Shelley Baranowski . Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler . New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 368. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.99.

Abstract

Shelley Baranowski strives to contextualize National Socialism and its mass violence within the broader history of the rise and disintegration of empires. Her perspective includes long‐term German imperial ambitions and the competition with other empires. She has based her arguments on an impressive amount of recent secondary literature in English and German. Baranowski argues that the Nazis grounded their empire in the principle of racial homogeneity and not in ethnic and religious diversity. German nationalism, she claims, was already distinctive in 1914 with its “explosive cocktail of will to power and the fear of dissolution” (p. 65), and under the Nazis the “prospect of annihilation coexisted with the euphoria of triumph” (p. 280). The twin goals of racial purification and the expansion of German Lebensraum lay at the core of the drive to build an empire between 1933 and 1945, which was intended to avoid the failures of the Second Empire (1871–1918) and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933).