The empire of Hitler was the greatest, most brutal and ambitious reorganization of Europe ever attempted in its history. The future for which it was destined was a new racial order based on uprooting, resettlement and the extermination of millions of people. Liberalism, democracy, international law, and the most basic rules of coexistence were shattered as mass murders, modern management techniques, and colossal organizational and administrative inadequacies merged into a deadly ideological-political cocktail.
The book maps the futuristic landscape of Nazi imperial fantasy: from the economists' dreams of transforming Europe into a huge economic market for German interests to Hitler's own plans for new intercontinental highways that would cross the ethnically cleansed Russian steppes, and from there to the grand theories of the high command and the SS about total war, Final Solution and long-term political domination. Above all, this chilling description shows what happened when such ideas actually met reality. After the initial triumphs on the battlefields, the bankruptcy of the Nazi political vision for Europe began to become apparent: as their allies withdrew and the New Order sank into successive military failures, what remained was a continent corroded by collaboration, impoverished by plunder and exploitation, torn apart by terrorism, genocide and mass destruction.
It is a trauma that has indelibly marked Europe and radically changed its position in the world. Hitler's empire offers a new, comprehensive assessment of this experience, a revealing picture of the future that never came and an original interpretation of the incomprehensible nightmare that nevertheless became Europe 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 world vision would have been that Hitler would have created if he had won the war.