Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Written by Timothy Snyder

Narrated by Ralph Cosham

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century.

Americans call the Second World War "The Good War."But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.

Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

Bloodlands won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists, and was a bestseller in six countries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Oct 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781549116698

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder es titular de la cátedra Housum de Historia en la Universidad de Yale, y fellow permanente del Instituto de Ciencias Humanas de Viena. Se doctoró en Oxford y ha sido investigador en las universidades de París, Viena, Varsovia y Harvard. Sus libros anteriores recibieron destacados premios. Es autor de Tierras de sangre. Europa entre Hitler y Stalin (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), traducido a trece idiomas, que recibió doce premios, entre ellos el Premio Hannah Arendt de Pensamiento Político, el Premio Leipzig para la Comprensión Europea y el Premio Emerson de Humanidades de la Academia Americana de las Artes y las Letras. Ayudó a Tony Judt a escribir una historia temática de las ideas políticas y de los intelectuales en política, Pensar el siglo XX (2012). Sus artículos académicos han aparecido en revistas como Past and Present y Journal of Cold War Studies, y también ha escrito en The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation y The New Republic, así como en The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune , The Wall Street Journal y otros periódicos. Es miembro del Comité de Conciencia del Memorial del Holocausto de Estados Unidos y del Consejo Asesor del Instituto Yivo de Investigaciones Judías. Sus libros El príncipe rojo. Las vidas secretas de un archiduque de Habsburgo (2014), Tierra negra. El Holocausto como historia y como advertencia (2015), Sobre la tiranía (2017) y El camino hacia la no libertad (2018) han sido publicados por Galaxia Gutenberg.

Reviews for Bloodlands

[a.godhelm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A reframing of the mass slaughter of WWII, from the popular image of nazi gas chambers, to vast killing fields and starvation camps employed by both the communist and nazi regimes concentrated in a swath of eastern Europe. Much in the same vein the popular image of the war needs to recalibrate to 3/4th of the dying happening on the much less covered eastern front, there's a blind spot and deliberate retelling of events that tries to tell a simple moralistic story about the war. This book presents the problem in a wider perspective and one that doesn't let mass murder and antisemitism be a unique property of the nazi regime. Aided and abetted by many others, and mirrored by the paranoid purges of the Soviet, the lessons of 'never again' need to have a wider scope - as modern day parallels in China and elsewhere also feature anonymous detention camps and mysteriously vanishing "problem" groups, the idea that it's not industralized genocide until gas chambers and ovens are involved miss the mark. By that time, as Snyder makes clear, the majority of the death toll was already accomplished.

[markm2315 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My question before reading this book was wondering if a rehash of the Holocaust, the Great Terror, the Warsaw Uprising, etc. in which Fourteen million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years would be worth the ensuing depression, just because the author organized his treatise based on the physical location of the events. The answer is yes, mostly because the book is more than that. His discussion does the following:

It attempts to accurately determine the number of lives lost and who was responsible for each stage of these crimes.

It highlights the crimes of the Soviets that are sometimes overlooked.

It compares and contrasts the motivations of Stalin and Hitler (if there were any in the usual sense).

It compares and contrasts the justifications needed by the actual physical murderers in the various scenarios in which they acted.

By itemizing, for example, the Holocaust deaths, it helps us understand the historical development of this tragedy.

It discusses alterations of the reported number of deaths that have been made for political purposes.

It tries to provide comparisons to help emphasize the magnitude of these crimes, for example, More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Charo88 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1-2024
When talking about the dead in World War II, we always think of the German concentration camps. I always thought that was where the most human beings died. But no, I have been wrong for years.

The "bloodlands" are all those areas, countries, or parts of countries between Germany and the USSR, where Stalin and Hitler decided they had too many people. They drenched those lands in blood, long before the war began and long after it ended.

Long before World War II began, around 1931, Stalin began his "massacres." His idea of modernizing the country involved making the peasant workers disappear, especially Ukrainians. But not only them; Poles and Russians also fell victim to the famine he caused. He collected the harvests and the grain that was needed for the next planting. He let them die of hunger without any guilty conscience, all under the pretense of industrializing the country.

And so the book begins, in that year and recounting the policies of both political leaders.

The more I read about this period of history, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I recommend it to anyone who enjoys this period of history and wants to know a little more.

What was done to Poland and Ukraine seems insane to me. And not only because of Stalin and Hitler; I'm referring to the rest of the world, who looked the other way and let it happen. The crime of murdering so many human beings was as criminal as the inaction by the rest.

Knowing, more or less, the number of people who died in this area during those years (and after 1945), which far exceeds those murdered in the concentration camps, plus the military who died fighting from all countries, indicates that these are unimaginable figures.

Both Hitler and Stalin were fixated on eliminating Jews. But they did not only kill Jews. These lands soaked with so much blood were made up of civilians massacred by both sides, often with the help of neighbors of the victims.

Very interesting, not heavy at all. (Translated from Spanish)

[swmproblems · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are so many different excerpts from this book that it would take pages and pages to fill out everything I find interesting or important. He is such a good writer that he can take something like this, which is widely written about, and make it interesting, shocking and at times brutal. There was only 1 very small part of a certain chapter that I got lost in the academia jargon but it seemed no other way to make it more simplistic. Almost the entire book is written for people who may not have vast knowledge of the Soviet and Nazi regimes in their peak of power. The Nazi brutality is more recognized and in popular literature/culture and it has to do with several things, mainly that they were a part of the "good guys" and fought alongside the British, American, French, ect. troops. Without the Soviet Union making a stand at the gates of Moscow and turning the tide to drive the Germans back westward, the outcome or length of the war would have been drastically different. The number of troop, and sadly civilians, who died in the Eastern Front is staggering and not easy to wrap your head around. I believe it's at the very top of any war for the amount of casualties in just the Eastern Front. So while Germanys war crimes and atrocities are more known in the West, I still knew the Soviets were ruthless killers too, but I misunderstood the severity and the destructiveness that the Soviets not only brought to the Germans but against their own people in the satellite soviet states and even Soviet Russia as well. Not just covering the time of WW2 between the 2 regimes, but it goes back and covers the Holomodor in mainly Ukraine between 1932-1933 that was a famine mainly Stalin-made and not naturally occuring. It breaks down their policies in a cold and straightforward way and can be a chilling read from start to finish. The amount of data and facts (numbers, locations of exact, or as close to it as they can get, numbers of people who died, including their nationalities and the particular way they ended up dying since there were several means of mass killing. Incredible book, if you haven't already picked that up by reading this far of my summary.

[tikimoof · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this for a history class focused on eastern Europe in World War II. It was more depressing than I would have expected, surprisingly, because I didn't know about some of the more egregious atrocities that the Soviets carried out.

That said, Snyder is too hyperbolic. He can let the text that he quotes speak for himself without adding adjectives to tell me how to interpret the readings. I found Evans' Third Reich at War, Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, and Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews: the Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 more impactful because I could interpret the atrocities myself rather than experience them in exactly the way Snyder wanted me to.

He had a few stories from reporters (it's been seven years, I no longer remember the specifics) that I remember not seeing in the other books. Other stories were repeated through all four books. Then again, primary sources from Polish Jews didn't really survive the war. And the Soviets suppressed the rest.

If you're okay with tell-don't-show, Snyder may be for you. If you're capable of forming empathy for yourself, he may annoy you as much as he did me.

[pferdina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A really good book about a really terrible time. I knew very little about this history, despite my formal education. Everything I knew was about the gas chambers at the concentration camps liberated by the Americans after the Second World War. But this book details the majority of killing that occurred before that, mostly on Polish and Ukrainian lands, by both Stalin and Hitler.

[tmph_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In extraordinary detail Snyder goes over pretty much every single one of the fourteen million civilian murders between 1932 and 1945 in the lands between the overlapping control, invasions and occupations of the Soviet Union and Germany; the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and their edges. It covers the forced starvations, purges and deportations, and the rounding up and shootings.

It is, obviously, utterly horrific. It's an amazing book to keep reading, many, many examples of mass murders of ten to twenty thousand people within just two days. Interesting notes like this,
"A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938."

It is a hard subject and a dense book to read. It is also modestly annoyingly repetitive. However, it is absolutely recommended if one thinks one knows anything at all about those years and that region.

[triley60 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

awestruck history

[librarycin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book looks at Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s political policies, mostly in the years leading up to and including the 2nd World War. Stalin took over many of the Baltic states, and – via policy – starved many of the peasants in the Ukraine: even as they were growing food for others, they were left to starve. I didn’t know any of this, so this part was particularly interesting to me. Both Stalin and Hitler wanted to take over Poland, and of course, we ended up with the Holocaust and World War II.

I feel like I would have liked this better if I hadn’t listened to the audio. I was afraid right from the start, though, when I heard the voice. Male voice (already a bad sign for me), and I’m sure I recognized it from another audio that didn’t hold my attention. There were parts that did, though, particularly about the starvation of the people in the Ukraine. Overall, I’m considering it ok.

[geza.tatrallyay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A history book I could not put down. Tells the story of the atrocities committed by both Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists in the buffer countries of especially Poland and the Ukraine, but also the Baltics, Romania and other Eastern European countries. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the Europe of today.

[larryerick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about the "Bloodlands" which are the European countries of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, plus the western edge of Russia and a bit of Hungary, during the years leading up to World War II and through that war's conclusion. Now let's establish the book's scope further. "The fourteen million murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power." 14 million murdered. What are we saying? Murdered? Out of all the soldiers killed in the entire Second World War, about half died in the Bloodlands. Please note: none of those soldier deaths are included in the 14,000,000 deaths this book studies. The book concentrates solely on the non-combat deaths. For example, the monumental battle for Stalingrad is little more than a sentence in the book. (I recommend Anthony Beevor's book, Stalingrad, to get perspective on how much the author avoided.) Perhaps to a stronger degree than many other histories I have read, I could really sense the university professor coming through in the author's reporting and analysis. Relationships are laid out, similarities and differences are pointed out, and conclusions drawn. (Get your blue books ready for the essay questions.) As an example, the Nazi concentration camps, where people were "allowed" to die or "worked to death", depending on your choice of terms, and which the American and British troops primarily discovered as they advanced, were distinguished from the death facilities, such as Treblinka, at which the killing was so fluid that the time period between a train full of victims arriving and all the remains being disposed of could be less than two hours. Most of these super efficient death facilities, many of them already closed down, were discovered by advancing Soviet troops, diluting access to knowledge of them for Americans. Odds are very high that Holocaust survivors that have shared their experiences actually survived the concentration camps because the killing at the death facilities was so all encompassing. Auschwitz, which was uniquely both concentration camp and death facility is the rare exception. And yet, the Holocaust accounts for less than half the deaths in the Bloodlands. Are you as familiar with the Holodomor in which the Soviets intentionally starved to death millions of its own citizens? Perhaps you are more familiar with the Soviet gulags where the lucky citizens who weren't starved to death or killed outright were sent -- to still maybe die. The book's conclusion is the real guts of the historical analysis. In fact, it struck me that the concluding chapter may have been written first and the first 300+ pages of the book were written to make the conclusions more obvious to more readers. Perhaps the author's most profound point deals with the distinction between the raw numbers of all these deaths and the memories of those events. I highly recommend that readers not overlook his analysis. It is important for understanding how we find our way as a society to the most humane response to genocides and other mass murders without laying the groundwork for more of them.

[adaorhell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Incredibly difficult to finish. As I've gotten older, it becomes harder and harder not to hear numbers of dead and not thinking about that being my group of friends, my family, my hometown, my school, anything. But it's important, it's important for all of us to know what has happened to the Jews, Muslims, Romani, homosexual, I mean everyone. Communists and stargazers. The reading of the names must be done, so we don't forget how cruel we can be as a race and our capacity for joy.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The history of mass killings in the lands between Soviet Russia and Germany in the run-up to and during World War II, where Stalin and Hitler oversaw the slaughter of millions of people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, often by the thousands at once. Snyder emphasizes the length of the devastation as well as the scale, given that the Germans regularly swept through places that had just seen a Soviet purge. Stalin was trying to get rid of useless classes—peasants—while Hitler was trying to get rid of useless races; the effect was much the same.

[apomonis-188499 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 Fantastic; horrifyingly eye-opening take on the Soviet Famine, the Great Terror, and WW2...well worth the investment of time.

[dettingmeijer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book describes the killing of more than 14 million people in the name of Stalin and Hitler. Many more people died by deliberate starvation, executions, and other forms of murdering than as direct casualties of the war in the so-called bloodlands: Poland, Ukraine, Belarusse, the Soviet Union west of Moscow.
The author is clear about his aim in this book and in later publications: "The nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these and put them into perspective. it is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into peoplel if we cannot do that, the Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, bur our humanity." (p.408)

[juva_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Let me give you a short summary of this book: 1) Stalin kills a lot of Poles. 2) Hitler kills a lot of Poles, Soviets, and Jews. 3) The Soviets kill a lot of Germans. This well-written history explores the killing fields of Europe where most of the civilian casualties of World War II occurred. It's a grim and unflinching look into the depths of human evil. Not for the faint of heart.

[fist_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In spite of the abundant WWII literature and movies, we only have a partial understanding of things since the first half of the 20th century is still too often viewed through Western European eyes only. Without wanting to minimise what happened in the Western half of the continent, the atrocities in Eastern Europe belonged to a wholly different order of magnitude. The author concentrates on this part of Europe that found itself between two totalitarian states - with tens of millions of civilian victims as a result. He makes the counterintuitive and chilling case how Hitler and Stalin, though political opponents, were often strategic allies in obliterating the population of these bloodlands. The consequences reverberate to this day, both in the physical landscape of the ruined cities, the silence of its lost population and in the geopolitical tensions in countries like Poland and Ukraine.

[twp77 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In writing Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder has given us a new way to look at the tragedy of the years leading up to and including the Second World War. While it makes for a harrowing read, it is a necessary book for anyone interested in Eastern Europe and the Second World War.

Snyder rightly eschews simplistic comparisons between the deaths caused by both Hitler and Stalin but does not shy away from a brutal retelling of the stories of those many millions who were soon to be voiceless.

If anything, this book provides a brilliant polemic against bureaucracy and totalitarianism while being careful not to dismiss the violence to come out of both fascism and communism as madness or behavior beyond the pale. Snyder teases out the perspectives of victims and oppressors on all sides, allowing one to see causes and consequences not of individual inhumanity but the inhumanity of the systems in which human beings were helplessly entangled.

Finally, Snyder's book provides a useful corrective to the dearth of information which still exists due to decades of Soviet secrecy in the wake of the USSR's victory. One gets the sense that there are volumes of research yet to be undertaken before a complete picture of the tragedy emerges, particularly surrounding deaths in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly the task to uncover this information remains daunting, but Snyder has provided us with the first steps as well as an excellent framework for doing so.

[neddludd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A path-breaking book that analyzes the murderous fate that was visited upon the citizens of nations in East and Central Europe under Stalin and Hitler. Incredibly detailed, the book explores such brutal Soviet policies as the Moscow-ordered famine in Ukraine, the Great Purge, and ethnic deportations that led to tens of thousands of deaths. The author also analyzes the Holocaust and presents a new theory of its cause and an overview of its process. The residents in this narrow slice of Europe had to be some of the unluckiest humans on the planet; for some, Stalin's NKVD was followed by Nazi death squads--and then, as the miltary situation changed--by Soviet terror again. Excellent for understanding the policies and planning that the wartime German and Soviet governments employed. New information includes Nazi documents that forecast the starvation of tens of millions of people in Soviet Russia given a Wermacht lightning victory. Of course a quick knockout did not occur. But the Germans did starve millions of Russian prisoners of war and the death rate was in the millions. The cruelty of these two states is boundless; after the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers, Stalin had the families of these men deported to Kazachstan, where many perished in such an alien location. This book demands a strong stomach and a strong urge to learn the "truth." One encounters aspects of humanity--such as routine cannabalism in the face of starvation--that are shocking and simultaneously "rational" given the provocation.

[yeremenko_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book that looks at topics familiar to historians, the Great terror of Stalin, the Holocaust, the Katyn Massacre. etc, geographically rather than politically, or ethnically. The result is a masterpiece.

Many criticize the book as drawing a equivalency between Stalin and Hitler and rail the primacy of the Holocaust being is denied by including other deaths. Syders points out most Jew killed by the Nazi's dies before any of the gas chambers were built and any western Jews were deported. He says the gas chambers of Auschwitz are central in our image of the mass killing of the 30s and 40s because survivors lived to tell their story, unlike so may Jews in Ukraine, or Belorussia where only numbers, staggering numbers of those shot remain. Nuance exists in history and Snyder goes to great lengths and used detailed information to show differences in many of the tragedies, but does not shy away from pointing out their similarities, as other writers have done to avoid controversy.

Snyder points out that many people suffered from Stalin, then Hitler, then Stalin again as borders shifted during the war. He also painstakingly points out the some of the killers were facing extreme moral dilemmas skillyfully manipulated by the Soviet Union or the Nazis regime to kill innocents in the hope of saving themselves, or families.

The conclusion of the book in an essential read. This portion shows the exaggerated numbers and erroneous causes cited by many national groups to advance an agenda.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Timothy Snyder looks at those lands that were occupied by both the Nazis and the Soviets, and how it impacted those places. He also, more importantly, seeks to both show how mass murder occurred and to make those horrifyingly large numbers represent real people. From the Baltic states, through eastern Poland, Belarus, the western edge of Russia and especially Ukraine, Snyder shows how these lands contained the vast majority of civilian deaths in the twelve years between 1933 to 1945.

Beginning with Stalin's Great Famine in the Ukraine, in which 3.3 people died, and continuing through final acts of ethnic cleansing that turned diverse and vibrant populations homogeneous, Snyder seeks to humanize the statistics, to explain the motivations of the perpetrators and to return to the dead the stories of their lives. He is too successful for this book to be easy reading.

People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and all was black.

Snyder looks at why both Stalin and Hitler found it necessary to slaughter so many civilians, most who posed no political threat, many of whom were children. He's interested in the motivations of the guards, the policemen holding the guns, the soldiers obeying orders. He's also interested in the lives of those who died and the reasons for those deaths.

Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761.

I took copious notes while reading this book, to absorb more of what I was learning, but also as a buffer against that relentless stream of information. Snyder writes well, has clearly done extensive research and has a passion for his subject. He wants the reader to be informed of the events of the past, the motivations and reasons, but most of all, he wants the reader to see each death as an individual story cut short.

[jcvogan1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A comprehensive catalog of the policies of mass killing carried out in lands occupied at one time by the Nazi regime and another by the Soviet regime. The concluding essay is pretty.

[jaylivernois · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite an unique and intelligent work bringing out the new information on this part of the world since the fall of the Soviet system.

[labfs39 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reviewing a book you love, can be as difficult as reviewing a book you hate. In the latter case, you want to be fair and not flaming. In the former, you want to be fair and not fawning. When it comes to this book, however, I can’t help but gush. I thought I knew a fair amount about the Holocaust: it’s history, it’s victims, and even the more subtle question of Why? But in [Bloodlands], Timothy Snyder takes everything I thought I knew and puts it in a new context that completely changes the way I view the entire period from 1933 to 1945.

The premise of the book is that in the area between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line and the Urals lie territories that were under the control of both the Germans and the Russians at some point between 1933 and 1945, an area he calls the Bloodlands. It includes Latvia and Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. In these lands, 14 million people were deliberately killed by a combination of Nazi and Soviet policies. This number does not include those who died of exertion, disease, or malnutrition in the camp or during deportment; forced laborers; civilians who died in bombings or wartime hunger; nor does it include the 12 million German and Soviet soldiers who died in WWII. It’s 14 million civilians who were murdered by deliberate policy in this strip of ground unfortunate enough to be occupied by the Germans and the Soviets (often undergoing three separate occupations: Soviet, German, then Soviet again).

So who were these 14 million people? To begin with, the 3 million Ukrainians that Stalin deliberately starved to death in pursuit of collectivization. Although I knew somewhat of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, I was shocked by some of the policy decisions that makes this a premeditated mass murder. For instance, that Stalin had the borders of the country closed so that the starving peasants couldn’t escape; that after requisitioning all the food that they had and imposing a meat tax in order to take the livestock, he then black listed the villages so that they could not even trade for food with other villages; that he closed the Ukrainian cities so that peasants could not beg for food. And perhaps most astonishing of all, goes from calling the famine a plot by saboteurs, to a deliberate attack on him, Stalin, and the progression of the Soviet Union to a communist ideal. Stalin becomes the victim, and starvation becomes an aggressive act tied to Ukrainian nationalism that turns the starving into traitors subject to the death penalty.

Hitler too had a “Hunger Plan” even more ambitious than Stalin’s. Hitler had imperialist dreams, but had to confine them to Eastern Europe because of the British Navy’s supremacy on the seas. He started to see the Soviet Union as less of an ally and more of a future colony. His plan? Conquer the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, starve roughly 30 million Slavs to death in the first winter (1940-41), raze the cities, and create German settlements all the way to the Urals. The Ukrainian breadbasket only produced enough food for Germany, he lectured the Wehrmacht, so every time you shoot a woman or child (something ordinary soldiers had a hard time doing), you are putting food into the mouths of your own wives and children. It’s us or them. The first step in the plan, conquer the Soviet Union, was not the quick work Hitler had expected, however, and only those Slavs who fell under his direct control were starved: 4 million civilians, mostly in Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkiv, as well as 3 million Soviet POWs (not counted in the 14 million).

As the war in the East bogged down, Hitler needed both a scapegoat and a new Final Solution to the “Jewish problem”. The first four versions of the Final Solution had to be abandoned: the idea of a giant reservation for Jews in the area of Lublin; sending the Jews to Stalin who could put them into his already existing gulag (after all Stalin had all that land east of the Urals); sending all the Jews to Madagascar; and conquering the Soviet Union and then putting all the Jews into the gulag. Himmler and Heydrich realized that Hitler needed a new plan that would reaffirm his genius and give him a new focus for the war. The new ultimate objective was not the subjugation of the Soviet Union, which was looking less likely, but the elimination of the Jews. Instead of working the Jews to death in a reservation or gulag, they were now to be systematically shot in every area the Germans conquered.

For many Americans and Western Europeans, the Holocaust has come to be symbolized by the concentration camp, particularly by Auschwitz. But the fact is more Jews were shot in the second half of 1941 alone, than were gassed at Auschwitz during the entire war. Another million were shot in 1942. The Nazis were able to convince many Ukrainians and Belorussians that the Soviet atrocities that had so recently been committed against them were in fact caused by Jewish communists. The Germans trained and armed them to assist in the monumental task of shooting millions of people. The Nazis were less willing to arm the Poles as accomplices, and wanting to save ammunition, after two years of occupation, the Germans began gassing Jews at extermination facilities: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Triblinka, Majdanek, and one part of Auschwitz.

It began in 1941 at Belzec. Guards were recruited from the Soviet populace (mostly Ukrainians) and trained at Trawniki, while Nazi specialists from Germany who had overseen the “euthanasia” program that had gassed 70,000 Germans deemed “life unfit for life” were brought in to supervise. Only 2 or 3 Jews who arrived at Belzec survived. 434,508 did not. And it is precisely because so few people survived the extermination facilities (combined with the fact that American and British armies did not liberate them, the Soviets did) that the concentration camp continues to loom large in our minds and places like Belzec do not. Auschwitz was actually built in 1940 to intimidate the Poles, and then to house Soviet POWs. When I.G. Farben decided the camp would be an ideal place to make synthetic rubber, Slovakia sent its Jews to be used as slave labor (all of them died). In 1942 the extermination facility was added and then expanded with the addition of Birkenau in 1943.

Auschwitz was the climax of the Holocaust, reached at a moment when most Soviet and Polish Jews under German rule were already dead.

But Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (1942); Greece and now occupied Italy (1943); and Hungary (1944) could and were sent to Auschwitz to die. Although no one survived the gas chambers, 100,000 people did survive the Auschwitz labor camp. (As opposed to less than a 100 people who survived the six extermination facilities.)

If this sounds too familiar, it is because of my ineptitude at summarizing my 62 pages of notes that is at fault, because Snyder brings to light hundreds of details that have not been previously published. His research in newly opened archives guarantees surprises. In addition, he draws conclusions about the nature of the killing and the psychology of victimhood in the double-occupied territories that are entirely his own. Simply reading the introductory and concluding chapters would provide much to consider. Even more than [Gulag: A History] changed the way I think about the Soviet camps, [Bloodlands] has changed the way I think about this region and this time period. Highly recommended.

[philip100 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book should be required reading in all History classes. If you are a follower of this WWII read this book. This is a very good book I learned a lot more about what happened on the eastern front.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an outstanding work of history that examines the deliberate mass-killing campaigns in eastern Europe (focused primarily on Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine) organized by Stalin and Hitler in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II Europe, during the war and several post-war years. A dense, thorough, and most impressive work of scholarship, and an important contribution to Holocaust and genocide studies.

[epersonae_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Intense and disturbing look at eastern Europe 1933-1946: "I wish to test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment" - by "the bloodlands", referring a region encompassing pre-1939 Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, along with the Baltic states and parts of western Russia. A somewhat different approach, looking at the commonalities of these areas and the waves of killing, starting with deliberate starvation in the Ukraine and going through to the ethnic cleansing (without much killing) of the immediate postwar period. A common theme is the ways that Hitler and Stalin basically played into each other's hands. The massive numbers make it difficult to comprehend, which is why he uses a lot of particular individual stories to illustrate each phase. A thoughtful book, worth reading if you can stand it.

[savagemalloy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent survey of the carnage

[br77rino · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus were the scene of mind-boggling levels of human destruction, and Mr. Snyder describes it all in almost excessive detail. Reminded me of "The Great Hunger" which was about the Irish Potato Famine.

[mnicol_11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The bloodlands are the regions between Moscow and Berlin that were subject to BOTH Soviet and Nazi control at some time between 1933 and 1945. 14 million people were murdered in this short period, in this relatively confined area, by active policies of mass killing - besides the deaths of soldiers in battles. Stalin's policies to kill kulaks and minorities had their greatest impact in the Ukraine/Poland, where the Germans killed so many Jews after 1941. The victims are the main story, illustrated in human stories and overwhelming statistics, but Snyder points out "The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or bystander" (p.400). This is a brilliant study.