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Angry Czechs watch German troops entering Prague, March 15, 1939 |
Dreams of empire fatally flawed
In Mark Mazower’s analysis, Hitler’s grand plan to conquer the world is exposed as hopelessly unsophisticated, writes Martin Sheppard
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe.
By Mark Mazower.
THE Germans, despite winning a huge eastern empire by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in 1917, lost the First World War when they ran out of food.
Hitler was determined to reverse this disaster and to make sure that his own empire was a permanent one. He planned to win back the East as Lebensraum for the German Volk, and to secure Germany’s long-term self-sufficiency in food by the establishment of a Greater German agricultural settlement there.
Hitler’s unsophisticated fixation on land and agriculture was based on a concept of economic life as a zero sum. Jealous of the British Empire and discounting the benefits of trade, he saw each nation as having finite resources. These, and particularly land, he was determined to seize for Germany, if necessary at the cost to the dispossessed Slavs of mass starvation.
To him the aim of empire was simply to benefit the ruling power, with the superior race taking over and exploiting conquered nations and their assets. The defeated would be swept away, as the Red Indians had been by American settlers, or reduced to slavery, like Africans transported by Britain across the Atlantic.
Unlike previous imperialists, Hitler had no qualms about treating fellow-Europeans as chattels.
Hitler’s Empire combines lucid analysis with superb scholarship in a chilling account of inhumanity and mass murder on an almost unimaginable scale.
Fortunately for Stalin, and for the world, Hitler was a hopeless negotiator who mistrusted his allies and ignored obvious opportunities for collaboration, not only in the East but also in the West.
To almost any question his only solution was to rule out compromise and to employ unlimited force. His brutal treatment of the Balts, Belorussians, Poles and Ukrainians alienated potential anti-Communist supporters.
Many Eastern Europeans also realised that if Germany won the war they might well follow the Jews to extermination.
The Germans, in fact, had no unified system for dealing with their massive conquests, with the Wehrmacht, the SS, Party officials, the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories and other agencies in bitter competition.
Instead they improvised wildly against the background of a losing war.
Their overall approach, however, was a classic instance of not paying the farm worker and not feeding the cow, then being surprised that the latter has stopped giving milk and died.
Although his initial military successes defied all reasonable expectation, Hitler’s grandiose plans for empire were fatally flawed, even before his disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
There simply weren’t enough Germans to settle the conquered land in the East.
With the Eastern War never won, Germany rapidly found itself short of soldiers and industrial workers, let alone potential settlers. Industrial shortages, not lack of food, became Germany’s key problem.
The Germans soon regretted their loss of captive slave labour in starving two million Russian POWs to death.
They started importing Slav labour to the Reich, with the ironic outcome that there were millions of Slavs inside Germany itself by 1945.
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