As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar with its manifold resentments. We also know that the myth of efficiency and single-mindedness was an illusion: the Third Reich was a shambles, both organisationally and ideologically. Much of the policy was made on the hoof, with the SS, the Gauleiters, the Army and the Civil Service in competition for power, and for Hitler’s attention.

What Mazower demonstrates in this exhaustive and brilliant book, is that the unexpected speed of the conquest of Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Norway and France led to utter confusion about how to govern, how to impose German dominance and how to lend some form to the racial paranoia which inhabited the minds of Hitler, Heydrich and Himmler, and the minds of many other lesser lights and opportunists like Rosenberg, Sauckel and Koch. What Mazower is interested in is something which, as far as I know, has never before been attempted, to explain coherently how confused policies of race and German-ness actually related to notions of empire — Hitler wanted an empire on the British model, but located in Europe — in the newly conquered territories.

Mazower shows that there were no agreed policies, because of the very subjective nature of racial judgments and because, by setting his Gauleiters and the SS in opposition, both to each other and to the army and the civil service, Hitler was courting chaos. With the recklessness engendered by the early successes in Western Europe, he imagined that Germany’s manifest destiny as the world’s greatest empire was about to be realised: Russia would fall and the East would provide raw materials, labour and Lebensraum for a new, racially pure state without minorities. Almost alone, he never doubted this vision until the very end. On the very day in 1944 — 20 July — that Stauffenberg brought his bomb from Berlin to the Führer’s eastern headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler was in conversation with his generals about the defeat of the Red Army. By this stage the inevitability of defeat was more or less taken for granted by much of the army, the navy, the Foreign Office and the Secret Service. Yet this was the moment when the madness of racial obsessions and the mythical concepts of Teutonic destiny prevailed

over pragmatism, at the cost of many more millions of lives, including more than two million Germans. Uppermost in the minds of the bomb plotters when they tried to kill him on 20 July 1944, was the certainty that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophic ruin and shame.

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