In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, [Timothy Snyder] argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think “the war” was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.
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The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia. This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.
More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness.
The Worst of the Madness by Anne Applebaum | The New York Review of Books
I know, I know. Dour stuff. But it’s a hell of a book—I’ve hobby-researched WWII for a decade and this angle is freshly shocking. This weekend I blame @berkun, who got me watching Ken Burns’ WWII docs. Which seems like at third of the story.
