John Boyne's The Boy in Striped Pyjamas will no doubt acquire many readers as a result of the subsequent film of the novel, but viewers of the latter would do themselves a favour by going back to the spare and powerfully affecting original book. Bruno is nine years old, and the Nazis’ horrific Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’ means nothing to him. He's completely unaware of the barbarity of Germany under Hitler, and is more concerned by his move from his well-appointed house in Berlin to a far less salubrious area where he finds himself with nothing to do. Then he meets a boy called Shmuel who lives a very different life from him -- a life on the opposite side of a wire fence. And Shmuel is the eponymous boy in the striped pyjamas, as are all the other people on the other side of the fence. The friendship between the two boys begins to grow, but for Bruno it is a journey from blissful ignorance to a painful knowledge. And he will find that this learning process carries, for him, a daunting price.

A legion of books have attempted to evoke the horrors of the Second World War, but in this concise and perfectly honed novel, all of the effects that John Boyne creates are allowed to make a maximum impact in a relatively understated fashion (given the enormity of the situation here). The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is also that rare thing: a novel which can affect both children and adults equally; a worthy successor, in fact, to such masterpieces as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye -- both, of course, books, dealing (as does this one) with the loss of innocence. --Barry Forshaw

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

magnificient documentary and close analysis, but..., 30 Sep 2008
This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular favour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact).

The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the object, rather than the subject side of the verb 'to colonize' meant, and my impression is that Napoleon's version was probably closer most of the time (though, note - and it is certainly germane - Napoleon's version was not very nice either). Yes, there were times and places that were like the Ukraine (the Belgian Congo, for instance) but not in general. And when Mazower tries to argue otherwise, his prose is littered with the tells characteristic of someone trying to hammer historical facts into an ideologically conditioned prior. For instance he tends to move smoothly from 'there exists' to 'for all' far too easily (minor example that comes to mind: the true observation that some Ukrainian post-war exiles were nasty pieces of work morphs slopily into a remark that vaguely implies that the post-war Ukraininan exile community in the 'States consisted solely of genocidal gangsters imported by the CIA). He writes, in the conclusion, presumably thinking of the British 'if they lacked the ideology and the resources to systematize mass killing on the scale of the New Order, they also lacked the fundamental sense of urgency'. I like the implication of that: as if the major reason why the Brits didn't try to recycle the population of India into lampshades was that they didn't have a good management consultant on the job (I somehow get the impression that Mazower doesn't like management consultants either). It is hard to square Mazower's basic argument with, for instance, Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings; that Burke could do this, even if he eventually failed, suggests a whole bunch of moral and legal assumptions about what you could do out in the colonies that didn't apply in the Nazi case. How - why? - would anybody have impeached Erich Koch? There is also the secondary point that, in the end, Warren Hastings was no Erich Koch.

The reality is that Hitler (together with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other lovables) was a phenomenon unique to the 20th C. and Mazower, in spite of his ambition otherwise, convincingly shows this. It's more than enough of an achievement.

Excellent, 26 Aug 2008
This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursued in the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominant in the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country and what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.

Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine, 01 Aug 2008
It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer and rule the countries they conquered and annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes and struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, and it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene and underground politics, and a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.

It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia and Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map and renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens and had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken place in the civil service, and a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been put in place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering and arresting people for flimsy political reasons.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) and the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing and racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate and be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it and instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, and so the Final Solution was mainly carried out in those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.

The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weakness in their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness and impossibility of racial segregation, and that mass murder and forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war and that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.

It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here and there, and didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity and beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something good in being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?

It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages, 20 Jul 2008
This book had a really excellent review in the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised and unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemies in 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, and given the subjective nature of racial hatred, and the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service and competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny and racial hatred prevailed over military necessity and pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'

Eye-Opening, 18 Jul 2008
Brilliant! This immense and wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before and after.

Is there anything fresh to be said about Hitler? He is an icon, maybe the icon, of the 20th century. He was a failed artist with Wagnerian fantasies, a slob who could not get up in the morning, but he exposed the frailties of modern civilisation in a way that should still make us giddy. How? Was it his doing, or German society's?

Professor Ian Kershaw has produced a work of definitive scholarship that will be the standard for years to come. It was badly needed; since Alan Bullock's 1952 classic Hitler: A Study In Tyranny and Joachim Fest's Hitler (originally published in 1973) there has been much valuable research, all of which Kershaw seems to have read (there are 200 pages of notes). Add to this the media (and, by extension, public) fascination with the nature of evil, and a resurgent interest in right-wing groups, and this book becomes long overdue.

Kershaw deals rigorously with the bones of his subject's life. He has no truck with psychological padding, and calmly demolishes most of the quasi-facts that have sprung up--if in doubt, he allows space within the chronology. His description of the path to the Chancellorship, which was always more messy than messianic, is painful to behold but gripping to follow, and concludes in 1936 with Hitler at the height of his "Hubris".

This is an important study of the character of power, as clearly written as it is intellectually engaging. --David Vincent

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

magnificient documentary and close analysis, but..., 30 Sep 2008
This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular favour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact).

The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the object, rather than the subject side of the verb 'to colonize' meant, and my impression is that Napoleon's version was probably closer most of the time (though, note - and it is certainly germane - Napoleon's version was not very nice either). Yes, there were times and places that were like the Ukraine (the Belgian Congo, for instance) but not in general. And when Mazower tries to argue otherwise, his prose is littered with the tells characteristic of someone trying to hammer historical facts into an ideologically conditioned prior. For instance he tends to move smoothly from 'there exists' to 'for all' far too easily (minor example that comes to mind: the true observation that some Ukrainian post-war exiles were nasty pieces of work morphs slopily into a remark that vaguely implies that the post-war Ukraininan exile community in the 'States consisted solely of genocidal gangsters imported by the CIA). He writes, in the conclusion, presumably thinking of the British 'if they lacked the ideology and the resources to systematize mass killing on the scale of the New Order, they also lacked the fundamental sense of urgency'. I like the implication of that: as if the major reason why the Brits didn't try to recycle the population of India into lampshades was that they didn't have a good management consultant on the job (I somehow get the impression that Mazower doesn't like management consultants either). It is hard to square Mazower's basic argument with, for instance, Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings; that Burke could do this, even if he eventually failed, suggests a whole bunch of moral and legal assumptions about what you could do out in the colonies that didn't apply in the Nazi case. How - why? - would anybody have impeached Erich Koch? There is also the secondary point that, in the end, Warren Hastings was no Erich Koch.

The reality is that Hitler (together with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other lovables) was a phenomenon unique to the 20th C. and Mazower, in spite of his ambition otherwise, convincingly shows this. It's more than enough of an achievement.

Excellent, 26 Aug 2008
This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursued in the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominant in the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country and what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.

Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine, 01 Aug 2008
It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer and rule the countries they conquered and annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes and struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, and it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene and underground politics, and a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.

It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia and Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map and renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens and had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken place in the civil service, and a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been put in place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering and arresting people for flimsy political reasons.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) and the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing and racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate and be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it and instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, and so the Final Solution was mainly carried out in those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.

The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weakness in their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness and impossibility of racial segregation, and that mass murder and forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war and that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.

It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here and there, and didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity and beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something good in being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?

It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages, 20 Jul 2008
This book had a really excellent review in the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised and unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemies in 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, and given the subjective nature of racial hatred, and the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service and competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny and racial hatred prevailed over military necessity and pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'

Eye-Opening, 18 Jul 2008
Brilliant! This immense and wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before and after.

A well thought out thorough view in the life of A.H., 01 Feb 2001
The best yet biography of Hitler, discussing in extent the first years of his life. Presents theories of how his ideas were formed backing them or dismissing them with extensive bibliography research. Even though the crucial matter on how and when his ideas were formulated is not definitely answered it is the best effort on summarising the available data up to date. Reccomended to the serious in depth researcher, with excellent notes for further reading.

V.A.Kouts

The (currently) definitive Hitler biography., 16 Nov 2000
As well as being a compellingly readable narrative, Kershaw's analysis is thorough, sophisticated and convincing. To be recommended to anyone with an interest in this period, and vastly superior to its predecessors (Bullock et al) in almost every way.

Surely the greatest book ever written about Adolf Hitler, 21 Jun 1999
Having always been interested in the myth of Hitler and German Nazism, I approached this book with a great deal of interest and, above all, expectation. I had read a highly favourable review commending Kershaw for producing not only a highly informative piece, but a highly readable one too. I was not disappointed. Quite simply, Hitler - Hubris is one of the best books I have ever read, if not the best. The fact that I compare it - for sheer entertainment and fluidity of writing - to things like Lord of the Rings and To Kill A Mockingbird is, to me, high praise indeed. Kershaw doesn't simply inform here. He GRIPS like a vice. It must surely be as indispensible a guide to Adolf Hitler (and as important an historical document for generations to come) as the film Schindler's List was in chronicling for our children and grand-children the horrors of the holocaust. Majestic and awe-inspiring.

A feat of historicism, 14 May 1999
The critique that Hubris is too complete with detail by some readers seems to miss the point; this is a scholarly work that is both well written and engrossing. Those seeking specifics from the book should not be afraid to do so via use of the index. Kershaw's aim to integrate Hitler with a structual analysis derserves credit.

Complex and Thorough, 01 Mar 1999
It is somewhat sobering to learn of Hitler's humble beginnings and the effect his leadership would have on mankind. Kershaw's book is sometimes complex and tests the powers of concentration as he plots the path of post 1st World War German politics culminating in the opportunities that were presented to Hitler and his subsequent rise to power.

Taken at face value the book illustrates that the atrocities that were to follow, were down to the actions, or in many cases inactions of individuals other than Hitler himself.

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

magnificient documentary and close analysis, but..., 30 Sep 2008
This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular favour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact).

The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the object, rather than the subject side of the verb 'to colonize' meant, and my impression is that Napoleon's version was probably closer most of the time (though, note - and it is certainly germane - Napoleon's version was not very nice either). Yes, there were times and places that were like the Ukraine (the Belgian Congo, for instance) but not in general. And when Mazower tries to argue otherwise, his prose is littered with the tells characteristic of someone trying to hammer historical facts into an ideologically conditioned prior. For instance he tends to move smoothly from 'there exists' to 'for all' far too easily (minor example that comes to mind: the true observation that some Ukrainian post-war exiles were nasty pieces of work morphs slopily into a remark that vaguely implies that the post-war Ukraininan exile community in the 'States consisted solely of genocidal gangsters imported by the CIA). He writes, in the conclusion, presumably thinking of the British 'if they lacked the ideology and the resources to systematize mass killing on the scale of the New Order, they also lacked the fundamental sense of urgency'. I like the implication of that: as if the major reason why the Brits didn't try to recycle the population of India into lampshades was that they didn't have a good management consultant on the job (I somehow get the impression that Mazower doesn't like management consultants either). It is hard to square Mazower's basic argument with, for instance, Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings; that Burke could do this, even if he eventually failed, suggests a whole bunch of moral and legal assumptions about what you could do out in the colonies that didn't apply in the Nazi case. How - why? - would anybody have impeached Erich Koch? There is also the secondary point that, in the end, Warren Hastings was no Erich Koch.

The reality is that Hitler (together with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other lovables) was a phenomenon unique to the 20th C. and Mazower, in spite of his ambition otherwise, convincingly shows this. It's more than enough of an achievement.

Excellent, 26 Aug 2008
This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursued in the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominant in the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country and what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.

Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine, 01 Aug 2008
It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer and rule the countries they conquered and annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes and struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, and it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene and underground politics, and a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.

It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia and Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map and renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens and had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken place in the civil service, and a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been put in place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering and arresting people for flimsy political reasons.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) and the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing and racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate and be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it and instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, and so the Final Solution was mainly carried out in those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.

The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weakness in their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness and impossibility of racial segregation, and that mass murder and forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war and that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.

It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here and there, and didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity and beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something good in being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?

It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages, 20 Jul 2008
This book had a really excellent review in the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised and unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemies in 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, and given the subjective nature of racial hatred, and the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service and competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny and racial hatred prevailed over military necessity and pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'

Eye-Opening, 18 Jul 2008
Brilliant! This immense and wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before and after.

A well thought out thorough view in the life of A.H., 01 Feb 2001
The best yet biography of Hitler, discussing in extent the first years of his life. Presents theories of how his ideas were formed backing them or dismissing them with extensive bibliography research. Even though the crucial matter on how and when his ideas were formulated is not definitely answered it is the best effort on summarising the available data up to date. Reccomended to the serious in depth researcher, with excellent notes for further reading.

V.A.Kouts

The (currently) definitive Hitler biography., 16 Nov 2000
As well as being a compellingly readable narrative, Kershaw's analysis is thorough, sophisticated and convincing. To be recommended to anyone with an interest in this period, and vastly superior to its predecessors (Bullock et al) in almost every way.

Surely the greatest book ever written about Adolf Hitler, 21 Jun 1999
Having always been interested in the myth of Hitler and German Nazism, I approached this book with a great deal of interest and, above all, expectation. I had read a highly favourable review commending Kershaw for producing not only a highly informative piece, but a highly readable one too. I was not disappointed. Quite simply, Hitler - Hubris is one of the best books I have ever read, if not the best. The fact that I compare it - for sheer entertainment and fluidity of writing - to things like Lord of the Rings and To Kill A Mockingbird is, to me, high praise indeed. Kershaw doesn't simply inform here. He GRIPS like a vice. It must surely be as indispensible a guide to Adolf Hitler (and as important an historical document for generations to come) as the film Schindler's List was in chronicling for our children and grand-children the horrors of the holocaust. Majestic and awe-inspiring.

A feat of historicism, 14 May 1999
The critique that Hubris is too complete with detail by some readers seems to miss the point; this is a scholarly work that is both well written and engrossing. Those seeking specifics from the book should not be afraid to do so via use of the index. Kershaw's aim to integrate Hitler with a structual analysis derserves credit.

Complex and Thorough, 01 Mar 1999
It is somewhat sobering to learn of Hitler's humble beginnings and the effect his leadership would have on mankind. Kershaw's book is sometimes complex and tests the powers of concentration as he plots the path of post 1st World War German politics culminating in the opportunities that were presented to Hitler and his subsequent rise to power.

Taken at face value the book illustrates that the atrocities that were to follow, were down to the actions, or in many cases inactions of individuals other than Hitler himself.

Too biased towards the republican side, 17 Nov 2008
I didn't like this book as although no one would pretend that Franco wasn't a deeply unpleasant man let alone the German and Italian leaders who sent him assistance, the author doesn't seem to explain properly the following facts:

1 The republic government only had a small majority of seats and the opposition had a majority of votes. Although technically the republic government was the legal government a sensible govenment with a small majority of seats and a minority of votes would have tried to adopt moderate policies. The republican government managed to upset too many important groups at once with foolish policies some of which may have been right and some of which were definitely wrong but all of which were foolish for a government with only a small majority to introduce. They alienated the Church, the armed forces, the peasantry in some areas of the country, the landowners and even the moderate middle class. There were huge areas of the country where they were deeply unpopular.

2 During the Spanish Civil War there was infighting between communist and anarchist groups. Read Orwell's "Homagee to Catalonia" for details.

3 Both sides carried out gratuitous atrocities and the republicans murdered thousands of low ranking priests, monks and nuns many of whom had never had any involvement with politics and had spent their entire lives teaching or nursing the poor.

4 The republic govenment was supported by the USSR and the attitude of the republic government towards religion and private property made it difficult for many other countries e.g. the United States and Great Britian to give it any moral support.



Really useful Introduction, 26 Jun 2008
I was a total beginner in terms of knowing about the Spanish Civil War and came across this little book in the local branch of Blackwells. As an introductory text, it is superb, the layout of each chapter indicating the main themes which may further be explored.
The author first gives an overview of the origins of the war: the dying colonialism of Spain's Imperial past, the consequent loss of status and role for the officer clas, the rise of a new industrial class, the increasing influence of the professions, all of which came to challenge the traditonal grip of the church and the big estate owners.
The author then situates these political and economic changes within the context of the wider European struggles following the first World War, particulary the establishment of the Soviet Union and the consequent fears that Spain would also become socialist. Because of these, the support for Franco by the governments of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which together with 'non-aligned' policies of Britain and the UK were in effect, guaranteed to lead to the defeat of the second Spanish Republic.
The author also discusses the internal splits between the socialists, communists,and the anarchists, its iconic significance for the international community of artists and intellectuls who moved by the Republican's idealism and effective military, political and economic isolation within Europe wrote, fought, painted and fought for the cause. She also en passim reflects upon the impact upon women, many of whom became political activists or fighters. She concludes that its signicance is crucial to any understanding of the subsequent development of European history.

A Very Substantial Introduction, 22 Oct 2007
There's so much material in this little book that I had to read it twice: the first time I was overwhelmed.

There's an 8 page chronology at the back of the book which I suggest reading first, to get an overview of the flow of events.

I had arrived at this book after reading Rudolf Rocker's "The Tragedy of Spain" and Colin Ward's "Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction", both of which discuss the role of the anarcho-syndicalist trade-union CNT in this civil war. The Wikipdea entry "Anarchism in Spain" also presents a significant role for the CNT in the Spanish Civil War. Graham references the CNT in a number of places but in minor ways, so I'm left uncertain as to whether they played as large a role as Rocker and Ward indicate. Graham notes some conflicts between the CNT and socialist groups which interfered with their working together effectively. Without help from England, France, and the United States and with limited help from the Soviet Union, the Left in Spain was at a huge disadvantage, given Italy and Germany's support of Franco. It seemed remarkable that the Left was able to fight for as long as it did.

I don't recall studying anything about this civil war in school, let alone knowing how much was involved. The relevance seems high: a country in which conservatives and liberals were in serious conflict. The conservatives started a war. A sobering lesson: bombing of, imprisonment of and execution of liberals. The conservatives won.

Graham has done her job in this introduction: I'm encouraged to read more about the Spanish Civil War. Graham provides 5 pages of further reading which includes some websites (3 in Spanish 2 in English)

Great overview of the political and social impact, less so for military aspects and causes, 18 Apr 2007
Before you buy this book, you need to ask yourself what aspects of the Spanish Civil war are you most curious about. If you are interested in the military history, then this is not the book for you, as little attention is devoted to the military developments of the war. Also, if you are interested in the origins of the war (i.e. what started it) then this book will only provide a general overview of the antecedents rather than a complex examination of them. However, if you have a general curiosity about the Civil War, especially the social and political aspects of it whilst it was going on, then this is a superb book.

The author has done three things particularly well. Firstly, the author been able to explain the political motivations of the outside powers Italy and Germany, whose involvement had more to do with cynical financial gains than it did with any ideological commonality with Franco. Secondly, the book beautifully examines and explains the strategies and motivations for the faction leaders. I found this to be amongst the most interesting aspects, and it was very informative to learn why Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Negrin were involved in the war, and what strategies they had in place to get the best favourable outcome for their side. Finally, the author also elegantly weaves the international frictions of the time into the conflict into the story.

Another interesting and enjoyable part of the book is its examination of what happened to the losing side. We discover that many fighters fled to France and became active in the French resistance, some even making it via the leftist underground to the USSR. Indeed, many of these men would one day fight the Spanish nationalists for a second time, as they clashed with Spanish Blue Shirt volunteers in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

The book does have one or two weaknesses. One weakness is the aforementioned scant treatment of the origins of the war and its military developments, although to be fair the author does warn us that these aspects will not be covered in any depth. Perhaps more serious is the slight bias the author has for the Republican side in the conflict. Indeed, her accounts of the Republic border at times on a letter to a fan club, or even a hagiography.

All in all however, the book provides an excellent overview of the Spanish Civil War, and for the price is simply the best introduction there is.


A great starting point, 27 Jun 2006
This is a great introduction to the topic. There is all the information you require to get an overall picture of the war and give you ideas for areas to further research.
My one complaint would be that I found it sprang back and forth a bit in terms of time lines, but referring to the breakdown of the war by date at the back of the book helped keep it in order.

Before writing Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris the first volume of his substantial biography of Adolf Hitler, Ian Kershaw focused on the popular appeal of the Nazi dictator in The Hitler Myth. Arguing that "the sources of Hitler's appeal must be sought...in those who adored him, rather than in the leader himself," Kershaw shows how Hitler's public image welded together antagonistic forces within the Nazi state, mobilised the nation for war, and contributed to the ethos that animated systematic and genocidal violence.

Responding to historians who maintain that Hitler's personality or ideological fixations accounted for his broad acceptance, Kershaw argues that, in the early 1930s a sizeable plurality of Germans hungered for an omnipotent Führer to stand above the political disharmonies of the Weimar state. Later, foriegn policy and military victories attracted many more to the Hitler legend. However, victories were the price for popularity; and Hitler became more and more bloodthirsty as both his image and regime foundered under the blows of the Allied powers. The Hitler myth, then--a cultural phenomenon the Reich Minister Joeseph Goebbels claimed as his greatest propaganda triumph--became a fundamental cause for the collapse of the Nazi State.

Kershaw's authoritative history of political culture in Hitler's Germany forcefully demonstrates that the Führer's popularity rested less on "bizarre and arcane precepts of Nazi ideology, than on social and political values...recognisable in many societies other than the Third Reich." In our present political environment, which repeatedly features outcries for "leadership" from pundits and public servants alike, the disturbing lessons of The Hitler Myth are an urgent warning. --James Highfill

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

magnificient documentary and close analysis, but..., 30 Sep 2008
This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular favour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact).

The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the object, rather than the subject side of the verb 'to colonize' meant, and my impression is that Napoleon's version was probably closer most of the time (though, note - and it is certainly germane - Napoleon's version was not very nice either). Yes, there were times and places that were like the Ukraine (the Belgian Congo, for instance) but not in general. And when Mazower tries to argue otherwise, his prose is littered with the tells characteristic of someone trying to hammer historical facts into an ideologically conditioned prior. For instance he tends to move smoothly from 'there exists' to 'for all' far too easily (minor example that comes to mind: the true observation that some Ukrainian post-war exiles were nasty pieces of work morphs slopily into a remark that vaguely implies that the post-war Ukraininan exile community in the 'States consisted solely of genocidal gangsters imported by the CIA). He writes, in the conclusion, presumably thinking of the British 'if they lacked the ideology and the resources to systematize mass killing on the scale of the New Order, they also lacked the fundamental sense of urgency'. I like the implication of that: as if the major reason why the Brits didn't try to recycle the population of India into lampshades was that they didn't have a good management consultant on the job (I somehow get the impression that Mazower doesn't like management consultants either). It is hard to square Mazower's basic argument with, for instance, Burke's impeachment of Warren Hastings; that Burke could do this, even if he eventually failed, suggests a whole bunch of moral and legal assumptions about what you could do out in the colonies that didn't apply in the Nazi case. How - why? - would anybody have impeached Erich Koch? There is also the secondary point that, in the end, Warren Hastings was no Erich Koch.

The reality is that Hitler (together with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other lovables) was a phenomenon unique to the 20th C. and Mazower, in spite of his ambition otherwise, convincingly shows this. It's more than enough of an achievement.

Excellent, 26 Aug 2008
This is a first class book which allows a comparative reading of the Nazi occupation of different countries of Europe. What it really shows is the difficulty of trying to see Nazi occupation as a monolith. In reality the practice pursued in the different occupied countries varied enormously- according to which German administration was dominant in the occupied country, according to Nazi stereotypes of each country and what they hoped to achieved from occupying it, according to how the population of each country responded, not forgetting that Nazi occupations generally became more severe with time. A complex history but well worth reading about.

Britain colonized India, Germany colonized Europe. Europeans didn't like the taste of their own medicine, 01 Aug 2008
It's easy to work out if you'll like this book. The subject is, how did Nazi Germany administer and rule the countries they conquered and annexed? If you're already rolling your eyes and struggling to keep a yawn down, then clearly this book is not for you. On the other hand, if like me, you think, "wow, what an interesting subject," then you will probably like this book, and it should fulfil your expectations with ease. I only skipped about four pages about France's art scene and underground politics, and a page at the end that waffled on about the post war economy, so it's not a dull difficult to read book.

It goes into a fair amount of detail of how each country was handled differently. Eastern countries like Russia and Poland (the Nazi's took Poland off the map and renamed it the General Government) had the law revoked for their citizens and had to endure brutal regimes due to racial hatred. Western countries were usually left to administer themselves after some political purging had taken place in the civil service, and a new Nazi sympathetic Government had been put in place. The book seems to suggest that we should be thankful for bureaucracy, as it's all the legal paperwork that stops our governments from turning on its citizens - it's the countries with weak legal bureaucrats that get away with murdering and arresting people for flimsy political reasons.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about how the Wehrmacht (German army that took commands from the political leaders but were not 100% under their thumb) and the SS (I guess you could describe them as the Nazi party's army, mainly responsible for policing and racial issues) each wanted to handle things differently. The Wehrmacht, who willingly perpetrated many atrocities, at least had generals who from time to time wanted to cooperate and be nice with the locals, but the Nazi high command would always reject it and instead insist on brutal repression. In the Eastern countries the SS had a large presence, and so the Final Solution was mainly carried out in those countries were the racial hatred was at its most pronounced.

The racial prejudices of the Nazi high command is also exposed as maybe being the main weakness in their war effort. Their refusal to work with existing governments once they took over a country created great strains on the German system that couldn't be eased by using the locals. You definitely see the pointlessness and impossibility of racial segregation, and that mass murder and forced migration were desperate but unworkable solutions that were improvised on the spot. I get the sense that they got too far into the war and that they ended up chasing their own tails following racial guidelines that they quickly realised made no sense.

It's clear that if Hitler was willing to compromise a bit here and there, and didn't automatically order his people to close their hearts to pity and beat what they wanted out of others (ie. some carrot to go with the overused stick) then Germany might have had a chance of winning. If countries could have seen something good in being under German control then they might have been happy to remain as such. As there were no benefits, just an endless list of brutally applied negatives, they had to fight back. If Hitler could have been nice from time to time, who knows what the world today would be like?

It had a great review in The Spectator's book pages, 20 Jul 2008
This book had a really excellent review in the London Spectator magazine dated 5th July. It made me put this book on my wishlist. One of the central theses of the book is that the Germans themselves were surprised and unprepared for the complete collapse of their Western European enemies in 1940. Thus, there were no settled policies, and given the subjective nature of racial hatred, and the competing heirarchies of SS, the Army, Civil Service and competing Gauleiters, chaos was inevitable and, ultimately, cost Germany the war. Mythical concepts of German destiny and racial hatred prevailed over military necessity and pragmatism. Mazower quotes Goebbels saying, perhaps ironically, 'If anyone asks us how you conceive the new Europe, we have to reply that we don't know.'

Eye-Opening, 18 Jul 2008
Brilliant! This immense and wonderful book is a revelation, not just about the extraordinary state of Nazi occupied Europe but about world politics before and after.

A well thought out thorough view in the life of A.H., 01 Feb 2001
The best yet biography of Hitler, discussing in extent the first years of his life. Presents theories of how his ideas were formed backing them or dismissing them with extensive bibliography research. Even though the crucial matter on how and when his ideas were formulated is not definitely answered it is the best effort on summarising the available data up to date. Reccomended to the serious in depth researcher, with excellent notes for further reading.

V.A.Kouts

The (currently) definitive Hitler biography., 16 Nov 2000
As well as being a compellingly readable narrative, Kershaw's analysis is thorough, sophisticated and convincing. To be recommended to anyone with an interest in this period, and vastly superior to its predecessors (Bullock et al) in almost every way.

Surely the greatest book ever written about Adolf Hitler, 21 Jun 1999
Having always been interested in the myth of Hitler and German Nazism, I approached this book with a great deal of interest and, above all, expectation. I had read a highly favourable review commending Kershaw for producing not only a highly informative piece, but a highly readable one too. I was not disappointed. Quite simply, Hitler - Hubris is one of the best books I have ever read, if not the best. The fact that I compare it - for sheer entertainment and fluidity of writing - to things like Lord of the Rings and To Kill A Mockingbird is, to me, high praise indeed. Kershaw doesn't simply inform here. He GRIPS like a vice. It must surely be as indispensible a guide to Adolf Hitler (and as important an historical document for generations to come) as the film Schindler's List was in chronicling for our children and grand-children the horrors of the holocaust. Majestic and awe-inspiring.

A feat of historicism, 14 May 1999
The critique that Hubris is too complete with detail by some readers seems to miss the point; this is a scholarly work that is both well written and engrossing. Those seeking specifics from the book should not be afraid to do so via use of the index. Kershaw's aim to integrate Hitler with a structual analysis derserves credit.

Complex and Thorough, 01 Mar 1999
It is somewhat sobering to learn of Hitler's humble beginnings and the effect his leadership would have on mankind. Kershaw's book is sometimes complex and tests the powers of concentration as he plots the path of post 1st World War German politics culminating in the opportunities that were presented to Hitler and his subsequent rise to power.

Taken at face value the book illustrates that the atrocities that were to follow, were down to the actions, or in many cases inactions of individuals other than Hitler himself.

Too biased towards the republican side, 17 Nov 2008
I didn't like this book as although no one would pretend that Franco wasn't a deeply unpleasant man let alone the German and Italian leaders who sent him assistance, the author doesn't seem to explain properly the following facts:

1 The republic government only had a small majority of seats and the opposition had a majority of votes. Although technically the republic government was the legal government a sensible govenment with a small majority of seats and a minority of votes would have tried to adopt moderate policies. The republican government managed to upset too many important groups at once with foolish policies some of which may have been right and some of which were definitely wrong but all of which were foolish for a government with only a small majority to introduce. They alienated the Church, the armed forces, the peasantry in some areas of the country, the landowners and even the moderate middle class. There were huge areas of the country where they were deeply unpopular.

2 During the Spanish Civil War there was infighting between communist and anarchist groups. Read Orwell's "Homagee to Catalonia" for details.

3 Both sides carried out gratuitous atrocities and the republicans murdered thousands of low ranking priests, monks and nuns many of whom had never had any involvement with politics and had spent their entire lives teaching or nursing the poor.

4 The republic govenment was supported by the USSR and the attitude of the republic government towards religion and private property made it difficult for many other countries e.g. the United States and Great Britian to give it any moral support.



Really useful Introduction, 26 Jun 2008
I was a total beginner in terms of knowing about the Spanish Civil War and came across this little book in the local branch of Blackwells. As an introductory text, it is superb, the layout of each chapter indicating the main themes which may further be explored.
The author first gives an overview of the origins of the war: the dying colonialism of Spain's Imperial past, the consequent loss of status and role for the officer clas, the rise of a new industrial class, the increasing influence of the professions, all of which came to challenge the traditonal grip of the church and the big estate owners.
The author then situates these political and economic changes within the context of the wider European struggles following the first World War, particulary the establishment of the Soviet Union and the consequent fears that Spain would also become socialist. Because of these, the support for Franco by the governments of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which together with 'non-aligned' policies of Britain and the UK were in effect, guaranteed to lead to the defeat of the second Spanish Republic.
The author also discusses the internal splits between the socialists, communists,and the anarchists, its iconic significance for the international community of artists and intellectuls who moved by the Republican's idealism and effective military, political and economic isolation within Europe wrote, fought, painted and fought for the cause. She also en passim reflects upon the impact upon women, many of whom became political activists or fighters. She concludes that its signicance is crucial to any understanding of the subsequent development of European history.

A Very Substantial Introduction, 22 Oct 2007
There's so much material in this little book that I had to read it twice: the first time I was overwhelmed.

There's an 8 page chronology at the back of the book which I suggest reading first, to get an overview of the flow of events.

I had arrived at this book after reading Rudolf Rocker's "The Tragedy of Spain" and Colin Ward's "Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction", both of which discuss the role of the anarcho-syndicalist trade-union CNT in this civil war. The Wikipdea entry "Anarchism in Spain" also presents a significant role for the CNT in the Spanish Civil War. Graham references the CNT in a number of places but in minor ways, so I'm left uncertain as to whether they played as large a role as Rocker and Ward indicate. Graham notes some conflicts between the CNT and socialist groups which interfered with their working together effectively. Without help from England, France, and the United States and with limited help from the Soviet Union, the Left in Spain was at a huge disadvantage, given Italy and Germany's support of Franco. It seemed remarkable that the Left was able to fight for as long as it did.

I don't recall studying anything about this civil war in school, let alone knowing how much was involved. The relevance seems high: a country in which conservatives and liberals were in serious conflict. The conservatives started a war. A sobering lesson: bombing of, imprisonment of and execution of liberals. The conservatives won.

Graham has done her job in this introduction: I'm encouraged to read more about the Spanish Civil War. Graham provides 5 pages of further reading which includes some websites (3 in Spanish 2 in English)

Great overview of the political and social impact, less so for military aspects and causes, 18 Apr 2007
Before you buy this book, you need to ask yourself what aspects of the Spanish Civil war are you most curious about. If you are interested in the military history, then this is not the book for you, as little attention is devoted to the military developments of the war. Also, if you are interested in the origins of the war (i.e. what started it) then this book will only provide a general overview of the antecedents rather than a complex examination of them. However, if you have a general curiosity about the Civil War, especially the social and political aspects of it whilst it was going on, then this is a superb book.

The author has done three things particularly well. Firstly, the author been able to explain the political motivations of the outside powers Italy and Germany, whose involvement had more to do with cynical financial gains than it did with any ideological commonality with Franco. Secondly, the book beautifully examines and explains the strategies and motivations for the faction leaders. I found this to be amongst the most interesting aspects, and it was very informative to learn why Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Negrin were involved in the war, and what strategies they had in place to get the best favourable outcome for their side. Finally, the author also elegantly weaves the international frictions of the time into the conflict into the story.

Another interesting and enjoyable part of the book is its examination of what happened to the losing side. We discover that many fighters fled to France and became active in the French resistance, some even making it via the leftist underground to the USSR. Indeed, many of these men would one day fight the Spanish nationalists for a second time, as they clashed with Spanish Blue Shirt volunteers in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

The book does have one or two weaknesses. One weakness is the aforementioned scant treatment of the origins of the war and its military developments, although to be fair the author does warn us that these aspects will not be covered in any depth. Perhaps more serious is the slight bias the author has for the Republican side in the conflict. Indeed, her accounts of the Republic border at times on a letter to a fan club, or even a hagiography.

All in all however, the book provides an excellent overview of the Spanish Civil War, and for the price is simply the best introduction there is.


A great starting point, 27 Jun 2006
This is a great introduction to the topic. There is all the information you require to get an overall picture of the war and give you ideas for areas to further research.
My one complaint would be that I found it sprang back and forth a bit in terms of time lines, but referring to the breakdown of the war by date at the back of the book helped keep it in order.

Image and Reality, 16 Apr 2008
A remarkable book , you will never view Hitler's Germany in the same light again.

A revelatory read, 29 Apr 2005
This fascinating study gives a whole new slant to what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Germans, angry and hurt after the defeat of the Great War, bothered by unemployment, dissatisfied with party politics, fearful of Bolshevism and seeking a strong leader who would be above politics and who would restore Germany's rightful greatness, found him in the apparently unlikely person of an embittered, Jew- and Communist-hating, Austrian ex-corporal incapable of normal human warmth. The creation of the mythical Hitler to fulfil expectations, often standing the facts of Hitler's actual person on their head, was a masterpiece of Goebbels's propaganda (Goebbels personally regarded the creation of the Fuehrer Myth as his greatest achievement). As a result, Hitler's personal popularity was almost universal, even among sections of the population who detested Nazism itself. He was given the benefit of the doubt every time. "If only the Fuehrer knew," people would say, after the latest bout of Nazi excesses.

However, the Hitler Myth carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. For one thing, Hitler came to believe it himself, and as a result became ever more divorced from ever more uncomfortable reality. Moreover, its prolongation required a continual stream of triumphs and successes, and when they faltered in the early 1940s (beginning with the Stalingrad catastrophe), so did it. However, it maintained a considerable hold right to the very end, even in the face of impending disaster. Professor Kershaw teases out the details of a complex story in a scholarly yet highly readable and informative way, and ends with an excellent concluding review chapter. The book was written in 1987, before the fall of the Wall, the subsequent reunification of Germany and the upsurge of extremist right-wing sentiment as a result of high unemployment, poor economic performance and dissatisfaction with the current government - now, where have we heard this before? It would be hard to improve on Professor Kershaw's masterly final paragraph as a commentary on modern-day affairs - and not only those of Germany:

"Old myths are however replaced by new as the combination of modern technology and advanced marketing techniques produce ever more elaborate and sophisticated examples of political image building around minority personality cults, even in western democracies, aimed at obfuscating reality among the ignorant and gullible. The price for abdicating democratic responsibilities and placing uncritical trust in the 'firm leadership' of seemingly well-intentioned political authority was paid dearly by Germans between 1933 and 1945. Even if a collapse into new forms of fascism is inherently unlikely in any western democracy, the massive extension of the power of the modern State over its citizens is in itself more than sufficient cause to develop the highest level possible of educated cynicism and critical awareness as the only protection against the marketed images of present-day and future claimants to political 'leadership'".

Shattering Third Reich and Nazi Apologists' Myths, 22 Jan 2003
The "myth" which Prof Kershaw exposes as a naked, squirming lie is the belief that hitler was above political intrigue and corruption, and was an innocent duped by self-serving, greedy, conniving underlings. This myth was very popular in Nazi Germany, where there was a general desire for a strong, single leader to clear away the messy, bickering mess that Weimar democracy had proved to be. The naive faith in the führer can still be seen on the faces of his former devotees in TV documentaries such as "The Nazis - A Warning From History".

The book is a detailed, broad examination of the social values and motives of the vast majority of Germans and austrians in those years, from the early thirties right up to the final collapse and Soviet invasion of 1945. It reveals the self-delusion that otherwise intelligent, rational people will employ to deny that they are supporters - whether active or passive - of a criminal state bent on mass murder and the enslavement of nations in their name.

Although the title might be misunderstood as an apologia for Hitler, perhaps seeming to be a defence of Hitler against anti-nazi, anti-aryan propaganda lies, this is to be welcomed. If even one confused potential nazi-supporter reads this and has their opinions overturned by Ian Kershaw's overwhelming evidence and arguments, the world will be a better, safer place.

A great book.

Another Kershaw masterpiece!, 06 Sep 2000
Kershaw is the best and he reminds us of this again as he takes us through the propaganda machine that was so important in Hitlers rise to power and the face of the Third Reich.

George VI thought him a "damnable villain" and Neville Chamberlain found him not quite a gentleman, but to the rest of the world Adolf Hitler has come to personify modern evil to such an extent that his biographers have always faced an unenviable task. The two most renowned biographies of Hitler--by Joachim C Fest (Hitler) and by Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny)--painted a picture of individual tyranny which, in the words of AJP Taylor, left Hitler guilty and every other German innocent. Decades of scholarship on German society under the Nazis now make that verdict unsafe, and so the modern biographer of Hitler must account both for his terrible mindset and his charismatic appeal. In the second and final volume of his mammoth biography of Hitler, covering the climax of Nazi power, the reclamation of German-speaking Europe, and the horrific unfolding of the final solution in Poland and Russia, Ian Kershaw manages to achieve both these tasks. Following on from Hitler: Hubris 1889-1936 the epic Hitler: Nemesis 1936-1945 takes the reader from the adulation and hysteria of Hitler's electoral victory in 1936 to the obsessive and remote "bunker" mentality which enveloped the Fuhrer as Operation Barbarossa (the attack on Russia in 1942) proved the beginning of the end. Chilling yet objective: a definitive work.--Miles Taylor

Some wry irony but a little lightweight for the subject , 17 Nov 2008
This is a very simply written short novel describing Auschwitz from the perspective of a nine year old boy. The writing is clear and very easy to read, divided into short chapters, some wry irony throughout. However, I personally felt that the naivety of the boy was somewhat overplayed: would a nine year old really be so unaware? Some of the boy's language and mispronounciation producing puns that only work in English, such as 'Fury' and 'Out with', I found a bit contrived and the constant repetition began to grate. I'm not sure I could really believe the storyline, although the ironic impact of the ending was strong. It provided a much lighter treatment of the subject than offered by Primo Levi and Ken Keneally for example, but because of this the book is somewhat lightweight and lacking impact. However, it is still an easy and thoughtful read.

Just read it, 15 Nov 2008
I'm going to keep this review simple: just read this book. Do yourself a favour, and grab it before the story is ruined by any movie trailers/previews etc...

I too finished the book in 2 days, and will risk spoiling a lot by mentioning anything other than it's about the holocaust, and a friendship between two young boys. AMAZING STUFF.

The Boy In Striped Pyjammas, 15 Nov 2008
I was reccomended this book by a friend who's really in to books set during wartimes. We don't often find that we like the same stories as i'm more in to thrillers and fantasy. However, I gave the book a shot and I'm glad I did. It was a very easy read but i think that made the story all that more effective. The narrotor, you see, is a young boy and the great saddness of his story and his time is intensified when seen through his naive eyes.

This book is one which leaves the reader stunned, thinking for a long while after, moved and leaking tears.

I reccomend that you read it and, if you like it, read 'The Book Thief'. Another book I was advised to read, by my Grandad this time, and found it so unbelievably detailed, passionately written, effective, and movcing that i was blubbering for days.

Laura Gray, 15.


Absorbing yet inplausible, 13 Nov 2008
I found it hard to believe that a child of Bruno's age could be so unaware of what was taking place in Nazi Germany. He seemed to have never noticed Jews wearing the Stars of David on the streets, nor even to have heard the word Jew until he hears it from Shmuel. He meets Adolf Hitler and is underwhelmed by him. Given that his father is a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime this seems unlikely and it somewhat undermined the book's credibility for me.

Also the fact that he befriends Shmuel for over a year is a farce. Any one who has studied the Holocaust knows that Jewish children were killed as soon as they entered the concentration camps.

Nevertheless, it is an absorbing book to read. The ending brutal. Throughout the book you know that this story cannot end happily and you are steeling yourself for various outcomes. Having said that, I didn't see the one that came... and it hit me hard!!

This is a quick and easy book to read, but I don't think I will forget it easily.

Boy in the striped Pyjamas, 13 Nov 2008
Unfortunatley, I have not been gifted with the best imagination and therefore often lose interest in many books I read. Not in this case I could not put it down. I loved it from page one. It was written so brilliantly through the eyes of this innocent young boy and yet leaving you under no illusions as to what exactly is going on. I have already passed it on to 3 of my friends who have all loved it as much as I have. Definately the best book I have read. Best read without finding out any information on the book or storyline allowing you to take this journey with Bruno with no preconceptions. The Film based on the book recently released comes nowhere close to the greatness of this book, do not see it first!

magnificient documentary and close analysis, but..., 30 Sep 2008
This is an excellent book, with a qualifying 'but'. If you want to understand the dynamic of 'Hitlers Empire', how it developed and collapsed, and the details of its particular favour of genocidal gangsterism, then this will satisfy all the curiosity you have, and then some. My only complain about the main content is that it is a bit short on personalities (though this may be an unavoidable problem - the focus of the book is, after all, on process and governance). You get little real feel for the _people_ who did all this. Mazower does not mention anyone having nightmares, or developing a drink problem (lots of people are mentioned as having drinking problems, but only for the usual, soap-opera sort of reasons, not because of a day job in the mass murder business), but there must have been some. Neither does he really give you a feel for the different sorts of people involved: it is difficult to differentiate the knuckle-draggers from the Schubert fans. I would have liked to learn more about the intellectuals, but they don't get much coverage (there is surely a good book there, in fact).

The problems start to appear when Mazower moves from documentary and close analysis to interpretive framework. His major theses - there are two - are familiar, but much enlarged from the core of his earlier 'Dark Continent': first that the Nazis were the culmination of the process of ethnic cleansing and national consolidation that completely restructured Europe in the 20th C., and second that what was new about them is really only that they did to _europeans_ what european colonial powers had been doing to non-europeans for centuries - this is some sort of variation on the old A.J.P. Taylor position. I have no problem with the first thesis, but I don't buy the second. Paul Schroeder has argued that Napoleon was the first to give Europeans a taste of what being on the o