, whose governor, Hans Frank, strenuously objected to his territory being used as a dumping ground for racial "inferiors...

...Rivalries between state and Party agencies, between moderates and radicals, between pragmatists and ideologues, impeded the efficiency of the regime from the beginning...

...he points out how and why more than a few of the nations allied to them aped their imperialist policies: Hungarians pursued a program of Magyarization in lands seized from Yugoslavia...

...The Wehrmacht, he notes, was widely welcomed as a liberating force...

...This misstep notwithstanding, Mazower’s conclusion makes clear that the Nazis’ imperialistic aspirations paved the way for postwar decolonization...

...This eye-catching declaration is probably meant to appeal to fans of the increasingly popular genre of speculative fiction known as alternate history...

...When they took over the western portion of Poland known as the Warthegau, they had no clear idea what they would do with its 9 million Poles and 600,000 Jews (only 10 per cent of the population was German...

...All of these cases illustrate how the German assault against the interwar policy of guaranteeing protection to national minorities ushered in the postwar preference for national homogeneity...

...Under the guidance of the SS, though, they quickly decided to expel its non-German inhabitants and replace them with ethnic Germans...

...During the ensuing chaos, Nazi officials frequently worked at cross purposes, with the racially driven S S insisting on deporting the very same Polish laborers the Party hoped to exploit in order to avert a looming labor shortage...

...As far back as the 19th-century Kaiserreich, nationalists dreamed of creating a “Greater Germany” by colonizing the territories Prussia had seized from Poland in the late 18th century...

...Writers & Writing The War That Backfired By Gavriel Rosenfeld THE DUST JACKET of Mark Mazower’s powerful new book, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (Penguin, 726 pp., $39.95), provocatively says it “offers a chilling vision” of the world that might have been had the Nazis won World War II...

...In France, where the Nazis initially tried a lighter touch than they employed in Eastern Europe, they had mixed success...

...But he soberly reminds us that, inefficient as the Nazis may have been at running an empire, they were brutally effective at suppressing resistance to it...

...Again to cite only one, the 1944 killing of 770 people in the Italian Apennine village of Marzabotto left no doubt that the Nazis were prepared to use excessively repressive measures to preserve their rule...

...Mazower marshals nauseating statistics to show the Nazis’ brutal attempts to suppress partisan activity...

...For this reason, even as Hitler’s Empire explains how the paradoxes that lay at the core of the Nazis’ dream of a Greater Germany contributed to their defeat, we remain chilled by the thought that, given slightly different circumstances, they might have triumphed...

...Bulgarians expelled Greeks...

...The new principle led to a reordering of the European map, now punctuated by the expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltics, plus the reshuffling of postwar populations involving Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, and Russia...

...The plan was never implemented due to the worsening military situation, but Mazower points out that it never would have worked because there simply were not enough Germans to settle the land Hitler had conquered...

...The resistance movements that emerged in every European country the Nazis occupied were not responsible for freeing the Continent from Nazi rule...

...Yet the author is right to emphasize that the eruption of war aggravated those rivalries...

...Germans could not be relocated from the Reich itself without depopulating it and necessitating the importation of foreign laborers (which would have undermined the SS's goal of a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft...

...In reality, Hitler’s Empire is a traditional work containing little counterfactual speculation...

...Yet instead of following the lead of Alfred Rosenberg, who as the head ofthe Ostministerium tried to organize these nations into a coalition of anti-Communist states, the Nazis followed SS chief Heimich Himmler's racist notion of Germanization through massive population transfers...

...The fact that ofthe nearly 250 million people under Nazi rule only 90 million were German, shows that the Nazis had overextended themselves...

...Under the direction of the plenipotentiary for labor, Fritz Sauckel, 20 per cent of Germany’s labor pool (some 7 million workers) was of foreign origin by 1944...

...It was hard enough, for example, for the Nazis to feed Germany's own population during the War without worrying about feeding the millions of POWs and European civilians who had come under their control...

...After the leveling of Marseilles’ expansive Vieux-Port neighborhood and the deportation of 40,000 of its inhabitants, many ordinary Frenchmen and women turned against the Nazis, especially after they increasingly began to rely on the hated Right-wing paramilitary miliciens of Joseph Darnand to preserve order...

...Moreover, they created massive difficulties for themselves in the process of using terror to evict the Poles and Jews from the Warthegau...

...The Nazis' decision to let many of their charges starve to death (forcing Ukrainian peasants, for example, to deliver large quotas of grain while they themselves starved) reflected a combination of racism and poor planning...