Help me remember the name of this Nazi-occupation-of-Eastern-Europe history book.

Cafe Society
1

OK, searching for the name of a history book.

It deals with Nazi Germany’s incredibly poor (according to the author) planning for, and handling of, the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. I haven’t read it, but I think the gist of it is, more or less, that the Germans failed to capitalize on both a) newly-acquired resources and, crucially, b) widespread anti-Soviet sentiment throughout Eastern Europe. Instead, they ended up antagonizing just about e’rrybody and royally fucking things up for themselves.

So, the book strongly argues against the idea of Nazi Germany as a “well-oiled machine”, cold and calculating and chillingly efficient.

I want to track it down and read it, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the damn thing. Help a brother out?

2

The disorganization of the Nazi state has been written about by many authors. Do you know when and where the book came out? Or the name of the historian?

One good work is Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. The main thesis of the second volume especially is how the Germans managed to “accomplish” as much as they did by “working towards the Fuehrer” in what was otherwise a basically anarchic state. Kershaw spends a lot of time talking about how chaotic the situation in the East was with respect to deportees, “resettlement,” etc.

3

I’ve started reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy D. Snyder. It’s going into extreme detail on the purges done by Stalin in the late 30s, especially in the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the ethnic Poles living there. It was very indiscriminate, “your uncle wrote a book where he cited someone whose cousin was half-Pole”. You read it and almost think “wouldn’t they run out of people to kill?”

Then you realize the book is only 1/4 over and still have Barbarossa and the Holocaust coming. :eek:

4

I think I found it!

Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe.

And:

Nothing about failing to “capitalize” on “newly-acquired resources,” but maybe I hallucinated that part.

I’m been thinking about reading Snyder’s Bloodlands as well. Even for a WWII book, it sounds exceptionally depressing, which is saying a lot…!

Also on my WWII reading list: Fritz’s Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East.

5

It’s almost like the USSR, Germans, and Japanese had a contest, who’s going to run out of people to kill first?