Be aware - if you like myself want to learn more about the actual inner workings of the economy of Europe-wide Nazi empire, you should probably look elsewhere, say, to A. Tooze's The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, because even though this tome is a doorstop, chapters directly pertaining to some figures won't start appearing until the middle of the book and there will be just a few of them. Some interesting economics related facts are sprinkled all over the book, but at times I had to start skimming over the pages, since apparently the author's idea of "How the Nazis ruled Europe" is far larger in scope and meaning than just questions of what, where and how expensively they produced this and that, how they transferred it across the continent and how it was all organised financially. Yet surely this book is a vast source of much other information.

***who sucked me in***
Most of the time if I get interested in a history book written in English Steve Donoghue on YouTube sucked me in.

This time because this book is written about the economy of Nazi-Germany, which isn't something I know a lot about.

But this period of time is really low on my list of time periods I like to learn more about for fun. But maybe my partner will be interested?

While there were parts of this book that were quite intriguing, in general, I found the book to be a bit bloated and scatter-shot. The last few chapters, dealing with the post-war era, weren't terribly relevant, and there were chunks of the book that dealt more with how Hungary, France and Italy dealt with Germany, than with the reverse. You can find much of the information in this book elsewhere, with less bloat. Not particularly recommended. ( )

This book aspires to describe in one volume the conduct of government in Europe under the Nazi German hegemon. Thus the author sets himself the task of covering the Final Solution, slave labor, atrocities committed by the contending armies as well as partisans, daily life, the diplomacy behind the innumerable transfers of territory and population between Germany's minor allies, collaborationists, the turf wars in the Nazi hierarchy, war and food production, and economics in general. For extra credit his final two chapters take on the various postwar schemes for regional, continental, and, occasionally, world federation and postwar anticolonial revolts, many of them quite obscure. Obviously it is not possible to do this, at least not well, and write a book of a manageable length; these topics, especially the first three, have already produced entire libraries of books. And indeed, at least on the Final Solution, it's difficult for me to believe that two or three chapters contain much that is new, though admittedly I speak from ignorance, not having read much in the area.

In many ways this is an outstanding book. The author is quick to advance revisionist approaches, and it's refreshing to listen to the shattering of all those Greatest Generation schoolroom bromides crashing to the sidewalk, at least when the author documents his points, as in his overarching thesis that a Nazi occupation was not uniform in every country; Denmark held free elections in 1943 and it was certainly less dangerous to live in occupied France than in Poland. Unfortunately, this trait becomes annoying when Mazower simply waves a hand to dismiss a truism, as when he asserts that the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 didn't affect the failure of their invasion of Russia or that the Wehrmacht was no gentler in its handling of civilians than the SS. These are counterintuitive notions in the first place, and thus need supporting evidence more than most. Conventional wisdom attains its lofty status for a reason, and those idols will retain their place in my mind until some support data are presented. With these reservations, along with, of course, the months necessary to read this, it's a memorable book which does a worthy job of telling you things you didn't know and making you think about the big questions. ( )