Serious Scholarship, Lightweight Polemics

Review by Yaacov Lozowick

Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. How the Nazis Ruled Europe, Penguin Press, New York, 2008, 726 pages.

Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust have the dubious distinction of being the only chapter of 20th century history about which it can be said that the more it recedes in time, the more it is remembered and discussed. There must be many explanations for this, but surely an important one is the sheer ferocity of the events and their ability to serve as laboratory-like conditions for historians: if a thesis successfully explains part of the story of Nazism, it may serve well elsewhere, too. Historians, after all, use the events of the past the better to understand human nature. They can’t just make things up out of whole cloth. There are rules of the trade that need to be observed while using events of the past as raw materials. We keep on returning to the story of Nazism, because we hope to learn something important about Man’s worst impulses, and perhaps also his best ones.

What happens when a certified and experienced professional tries to bend a story beyond what’s reasonable, when his subjective viewpoint and the answers he’d like to find clash with his methodology and the results it forces him to reach? Mark Mazower is an important historian, who has published nine books about Greece, Nazism, and Europe in the 20th Century. He’s also a polemicist, who writes often in the Financial Times and elsewhere, where he takes standard positions of a left-leaning academic[1]. His most recent book, Hitler’s Empire, How the Nazis Ruled Europe, offers an interesting example, a test case for professional integrity versus political ideology. The result is an interesting cross between serious history, less than convincing interpretation, and plain silliness. He convincingly tells the story of the Nazi empire in its horrendous detail, murderous ideology and its consistent preference for the harshest of alternatives. Less convincingly, he proposes that we see Nazi empire-building in the context of European colonialism. His views on Israel are simply poor polemics, and mar the entire effort.

Readers who start with the bibliography – most wouldn’t, but fellow guild members might – will note that Mazower used only secondary sources. The book has a broad scope and it would require a lifetime singlehandedly to write such a comparative study based on multi-lingual original sources. Yet being divorced from the sources requires care: the secondary sources contain the interpretations of their authors. Synthesizing them into a thesis requires either the search for their common ground, or the confidence to choose which interpretations are correct. Mazower is nothing if not confident. Not for him the indecision of a scholar faced with conflicting evidence: he tells things as he sees them and expects us to accept.

The book starts off telling about the mainstream idea of Greater Germany: a political unit that would encompass all the Germans and dominate Europe. The idea was popular in the mid-19th century, it never went away, and while it didn’t lead inevitably to Nazism, it made some of Nazism’s rhetoric plausible across the political spectrum. After the Great War, the insistence of the victors that Austria remain separate from Germany was inconsistent with their idea of national self-determination, and aggravated Germans and Austrians alike. The Anschluss of 1938 was regarded as a corrective, not some dangerous departure into uncharted waters, and even the annexation of the Sudetenland could be cast in that light. From early 1939, however, the Nazis controlled territories that lay ever further beyond Greater Germany, and they hadn’t planned what to do with them.

There was an over-arching ideological blueprint, however. Germany must become one of the Great World Powers. The way to do this would be to colonize Eastern Europe. Eventually, far in the future, Poland and the European Soviet lands would be part of a vastly expanded Germany, settled by German yeomen in villages and German townsmen in a grid of towns and cities; this Germany would supply its own food and energy, and be an unassailable world power dependent upon no-one for anything. The original populations of the vast territories would either assimilate into the German nation, or support the edifice from below as helots, or disappear. The Jews would be the first to disappear.

At the beginning of the war Hitler appointed Himmler, head of the SS, to be the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom. His program was to “bring home” ethnic Germans from Soviet, Baltic and Romanian areas, to settle them in newly acquired parts of Poland, and to deport large numbers of Poles and Jews to make room for them. This was done with great chaos, mass suffering, brutality and murder. It was also not successful, and many of the ethnic Germans wasted for years in makeshift camps. Once the invasion of the Soviet Union began there was no longer any sense to “bringing back” ethnic Germans, and the territories to be settled were immense. There were German plans for the elimination of tens of millions of Slavs; even though they were never fully adopted Nazi domination of the Eastern territories was based upon extreme repression, draconian expropriation and extraction of food and minerals, and mass murder under the cover of a war against partisans. This wholesale violence was the backdrop for the decision to murder all the Jews.

The Nazi intentions for Western Europe were less deadly, but Hitler’s fundamental insistence on total German domination meant local governments, even when put in place by Germany, were given very little leeway. They were not allowed even to take what might have been popular measures that might have made Germany’s New Order acceptable to the junior partners. The Nazis wanted subordinates to supply them with labor and commodities, not junior partners. The Balkans, occupied in spring 1941, weren’t even slated to be conquered; the Germans were drawn in by Italian ineptitude and Yugoslav politics.

In 1943 and 1944 some attempts were made to backtrack, and some stingy offers of partnership were hesitatingly made, but it was too late.

This brief history of Hitler’s empire was mostly put together in the 1990s by a group of young German researchers. Before they burst onto the scene historians of Nazism had been furiously debating the role of prior intentions and Hitler’s will in causing the Holocaust.  One camp, the Intentionalists, claimed the Holocaust happened because Hitler intended it to happen, while the functionalists claimed it happened because of bureaucratic logic in time of war. The argument heated up even more after 1986 in the Historikerstreit, a protracted media fracas among Germany’s top historians about the roots of Nazism’s crimes, set off by the claim that Nazism had merely been responding to Communism. As the power of these debates waned, a new generation of German historians turned their attention to the specifics of what the Germans had done; they seemed less interested in how it fit into universal models. Prominent among them were Goetz Aly, Ulrich Herbert, and Michael Wildt, but the group included a few dozen researchers. 

Mazower, born in 1958 and almost their contemporary, has read these Germans and Hitler’s Empire condenses their findings well into a single English-language volume.[2] Yet his project is fundamentally different: he wishes to see Nazism in a broader, universal context; specifically, he sees Nazism as an example of European Colonialism. He prepares his argument by describing the road not taken. Those German historians were describing what happened and why; they had less interest in the alternatives that were discarded. Mazower is interested, and focuses on the alternatives policies preferred by some high-level Nazis, especially the officials in the Foreign Office, facing Western Europe, and in Alfred Rosenberg’s new Ministry for the Conquered Eastern Territories. These officials remind Mazower of imperialist in other countries. They wanted to give the non-Germans some degree of political autonomy and freedom of action; they also wished to create some sort of common market. It would all be under German hegemony, obviously, but it would be sophisticated imperialism.

Hitler, the SS, and other powerful Nazis would have none of it. Their determination to think only of German interests took precedence. Even with the Italians, notionally full allies, and with Spain, a potential fascist ally, Nazi Germany couldn’t kick the habit of putting its narrow interests first. Western Europe was to pay with commodities and labor so that the German standards of living remain unaffected by war, and to supply large numbers of laborers to replace millions of German men who were off fighting; the Slavs in the east were to supply Germany with food and stay alive if they managed; if they starved, so be it. There would certainly be no anti-Bolshevist Ukrainian entities. Unrest of any sort was always to be repressed with the greatest harshness and bloodshed; if this didn’t work, more violence would be applied.

Mazower dedicates a separate chapter to the Holocaust, and swiftly outlines the story of the events. It’s a perfunctory description, which is fine given the scope of his study, but it’s also detached from the rest of the story, and that’s not so fine. Was the persecution of the Jews the culmination of Nazism? A side show, perhaps? Was it a view of the future and fundamentally what Nazism was all about, or were the Jews a unique case and aberration even in the Nazi scheme of things? For someone presenting a thesis about the essence of Nazism, these are important questions. He never tells.

Mazower is British, although he has taught at Princeton and currently teaches at Columbia. Colonialism is a major theme in British public and academic discourse, as it isn’t in any of the other countries with a high interest in Nazism: Germany, the United States, Poland or Israel. Here, for example, John Crace of the Guardian approvingly embraces Mazower and his thesis:

So just when you reckon that there can't be anything much more to say about the Nazis, along comes another approach that makes you think again. The term "empire" is often quite loosely used by historians to describe German expansionism, but what Mark Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University in New York, does in his new book, Hitler's Empire, is to use it quite precisely. For him there are exact parallels between the Nazis and the British, Dutch and Ottoman empires of modern history, and the Nazis original sin was to treat Europeans as Africans.

You can see why this is a novel thought.[3]

Novel or not, it deserves to be evaluated on its merits, not its political correctness. The idea that Germany saw itself as a latecomer to the imperial club is banal: the Nazis were quite open about it, and about their intention to carve their empire on European soil rather than overseas. Hitler often talked about the cynicism of imperial power-wielders. These sentiments, however, don’t explain the magnitude of Nazi destructiveness and murderousness, and Mazower himself convincingly shows the consistent Nazi preference for more violence and less diplomacy, for harsh policies over sophisticated ones. The colonial powers weren’t intoxicated by violence; the Nazis were. Yet  Mazower insists this is merely a reflection of the Nazi need for haste, as they scrambled to create in a few years what their colonial predecessors had erected over generations. He caps his argument with the claim that it was precisely the growing European awareness that the Nazis weren’t so different, that caused Europe to lose its imperial appetite after the war. Abhorrence from Nazi brutality led to the awareness that colonial praxis was not morally much better.

It’s an odd thesis. European colonial powers controlled vast territories, subdued their populaces, expropriated their natural resources, sold them cheap products and conscripted their men as soldiers. Nazi Germany controlled vast territories, tried to re-arrange the ethnic map while murdering masses of natives, imported millions of slave laborers, forced millions of peasants to hand over their produce even at the cost of mass starvation, and made no visible attempt to export anything. Mazower argues that viewing Nazism through the prism of colonialism will give us new insight into Nazism – but it’s hard to see how. Indeed, the colonial powers had their share of contemptible policies and actions, but they pale in comparison with Nazism. How then might they offer a template to explain Nazism – unless one wishes to argue that the imperialists really were as bad as the Nazis: but then one should write a book about the former, not the latter.

Ironically, the solid historical backbone of this book serves well to emphasize how unusual the Nazis were, and the extent to which horror was central and essential to their existence. It is this heart of darkness which – in spite of anything Conrad might say – European imperialism may hint at, perhaps even augur, but cannot explain. And it doesn’t portend the attempted total murder of the Jews, at all.

Mazower is Jewish. When he writes polemic columns about the Jewish State, he’s not always careful to distinguish between his legitimate political views and reports of fact; see for example the confusion in the following paragraph, taken from a November 2003 column[4] titled “Antisemitism is not the real danger to Jews today”:

There has always been a debate among Jews about the importance of anti-Semitism in Europe, and Zionists for obvious reasons have tended to emphasise the threat it poses. But today Israel itself looks more like a source of danger for Jews worldwide than a refuge, and even Israelis — though the emigration statistics remain a closely guarded official secret — are voting with their feet.

The debate about antisemitism is fact; Israel’s being the source of danger is opinion; Israelis voting with their feet seems a bit of a stretch, especially as he admits he doesn’t have any data; the part about the closely guarded secret is simply wrong. Still, as long as his scholarship is professional, none of this needs to distract us. Indeed, until page 597, it doesn’t. Then abruptly it does, with a vengeance.

Five of the final eight pages of the book deal with Israel, in a visibly tendentious way. Mazower cherry-picks a number of figures and statements, and presents them in unacceptable contexts.  Arthur Ruppin’s land-acquiring actions in 1907 are compared to the Prussian precedents for Nazism. There’s an approving citation of a critical statement by Martin Buber, shorn of context. He wonders if Israel may have forced Iraq’s Jews to leave, rather as Himmler’s henchmen once uprooted ethnic Germans – and so on. His sources for all this? Hidden in the 800-item bibliography are four or five titles written by controversial  Israeli researchers, with no titles to balance them. People like Idit Zertal or Yehuda Shenhav. Sort of like hand-picking three revisionist American historians and allowing them to represent the story of the United States.

It’s a jarring and unfortunate ending to what is otherwise a serious book. A book in which the integrity of the historian trumps the viewpoints of the polemicist, since the story of the events disproves the ideas of the pundit. Contrary to what Mazower would have us accept, his own book has only emphasized the basic question about the Nazis: since they were so much more awful than everyone else with the possible exception of the Communists, where did they come from, and why? Why were they so rabidly murderous, especially towards the Jews, but also towards so many other people, too? Why did they have such a drive to destroy, even when it meant reducing their chances to reach their own goals?

[1] See his website at http://mazower.com

[2] The odd exception being that he seems not to have read Michael Wildt’s magisterial group biography of the 300 mid-level SS officers who essentially ran Nazism. Generation des Unbedingten; Das Fuehrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamptes, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg, 2002, 964 pages

[3] The Guardian, July 1st 2008.

[4] The Times, November 27 2003.