It's often said that history is written by the winners. Yet you can also make a good case for it being written by the people who ask the right questions. So just when you reckon that there can't be anything much more to say about the Nazis, along comes another approach that makes you think again. The term "empire" is often quite loosely used by historians to describe German expansionism, but what Mark Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University in New York, does in his new book, Hitler's Empire, is to use it quite precisely. For him there are exact parallels between the Nazis and the British, Dutch and Ottoman empires of modern history, and the Nazis original sin was to treat Europeans as Africans.
You can see why this is a novel thought. The history of the second world war has primarily been retold by western and, more particularly, European historians, and in this context empire is something western Europeans do to the rest of the world, not something the rest of the world does to Europe. And it certainly isn't something one European country does to other European countries. The only framework in which Nazi Germany can be discussed is that of western European stability; western Europe has its own particular problems and colonialism is the way it connects with the rest of the world.
But start looking at the Nazis as empire and you open up interesting arguments. Not least about international law, which emerged as a rationale for treating Africans differently from Europeans. "When the Germans invaded France in 1870 it was described as an occupation," says Mazower. "This implied some mutuality, with one sovereign state temporarily taking over another equal sovereign state. When Germany goes into Czechoslovakia in 1939, it declares a protectorate, a term last used when the French went into Tunisia in the 1880s and which suggested a very different relationship, one in which the occupying power has licence to do almost what it wants, as it is basically doing the other country a favour by civilising it."
Racial logic
While this raises obvious present-day questions about the relevance - and legitimacy - of international law in Iraq, it also forces a slight reappraisal of western critiques of Nazism at the time. For when Czech emigres protested about the establishment of a protectorate in their homeland, they were actually applying a kind of Nazi racial logic; a protectorate in east Africa would have been fine, in Czechoslovakia it was a major category error. More important, though, it takes you into the previously little-documented area of dissent among the Nazis.
Most people know that Hitler was a megalomaniac who was only interested in uniting Europe under the Germans; what's less well known is that there was a huge debate within the elite about the typology of occupation. "There were serious arguments about what should happen to the Slavs and Poles in eastern Europe," says Mazower, "and how many of them should be sent to the camps and what proportion could be Germanised ... No one ever came out and directly said Hitler had got it wrong, but there was plenty of implied criticism through comparisons with the Roman empire. And if those voices who were pressing for mobilising the anti-Bolshevik feeling in the Ukraine to create a Nazi cordon sanitaire - rather than eliminating everyone - had they got their way, the result of the war may have been rather different."
Depathologised
The idea of a Nazi intellectual elite is usually dismissed as an oxymoron, but Mazower believes there is more to be gained by trying to get an insight into Nazi rationality. "A lot of what Nazism was about was completely ridiculous solutions to European problems everyone recognised," he says. "If you only focus on the dark side of the Nazis, they just appear like crazies operating slightly out of time. If you look at the SS as an elite, sophisticated level of management grappling with overpopulation, unemployment and European fragmentation, they become depathologised, and what happened under the Reich flows naturally into what came after, rather than some aberrant historical blip."
Mazower's unorthodoxy feels quite natural. For, somehow, he's always seemed to be on the outside looking in. He was born in Golder's Green and spent his early life in north London, where his mother practised as a physiotherapist while his father commuted to the centre of town to work for Unilever. He went to local schools but was almost nerdishly out of the in-crowd loop, spending much of his time playing the French horn or composing endless pieces of classical music. "It was all terrible crap," he laughs.
He was very bright, though, and the sixth form head at William Ellis school pointed him in the direction of Oxford. "I chose to read classics as it was a four-year, rather than a three-year course," he says, "and I wanted to string out my education for as long as possible." After taking his Oxford entrance in the November, Mazower found himself with the best part of a year to spare before going to university and he skipped off across Europe by rail, taking in Italy and Yugoslavia before ending up in Greece.
"I reckoned it would do me good to get a feel for Greek and Roman culture," he says, "and the whole experience left a lasting impression." Even so, he still had no real sense of direction, happy just to enjoy classical literature and philosophy and to be brought up to speed on popular culture by his friends. "They taught me that Emerson, Lake and Palmer were brilliant," he blurts, before realising he has made a serious blunder. "Oh God, please don't put that in." Wouldn't dream of it.
It wasn't until he left Oxford that Mazower even gave a thought to becoming a historian. "I wanted to continue studying," he says, "not least because I wanted to put off the time when I had to get a proper job as long as possible, and I knew that I wouldn't make the grade as a classics academic. So I just looked around for someone to pay for me to study." That someone turned out to be Johns Hopkins University, which had a school of international studies in Bologna. Going abroad had been high on Mazower's wish list. For all the advantages Oxford had given him, he had always felt himself to be an outsider there, and living in Italy gave him the freedom to reinvent himself.
Well, up to a point. He still had no life plan beyond spinning out his education as long as possible coupled with the nagging suspicion that he'd probably have to compromise sooner or later and get a job. So he opted for the economics and international relations modules of his MA, reckoning that if the worst came to the worst he could get a job in the City. And once he had decided that, he needed something to unifying these two elements. He came up with modern Greece. "I'd started to speak the language, I had friends there and liked the relatively uncynical Greek attitude to politics," he shrugs.
Even when he started a PhD at Oxford, the jigsaw was far from complete. "Now that I mentor students in the highly professionalised world of a big US university, I can appreciate the unstructured unprofessionalism of the time. No one told me it was a completely stupid thing to do, that no one was interested in modern Greek history; and that there were no jobs for modern Greek historians. So I did it anyway." Anything to put off that City job.
One step ahead
His luck held. There might not have been any jobs for modern Greek historians in the UK but one came up at Princeton. And since there weren't any modern Greek historians in the US, Mazower would up with a top job at a major university pretty much by default. "My education as a historian really started at Princeton," he says. "By the time I left, I was thinking about the subject in a very different way to when I arrived." Much of his education was also about trying to keep one step ahead of his students. Understandably, none of them were that fascinated by his specialism in the Greek economy of 1929, so he cast around for something to grab their attention. He came up with the Nazis.
"I'd done some research for a TV documentary on Kurt Waldheim's war," he says, "during which he spent 18 months in Greece, and I started to think about what it must have been like for the German soldiers as the occupying force. For many of them it was their first experience of another country, and many of their journals and photos record the war almost as if it was a form of tourism."
This would later become the subject of Mazower's first book, Inside Hitler's Greece, but before that he returned to England to take up a post in the international relations department at Sussex University. Yet again, this turned out to be a case of being in the right place at the right time, as Yugoslavia collapsed into civil war. "Everyone said, 'You're the Balkans expert, you tell us what's going on,'" he smiles. "My career was beginning to look a great deal better planned than it was." After a few years, Mazower went back to Princeton as visiting professor, before coming back to Birkbeck College. He now teaches at Columbia but he still plays the outsider, spending half his life on a train between New York and Boston, where his wife works at Harvard.
But being the outsider has always turned out to be a smart career move. You can't help wondering, though, just how long he can keep it up. For sooner or later, Mazower is going to have to come to terms with the fact that he is on the inside of the history establishment.
Curriculum vitae
Age: 50
Job: Professor of history, Columbia University
Books: The Balkans: A Short History; Dark Continent; Hitler's Empire
Likes: walking, football, swimming in Hampstead ponds
Dislikes: commuting; celebrity culture
Married with a baby on the way