Reviews for Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

The average rating for Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-27 00:00:00 Shane Bunn I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe. My mother endured forced labour under the Soviets in 1940 and slave labour under the Nazis after 1941. She saw some of her family being deported by the Soviets to almost certain death in Kazakhstan and discovered the rest in a mass grave, shot by the Nazis. Her best friend survived Auschwitz. My Godfather was a partizan in the forests around Lwow, fighting both Nazis and Soviets. My Godmother lived through the Stalinist regime, survived the battles for Kharkov and slave labour in Germany. I was taught chess by a White Russian whose memories of that time were horrific. Even I visited Auschwitz in 1963 - when I returned to England I was shocked to realise non of the English people I knew knew anything about the place. Until recently who, apart from the Poles, knew the truth about Katyn? So, when I started reading Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" my first impression was "There is nothing new here". I'd heard it all in one place or another. But what Snyder does do is take all those evils and puts them together in his Pandora's Box - only one thing is missing, Hope. Because there was no hope, only fear and death. The depressing bleakness hollows out the soul. One has to pause to take stock, to look away, to absorb the evil and hear the dead cry out for justice, and an understanding that what happened there, on the "Eastern Front", in the "Bloodlands", actually exceeded anything the West could understand: "...The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar." Timothy Snyder is the conscience of us all. Snyder fills his Pandora's Box and then he reveals its contents to us. He deals with the real terrors of Stalinism; the tragedy of the Great Famine of the Ukraine, the nightmare of the Great Terror, and the cold-blooded elimination of the educated classes and all forms of potential resistance in Poland. He goes on to deal with Nazism; once more, the elimination of educated Poles, the attempts to depopulate Belarus, and the Final Solution. He looks at Post-War Cold War anti-Semitism in a very knowledgeable manner that makes the era clearly understandable. He does a wonderful job of sorting the truth out from the "false history" we have in the West by reminding us (for example) that "by the time the gas chamber and crematoria complexes came on line in spring 1943, more than three-quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead." The name of Belzec is less well known than that of Auschwitz because it was a death camp - those who survived it were highly lucky and could be counted on the fingers of one hand. "The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp." Snyder debunks the modern attempts to "balance" out history: the Nazis and the Soviets were not inhuman beasts - they were ordinary men and women like you and me. These men and women had ideals which they tried to live up to. They saw themselves as victims of other groups and their actions were a form of self-defense. They forced others to collude in their plans by giving them a choice between that or death. He reminds us of the real atrocities carried out in the war, for example, "About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war... " and that "German journalists and (some) historians ... have exaggerated the number of Germans killed during wartime and postwar evacuation, flight, or deportation..." Snyder's "Bloodlands" are, for me, the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth partitioned between 1772 and 1794. The horrors that took place here are just a continuation of the policies of the Germans and Russians to control those lands. Perhaps I fall into that category of historians who try to understand the horrors in nationalistic terms - he debunks the Russian myth of the "Great Patriotic war" and points out that most of the "Russian" dead were "Soviet" and came from Belarus, the Ukraine and Eastern Poland - themselves victims of Stalinism in 1939 (and earlier). I said there was nothing new here - that isn't completely true. Snyder's research is so broad as he brings the strands together that there will always be a fact that will surprise you, no matter how much you think you know the history. I never knew that the invading Germans, in 1939, tended not to treat captured Polish soldiers as prisoners-of-war but simply shot many of them as they surrendered. Snyder filled his history with facts and figures throughout. One simple fact stands in for so many in the book: "On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire." There's nothing new in this book. The story and the facts have always been available. In this post-Cold war era the truth about what went on in the East has been slowly revealed to the West: all the "false" history is been revealed as another version of the West's anti-Communist propaganda, a Big brother version of history in which Polish troops, for example, were not allowed to partake in VE celebrations because the country was Communist (albeit sold out by the allies at Yalta). Snyder brings the true history of this era to the attention of the West. Everyone should read it - but then I would say that, wouldn't I, I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-22 00:00:00 Don Meyers Man. Oh, man. This book is without a doubt the most depressing thing I've ever read. If there was ever a time and place that demonstrated man's inhumanity to man, it would be the "Bloodlands," the areas of Eastern Europe squashed flat two or three times by Hitler and Stalin. The author's accounts of casual starvation, brutal repression, and mass murder were horrifying not just because they happened, but because both victims and perpetrators were everyday, normal people. This is why you read the epilogue in any history text: it's where the author makes their point. In this case, the author wanted to make clear exactly what happened to the 14 million people who died as a direct result of Soviet and Nazi policies before and during the Second World War. Specifically, he wanted to make it clear that it was actual people who died, and actual people who did the killing. He dips down into the masses and chooses one or two telling examples from each murder, each siege, each starvation. It's people who died, the author says, and it's people who killed them. It's easy to dismiss the Nazis and the Stalinist as monsters, and in a sense they were. But that's a cop-out. The fact is, given the right time and circumstances, any of us might decide that it was in our best interest to cooperate in a program of mass killing. That's what the thousands of SS and NKVD men did. They're not so different from us. In acknowledging this, and in making plain what happened, Snyder make it ever so slightly less likely that it will ever happen again. There are few history texts--few books of any kind--that have affected me as strongly as this book did. There were times I could barely keep listening, but I'm glad I did. Everyone should read this book. Not just historians or World War II enthusiasts (although the latter definitely should, if they only follow American history). Everyone should read this book, because everyone needs to hear its lesson. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, because I'm being entirely sincere. Read it. Edit: corrected some embarrassingly bad grammar