Nazi Empire

Shelley Baranowski is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Akron. She is the author of Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (2004), The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (1995) and The Confessing Church, Conservative Elites and the Nazi State (1986) and the co-editor, with Ellen Furlough, of Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (2001).

• Introduction; 1. From imperial consolidation of global ambitions: imperial Germany, 1871–1914; 2. From dominion to catastrophe: imperial Germany during World War I; 3. From colonizer to 'colonized': the Weimar Republic, 1918–33; 4. Empire begins at home: the Third Reich, 1933–9; 5. The Nazi place in the sun: German occupied Europe, 1939–41; 6. The final solution: total war and genocide, 1941–5.

'For more than a decade now, historians have been rediscovering that the best key to the question of the continuities of German history is to be found in the histories of German expansionism since the mid-nineteenth century. Admirably attuned both to the longer-term patterns and to the Nazi empire's terrible specificities, with an assured grasp of detail and a clear analytical vision, Shelley Baranowski has given us the best critical synthesis yet of that steadily mounting scholarship.' Geoff Eley, University of Michigan