Black earth The holocaust as history and warning

Review by Choice Review

Snyder's bold rethinking of the Holocaust is bound to be seen as provocative, going against or refashioning many elements of a (fragile) consensus arrived at over the years. For example, the author finds that Hitler's plans for Eastern Europe were influenced by the "North American model" for dealing with indigenous peoples. He dismisses what most scholars see as the critical role the state and its bureaucracy played in the Final Solution. His extensive treatment of rescue arrives at few solid conclusions. Snyder's interpretation also relies heavily on comparisons among German, Soviet, and Polish attitudes, experiences, and policies with regard to Jews and many related matters. He closes with a dire warning about the conditions that might produce a "new Holocaust"--climate change that will engender an increasingly desperate competition for land and resources while defining "unwanted populations" to be dealt with mercilessly. The book largely dispenses with narrative and is therefore most appropriate for those already deeply engaged in the discourse. It will undoubtedly arouse vigorous debate. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty. --Richard S. Levy, University of Illinois at Chicago

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

MORE THAN 70 YEARS after the Holocaust, there is no sign of research on it abating. Instead, over the past few decades, historians have been extending their inquiries. Investigators who once understood the wartime massacres as a unique historical episode that mainly concerned Germans and Jews and was driven principally by ideology have increasingly produced comparative studies of regions and states, turning their attention to other victims and to what Eastern European archives are able to tell us about the dynamics of persecution and mass murder; economic issues; and the motivations of perpetrators, bystanders, women, religious and political leaders, neutrals, rescuers and others. So voluminous is this scholarly outpouring that few are able to keep up with it, although some historians continue to grapple with the subject as a whole. Notwithstanding all this effort, Timothy Snyder, a Yale University specialist in Eastern Europe, contends in "Black Earth" that our understanding of the Holocaust has failed us. We have misunderstood its lessons. To his credit, Snyder reaches more widely than most and deploys formidable linguistic skills. His previous work has received considerable acclaim. Since the publication of "Bloodlands" in 2010, which concentrated on the mass killings of Stalin and Hitler in regions where they both clashed and coexisted, Snyder has emerged as an admired, if disputed, analyst of the sanguinary borderlands between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the scene of one of history's great calamities - some 14 million killed during the 1930s and 1940s. Snyder concentrated on the Soviets' deliberate famine in the Ukrainian countryside and the Nazis' slaughter of European Jews. His approach has drawn criticism, particularly from those who believe that he neglected the singularity of the Holocaust and missed, in his pairing of Hitler and Stalin, the particularities of each ruler and each regime. In this new survey, Snyder pursues many of the theses of "Blood-lands," while giving respectful attention to the Holocaust. But he goes further. Snyder boldly asserts an unconventional interpretation of Holocaust history, connecting it to the Nazis' deluded way of contending with an ecological crisis affecting the entire planet. Yet while this argument is central to his account, it is one of the book's least fully explored themes. Its various strands come together only in a concluding chapter that unconvincingly ties mass killing to challenges of food scarcity and dwindling resources. We may think we know about the Holocaust, Snyder seems to be telling his readers. But he then goes on to contend that "we" get it wrong: We fail to understand Hitler's ecological viewpoint, we neglect the participation of non-Germans in the killing, we distort the meaning of the concentration camps, we misread the role of states in which massacres occurred, we are wrong about the place of science, among other mistakes. To rectify this mountain of errors, Snyder prescribes some antidotes: a global perspective, an appreciation of Hitler's colonial policy toward other countries and a "multifocal" approach, "providing perspectives beyond those of the Nazis themselves." Tilting at some rather elderly windmills, Snyder insists we see that "Hitler's world-view did not bring about the Holocaust by itself" and that the subject must be viewed internationally, "for Germans and others murdered Jews not in Germany but in other countries." Even minimally informed readers are likely to find at least some of Snyder's so-called failures inapplicable and at least some of his remedies familiar. And few are very likely to be surprised when, as if this were a new revelation, he announces that "the Holocaust is not only history, but warning." Snyder's title refers to the fertile, food-producing regions in the heart of Ukraine, in the southern part of the Soviet Union, where Hitler and Stalin allowed their ecological fantasies, fears and murderous ambitions to roam freely, each considering the fate of the region and its population as crucial to the outcome of colossal geopolitical struggles. These territories were a prize for which each was prepared to sacrifice millions, and in the pursuit of which the Jews became the central obsession of the Nazi dictator. This was the cradle of the Holocaust, Snyder says, Hitler's effort to destroy a planetary enemy. He begins with a fairly conventional chapter on Hitler's worldview and his quest for Lebensraum. Unfortunately, he seems to lose focus early on, turning abruptly to German-Polish relations in the second half of the 1930s, complex issues of Polish and Polish-Jewish politics, and in particular the flirtation of Poland's Zionist right (Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionist movement) with the leaders of the Polish national government. Snyder takes us to the crucial year 1938 with a chapter on German and Polish policies on Palestine, devoting many pages to Polish right-wing Zionism, Polish interest in the idea of "a State of Israel" - a terminological anachronism - and German schemes to prepare for an attack on the Soviet Union through the destruction of the Polish state. I suspect that Snyder will have lost many readers by this point. As if remembering that his subject is the Holocaust, he occasionally explains how perilous all these maneuverings were for the Jewish masses in Poland and for those of the Soviet Union as well. Having reached the start of the war in 1939, we are still without a survey of German or European Jewry, a sense of the varying potency of anti-Semitism or other contextual factors in the events of the time. As a result, Snyder gives us insufficient means to appreciate one of the key elements of the Holocaust - the Nazi determination to hunt down and murder Jews wherever they lived, even in countries like England and Ireland, which Hitler's legions had not yet had the opportunity to conquer. Instead, Snyder highlights the issue of the state. Playing down anti-Semitism as a driving force behind Eastern European involvement in the Holocaust, he introduces a special kind of politics generated by the Germans' and, to some degree, the Soviets' destruction of the states in territories they envisioned as part of their respective empires. The destruction of state machinery, he says, first by the Soviets and then by the Germans, stimulated a frenzy of lawlessness and murder, facilitating, in case of the Nazis, genocidal campaigns against imagined enemies. Killing flourished in "zones of statelessness," Snyder writes, extending his analysis at this point to Western Europe, and even Germany itself. "Wherever the state had been destroyed," he tells us, "whether by the Germans, by the Soviets, or both, almost all of the Jews were murdered." A more pertinent observation, I believe, is that in some countries - notably France and the Netherlands - despite the radically different proportions of Jews murdered, the persistence of prewar bureaucracies facilitated the registering of Jews and the carrying out of the Final Solution. A better interpretation would depend less on statelessness than on the degree to which the Germans were able to apply their power. Murder varied according to wartime strategy, geography, the concentrations of the Jewish population and the attitudes of the locals. And the most crucial variable of all may have been time. Had the 1944 D-Day landings failed, and had the war persisted for several more years, killing rates might have approached 100 percent everywhere, rather than the different percentages on which some historians continue to speculate. Using the idioms of globalism, colonialism and ecology, Timothy Snyder's book may promote warnings, but not because it unlocks a fresh understanding of the Holocaust. Rather, through its horrific descriptions, "Black Earth" elucidates human catastrophe in regions with which a Western audience needs to become more familiar. The book is not a guide to preserve humanity, as Snyder suggests in his closing remarks, but it is important enough to prompt reflection, as with much other learned Holocaust history, on the potential for human destructiveness that resides in a world of ill-understood global calamities. ? MICHAEL R. MARRUS'S latest book, "Lessons of the Holocaust," will be published in December.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Veteran voice actor Bramhall gives a sturdy and compelling reading of Snyder's riveting examination of the rise and implementation of the Holocaust. The book offers a detailed analysis of how the collapse-rather than the excess-of Central and Eastern European nation-state power (a collapse instigated by both the Nazis and Soviets) led to the Holocaust. Bramhall does a fine job as narrator. The complexity of the author's argument poses a challenge, but Bramhall's focused yet conversational delivery holds the listener's attention throughout. Most effective is his unflinching portrayal of the stories of those who suffered horrendously and died, not just at the hands of the Nazis, but from their neighbors and supposed friends. A Crown/Duggan hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Snyder (history, Yale Univ., Bloodlands) asks what lessons have been learned from the Holocaust 70 years after the end of World War II. The unfolding of the Third Reich is chronicled using survivor testimonies and archival sources that cover the effect of widespread famine and political upheaval in post-World War I Europe on Hitler's racial policies, up until his rise to dominance in the 1930s and 1940s. As in Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt's Holocaust, variations in implementation of the Final Solution by country are examined. Snyder highlights the doubly occupied areas of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, where the majority of deaths occurred. The application of his analysis of the Holocaust's causes to 21st-century political conditions and ecological stresses is grim. Competition for increasingly scarce planetary resources dovetail with the demonization of neighbors to create conditions remarkably similar to those prior to World War II. -VERDICT Snyder's investigation will appeal to readers with an interest in the history of the Holocaust; his call to action will attract those who believe that, as philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."-Laurie Unger -Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A prominent historian brings the Holocaust under new scrutiny and wonders if the right confluence of modern forces could bring genocide back. Snyder (History/Yale Univ.) polarized academics and other experts on the Holocaust with his study Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), and he largely continues that line of thinking here as he attempts to contextualize the events that led up to the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews. The author argues that Hitler saw the world in terms of a twisted kind of ecology, one in which he saw Jews as a mistake to be removed. He also glances off the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, the mistaken concept that Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, but he admits that there's no excuse for claims of ignorance of these graphic events. "What happened in the second half of 1941 was an accelerating campaign of murder that took a million Jewish lives and apparently convinced the German leadership that all Jews under their control could be eliminated," Snyder writes. "This calamity cannot be explained by stereotypes of passive or community Jews, of orderly or preprogrammed Germans, of beastly or antisemitic locals, or indeed by any other clich, no matter how powerful at the time, or how convenient today. It would have been impossible without a special kind of politics." In addition to probing the intellectual origins of the Final Solution, the author also offers thoughtful portrayals of Jews who survived execution and how institutions and states, as well as specific individuals, were crucial in these rescues. Snyder argues that the Holocaust should stand as a warning for our own future, but his conclusion is rather tepid in its analysis, with simplistic pronouncements that "our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same." A scholarly examination that poses important questions but ultimately offers less in the way of original reportage than Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL (2015). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Living Space Although Hitler's premise was that humans were simply animals, his very human intuition allowed him to transform his zoological theory into a kind of political worldview. The racial struggle for survival was also a German campaign for dignity, and the restraints were not only biological but British. Hitler understood that Germans were not, in their daily life, beasts who scratched food from the ground. As he developed his thought in his Second Book, composed in 1928, he made clear that securing a regular food supply was not simply a matter of physical sustenance, but also a requirement for a sense of control. The problem with the British naval blockade during the First World War had not simply been the diseases and death it brought, especially at the end of the conflict and in the months between armistice and final settlement. The blockade had forced ­middle-­class Germans to break the law in order to acquire the food that they needed or felt that they needed, leaving them personally insecure and distrustful of authority. The world political economy of the 1920s and 1930s was, as Hitler understood, structured by British naval power. British advocacy of free trade, he believed, was political cover for British domination of the world. It made sense for the British to parlay the fiction that free exchange meant access to food for everyone, because such a belief would discourage others from trying to compete with the British navy. In fact, only the British could defend their own supply lines in the event of a crisis, and could by the same token prevent food from reaching others. Thus the British blockaded their enemies during war--an obvious violation of their own ideology of free trade. This capacity to assure and deny food, Hitler understood, was a form of power. Hitler called the absence of food security for everyone except the British the "peaceful economic war." Hitler understood that Germany did not feed itself from its own territory in the 1920s and 1930s, and knew perfectly well that Germans would not actually have starved if they had tried. Germany could have generated the calories to feed its population from German soil, but only by sacrificing some of its industry, exports, and foreign currency. A prosperous Germany required trade with the British world, but this trade pattern could be supplemented, thought Hitler, by the conquest of a land empire that would even the scales between London and Berlin. If it conquered a vast land empire, Germany could preserve its industrial excellence while shifting its dependence for food from the ­British-­controlled sea lanes to its own imperial hinterland. If Germany controlled enough territory, Germans could have the kinds and the amounts of food that they desired, with no cost to German industry. A sufficiently large German empire could become ­self-­sufficient, an "autarkic economy." Hitler romanticized the German peasant, not as a peaceful tiller of the soil, but as the heroic tamer of distant lands. The British were to be respected as racial kindred and builders of a great empire. The idea was to slip through their network of their power without forcing them to respond. Taking land from others would not, or so Hitler imagined, threaten the great maritime empire. Over the long term, he expected peace with Great Britain "on the basis of the division of the world." He expected that Germany could become a world power while avoiding an "Armageddon with ­En­gland." This was, for him, a reassuring thought. It was also reassuring that such an alteration of the world order, such a reglobalization, had been achieved before, in recent memory. For generations of German imperialists, and for Hitler himself, the exemplary land empire was the United States of America. America taught Hitler that need blurred into desire, and desire arose from comparison. People were not just animals seeking nourishment, nor even just members of societies yearning for security in an unpredictable British global economy. Families observed other families: around the corner, but also, thanks to modern media, around the world. Ideas of how life should be lived escaped measures such as survival, security, and even comfort as standards of living become comparative, and as comparisons become international. "Through modern technology and the communication it enables," wrote Hitler, "international relations between peoples have become so effortless and intimate that Europeans--often without realizing it--take the circumstances of American life as the benchmark for their own lives." Globalization led Hitler to the American dream. Behind every imaginary German racial warrior stood an imaginary German woman who wanted ever more. In American idiom, this notion that the standard of living was relative, based upon the perceived success of others, was called "keeping up with the Joneses." In his more strident moments, Hitler urged Germans to be more like ants and finches, thinking only of survival and reproduction. Yet his own scarcely hidden fear was a very human one, perhaps even a very male one: the German housewife. It was she who raised the bar of the natural struggle ever higher. Before the First World War, when Hitler was a young man, German colonial rhetoric had played on the double meaning of the word Wirtschaft: both a household and an economy. German women had been instructed to equate comfort and empire. And since comfort was always relative, this struggle could never cease. If the German housewife's point of reference was Mrs. Jones rather than Frau Jonas, then Germans needed an empire comparable to the American one. German men would have to struggle and die at some distant frontier, redeeming their race and the planet, while women supported their men, embodying the merciless logic of endless desire for ever more prosperous homes. The inevitable presence of America in German minds was the final reason why, for Hitler, science could not solve the problem of sustenance. Even if inventions did improve agricultural productivity, Germany could not keep pace with America on the strength of this alone. Technology could be taken for granted on both sides; the quantity of arable land was the variable. Germany therefore needed as much land as the Americans and as much technology. Hitler proclaimed that permanent struggle for land was nature's wish, but he also understood that a human desire for increasing relative comfort could also generate perpetual motion. If German prosperity would always be relative, then final success could never be achieved. "The prospects for the German people are bleak," wrote an aggrieved Hitler. That complaint was followed by this clarification: "Neither the current living space nor that achieved through a restoration of the borders of 1914 permits us to lead a life comparable to that of the American people." At the least, the struggle would continue as long as the United States existed, and that would be a long time. Hitler saw America as the coming world power, and the core American population ("the racially pure and uncorrupted German") as a "world class people" that was "younger and healthier than the Germans" who had remained in Europe. While Hitler was writing My Struggle, he learned of the word Lebensraum (living space) and turned it to his own purposes. In his writings and speeches it expressed the whole range of meaning that he attached to the natural struggle, from an unceasing racial fight for physical survival all the way to an endless war for the subjective sense of having the highest standard of living in the world. The term Lebensraum came into the German language as the equivalent of the French word biotope, or "habitat." In a social rather than biological context it can mean something else: household comfort, something close to "living room." The containment of these two meanings in a single word furthered Hitler's circular idea: Nature was nothing more than society, society nothing more than nature. Thus there was no difference between an animal struggle for physical existence and the preference of families for nicer lives. Each was about Lebensraum. The twentieth century was to bring endless war for relative comfort. Robert Ley, one of Hitler's early Nazi comrades, defined Lebensraum as "more culture, more beauty--these the race must have, or it will perish." Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels defined the purpose of a war of extermination as "a big breakfast, a big lunch, and a big dinner." Tens of millions of people would have to starve, but not so that Germans could survive in the physical sense of the word. Tens of millions of people would have to starve so that Germans could strive for a standard of living was second to none. "One thing the Americans have and which we lack," complained Hitler, "is the sense of vast open spaces." He was repeating what German colonialists had said for decades. By the time Germany had unified in 1871, the world had already been colonized by other European powers. Germany's defeat in the First World War cost it the few overseas possessions it had gained. So where, in the twentieth century, were the lands open for German conquest? Where was Germany's frontier, its Manifest Destiny? All that remained was the home continent. "For Germany," wrote Hitler, "the only possibility of a sound agrarian policy was the acquisition of land within Europe itself." To be sure, there was no place near Germany that was uninhabited or even underpopulated. The crucial thing was to imagine that European "spaces" were, in fact, "open." Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonization of North America and Africa. The conquest and exploitation of these continents by Europeans formed the literary imagination of Europeans of Hitler's generation. Like millions of other children born in the 1880s and 1890s, Hitler played at African wars and read Karl May's novels of the American West. Hitler said that May had opened his "eyes to the world." In the late nineteenth century, Germans had tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control. One colony was German East Africa--today Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and a bit of Mozambique--where Berlin assumed responsibility in 1891. During an uprising in 1905, the Maji Maji rebellion, the Germans applied starvation tactics, killing at least seventy-­five thousand people. A second colony was German Southwest Africa, today Namibia, where about three thousand German colonists controlled about seventy percent of the land. An uprising there in 1904 led the Germans to deny the native Herero and Nama populations access to water until they fell "victim to the nature of their own country," as the official military history put it. The Germans imprisoned survivors in a camp on an island. The Herero population was reduced from some eighty thousand to about fifteen thousand; that of the Nama from about twenty thousand to about ten thousand. For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was ­self-­evident. "The natives must give way," he said. "Look at America." The German governor of the region compared Southwest Africa to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. The civilian head of the German colonial office saw matters much the same way: "The history of the colonization of the United States, clearly the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known, had as its first act the complete annihilation of its native peoples." He understood the need for an "annihilation operation." The German state geologist called for a "Final Solution to the native question." A famous German novel of the war united, as would Hitler, the idea of a racial struggle with that of divine justice. The killing of "blacks" was "the justice of the Lord" because the world belonged to "the most vigorous." Like most Europeans, Hitler was a racist about Africans. He proclaimed that the French were "niggerizing" their blood through intermarriage. He shared in the general European excitement about the French use of African troops in the occupation of Germany's Rhineland district after the First World War. Yet Hitler's racism was not that of a European looking down at Africans. He saw the entire world as an "Africa," and everyone, including Europeans, in racial terms. Here, as so often, he was more consistent than others. Racism, after all, was a claim to judge who was fully human. As such, ideas of racial superiority and inferiority could be applied according to desire and convenience. Even neighboring societies, which might seem not so different from the German, might be defined as racially different. When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany's only opportunity for colonization was Europe, he discarded as impractical the possibility of a return to Africa. The issue for him was distance, since Germans could find racial inferiors near and far. In the nineteenth century, after all, the major arena of German colonialism had been not mysterious Africa but neighboring Poland. Prussia had gained territory inhabited by Poles in the partitions of the ­Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century. Formerly Polish lands were thus part of the unified Germany that Prussia created in 1871. Poles made up about seven percent of the German population, and in eastern regions were a majority. They were subjected first to Bismarck's Kulturkampf, a campaign against Roman Catholicism whose major object was the end of a Polish identity, and then to ­state-­subsidized internal colonization campaigns. A German colonial literature about Poland, including best sellers, portrayed the Poles as "black." The Polish peasants had dark faces and referred to Germans as "white." Polish aristocrats, fey and useless, were endowed with black hair and eyes. So were the beautiful Polish women, seductresses who, in these stories, almost invariably led naive German men to racial ­self-­degradation and doom. During the First World War, Germany lost Southwest Africa. In eastern Europe the situation was different. Here German arms seemed to be assembling, between 1916 and 1918, a vast new realm for domination and economic exploitation. First Germany joined its prewar Polish territories to those taken from the Russian Empire to form a subordinate Polish kingdom, which was to be ruled by a friendly monarch. The postwar plan was to expropriate and deport all of the Polish landholders near the ­German-­Polish border. In early 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution had taken Russia from the war, Germany established a chain of vassal states to the east of Poland, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the largest of which was Ukraine. Germany lost the war in France in 1918, but was never finally defeated on the battlefield in eastern Europe. This new east European realm was abandoned without, it could seem to Germans, ever having been truly lost. Excerpted from Black Earth: The Holocaust As History and Warning by Timothy Snyder All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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