A latter-day Genghis Khan
Warmonger? Mass murderer? Evil incarnate? Yes, Hitler was all of these things, but, as Niall Ferguson says, he was also an inept colonialist, and his Reich one of the last, worst incarnations of the resource-extraction colonial power. Ferguson’s short review focuses mostly on Nazi Germany’s treatment of Ukraine, a place where ethnic Germans and various other minority groups who had suffered under the Russians were inclined to view the Nazis as liberators.
That sentiment didn’t last long:
What went wrong? The answer can be given in four words: arrogance, callousness, brutality and ineptitude. All empires are prone to these vices, of course. But the Nazi empire took them to such an extreme that any possibility of sustainable rule was destroyed. Later empires worried about winning hearts and minds. The Nazi empire was both heartless and mindless.
The “arrogant and overbearing Reich Germans”, strutting around in their fancy uniforms, alienated even the ethnic Germans they claimed to have freed from foreign oppression. Moreover, they took positive pride in starving the newly subject peoples.
“I will pump every last thing out of this country,” declared Reichskommissar Erich Koch, when put in charge of the Ukraine. “I did not come here to spread bliss . . .”
Props to Reichskommissar Koch for understatement of the century.
There were some dissenting voices in the Reich government. One official in the Ost Ministerium (nicknamed Cha-ost Ministerium, or Ministry for Chaos) called Germany’s record in the east
a masterpiece of wrong treatment . . . to have, within a year, chased into the woods and swamps, as partisans, a people which was absolutely pro-German and had jubilantly greeted us as their liberator.
But could they have been more successful if they had been less brutal and incompetent? Probably not, Ferguson says. By then it had been proven that even relatively (much much) better governed empires, such as Britain’s, were a constant nuisance to their thoroughly industrialized mother states.