Big Book Summer Challenge: Black Earth by Timothy Snyder

I decided to kick off Sue’s Big Book Summer Challenge and Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer with Timothy Snyder’s 2015 Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Despite being a fan of Snyder’s for years and his 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin one of my all time favorite history books I’d ignored my Kindle copy for over five years. But inspired by a host of reading challenges including the Big Book Summer Challenge and the 20 Books of Summer, I finally decided to read it. Once again, like so many other books in my personal library that languished ignored and unread for years I kicked myself for not reading it sooner.

Of all the books I’ve read about the Holocaust a huge percentage have been memoirs. These range from the familiar like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz to lesser known works like Sara Zyskind’s Stolen Years, Tivadar Soros’s Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary and Schoschana Rabinovici’s Thanks to My Mother. If not memoirs, these book describe the Holocaust’s impact on a specific area, be it Lithuania with David E. Fishman’s The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, Belarus with The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews and Built a Village in the Forest and Poland with Matthew Brzezinski’s Isaac’s Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland.

Black Earth differs from all these in it’s the only book I’ve read (other than perhaps Snyder’s earlier Bloodlands) that could be called a 40 thousand foot level look at the Holocaust. With no shortage of detail Snyder discusses the history of the Holocaust as it unfolded across Europe. Rare among books about the Holocaust he also devotes much attention analyzing the geopolitical and pseudo scientific thinking behind the mass killings.

Snyder begins with explaining Hitler and his fellow Nazi’s rationale for ridding Europe of Jews. The Nazis believed the world was ruled by the law of the jungle in which various races battled each other for resources and supremacy leading to the strong ultimately subjugating the weak. Concepts of nationhood, international law, and anything remotely resembling human rights were viewed as artificial constructs perpetuated by a worldwide Jewish conspiracy designed to keep the Aryan race in check. According to this zero sum game if Germany needed to smash the “Judeo Bolshevik” Soviet Union, convert the Ukraine into Germany’s breadbasket, enslave  and ultimately depopulate what remained of the native population. Ultimately the region’s Jews would be forcibly resettled to Siberia, Madagascar or possibly Palestine.

Originally Germany hoped such an invasion would be a joint German-Polish operation since any German army would need to cross Polish territory. But after Poland refused Hitler struck up a temporary alliance with the USSR in order to eliminate the Polish state and thus bring Germany one step closer to invading the USSR. After the invasion France and Great Britain responded by declaring war triggering World War II. Not long after France’s defeat followed by Germany’s inability to win the Battle of Britain did Germany turn its mighty war machine against the USSR.

According to Snyder two things happened in the lands of Eastern Europe that led to the Nazis and their underlings to committing mass murder on an unprecedented scale. After Poland was invaded by the Germans from the west and the USSR from the east the USSR annexed the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as what’s now Moldova. Germany and the USSR then proceeded to destroy the institutional structures of these conquered states. Two years later, in 1941 Germany invaded its former ally the USSR and forcefully eradicated any structures of statehood, be they remaining be they vestiges newly established by the Soviets.

The result was a Hobbesian landscape devoid of civilizing influences. Now the Nazis could murder millions with impunity. Residents were stripped of citizenship, legal protections were rendered null and void,  and armed guardians of the state like the police and military who’d been entrusted with the safety and well-being of the population were either eliminated or subjugated. Locals assisted in the atrocities, sometimes motivated by antisemitic anger but frequently in order to ingratiate themselves into the newly-imposed Nazi power structure.

Secondly, by late 1941 the Nazis realized there’d be no speedy defeat of the USSR. Realizing Germany would be unable to swiftly smash the perceived Judeo Bolshevik regime attention shifted to eliminating the Jews. If Germany were to survive, the Jews would need to be murdered not just in occupied Eastern Europe but throughout all of Nazi occupied Europe. With America now in the war and Great Britain unbowed and undefeated it became imperative to destroy as many of the world’s Jews as possible to undercut the Jews secretive global support of the Allies. The killing of Jews in Eastern Europe would accelerate leading to the deportation of Jews from the rest of occupied Europe to Auschwitz to be murdered.

Black Earth is also a warning. Fearful the German people would be unable to live comfortably in a chaotic world and doomed to fight endlessly over food and resources Hitler and his fellow Nazis embarked on a murderous mission to kill millions and that resulted in unimaginable suffering and destruction. If the ravages of climate change like drought, receding coastlines and powerful hurricanes spawn famines, mass migrations and political unrest will desperate nations once again be captured by deadly ideologies and launch wars to help safeguard their respective standards of living? Please consider Black Earth highly recommended.