The New Order could never survive the contradictions in the Nazis' ideal of empire
HITLER'S EMPIRE
Mark Mazower
Allen Lane, £30IT IS hard to have a Nazi International. In fact, it is impossible. As Mark Mazower shows, at the heart of Hitler's idea of Europe was a gaping hole, blasted open by his racial my
sticism and cult of brute force. The Third Reich's foreign collaborators and the ethnic Germans outside its borders would learn this harsh lesson at tremendous cost.
In their own way, the Nazis were pursuing Bismarck's dream of "a place in the sun" for a European power lacking an empire. The German people, biologically 'threatened' by the Treaty of Versailles, needed Lebensraum.
The lightning speed with which Nazi Germany defeated, occupied, enslaved and annihilated its neighbours was impressive. Within six months of invading the Soviet Union, barely a quarter of four million Red Army prisoners of war were still alive. Within four years, over five million Europeans had been coerced into work in the Reich, compared with the 10 to 20 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic by the slave trade in more than a century. By 1942, the Third Reich ruled 250 million people, of whom only 90 million were Germans.
Such expansionist ambition attracted the Nazi regime's 'colonial adviser', Ritter von Epp, who had fought the Boxer Rebellion in China at the turn of the century, then suppressed with equal brutality the Herero tribe in German South-West Africa. But the dream of Euro-Afrika never became reality: it was in the forests, swamps and steppes of eastern Europe, on the back of 'primitive' peoples, that Hitler would emulate the British Raj.
"In the East," declared the Fuhrer, "toughness is softness for the future." Along with the chicken-farming chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, he dreamed of a medieval, agrarian idyll where blue-eyed Teutonic knights lorded over vast and suspicious-ly empty spaces.
But the early successes of expansion brought intractable problems. The continuing war effort against surprisingly brave and resourceful 'subhumans' meant increasing dependency on inferior races, with the threat it brought of racial mixing. Demographic deficiency led to ill-fated attempts at 're-Germanisation' of 'racially valued' Poles and Czechs. Even Hitler finally agreed to the raising of 'national' legions of the SS. But from the Baltic to Bulgaria, from Vilnius to Venice, Hitler's helpers in the struggle against Judeo-Bolshevism wondered aloud about their place in the New European Order.
In the scorched earth of the Eastern Front, it dawned on them that Hitler's appeal to non-German nationalism was even more tactical and opportunistic than Japanese anti-colonial rhetoric in Asia: Europe ultimately meant natural resources and cannon fodder for the Reich. As the war turned rapidly against Berlin, so Hitler's erstwhile allies, such as Romania, became uncooperative, notably on the extermination of Jewry.
Mazower shows brilliantly how, behind the theory of 'totalitarianism', the reality of Hitler's Empire was far from monolithic. Just as the Reich's allies were fractious, so the Nazi regime was at war with itself: the SS competed with the remains of the SA brownshirts, the Wehrmacht and civil servants for control of occupation policy and the colonial plunder with which gauleiters lined their pockets. In Paris, artists such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso were saved from the tender mercies of extremist compatriots by the francophile ambassador, Otto Abetz, himself at war with Joseph Goebbels' Propagandastaffel.
Even the Final Solution was not as planned as might be thought: the Reich seems to have acquired the great centres of central and east European Jewry in a fit of absent-mindedness. What to do with the mortal enemy developed chaotically, from deportation to extermination, from mass shooting to mass poisoning.
Mazower's thoughtful conclusion offers perspective on the peculiar nature of Hitler's imperial ambitions. Nazism was a doctrine of 'perpetual empire', for which all nations, and not only Poland, were 'incapable of existence'. There could be no mission civilisatrice, no eventual 'maturing' of subject peoples, nor the relationships now enjoyed between sovereign European states. And the end of the Second World War led to the decolonisation and rise of superpowers which made redundant the old imperial dream, British as well as German.
Of course, it could be argued that the carnage of Nazi imperialism was not historically unique. The recently deceased Antillean poet Aimé Césaire argued that the victorious 'democratic' powers continued to treat their African subjects in a Nazi-like fashion. In addition, Euro-sceptics have described the European Union as the fulfilment of Nazi war aims by different means: after all, some of the chief advisers on the construction of the Common Market had pasts in the fascist apparatus.
The full article contains 789 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
