The book under review is an English translation of the original German-language version published in 1976. In general, it may be a somewhat daunting assignment to review a book written almost four decades ago, but in this case it may be especially so because the general topics at hand—Hitler's political aims, intentions, and worldview—have attracted some attention since the mid-1970s. Nearly all the historiographical issues that Jochen Thies engages no longer animate historians as stirringly as they once did, not least the debates over Hitler's foreign policy and the debates over whether it was Hitler's “intentions” or the polycratic functioning of the Nazi party-state that radicalized domestic and foreign policies in Nazi Germany. Indeed, over the past twenty years, historians of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust have turned away from looking at the decision-making processes inside Nazi Germany and toward examining the murderous actions in eastern Europe. Working in other languages than only German and asking other questions than those framed by German historiography, scholars such as Karel Berkhoff, Jan Gross, Barbara Engelking, and Timothy Snyder, among many others, have explored the complexities of everyday life, collusion, and genocide in eastern Europe. In a reversal to the immediate postwar years, Warsaw, not Berlin, has once again emerged as one of the leading places in contemporary Europe for the study of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, other historians have examined survivor testimonies, perpetrator motivation, property relations in eastern Europe, popular opinion in Nazi Germany, the language of Nazism, Soviet photographers of Nazi genocide, and postwar memories of Nazi violence across Europe.

With the field so seemingly different now, it might be compelling to read Thies's book as an artifact of past debates that has little intervention into the concerns of today. To read it in that way would, though, overlook the book's most persistent arguments and its most interesting methodological moves. In twenty-three short chapters, some totaling no more than three pages in length, Thies posits and then reprises throughout the book a simple argument: Hitler intended to dominate the world and would have done so had his military defeated the Soviet Union. Hitler's vision for world domination was clear, decisive, and consistent throughout his political career. As Thies writes, “At no time between 1920 and 1945, as is clearly shown by his personal comments, did he lose sight of his goal of world domination” (p. 197).

Some of Theis's readers may lose interest in pondering the counterfactual of what Hitler would have done had he defeated the Soviet Union, and some may grow skeptical of earnestly considering Hitler's often vaguely formulated visions for a global empire when he and his accomplices were brutally carrying out an imperial regime in eastern Europe; they may turn to a book that tells them what the Nazis were actually doing. Yet, Thies's study deserves reading for two reasons. First, he digests a significant body of evidence concerning Hitler's plans for world domination, and he discusses, among others, plans for the manufacturing of long-range bombers to reach the United States and for the building of an 800-ship fleet by 1944. This evidence will not be new to readers of Central European History, and much of it rests on Hitler's public speeches and private conversations; that such evidence unequivocally points to a defined set of ultimate aims is dubious. Nevertheless, historians working on Nazi empire building in eastern Europe will benefit from thinking about Thies's broader perspective on Nazi imaginations of world domination.

Second, and most substantially, Thies assays important insights into Hitler's worldview through a rich discussion of Nazi architecture and time. Taking physical space as an illuminating category of historical analysis, he captures the terrifying utopianism of Hitler's understanding of time through architecture. He reads the architectural plans for Berlin, Nuremberg, and Munich as spatial markers of time that Hitler invested with political and religious meaning. With Rome as his historical model and neoclassical architecture as his guiding aesthetic, Hitler imagined a monumental reordering of urban space to display Germany's eschatological arrival as a world empire, the redemptive end to a long struggle against world Jewry and bolshevism. Hitler's monumental buildings, which were supposed to last 10,000 years, would embody the final moment of Nazi temporality—the climactic end of history. History would culminate and stop before the steps of Albert Speer's Great Hall once Europe lay in rubble. As Ties concludes, “humanity would have been brought to a historical stop, and the status quo would be in the future guaranteed by the breeding of a biologically elite race” (p. 194).

Thies intimates that such temporal utopianism defines Nazism as a distinct rupture from past or concurrent iterations of imperialism and totalitarianism. Of course, comparisons continue to bedevil historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but they have become more nuanced since the 1970s with the growth of comparative genocide studies. As I read Thies's discussion on the filiations of space and time, I kept thinking back to Karl Schlögel's Moscow, 1937 (German, 2008; English, 2012). Here, too, we learn about monumental buildings never constructed—the Palace of the Soviets, in this case—to understand terrifying visions of the future. Both authors study history through space, and perhaps in that interrelationship between space and time, in what Bakhtin called a “chronotope,” lies a meaningful comparison of the dystopias of twentieth-century European utopianisms.