Their part in his downfall

ANY military man will tell you that a successful campaign depends largely on two factors – timing and luck.

In the sense that World War II is currently a hugely popular draw in movies and books, Diarmuid Jeffreys and Mark Mazower have timed their arrival in the market well.

Their books are very different. Jeffreys focuses on one relatively small aspect of the war, IG Farben and the chemical cartel which was deeply complicit in Nazi atrocities, particularly the Monowitz plant in Auschwitz, where children were routinely blinded, castrated or had organs removed in the name of research.

The unholy alliance had an uncomfortable ending which doesn’t entirely surprise the reader – Carl Krauch, the mastermind of the operation and the “most important man in German industry” served a mere two years in Landsberg prison after the war, while to this day no German company which used slave labour in the conflict has ever apologised to survivors for having done so.

Those survivors, by the way, received an embarrassingly small amount in compensation – $1,250 was the maximum received, and thousands of compensation awards remain unclaimed to this day.

Mazower’s is a more broad-ranging book, taking in the entire gamut of continental resistance offered to the German occupiers, while also outlining the Nazis’ plans for their European empire. To a large extent that entailed draining every resource in Europe they could get their hands on, while also carrying out the most ambitious attempt at genocide in recorded history.

Mazower also tries to give a glimpse of the reaction to the occupation, from guerrillas in the snows of Lithuania to Tito’s disciplined partisans taking over Belgrade, and saboteurs roaming the French railways. In that sense the book is a little over-stretched. There are the occasional glimpses of hugely ambitious projects by the occupiers – Hitler planned to extend the autobahns from the homeland out through the vast, empty expanses of Russia – and the vagaries of life under German rule.

There are also odd omissions – for instance, Jean Moulin’s organisation of disparate Maquis groups is mentioned, but not the Frenchman’s death in German custody, which is a powerful patriotic legend in France to this day.

Still, Mazower is good on the central contradiction of the Nazi position – that a rabid ultra-nationalism led Germany to create a pan-European empire which could never be held together precisely because of the nationalist impulses of the occupied countries.

Both books suffer drawbacks based on their content – Mazower’s work is too diffuse for us to focus on one particular narrative thread, while Jeffreys’ central characters are universally dislikeable, which makes it hard for a reader to see the entire story through to its ignoble conclusion.

Jeffreys and Mazower also face a major battle of their own in terms of publication dates – the big beast of popular World War II history, Antony Beevor, has a new book out now on D-Day. Maybe it’s not timing – just bad luck.