BLOODLANDS
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy D. Snyder
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book written by Timothy D. Snyder, first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010. The book is about the mass killing of an estimated 14 million non-combatants by the regimes of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany between the years 1933 and 1945.. Snyder finds similarities between the two totalitarian regimes, and many forgotten or misremembered parts of the history, such as the fact that most of the victims of the two regimes died outside their respective concentration camps. He estimates, contrary to a commonly held view, that the Nazis were responsible for about twice as many noncombatant killings as Stalin's regime.
There are many studies available that document the most brutal chapters of 20th-century history. The Holocaust is well-covered in both scholarly and popular volumes, and even lesser-known subjects, such as the Soviet 'Great Terror', the Warsaw Rising and the postwar expulsions of the Germans, have all found their own champions in print.
Yet, to date, nobody has sought to place all of these grim examples of man's inhumanity to man into a single all-encompassing narrative. That is the task that the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has set for himself with his new book Bloodlands. Snyder concentrates his attentions on the very epicentre of those horrors, the ''Bloodlands'' of the title, the territories between Germany and Russia comprising mainly Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, which bore the brunt of the killing in the mid-20th century.
It was there, Snyder suggests, that the two most murderous totalitarian regimes of the time competed, co-operated and overlapped through 20 of the darkest years of human history.
Consequently, it was there that as many as 14 million lives were lost; not through military action, but through deliberate state policy of starvation, execution, maltreatment and gassing.
Professor Snyder is an excellent guide through this man-made hell. A talented historian and an accomplished storyteller, he expertly negotiates an extremely complex story, debunking myths, correcting misconceptions and providing context, analysis and human interest in equal measure, always with a sympathetic ear for the victims themselves.
The book is available in many stores and online. Here is a link to the book on Amazon
A book review in the Economist