Customer Reviews
Excellent - By: Gertrude Stone, 26 Aug 2008 
This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursuedin the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominantin the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country & what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.
Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine - By: Pete, 01 Aug 2008 
It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer & rule the countries they conquered & annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes & struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, & it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene & underground politics, & a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.
It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia & Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map & renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens & had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken placein the civil service, & a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been putin place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering & arresting people for flimsy political reasons.
There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) & the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing & racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate & be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it & instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, & so the Final Solution was mainly carried outin those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.
The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weaknessin their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness & impossibility of racial segregation, & that mass murder & forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war & that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.
It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here & there, & didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity & beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something goodin being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?
It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages - By: Michael J. Brett, 20 Jul 2008 This book had a really excellent reviewin the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised & unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemiesin 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, & given the subjective nature of racial hatred, & the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service & competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny & racial hatred prevailed over military necessity & pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'
Eye-Opening - By: Eliza Fewitt, 18 Jul 2008 Brilliant! This immense & wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before & after.
A superb book. - By: Great War Buff, 11 Jul 2008 This book is a real eye-opener! I wasin turn shocked & horrified by the detailed accounts of atrocities that this book reveals. That World War 2 was essentialy a 'race war' at (least as far as the Nazi's were concerned) is a fact brought home brilliantly by the author. Buy this book but don't read it at bedtime!
