Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

I would suggest taking a careful look at the Kindle edition of this book (the free sample) before ordering it: I downloaded the sample of this book and quickly discovered that the maps in the Kindle version were almost illegible. The book looked fascinating, and the maps are important, so I ordered the hardbound version instead.---------------------I have now owned the hardbound edition of this book for a week or two, and, although the book is excellent in every way, my reading progress has been slow because the subject matter is both terrifying and depressing. So far, the book has demolished many of my hazy ideas about what happened in the Bloodlands.For example, I had a never-closely-examined "picture" of how Hitler killed six million Jews. That would be as follows: he rounded up the Jews living in Germany, took them to concentration camps like Auschwitz, and gassed them. We have all seen the film footage, which makes an indelible impression.It turns out that my "picture" is completely wrong. Germany simply did not have enough Jews, and a huge number escaped through emigration while it was still allowed. The total of German Jews killed was 175,000. That is (don't mistake my meaning) in itself an incomprehensible, enormous number, but it does not account for six million dead. What Hitler did, in fact, was to conquer Poland (with the connivance of Stalin) and begin massacring Polish and East European Jews. A huge number were simply shot and tossed into unmarked mass graves. There were also "killing camps" (NOT concentration camps) where the average "stay" was just a day or two, and the victims were gassed without any pretense of work whatsoever.One reason we Americans were slow in understanding the truth is that we (our troops) never even got to the Bloodlands, and so the massive crimes of Hitler and Stalin, amounting to 14 million dead, were simply things that we remained unaware of. I could recite the names of the monstrous killing camps and you most likely would not recognize them --- neither did I.What we remain ignorant of are horrendous crimes such as Stalin's collectivization drive in the Ukraine, which was an utter failure. Shortly after his wife committed suicide (with a bullet through her heart), Stalin became actively malicious towards the Ukraine, seizing all their grain and selling it abroad, and causing a famine which killed 3.3 million people. This is described in the chapter on "Class Terror."But then came the show trials and the Great Terror. This time, Stalin went after nationalities which he suspected --- Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians -- and the Ukraine experienced a second wave of terror-murder, described in the chapter on "National Terror." All of this happened well before World War II, and all of this time Hitler was able to point to Stalin as a horrific example of Bolshevism ("Why You Should Vote for the Nazis").Very soon, Hitler invaded Poland from the West, and Stalin (after a cautious pause) invaded from the East, and the stage was set for some of the worst crimes in human history. When you realize that Hitler, in annexing "his half" of Poland, had suddenly created a nation with more Slavs than any other nation in the world (aside from the USSR), and when you think of Hitler's lunatic insistence on "racial purity" --- in addition to his initial plan to steal the land of the Slavs, annihilate them, and populate the lands with German farmers --- a genuine shiver of terror runs down your back.This is a long overdue, magisterial work, which will be a very valuable source for students, teachers, and researchers in the future.

True or not, Joseph Stalin is often credited with stating: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” That broadly applied quote certainly rings true when one factors how little value human life had in Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1953 (encompassing the crux of Stalin and Hitler’s reigns). With BLOODLANDS, Timothy Snyder sifts through millions upon millions of needless deaths at the hands of two bloodthirsty regimes and draws logical conclusions as to how and why the simple statistics often overshadow the underlying tragedy.The experience of reading “Black Earth” (Snyder’s most recent work) prompted me to go back and read BLOODLANDS; I was glad I did. While both books exemplify a deep, personal approach by the author to present the subject matter in a scholarly manner, I found “Black Earth” to be more provocative and ambitious than I would have preferred, with the author dragging the issue of “climate change” at the end of the book. BLOODLANDS, on the other hand, digs deep into the unimaginable horrors endured by those living in specific region of Europe. A region that, for 20+ years, served as a carcass that was ripped apart and fought over by two ravenous lions (Stalin and Hitler).What made BLOODLANDS such a compelling read? Mainly, it is the manner in which the author presents the material. After reading countless volumes addressing individual aspects of modern Eastern European history that includes Stalin’s purges, designed famine, World War II, ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust, I have yet to read a book that encompasses such a broad, yet thorough, analysis of the region that bore the brunt of all these tragedies. Snyder manages to examine the significant complexities associated with all these horrific events and merge them as one elongated period of suffering delivered by different hands. It is from this perspective that readers will better understand the more intricate nature of tragedy amid the gaudy death counts that characterize this period of time. Chronologically written, the book introduces the effects of Stalin’s failed attempts to industrialize the beleaguered Soviet Union by collectivizing farms and eventually starving, murdering or imprisoning entire rural regions. The death toll from famine and political purging is already in the millions before Adolph Hitler sets forth with his plans for Eastern Europe. Snyder bookends the disaster of World War II and the Holocaust with pre- and post-war actions directed by Stalin against his own people. Snyder purposefully makes it difficult to simply label either Stalin or Hitler as being “more evil” than the other … the book is too deep to draw such a simple conclusion. Starvation, mass murder, imprisonment and ethnic cleansing were tools used by both dictators to achieve desired goals and the mounting millions of dead simply became a tool of justification (you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs).What I really appreciated about BLOODLANDS was that it provided a clearer understanding of the dilemma faced by those living between Hitler and Stalin (the “bloodlands”) … approximately 100 million people comprising large ethnic groups deemed undesirable in one way or another. Subject to being successively occupied by the Soviets and the Germans (and in places like Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine … the Soviets again) there was nowhere to go … no escape. Collaborating with one occupier generally meant death when the other occupier gained/re-gained control. The desperation described by those put in this position is quite palpable and summed up quite succinctly in a poem written by a Polish Home Army soldier fighting the Germans in Warsaw and waiting for relief from the Red Army: “We await you, red plague / To deliver us from the black death”. This region was where the majority of all deaths on the Eastern Front occurred … it is the site of the Katyn massacre, the pits of Babi Yar, all of the extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos and thousands of villages/towns burned to the ground. The Holocaust has its place in the book, but only represents a part of the whole story. Snyder does a good job in keeping focus on the plight of the overall region, not just the Jews (although anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe doesn’t end with Germany’s defeat). The history presented throughout the book, while sobering enough, is accentuated with individual accounts that provide a deeper perspective of the ongoing inhumanity that this part of Europe endured for more than 20 years.The bulk of BLOODLANDS lends itself to the period of the Second World War, but, in essence the bloodshed didn’t start with the war and it doesn’t end with the war. Postwar Stalin directives led to many more deaths in the form of Gulag internments and forced relocations. Throughout the book, the death tolls from various actions (large and small) are hammered out on a regular basis and the reader is somewhat numbed by these figures from the beginning (they simply become statistics). At the book’s conclusion, Snyder examines the numbers and effectively manages to convey these statistics for what they truly are: millions of individual tragedies. He also offers clarification to the West, which tends to associate the concentration camps liberated in western Germany as examples of the killing in the East. He points out that concentration camps were never designed to kill and the deaths at those camps were more consequential than intentional … all the extermination camps were located in the “bloodlands”.BLOODLANDS is one of the better history books I’ve read in years. While I have numerous volumes that detail specific events in the same period of history, none of them collectively illustrate the misery and atrocity as concisely as this book does. BLOODLANDS certainly provides a much better understanding of one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of the modern era.

I thought I knew a lot about this subject, but realized I only knew it from a military-historical point of view. Bloodlands looks at the conflicts in the zone between Germany and Russia from the civilian point of view, and it's astounding. The breadth and depth of Snyder's scholarship is staggering. I learned so much about what befell the Jews, Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians. The genocidal cruelty of the Nazis was well known to me, but I learnt a lot about how the Soviets were comparably genocidal, including before the war. I learnt too that most of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis was outside of Germany itself, and how it swung back and forth between needing Jews to work versus wanting to exterminate them. It makes for very difficult but necessary reading. Thank you, Professor Snyder.

Apre un mondo di conoscenza a chi han raccontato la guerra solo dalla parte occidentale. Si riscoprono politiche e macelli in gran parte tenuti nell'ombra. In evidenza molte bugie fondanti delle politiche espansioniste attuali. Non sempre scorrevole. Sarebbe utile una tabellina riassuntiva delle cifre, talmente alte e frammentate da far perdere il conto più e più volte.

Like many others I turned to this book after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.In terms of the basics it’s excellent history: well researched and with strongly argued interpretations. It’s well written, and where terminology or it’s use is unusual the author provides clear definitions.Beyond those basics, of course the subject matter makes for very difficult reading, and I had to tackle the book in instalments. There’s only so much calculated mass murder I can take at one sitting. Nonetheless it was worth it. My understanding of the geopolitics of the region has indeed been deepened.I am not convinced that Timothy Snyder has quite expressed his conclusions with the same clarity as his exposition. But perhaps that would be impossible, given the subject matter, and he negotiates the liminal area between ethics and history with some skill, and thankfully without conceding a final value judgment as to which (perpetrators) of these terrible crimes might have been the worst.

Richly detailed, conservative (and still high) in death rates reported...this is a piece of history that every student of European history in any form should read, not for the acts itself, but the ideologies and the twisted political reasonings explained behind those acts.

Timothy Snyder beschreibt akribisch und nüchtern wie zunächst der sowjetische Bolschewismus, danach der nationale Sozialismus und zuletzt wieder der sowjetische Bolschewismus (nunmehr geronnen zu einer Art bizarrem Nationalbolschewismus) die Bloodlands, Länder und Gebiete östlich der Grenzen des Deutschen Reiches von 1938 und westlich der Linie Leningrad-Smolensk-Rostow am Don, nachhaltig zerstört haben. Die verstörenden Details hierzu sind im Werk selbst nachzulesen und brauchen an dieser Stelle nicht repetiert zu werden.Auf der Metaebene protokolliert Snyder das Zeitalter der Ideologien, den Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, das im Ringen um ideologische und territoriale Vorherrschaft zwischen der marxistisch-leninistisch-stalinistischen klassistischen Variante des Sozialismus und der rassistisch-faschistischen nationalsozialistischen Variante des Sozialismus seinen tödlichen Gipfelpunkt fand. Die Verschränkung zwischen Bolschewismus und Nationalsozialismus tritt deutlich hervor, ebenso die Art- und Wahlverwandtschaft zwischen beiden, der allmählichen Anverwandlung des Anderen im jeweils eigenen und der daraus resultierenden Eskalation an Gewalt, Völkermord und Vertreibung.Die sowjetischen Morde, die geplanten Hungersnöte, die Konzentrationslager, die Vertreibungen und ethnischen Säuberungen gingen jenen der Nationalsozialisten vor, bildeten aber auch den Referenzrahmen für nationalsozialistisches Handeln. Die "antibolschewistischen Bolschewisten" (Zitat: Joseph Goebbels) waren gelehrige Schüler ihrer bolschewistischen Todfeinde und Lehrmeister. Wo der Bolschewismus Klassenfeinde vernichtete (und zunehmend Klassenfeinde mit ganzen Nationalitäten gleichsetzte, siehe "Polenaktion", "Ukraineaktion" und Säuberungen in den besetzten baltischen Staaten), wollte der Nationalsozialismus die Rassenfeinde der Arier vernichten, die er zugleich als Träger des bolschewistischen Virus ansah, die Juden. Im nationalsozialistischen Ansatz verschränkten sich Rassenhass mit Klassenhass (das Ziehen der Goldzähne, die Ausplünderung der Juden vor ihrer Ermordung und der Umverteilung dieses Wohlstandes an bedürftige Volksgenossen, sind Tatsachen des Klassenhasses, s.a. Götz Aly, Volksstaat), der zunächst gar nicht exterminatorisch war, sondern anglehnt an das bolschewistische Vorbild, Vertreibung der Juden nach Sibirien oder Madagaskar vorsah. Mörderisch wurde die angedachte Endlösung erst als im Winter 1941 klar wurde, dass der Weltanschauungskrieg im Osten zuungunsten der nationalsozialistischen Variante beendet würde. Zumindest der Krieg gegen den Rassen- und Klassenfeind sollte dann noch gewonnen werden.Wo NKWD (direkter Vorläufer des KGB und heutigen FSB), flankiert von wohlwollenden und sympathisierenden westlichen Literaten und Journalisten, leidlich klandestin Verschleppungen, Ermordungen und Konzentrationslager betreiben konnte, blieben diese Privilegien dem Nationalsozialismus von vornherein verschlossen und so steigerte sich das nationalsozialistische Morden hin zu einem Crescendo einer Symphonie des Grauens 1944 nach dem Warschauer Aufstand. Die Erzählung an dieser Stelle evoziert Bilder eines Hieronymus Bosch, dessen Teufel in Gestalt der Mörder, Vergewaltiger, Diebe und Geistesgestörten der SS-Sonderbrigade Dirlewanger ihre Widergänger fanden. Das Ringen der verschränkten Ideologien fand seinen Höhepunkt in einem unwirklichen, satanischen, perversen Karneval der Gewalt."Befreit" wurde von der Roten Armee anschließend niemand, außer vielleicht ein paar Juden in den übriggebliebenen Konzentrationslagern. Für die Übrigen gingen die Verschleppungen, Vertreibungen und Morde unter anderen Vorzeichen, wenn auch vermindert, weiter. Das Feuer der großen ideologischen Auseinandersetzung sollte noch bis Anfang der 1950er Jahre glimmen und in einer perversen aber folgerichtigen imitatio, eignete sich das nun zum Nationalkommunismus gewendete stalinistische Regime Kernpunkte der nationalsozialistsichen Ideologie an. Die Juden wurden im sog. Ostblock ab 1948 wie einst unter Hitler als unzuverlässige, zersetzende Elemente und "Kosmopoliten" geschmäht; eine anti-semitische Kampagne nach der Vorlage des Großen Terror 1937-38, eine "Judenaktion", zeichnete sich bereits am Horizont ab - nur der Tod Stalins ließ es nicht zum Äußersten kommen.Die Sowjetunion hatte das Ringen für sich entschieden, aber sie hatte den Nationalsozialismus buchstäblich verschlungen und ihre eigene DNA mit der des NS vermischt. Eine kapitalistische Sowjetunion war stets undenkbar gewesen, aber eine Sowjetunion erweitert um nationalsozialistische Elemente nicht; das ist die Wahlverwandtschaft aller sozialistischen Varianten und Häresien.Snyder bestätigt nicht die These Ernst Noltes vom Kausalen Nexus, für welche Letzterer 1985 von der linken deutschen Haute Volée gecancelt wurde, wie man heute sagen würde, aber er widerlegt sie auch nicht. Beide Ideologien führen ihre Wurzeln auf den Sozialismus zurück, beide haben sich verschränkt, bekämpft und von Vernichtungswillen getrieben einander anverwandelt. Der Bolschewismus kam zuerst, der Nationalsozialismus ahmte nach, überflügelte dann, wurde zerschmettert; der Bolschewismus blieb übrig, aber verwandelt da auch er nachahmte und anverwandelte. Das ist sozialistische Dialektik im Weltmaßstab und das hat Nolte nicht gesehen, Snyder aber durchaus.Dies relativiert nicht den Holocaust, aber es historisiert ihn, setzt ihn in Beziehung als eine Funktion einer gescheiterten sozialistischen Utopie die sich gegenüber einer anders gelagerten sozialistischen Utopie nicht durchzusetzen vermochte.Das Schicksal der Juden war allen egal. Sowjets, Engländer und Amerikaner wussten von der Vernichtungstaten der deutschen Nationalsozialisten aber es spielte keine Rolle in einem Ringen in dem es um Vorherrschaft ging. Und so saßen denn in Nürnberg, Mordbrenner, Massenmörder, die Architekten ethnischer Säuberungen und (im Falle der Sowjets, die Betreiber von Konzentrationslagern) über Mordbrenner, Massenmörder, Architekten ethnischer Säuberungen und Betreiber von Konzentrationslagern zu Gericht.Dir Urteile von Nürnberg die in der Erinnerungspolitk der BRD den Rang von Gottesurteilen einnehmen, erscheinen als eine Farce von Justiz und die in Nürnberg aufgestellten Grundsätze sind heuchlerisch als sie nicht auch gegen diejenigen angewandt wurden - und werden - die nicht wehrlos waren bzw. sind. Göring et. al. hatten nur das Pech das Ringen um Vorherrschaft verloren zu haben.Snyders Werk ist ein revisionistisches Werk und daraus erklärt sich wohl auch die kühle Aufnahme die dieses Buch in Deutschland gefunden hat. Revisionismus ist in Deutschland von tonangebenden Eliten (die allesamt bolschewistische Vergangenheiten und anhaltende Sympathien haben) negativ konnotiert worden. Dabei ist Revision lediglich das Fortschreiten der Geschichtswissenschaft. Die Einordnung von neuen Erkenntnissen in einen historisch-sozialen Kontext.Die Revision des Zeitalters der Ideologien ist noch lange nicht abgeschlossen und die auf den post-Nürnberg blühenden Mythen und ihren eigenen Geschichtslügen aufbauende Bundesrepublik erscheint zunehmend unglaubwürdig in ihrem Beharren auf ahistorische Schuldbezeugungen und der Einzigartigkeit des den Deutschen innewohnenden All-Bösen. Diese Lügen könnten sich noch als Stolperstein des "besten Deutschlands aller Zeiten" erweisen.