History’s Black Hole: The Holocaust in Eastern Europe

David A. Bell

Security, Europe

Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth does less than it might have to increase our understanding of the Holocaust.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 480 pp., $30.00.

 

SEVENTY YEARS after it ended, the Holocaust remains the black hole at the heart of modern history. We possess mountains of meticulously collected information about it. Historians have produced libraries’ worth of sober, careful and often quite remarkable analysis. Even so, something about this evil still slips out of our grasp, resists interpretation and refuses illumination.

Timothy Snyder, the latest historian to propose an overall account of the Holocaust, is no stranger to the subject. His highly acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin traced the immensity of the slaughter that took place between 1933 and 1945 in the spaces where the old German, Austrian and Russian empires bumped up against each other. It did not really try to explain why the Holocaust happened, but it did make an argument about how the slaughter became possible. In order to carry out the murder of the Jews, Snyder suggested, Adolf Hitler depended on Joseph Stalin. Stalin not only provided a model of large-scale terror and murder that the Nazis learned much from, but also destroyed civil institutions throughout the western Soviet Union (especially Ukraine), and then in the Polish and Baltic territories he annexed in 1939 and 1940. It was precisely in these areas where the Nazis could begin the genocide in 1941. Here, in these lands of destruction, not only did they meet with little institutional resistance, but they could also count on the active connivance of desperate local populations. Without in any sense denying Nazi Germany’s ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust, Snyder cast the event as part of a larger pattern of mass death that also encompassed Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukraine in the 1930s and the mammoth wartime atrocities committed during the war itself against prisoners of war and civilians of all ethnicities.

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