The Hitler Empire constituted the largest, most brutal, and most ambitious reorganization of Europe ever attempted in its history. The future for which it was intended was a new racial order based on the uprooting, resettlement, and extermination of millions of people.

Liberalism, democracy, international law, and the most basic rules of coexistence were dismantled as mass murders, modern management techniques, and colossal organizational and administrative deficiencies merged into a deadly ideological-political cocktail.

The book maps the futuristic landscape of Nazi imperial fantasy: from the dreams of economists to transform Europe into a vast economic marketplace for German interests to Hitler's own plans for new intercontinental highways that would traverse the ethnically cleansed Russian steppes, and from there to the spectacular theories of the high command and the SS regarding total war, the Final Solution, and centuries-long political domination.

Above all, this chilling description shows what happened when such ideas truly met reality. After the initial triumphs on the battlefields, the bankruptcy of the Nazis' political vision for Europe began to become evident: as their allies withdrew and the New Order sank into successive military failures, what remained was a continent corroded by collaboration, impoverished by looting and exploitation, crushed by terror, genocide, and mass destruction.

It is a trauma that has indelibly marked Europe and radically changed its position in the world. The Hitler Empire offers a new, comprehensive assessment of this experience, a revealing image of the future that never came, and an original interpretation of the incomprehensible nightmare that Europe nevertheless became for countless inhabitants and for the whole world.

Drawing from an unprecedented range of sources, Mark Mazower reveals how the Nazis planned, maintained, and ultimately lost their European empire and what the vision of the world that Hitler would have created had he won the war looked like.