Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder, “Blood lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”, Basic Books, 2010, 421 Pgs. (505 pgs with notes included).

Bloodlands presents 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. The authors’ research is exhaustive and convincing.

Before reading this book, reflect on a few items:
• Evolution has not changed human nature since the early 1930’s; we are still capable of performing the actions of the western people of that time as well as the atrocities of the Japanese performed at this same time.
• Be prepared to recognize that Stalin was every bit as bad as Hitler. The only particularly distinguishing difference between the two is Stalin’s willingness to kill his own citizens regardless of nationality or religious affiliation.
• If you want to understand cynicism and are not already a cynic, read this book and understand cynicism and become a cynic. Also, be extremely glad you were not living in the area between Warsaw and Moscow beginning in 1930 until Stalin died in 1953.

When I got half way through this disturbing book, I concluded that apparently all peoples of all nationalities are very susceptible to subject fellow human beings to unspeakable treatment. It is extremely important that the army of any country is in sympathy with the general population of the country. If the military is tied to the fortune of the leader or to the fortune of the army itself, tragedy is not far behind. One of the most dangerous things the U.S. ever did is to take away the draft and create a professional army.

My Notes:

Pg. 411: . The count of fourteen million victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following approximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by Stalin in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 – 1933; 300,000 Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly 700,000 thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937 – 1938; 20,000 Polish citizens shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939 – 1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941- 1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941 – 1944; and 700,000 civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “reprisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941 – 1944.

In this 14 million figure, the author is NOT counting those people who died of exertion or disease or malnutrition in concentration camps or during deportations, evacuations, or flight from armies. He also excludes people who died as forced laborers. He does not include people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, or civilians who died in bombings or as a result of other acts of war. He does not count the soldiers that died on the fields of battle. Only the killings that were the results of direct Soviet or Nazi deliberate policy to kill are counted.

Pg. 155: The deliberate policy killings are divided in to three segments:
1. 1933 – 1938: The Soviet Union carried out almost all of the mass killing in this period.
2. 1939 – 1941: During the second segment, the German-Soviet alliance had a balanced killing between the two allies.
3. Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) beginning in June 1941 marks the beginning of the third segment and between 1941 and 1945. In this segment (the one most people are familiar with) the Germans were responsible for almost all of the political murder.

Pg. 184: The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more. All in all, perhaps 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed.

Pg. 275: Auschwitz was the climax of the Holocaust, reached at a moment when most Soviet and Polish Jews under German rule were already dead. t the million or so Soviet Jews killed in the Holocaust, fewer than one percent died at Auschwitz. Of the three million or so Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust, only about seven percent perished at Auschwitz. Nearly 1.3 million Polish Jews were killed, usually shot, east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. Another 1.3 million or so Polish Jews were gassed in Operation Reinhardt in the General Government (more than 700,000 at Treblinka, roughly 400,000 at Belzec, 150,000 at Chelmno). most of the remaining Polish-Jewish victims were shot during the ghetto clearings (about 100000) or in Operation Harvest Festival (42, 00). A considerable number of the mortal victims of Auschwitz, more than 200,000, were not Jews.

Pg. 298: At Teheran in December, 1943, the U.S. and Britain agreed that the Soviet Union would reclaim the eastern half of prewar Poland after the war. Thus the western Soviet border accorded Stalin by Hitler was confirmed. The Poles did not participate in the conference.

Pg. 388: In both collectivization and the Final Solution, mass sacrifice was needed to protect a leader from the unthinkability of error. After collectivization brought resistance and hunger to Soviet Ukraine, Stalin blamed kulaks and Ukrainians and Poles. After the Wehrmacht was halted at Moscow and the Americans entered the Second World War, Hitler blamed Jews. Just as kulaks and Ukrainians and Poles had taken the blame for slowing the construction of the Soviet system, Jews took the blame for preventing its destruction. Stalin had chosen collectivization, Hitler had chosen war: but it was more convenient, for them and their comrades, to shift the responsibility for the associated catastrophe elsewhere. Stalin’s interpretation was used to justify the starvation of Ukraine and then the mass shootings of kulaks and members of national minorities; Hitler’s interpretation was used to justify the shooting and gassing of all Jews. After collectivization starved millions, this was adduced by Stalin t be evidence of a victorious class struggle. As the Jews were shot and ten gassed, Hitler presented this as a war aim in and of itself. When the war was lost, Hitler called the mass murder of the Jews his victory.

Pg. 391: In practice, the Germans generally killed people who were not Germans, whereas the Soviets usually killed people who were Soviet citizens. The Soviet system was most lethal when the Soviet Union was not at war. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed no more than a few thousand people before the war began. During the war, Germany killed millions of people faster than any state in history.