Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It is about mass murders committed before and during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.
Snyder draws similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and the enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and suffering that they inflicted upon noncombatants. According to Anne Applebaum, "Snyder's book has a lot of information that people who know these subjects know very well. But what it does that is different and wholly original is show the ways that Hitler and Stalin echoed one another, at times working together and other times fighting one another. The way in which they egged each other on, acting as two facets of what was really the same phenomenon."
According to Snyder, "the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately 6 million and 9 million."Snyder, Timothy (10 March 2011). "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?" The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 25 December 2020.
The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".
Synopsis The Central and Eastern European regions that Snyder terms "the bloodlands" is the area where Hitler's vision of racial supremacy and Lebensraum, resulting in the Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, met, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, with Stalin's vision of a communist ideology that resulted in the deliberate starvation, imprisonment, and murder of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere.
The combined efforts of the two regimes resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million noncombatants in the Eastern European "Bloodlands"; Snyder documents that Nazi Germany was responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths. At least 5.4 million died in what has become known as the Holocaust, but many more died in more obscure circumstances.
Snyder seeks to show that interaction between the Nazi and Soviet regimes is crucial to telling the story of this bloodshed. He posits that early Soviet support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation was followed by an unwillingness to aid the uprising because the Soviets were willing to have the Nazis eliminate potential sources of resistance to a later Soviet occupation. Snyder states that this is one example of an interaction that led to many more deaths than might have been the case if each regime had been acting independently.
According to Jacob Mikanowski, one of the book's overarching goals is to argue that "it's wrong to focus on the camps when so much of the Holocaust was committed out in the open." To this end, Snyder documents that many Jews were killed by mass shootings in villages or the countryside, in addition to those deaths suffered in the death camps. As commented by Anne Applebaum, "[t]he vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp." Similarly, all of the Soviet victims discussed were killed outside the Gulag concentration camp system; within those camps, an estimated million people died. More Soviet prisoners of war died every day in Nazi camps during the autumn of 1941 than the total number of Western Allied POWs in the entire war; over three million Soviet POWs died in the Nazi camps. The fate of the German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union was little better, as more than half a million died in the terrible conditions of the Soviet camps.
Snyder focuses on three periods, summarized by Richard Rhodes as "deliberate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and German killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of more than 5 million Jews by the Germans between 1941 and 1945."Rhhodes, Richard (16 December 2010). Review of Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin". The Washington Post. Retrieved 17 December 2010. He re-examines numerous points of the war and postwar years such as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, and the Soviet persecution of the Polish Underground State, cursed soldiers, and their own prisoners of war after the war.
The chapter covering the early 1930s famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union (often termed the Holodomor, a term Snyder avoids) goes into considerable detail. Snyder recounts that in an unofficial orphanage in a village in the Kharkiv region, the children were so hungry they resorted to cannibalism. One child ate parts of himself while he was being cannibalised. 3.3 millions died during the Ukrainian starvation of 1933. Under his Hunger Plan, Hitler starved 4.2 million persons in the Soviet Union, mostly Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians.Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands. Basic Books. p. 411.
The book highlights the similarities between the two regimes, with Snyder stating: "Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory."
Snyder also describes how the two regimes often collaborated and aided one another before the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, such as the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. They collaborated extensively in the killings of Poles such as Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946); between the two of them, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union killed about 200,000 Polish citizens in the period 1939–1941.
About this, Applebaum wrote: "The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule ... . Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have." Snyder stated that after the Western Allies had allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, they did not have the will to fight the second totalitarian regime when the war ended. As American and British soldiers never entered Eastern Europe, the tragedy of those lands did not become well known to the American or British populace and led to the view of Western betrayal.
Number of victims Snyder put the total death toll in the "Bloodlands" at 14 million victims of both Stalin and Hitler, including Jewish civilians transported to German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, Polish intelligentsia killed in war crimes such as in the Katyn massacre, disarmed military personnel in occupied countries and prisoners of war. Snyder pointed out that "I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle", saying that this "is not a complete reckoning of all the death that Soviet and German power brought to the region."
Snyder identifies those victims killed as a result of "deliberate policies of mass murder" by governments, such as executions, deliberate famine and death camps. Snyder said that he "generally excludes from the count" deaths due to exertion, disease, or malnutrition in concentration camps; deportations, forced labor, evacuations; people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, and civilians killed by bombings or other acts of war. The geographic area covered by the "Bloodlands" is limited to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and western Russian regions occupied by Germany. Regarding the figures, Snyder stated that his reckoning is "on the conservative side."Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands. Basic Books. pp. 410–412.
Snyder provided a summary of the 14 million victims as follows: 3.3 million victims of "the Soviet Famines", using the term for the famines in which the victims were "mostly Ukrainians", as he does not use the term "Holodomor"; according to Snyder, Stalin wanted to exterminate by famine those Ukrainians and ethnic Poles who resisted collectivization in the Soviet Union. 300,000 victims in the Great Purge in the Soviet Union from 1937–1938, using the term "national terror", which targeted "mostly Poles and Ukrainians", killed because of their ethnic origins (the figure does not include an additional 400,000 Great Purge deaths in areas outside the "Bloodlands"). According to Snyder, Stalin considered ethnic Poles in the western Soviet Union as a potential agents of the Second Polish Republic; Ukrainian kulaks who survived the famine of 1933 were also considered to be potentially hostile to the Soviet regime in a future conflict. 200,000 Poles were killed between 1939 and 1941 in occupied Poland, with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. The deaths included civilians and military prisoners of war killed in the Katyn massacre.Timothy Snyder, "Hitler vs Stalin, who was worse", The New York Review of Books, 27 January 2011 Most of the victims were the intellectual and political elite of Poland. According to Snyder, both Stalin and Hitler worked to eliminate the leadership of the Polish nation. 4.2 million victims of the German Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union, "largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians"; Snyder does not include famine deaths outside the Soviet Union.Snyder (2010), Bloodlands, p. 411. "... 4.2 million Soviet citizens starved by the German occupiers." According to Snyder, Hitler intended eventually to exterminate up to 45 million Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Czechs by planned famine as part of Generalplan Ost.Snyder (2010), Bloodlands, p. 160. 5.4 million Jewish victims in the Holocaust (does not include an additional 300,000 deaths outside the Bloodlands). 700,000 civilians, "mostly Belarusians and Poles", shot by the Germans "in reprisals" during the occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.Snyder (2010), Bloodlands, p. 411.