Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
By Mark Mazower
Allen Lane £30, 726 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24

Hitler
By Ian Kershaw
Allen Lane £30, 1,030 pages
FT Bookshop price: £24

Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution
By Ian Kershaw
Yale University Press £19.99, 394 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.99

In September 1942 Heinrich Himmler had an imperial vision. In the 20 years after Germany’s victory in the war, “the Germanic peoples” would grow in number from 83 million to 120 million and would resettle all the land Germany had conquered from Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union. They would go forth and multiply in splendid new provinces with names such as “Ingermanland”. Autobahns and high-speed railways would connect a “string of pearls” – fortified German outposts – as far as the Don, the Volga and ultimately even the Urals. In Himmler’s words, the German conquest of “the East” would be “the greatest piece of colonisation which the world will ever have seen”.