Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (PDF)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[Timothy] Snyder identifies the conditions that allowed the Holocaust—conditions our society today shares. . . . He certainly couldn’t be more right about our world.”—The New Republic A “gripping [and] disturbingly vivid” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of the defining tragedy of our time, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of On Tyranny ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The Washington Post, The Economist, Publishers WeeklyIn this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on untapped sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think and thus all the more terrifying. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler’s than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was—and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.New York Times Editors’ Choice • Finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize; the Mark Lynton History Prize; the Arthur Ross Book Award

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Clear-eyed . . . Arresting . . . An unorthodox and provocative account . . . Snyder is admirably relentless.”—The New Yorker“Black Earth is mesmerizing . . . Remarkable . . . Gripping . . . Disturbingly vivid . . . Mr. Snyder is sometimes mordant, often shocked, always probing.”—The Wall Street Journal“Revelatory . . . Evocative . . . Most relevant today.”—The Atlantic“An unflinching look at the Holocaust . . . Mr. Snyder is a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present.” —The New York Times“Snyder’s historical account has a vital contemporary lesson. . . . It’s a testament to his intellectual and moral resources that he can so deeply contemplate this horrific past in ways that strengthen his commitment to building a future based on law, rights, and citizenship.”—The Washington Post“Black Earth elucidates human catastrophe in regions with which a Western audience needs to become familiar.”—The New York Times Book Review“An impressive reassessment of the Holocaust, which steers an assured course [and] challenges readers to reassess what they think they know and believe . . . Black Earth will prove uncomfortable reading for many who hew to cherished but mythical elements of Holocaust history.”—The Economist“Excellent in every respect . . . Although I read widely about the Holocaust, I learned something new in every chapter. The multilingual Snyder has mined contemporaneous Eastern European sources that are often overlooked.”—Stephen Carter, Bloomberg“In Black Earth, a book of the greatest importance, Snyder now forces us to look afresh at these monumental crimes. Written with searing intellectual honesty, his new study goes much deeper than Bloodlands in its analysis, showing how the two regimes fed off each other.”—Antony Beevor, The Sunday Times About the Author Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Living SpaceAlthough Hitler’s premise was that humans were simply animals, his own 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, he maintained, 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 during 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 emphasized, 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, but also knew 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 exchange 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. Once it had gained the appropriate colonies, 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 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 that desire arose from comparison. Germans were not only animals seeking nourishment to survive, and not only a society 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 became comparative, and as comparisons became 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, the political justification for colonies was inexhaustible. 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 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 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 in German Southwest Africa 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 search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in eastern Europe as well. 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 elimination of Polish national 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.The complete loss of the African colonies during and after the war created the possibility for a vague and malleable nostalgia about racial mastery. Popular novels about Africa with titles such as Master, Come Back! could make sense only after such a complete break. Germans could continue to see themselves as good colonizers, even as the realm of colonization itself became fluid and vague, projected into the future. Hans Grimm’s novel A People Without Space, which sold half a million copies in Germany before the Second World War, concerned the plight of a German who had left Africa only to be frustrated by confinement within a small Germany and an unjust European system. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐It was like attending a lecture!Lot of info from a brilliant historian!

⭐I have read “about” Dr. Snyder views on Holocaust and got curious. I ordered the “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” from my local library and I read it from the first page to the last… Than I ordered “Black Earth” from Amazon: I want to have my own copy.First comment is on available editions: I don’t know quality of eBook version, but I won’t recommend first paperback edition (it what is now, the following editions may be better). Reason: “Black Earth” contains maps (many maps). Paperback edition made pocket-size on non-whitened paper of poor quality in very small font. Even I can read the text, maps become non-intelligible to me (I’m moderately near-sited and read small font without glasses). And maps is important part of the book.I ordered hard-cover edition used in near new condition and I received it in a new condition (not even traces of any use). try your luck like me or pay a bit more for a new hard-cover edition (IMHO, paperback edition should be recalled as defective product, but I never heard about such things in book publishing).Dr. Henry Kissinger on the back cover stated “Part history, part political theory…” and he’s absolutely right. Book is indeed groundbreaking on both of those points. I see some number of very interesting comments on the merit and accuracy of some details in the book, but the big picture is what I’m talking about.I’m not a learned historian of any kind, I just leaved my life in this history (I’m not eye witness of Holocaust, thanks Haven, I was born almost 20 years later, but my family, my growing-up in the shadow of it…). It was my life-long straggle to understand how it happen, why, and why it happen to “my people”.I have read with interest the very extensive academic-level comments and won’t go into those details. I just want to say that “Black Earth” is a very hard and slow read (it was for me). Much more so than “Boodlands”. I have a very few points that I would like to have clarification from Dr. Snyder and will try to contact him through the publisher (or Amazon). I would point that “Bloodlands” is much more “conventional” read (with and without quotes) and I will write the separate comments on it.And the last: “Black Earth” is – technically – about events of 70+ year old history, but it has very explicit implications on today’s World (and Dr. Snyder touching it in afterwords). You don’t need to have PHD in History or Social or Political Since to read this book, but don’t expect any enjoyment from reading other than better understanding of the World around you. And yes, read it. It worth the trouble doing it.

⭐I had no idea these things happened, but bloodlands was so much the horrible history, and what I love about this book is he includes that part, but puts it in a context to understand it better and to hopefully be able to do more to prevent it happening again. A very good book.

⭐Virtually everyone I know who thinks, and who has any interest in understanding our world and the Holocaust , should read “Black Earth”. Prof. Snyder had written the definitive single volume that can enable someone who understands “what” happened in the Holocaust to form some very good ideas—in an understandable vehicle—about “how” and “why” it happened. “Black Earth” disabuses the reader of many of our misconceptions about where the Holocaust happened and who the victims were (e.g., only 3% of Holocaust victims even spoke German)—and that there were clearly discernible “good and bad guys” living in the areas where it happened at the time. For me , this is a great service to European history of the 20th (and, arguably, 21st Century) as I view the Holocaust as the “axial” event of the former, to use his term. (A clever play on the “Axis” powers, whether intended or not.)Prof. Snyder has accomplished this without “merely” writing a history of specific “mass murder.” His purview and conclusions are much much larger and more profound and compelling. (If this isn’t the “job” of a historian, whose “job” is it? ).“Black Earth” allows us to understand the minds of the perpetrators and accomplices , and even question the innate beneficence of humankind. In fact, many “choices” made in the Holocaust were more a question of shades of gray than “Black” or Blood(lands) red. In my view, this approach well serves the memories of the victims of this tragedy, as it explicates their then-incomprehensible (and often shades of gray) universe as the unfortunate product of much more than the simplistic “antisemitism” gone rampant. At least thinking in this way can, hopefully, serve to thwart subsequent “perfect storms” and their havoc, as Snyder urges. “Black Earth” enables a big payoff for intensive reading and some new, big words. Most people interested in trying to comprehend the Holocaust have one book “in them”. This is that “one book” I’ve long sought that I can recommend to attempt comprehend the “how did it happen?” of the Holocaust, for those who know– or think they know– “what” happened.

⭐I have all of Timothy Snyder’s books.In ‘Blood Lands’ his account of Nazi and Communist fascism and how the peoples between Berlin and Moscow suffered was good enough for most of us, albeit harrowing. His idea (also echoed in the ‘Road to Unfreedom’) that both Left and Right use fascist techniques to rule over people and achieve nationalist goals I think is spot on and refreshing.He also keeps Hannah Arendt’s flame alive about the concept of the ‘banality of evil’ – that there exists in any society at any time a portion of the population who are receptive to fascistic manipulation (especially during certain vulnerable circumstances such as when society is destabilised by economic or geo-political shocks for example). And that there are people willing to use fascism to get into political power.In ‘Black Earth’ however, Snyder digs deeper and looks at the mechanics of fascism – how fascism’s practitioners were able to win over normal everyday people and wreak hell upon the earth.This time Snyder focuses on the Nazi’s and their persecution of the Jews and others and highlights and examines the methodologies and tactics used to make these unfortunate victims into ‘non-people’.First of all, there is the creation of the alien – the person who is not one of us even though they’ve lived amongst us for years – they are different and not part of our culture and this is repeated over and over again with a fair dose of lies for good measure and faux-science.Upon the ‘aliens’ will be heaped all sorts of crimes from reducing the sanctity and purity of the blood line to their presence soaking up resources that only genuine non-aliens should be entitled to.Then having convinced everyone that these aliens are not wanted or welcome ( adding a few others to the list to be seen as fair game such as gays, the mentally ill, gypsies etc.,), next begins the excising of these people as citizens from the legal laws of the country – de-citizen-ising them so that they have no legal status and are thus welcome to be treated badly. They’re being set up to be got rid of, basically. Therefore the State’s institutions also stop seeing them as citizens and offer to recourse or those institutions are destroyed altogether (particularly in the states you invade, allowing these to become killing grounds for the aliens you have created).Once at that level, you have a problem in that there are so many of these ‘un-citizens’. So, the next thing the good fascist does is co-opt the nation or whatever countries you have conquered into joining in wiping the aliens out. It’s a good way of increasing manpower to get the extermination done.By doing this you are increasing your capacity to get rid of the numbers. But also it has subtle underlying personal political effects too on those press ganged or exhorted to join in. It creates a climate complicity through fear that causes shifting loyalties.Guilt through association is produced and a fear of personal retribution makes it essential to understand that the best way to deal with your complicity is to remove as much evidence as you can – wipe out the witnesses and your victims: burn and bury them and then destroy what you burned and buried them with if you can. Otherwise, you will be next – get them before they get you. This manufactured ‘logic’ is what drives complicity and denial that such horrors ever happened and effectively closes the door the Nazis opened.And those who helped persecuted peoples and rejected the self-surviving rationality of complicity can be seen as ‘irrational’ in their humanistic behaviour – it simply turns what being a decent human being is on its head and indicates the perverted twisted world created by fascism can be.Creating such societal pressures (to be seen to be joining in with murder just to prove that you are on the ‘right side’ for example ) with fascist techniques creates huge moral, ethical and tactical ambiguity for people in order to just survive. And despite all this some did indeed help Jews and persecuted groups – but they were an exception and also extraordinary people for the times. It certainly begs the question to the reader ‘What would you have done?’.And Poland – poor Poland – how she has suffered – attacked by both Germany and Russia as allies, then having the largest Jewish population in Europe erased by the Nazis, the rest of its people seen as sub-human until ‘liberated’ by Russia only for its nationals to be sent to the gulag for daring to say they were Polish. Horrendous.What is fascinating about this book is the final chapter – the conclusion – where Snyder asks if we have really changed since WWII. I also recommend this book because then Snyder does an amazing pivot at the end. He stops looking at history and turns his eye to the now and the future.He brings into play global warming, and looks at its potential geo-political impact which is going to cause a lot of change to happen and links Hitler’s desire for more living space for Germany (the driver for the Nazi advance into the East) with the pressures created by nations needing space as the ocean’s rise AND the land becomes too hot to live in under the pressure of global warming.Societies – as I interpret Snyder – are at their most vulnerable to fascism when faced with change or other pressures (real or imagined – and we know manufacturing problems is definitely a fascist tactic for Right wing and Left fascists but also global warming is such a real external pressure now). Snyder sees a lot of competition for liveable space in the future as the oceans rise and where we could begin to see mass migration and competition for space between nations.It makes for uncomfortable reading as even here at the end bringing together Nazi history with more recent and forthcoming events there is superb erudition, insight and reflection.Snyder’s concern is that fascism is there like an unexploded bomb just waiting to be touched or shaken and that instead of humanity working together to address and get through global warming we will instead be catapulted into another fascist era as we dehumanise and kill each other in pursuit of our own survival. The potential for fascism to turn people against each other (and for nations to dehumanise and de-citizen those who need our help) even as the planet begins to die is simply terrifying to consider. But having read this book, it is I’m afraid entirely possible. I kid you not.So reflecting on the title of the book ‘ Black Earth’ – what did Snyder have in mind when he wrote it? The ashes of the Jews and other Holocaust victims of the Nazis scattered over West and mostly Eastern Europe? The fertile lands between Berlin and Moscow that Hitler wanted for Germany? The mouldering loam of the Nazi execution pits dotted around the East? Or is it the scorched uninhabitable planet made uninhabitable by global warming and a fascist future? Or is it I suspect all of these things?We’ve been issued with a warning: we had better heed it, otherwise fascist hell will reign once more and not just in Europe this time but globally.Please read it.

⭐Simply the best history of the holocaust I have read.Most historians fall under the the enormity of this subject and fail to ask why. Snyder adopts a comparative approach and compares the fate of various Jewish populations throughout WW2 to try to understand why the survival rate in say Denmark was much higher than in say Holland. His conclusions are thought provoking, chilling but always argued from an evidence rich picture.Coupled with bloodlands, this establishes Snyder as the pre eminent historian of Europe’s descent into hell in the 1930s and 1940s.

⭐A very disturbing and fact based book on the political events leading up to and during the 2WW. A complicated subject dealt with in a not overly scholarly way that is easily understood and tends to dispel many myths surrounding The Holocaust. Excellent book, very good service from Wordery.

⭐The book reads a little heavy in parts for me, but not so bad that I even entertained the thought of putting it down. Where it discusses the conditions in which the holocaust thrived, and those where it did not, it is a fascinating read. I have read about some of these themes in other books, the role of citizenship for example, but this really picks out the context and nature of the issues. It certainly is the holocaust as history and warning.

⭐Awesome work. Timothy Snyder shows the steps by which such a terrible crime became possible. His knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe of this period is highly impressive. He does not get lost in fine detail, but keeps the big picture in view at all times. It’s an excruciating experience reading this, of courseThis is a very rare work of history that has changed the way I look at politics and the world today. I really hope that our current generation of political leaders read this.

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