Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010.
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 killings of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), northeastern Romania and the westernmost fringes of Russia, is the area that Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in Western history. Snyder draws similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and also the enabling interactions that reinforced …
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010.
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 killings of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), northeastern Romania and the westernmost fringes of Russia, is the area that Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in Western history. Snyder draws similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and also the enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and suffering that were inflicted upon noncombatants. According to Snyder, Nazi Germany was responsible for twice as many deaths as the Soviet Union.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".
Incredible . .. . a must read for anyone doing research into WWII and the period between 1933 and 1945.
Before reading Bloodlands I thought I had a grasp of the general outline of the horrors inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Nope. Like many other Americans, I suppose, my ideas of WWII in Europe were formed (naturally enough) by accounts from a U.S. perspective, my ideas of the Holocaust by accounts of the experiences of bourgeois Jews from western Europe (e.g. and above all, Anne Frank). WWII viewed from such a perspective is like looking at certain 2-D projections of the globe which distort the world to flatter the mapmaker. Bloodlands revealed to me how narrow was my understanding of the scale of suffering, and more to the point where it occurred and who bore the brunt of it. In Timothy Snyder's geography of mass killing, the Bloodlands -- primarily eastern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine -- assume their rightful proportions. His discussion of the policies that led to the murder …
Before reading Bloodlands I thought I had a grasp of the general outline of the horrors inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Nope. Like many other Americans, I suppose, my ideas of WWII in Europe were formed (naturally enough) by accounts from a U.S. perspective, my ideas of the Holocaust by accounts of the experiences of bourgeois Jews from western Europe (e.g. and above all, Anne Frank). WWII viewed from such a perspective is like looking at certain 2-D projections of the globe which distort the world to flatter the mapmaker. Bloodlands revealed to me how narrow was my understanding of the scale of suffering, and more to the point where it occurred and who bore the brunt of it. In Timothy Snyder's geography of mass killing, the Bloodlands -- primarily eastern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine -- assume their rightful proportions. His discussion of the policies that led to the murder of 14 million people is lucid and deeply disturbing. A must-read.
