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Bloodlands

Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Aug 01, 2020tjdickey rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The "bloodlands" are defined as the countries unfortunate enough to stand between Hitler and Stalin, from 1933 to 1945 and beyond, and who thus endured up to three separate and deadly occupations - Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the three Baltic republics. The story of at least 14 million (!!) civilian deaths does not thus begin with the joint invasion of Poland by Soviet troops and the Nazis in 1939, and it does not end with the fall of Berlin. And since so many of the atrocities executed by both sides ended up behind the Iron Curtain, and the politicization of WWII history on both sides of the Cold War, the stories of Katyn, Babi Yar, and Treblinka are less known to Western history than the tip of the Nazi iceberg in Buchenwald and even Auschwitz. Snyder sets out to tell this terrible story complete for the first time. Millions die in every chapter, from the deadly and planned famines in Soviet Ukraine, to the operations of Soviet mass ethnic murder (the Great Terror) across their central "republics," to the Nazi policies towards prisoners of war and their operations of mass ethnic murder (the Holocaust of bullets in western Poland, bullets and gas to the east), to both sides' vicious anti-partisan actions and the incineration of Warsaw, and following into the Soviet re-shaping of ethnic and national boundaries (a very real if somewhat less lethal kind of ethnic cleansing), and the pervasive "Stalinist anti-Semitism" after the war. The concluding reflection on the place of humanity within a modern state is well-worth considering for 21st-century lessons, including the humanity of all concerned - "victors, perpetrators, bystanders, and leaders" - that must be examined to be understood. Every number, ideally, the author concludes, must be turned back into a single individual human person.