Nazi Empire

The powerful, disturbing history of Nazi Europe by Mark Mazower, one of Britain's leading historians and bestselling author of Dark Continent and Governing the World Hitler's Empire charts the landscape of the Nazi imperial imagination - from those economists who dreamed of turning Europe into a huge market for German business, to Hitler's own plans for new transcontinental motorways passing over the ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, and earnest internal SS discussions of political theory, dictatorship and the rule of law. Above all, this chilling account shows what happened as these ideas met reality. After their early battlefield triumphs, the bankruptcy of the Nazis' political vision for Europe became all too clear: their allies bailed out, their New Order collapsed in military failure, and they left behind a continent corrupted by collaboration, impoverished by looting and exploitation, and grieving the victims of war and genocide. About the author: Mark Mazower is Ira D.Wallach Professor of World Order Studies and Professor of History Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, The Balkans: A Short History (which won the Wolfson Prize for History), Salonica: City of Ghosts (which won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Runciman Award) and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He has also taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, Sussex University and Princeton. He lives in New York.

Examines the history of Germany from 1871 to 1945 as an expression of the 'tension of empire'.

On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Goring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Midlevel "managers," Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi "race" and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices.

Describes the experiences of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany, explains how they aided or avoided Nazi programs, and analyzes the use of terror against social outsiders

History of Nazi Germany.

The first comparative, comprehensive history of Nazi mass killing – showing how genocidal policies were crucial to the regime’s strategy to win the war Nazi Germany killed approximately 13 million civilians and other non-combatants in deliberate policies of mass murder, mostly during the war years. Almost half the victims were Jewish, systematically destroyed in the Holocaust, the core of the Nazis’ pan-European racial purification programme. Alex Kay argues that the genocide of European Jewry can be examined in the wider context of Nazi mass killing. For the first time, Empire of Destruction considers Europe’s Jews alongside all the other major victim groups: captive Red Army soldiers, the Soviet urban population, unarmed civilian victims of preventive terror and reprisals, the mentally and physically disabled, the European Roma and the Polish intelligentsia. Kay shows how each of these groups was regarded by the Nazi regime as a potential threat to Germany’s ability to successfully wage a war for hegemony in Europe. Combining the full quantitative scale of the killings with the individual horror, this is a vital and groundbreaking work.

Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler?s Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion?and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the Nazis? lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking level of cooperation from the overwhelmed countries. A work as authoritative as it is unique, Hitler?s Empire is a surprising?and controversial? new appraisal of the Third Reich?s rise and ultimate fall.

Understand the rise of a dangerous ideology. There is renewed interest in the Nazi Party that ruled Germany as a fascist state from 1933 to 1945 under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. However, the events that led to the rise of Nazism--and the near victory of the Axis Powers in World War II--date back to the economics and politics of 1860s Europe. From facts about the iron-fisted rulers who forged a new German empire to clear analysis of the Third Reich's psychological, political, and military underpinnings, learn all there is to know about the rise and fall of Hitler's Nazi Germany, including: The unification of Germany and the formation of the first empire under Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck How the Versailles Treaty's disarmament of Germany after World War I failed to ensure peace Adolf Hitler's evolution from an imprisoned revolutionary to Nazi dictator The Nazi reign over Germany and occupied countries--including the military strategies of World War II The German military officers who plotted to assassinate Hitler The justifications behind the Nuremberg trials