Can a nationalist found an empire? The United States of George W. Bush invaded
Iraq in the name of democracy, though any representative Iraqi government
would have to oppose a foreign occupation. Russia under Vladimir Putin tries
to impose its will on Ukraine in the name of national self-determination,
denying that Ukrainians are a separate people. The Chinese regime modernizes
Tibet while expressing its own sense of national superiority. All of these
are imperial policies by essentially nationalist regimes, and all of them
spread nationalism around the world. Ukrainian national identity is ever
more distinct. Tibetan protests spread from towns to the countryside. The
American occupation will build the Iraqi nation, as the inevitable
withdrawal creates a heroic myth of resistance to the outsider. In Isaiah
Berlin’s famous formulation, a bent twig snaps back.
But what if a nationalist made an empire by exterminating the native
populations of conquered lands? As Mark Mazower shows in Hitler’s Empire:
Nazi rule in Occupied Europe, this is exactly what Adolf Hitler set out to
do. Hitler dreamt of an empire in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and western
Russia, denuded of its native populations. After 50 million Slavs and Jews
were murdered or deported, like (in Hitler’s comparison) the “Red Indians”
of North America, free German farmers could claim their “Lebensraum” in the
East. (Americans of my generation learned from government-sponsored
television that the history of our country was indeed one of the pursuit of
“elbow room” in the West.) As German scholarship has recently stressed, and
as Mazower skilfully argues, Hitler and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler counted on
a quick victory over the Red Army in the East, followed by the elimination
of Jews and Slavs – Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. Before and
during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, German planners designed
agricultural colonies to defend and Germanize the depopulated wasteland.
Mazower’s book treats two empires: the mythical one that Hitler and his
collaborators imagined in the East and tried to make by invading the Soviet
Union in 1941, and the real one comprised of the lands the Germans annexed
and controlled, beginning with the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. In his
detailed discussions of the real empire, Mazower is concerned to present a
comprehensive account of German aims and local experiences in all of the
European countries occupied by German forces. This he achieves to an
astonishing degree, by seeking and finding the themes (Germanization,
collaboration, resistance, culture) that express the particular realities of
occupation by Germany. Although these thematic chapters are full of motion,
they convey a sense of stable equilibrium in most of the countries under
German power. Mazower does observe that a certain destructive tension builds
from 1938 to 1941, as the Germans find that conquest created problems that
only further conquest can solve. For example, the destruction of the Polish
state in 1939 brought millions of Jews under German dominion. The conquest
of France in 1940 suggests a solution to what the Nazis regarded as the
“Jewish problem”: deportation to Madagascar, a French possession. But since
Britain blocked the sea lanes, this proved impossible. The Final Solution
would have to take some other form, in the East, after a quick war to be
fought and won in 1940.
The East was the object of the mythical empire, where this tension and all
others would be resolved. Even as he describes German policies in the real
empire, Mazower illuminates the abominable aspiration that was only very
partially achieved, the project to destroy the Soviet Union and Poland and
kill the mass of their populations. Poles were indeed deported by the
hundreds of thousands, and saw their educated classes murdered and their
capital burned to the ground. Soviet citizens were starved to death to
ensure the food supply of Germany.
This policy was realized in the siege of Leningrad, the blockade of Kiev, and
under the watchtowers of gruesome POW camps. After the war, the survivors
were to be deported beyond the Urals or killed. Some would remain to be
Germanized or to work as slave labourers, building German settlements and
infrastructure. Cities would be razed and the East would be
deindustrialized. Proud German farmers would defend their new living space
behind impenetrable defence walls and pretty barnyard fences. Himmler was
working, as Mazower records, on the landscaping.
In this vision, Germany was to emerge from victory as the third World Power,
alongside the British and the Americans. After the easy gains of 1938–40,
when Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands,
Belgium and France all fell, these ambitions seemed attainable. Yet in 1941
Hitler’s luck changed. The British declined to confuse the mythical empire
with the real one, and refused to make peace, as Hitler expected, “on the
basis of the division of the world”. The Soviets did not surrender after
nine to twelve weeks, as the Germans assumed. The Soviet counter-attacks
around Moscow began on December 5. The USA declared war on Germany six days
later, thus bringing to bear the resources of another continental state
before Hitler could consolidate one of his own. By early 1942, the Germans
were improvising, at first on the basis of an unexpectedly protracted war,
and then in reaction to anticipated reversals.
A prolonged war meant opposition behind the lines to German rule. Soviet
resistance inspired opposition to German Occupation all the way from
Yugoslavia to France. The Soviets began partisan warfare, which brought
horribly bloody German retaliations. The partisan war in Soviet Belarus, in
which nearly half a million civilians lost their lives, is an obscure but
important episode of the Second World War that Mazower handles with enviable
grace. Hitler saw partisan war as the opportunity to destroy “anyone who
even looks at us askance”, but in fact it overstretched the German police
and helped the Red Army. Yet as the mythical empire receded behind Red Army
counter-attacks, some German policies of repression were actually scaled
back. Hitler understood that the German men sent to the front would have to
be replaced in factories and farms. Beginning in 1942, Soviet prisoners of
war were fed and sent to the Reich. By then 2 million of them had already
been deliberately starved to death. In the new situation, however, there
could be no thought of purposefully killing further tens of millions of
Slavs – at least, not for the moment. In a long war, Germany needed labour
at home and some measure of support from the populations it controlled. As
Mazower shows, an attempt at Zamosc to begin forced transfers of native
Poles at this later stage of the war brought enormous resistance, because
the victims believed that their fate would be the same as that of the Jews.
For the Jews the new conjuncture indeed meant death. Hitler identified Jews
with the Soviet system, and Himmler’s SS killed them right from the
beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet East, in the
summer and autumn of 1941, where everything was permitted, Himmler saw to it
that entire Jewish communities, including women and children, were murdered.
SS task forces shot Jews in the tens of thousands in front of death pits.
The killing of 23,000 Jews in a single action at Kamenets-Podilsk, in late
August 1941, revealed the effectiveness of the technology of gathering and
gunning down. This inaugurated a policy of unprecedented horror, but in 1941
there was not the attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe. There was not
even, in 1941, an attempt to kill all the Jews in the Occupied Soviet Union.
As the Soviets held firm and the Americans declared war, Hitler repeated, on
December 12, 1941, his “prophecy” of 1939 that a world war would mean the
death of all of Europe’s Jews. In 1942, the SS task forces in the USSR moved
back from east to west in a massive new sweep, killing surviving Soviet Jews
by the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, in what Mazower rightly sees as a
distinct step, the German policy of killing Jews en masse was extended
westward from the Soviet Union to Poland. Death pits in the Occupied USSR
gave way to the new gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec in
Occupied Poland. By the end of 1942, the original German war plans were in
tatters, but the major centres of Jewish life in Europe had been destroyed.
The Final Solution is the main text in our history of atrocity, but it was
only a chapter in the Germans’ original plans. The Jews were a small part of
the population between Germany and the Urals that was to perish to make way
for empire. The events we call the Holocaust reveal not the heights of
Hitler’s malignant ambition, but rather the limits of German power. Even
Auschwitz can be understood, as Mazower carefully argues, as an instance of
Germany’s waning influence. When Germans killed Jews in Poland and in the
Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, they were operating in territories that they
controlled but would soon lose. They killed in haste and in secrecy, and
covered their tracks. When the Germans sought the transfer of Jews from
other European states to Auschwitz in 1942–5, they could not count on full
cooperation. Regimes that had curried favour with Hitler by deporting Jews
sought the friendship of the British and the Americans by keeping Jews
alive.
Mazower’s is thus an account of rise and fall, in which both are destructive
in their different ways. He is concerned with empire as such rather than the
earlier decline and collapse of German democracy. He does note that the
early years of the Second World War consolidated Germany as a Führerstaat:
Hitler’s personal decrees, rather than law in the traditional sense,
determined policy. Mazower shows that the competition for Hitler’s favour
coincided with the rapid addition of new lands that had somehow to be ruled.
In Poland, Nazi Party leaders were placed in charge of new districts created
personally by Hitler, sometimes resisting deportations organized by Himmler
and his SS. In the Soviet Union, the priority of destruction gave the SS the
upper hand over the Nazi Party and local governors. Mazower pays less
attention to Hermann Goering and his Four-Year Plan, although it was this
apparatus that planned the starvation of the Soviet Union. As Mazower shows,
the Germans administered the western dependencies with incomparably less
violence and with much greater reliance on native structures and personnel.
Could the mythical empire in the East have been won? Rather than killing the
populations of the USSR, might the Germans have interested Ukrainians,
Belarusians and Poles in a war of destruction against the Soviet Union, a
“European” crusade against Jews and Bolsheviks? Mazower explores the
apparent opportunities the Nazis lost for cooperation from subject
populations. He presents the unapologetic race war as a bureaucratic victory
of Himmler and his SS over Nazi local governors. Yet Hitler, as Mazower also
notes, saw any promise of political cooperation with non-German peoples as a
fantasy. The failure to dominate the East was what doomed Hitler’s empire;
but the myth of Lebensraum is what made him what he was. It was also his
solution to the conundrum of a nationalist empire: the racist elevation of
one nation so far above all others that mass extermination seems obviously
permissible. Slave labourers, deportees and starvation victims will mount no
national resistance to empire. Hitler wanted to avoid the problem of the
bent twig by ripping the whole tree from the ground.
This had a certain apparent logic, but it failed in practice. Was Hitler’s
failure historical, or conceptual? Isaiah Berlin maintained that the various
things we reasonably regard as good can neither be reduced to any one larger
good, nor reconciled one with the other. Ethics thus has a tragic character,
in that even the best choice can be a choice against some good thing:
loyalty sacrifices honesty, for example. Might something similar be said
about counter-ethics, the pursuit of evil? Perhaps Hitler’s nationalist
imperialism was not only horribly destructive, but contradictory in its
conception. Death does set a final limit on human malleability. The desire
to murder and the desire to exploit are irreconcilable: dead men till no
fields. And life cannot be willed into existence. The production of millions
of German racist imperialists to populate the East would have taken time, if
it was possible at all; German soldiers who saw the USSR only wanted to
return home. Himmler and Hitler had dialectical solutions to these problems:
“extermination through labour” and “nation through empire”. But perhaps
these were simply irreconcilable evils, impossible to attain in the same
moment. Even had Germany destroyed the Soviet Union, it seems unlikely that
the mythical empire could have arisen. Yet the attempt to create it was the
fulcrum of the European twentieth century; Mark Mazower’s magnificent
synthesis, admirably balanced, makes this utterly clear.
Mark Mazower
HITLER’S EMPIRE
Nazi rule in Occupied Europe
768pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 7139 9681 4
Timothy Snyder is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies
in European and Russian Studies at Yale University.His most recent book, The
Red Prince: The secret lives of a Habsburg Archduke, was published earlier
this year.
