In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people.
In 400 pages of densely packed text, illustrated by numerous maps, backed up by 40 pages of bibliography and 40 pages of notes, American historian Timothy Snyder places the Holocaust within the broader context of the planned and institutionalised mass murder of civilians undertaken by the Soviet and Nazi regimes between 1933 and 1945.
The Ukraine famine
Snyder points out that Stalin and the Soviet apparat began killing people in bulk before Hitler even became Chancellor. In fact Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 coincided with, and helped to conceal from public interest, the vast famine Stalin caused in the Ukraine which led to the deaths of over three million people. Hunger was the most consistent tool used by both dictatorships to kill millions, as many as seven million victims in all.
The Nazi Hunger Plan
I don’t think I knew about the Nazis’ Hunger Plan, a deliberate scheme to starve to death all the Russians in the area they invaded in the first winter of the attack on Russia (1941). Hitler intended to destroy Poland and Russia as states, exterminate their ruling classes and intelligentsia and then, in that first winter of conquest, deliberately starve some 30 million Slavs to death. Tens of millions more would have been killed or enslaved in what would have become permanent slave colonies supplying the Fatherland.
Nazi mass murder of Soviet POWs
Snyder calls Operation Barbarossa – the Nazi invasion of Russia – a ‘fiasco’ for the complete dysjunction between plan and achievement: Russia didn’t collapse, the Red Army fought on with growing confidence, and the Nazis didn’t seize vast stocks of food to feed their army and people, as they had planned.
What they could do was starve to death the Russians under their control and so they did. Russian POWs were corralled into prisoner of war camps which were mostly just barbed wire fencing around empty fields, with no toilets or shelter and no food. Here Russian POWs were crammed, sometimes packed so tight they couldn’t move, let alone sit – and then left to die, the living skeletons trampling over the growing mound of corpses. Snyder describes these (as all the other killing methods) in unsparing detail. Over three million Russian POWs are estimated to have died of starvation and exposure, as deliberate German policy.
The scale of the killing, the number of individual tragedies encompassed by these numbers, dwarfs anything else in human history until the great disasters of Mao’s China in the 50s and 60s.
A hecatomb of examples
- The flower of Belorusia’s literary culture deliberately exterminated: 218 of the country’s leading writers were all executed.
- Ten thousand Poles of the officer class executed in the Katyn Forest, followed by mass killing of schoolteachers. The Nazi plan was for Polish children to be brought up to understand enough German to obey orders and to count to 20. Nothing more. A slave nation.
- Between 1931 and 1933 over three million Ukrainian peasants were deliberately left to starve once it became clear that Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation of Ukraine’s farms had backfired and catastrophically reduced, not increased, harvests. Cannibalism became widespread, parents ate their children, children ate their parents, brothers ate sisters. Visitors to the region became used to seeing bloated corpses littering the streets. NKVD and communist officers were given quotas of peasant ‘saboteurs’ and ‘spies’ i.e. anyone who complained about starving to death – to be captured, interrogated and shot, so industrial killing was added to mass starvation.
- But the Russians did it to themselves, too. During the great leap forward of the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, over five million starved across the USSR in 1932 and 1933. Starved to death.
- When the NKVD ran low on bullets they made prisoners sit side by side so one bullet could be fired through two or more skulls simultaneously, then tipped the corpses into mass graves.
- Order 00447 ‘On the operations to repress former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements’ (dated 30 July 1937) led to the execution of nearly 400,000 Soviet citizens in 18 months in 1937 and 1938.
- It ran concurrently with order 00485, mandating the ‘total liquidation of the networks of spies of the Polish Military Organisation’, issued 11 August 1937. Quotas were issued to all NKVD offices throughout the USSR to capture, interrogate, despatch to the gulag or just execute a fixed number per week; if you didn’t fulfil your quota you yourself would be arrested. Since there was in fact no Polish Military Organisation, the NKVD had to manufacture networks of spies by arresting anyone with a Polish name, who had Polish relatives, had ever been to Poland or worked for Poles, then extracting confessions under torture, then executing them to fulfil their quotas.
- Evgenia Babushkina wasn’t Polish, she was a promising organic chemist, but her mother had once been washerwoman for Polish diplomats and so she was arrested and shot. One of millions.
- Sometimes more than a thousand death warrants were signed by NKVD authorities per day, and then rubberstamped en masse by their superiors. It was hard to find secure places to execute so many people, and vast areas of mass graves had to be organised outside major settlements throughout the USSR. Work work work.
I gave up listing even random examples. There are too many, too many statistics on every page. Thirty-three thousand seven hundred and sixty-one people, the entire Jewish population of Kiev, were forced to march to the Jewish graveyard where they were stripped of their valuables and clothes, forced to lie face down on the still warm corpses beneath them, and machine gunned through the head. Then another line. Then another. Then another. For years. In Europe’s killing fields.
Snyder has a way with days, with the way figures per day bring home the horror.
- On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed in all the pogroms in the whole history of the Russian Empire. (p.227)
- On any given day in autumn 1941, as many Soviet prisoners of war died as the total British and American POW deaths in the entire war. (p.182)
Comment
This book sheds new light on well-known events because:
- it brings together into one gruesome continuum Soviet and Nazi killing, usually kept separate
- it uses newly accessible and translated archives all across Eastern Europe and Russia to give a detailed account of Soviet mass murder, and to put precise numbers to the Nazi killings
- its focus on the Bloodlands – a broad loop of territory from the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) down through Poland and East through the Ukraine to the Black Sea – unifies the story and shows how the competing dictatorships learned from each other, shared murder techniques and bureaucratic procedures
It is a transformative book, completely reshaping how you think about these events, placing them in completely new contexts and prompting new thoughts and insights, not least about the dictators’ aims and strategies and how these changed in the stressed, pressure-cooker atmosphere of the 1930s.
In its thoroughness and its presentation of unstoppable facts and statistics of mass murder on every page, it drives the reader down and and further down into the deepest pits of hell, till you almost feel like one of the countless thousands, tens of thousands, of children thrown alive into the death pits and buried alive by the bulldozers. Why anybody would ever think well of humanity ever again defeats me.
Utopias of blood
But mostly this book reinforces the terrible truth that all powerful leaders with utopian visions for transforming societies, always seem to start by having to murder some, then many, and then millions and millions, of their own citizens in order to get to the Promised Land of their dreams – a utopian fantasy which they never, in fact, reach. By the time they’re done all they leave behind is mountains of skulls – in Poland, Ukraine, Belarusia, China, Cambodia, Rwanda.
Building a paradise on earth is difficult, given that even building a house is demanding, raising healthy, happy children is well nigh impossible. But burning down houses, villages, entire towns – shooting, gassing and starving unarmed civilians. Easy peasy. The lazy way out.
Snyder’s long concluding chapter engages with various commentators on modernity or the industrial state or theorists of totalitarianism like Hannah Arendt. But maybe maybe all this evil really just stems from laziness and stupidity: neither Stalin nor Hitler were great thinkers, they were great manipulators of people’s stupid fears and stupid utopian hopes: ‘if only we can get rid of the Jews-kulaks-saboteurs-right deviationists etc, we’ll all be rich, everything will be better, we can sleep safe in our beds.’
And so they tried to get rid of the bourgeoisie in Mao’s China and the urban intellectuals in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Croats and Bosnians in Greater Serbia, and now they are trying to get rid of the ‘infidel’ in the ‘caliphate’.
Primitive tribal fear of ‘the other’, shaped by dictators into genocidal violence. And when you’ve killed this lot of suspects and things don’t get better, well, it must be because of deeper conspiracies, of darker forces undermining the Volk or the People or whatever gibberish you’ve manipulated your people into worshiping – and that calls for another round of purges, killing and purification, until the cycle of mass murder becomes a self-fulfilling machine.
The hardest thing for humans seems to be accepting the otherness of other people, other beliefs and other traditions, of living and letting live. Truly tolerant and multicultural states seem to be among the hardest to create and the most liable to collapse. I’m thinking about the Ottoman empire in its heyday and the Austro-Hungarian empire, ramshackle entities which seemed to allow a tremendous diversity of peoples to live together, grumbling and complaining but tolerating each other.
But almost any state, anywhere, ever, would be better than the hell on earth created by Hitler and Stalin in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.
Books & Boots 