Review: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating approach to The Holocaust, as it is a political history more than a military one. The eventual recounting of moving fronts - not really the detail of individual battles - is focused on the Eastern Front and is the last third of the book. The morbid, if necessary and eye-opening, recounting of Holocaust atrocities individual and mass atrocities is in the last quarter, or so. If anything is less covered in content, it is the warning Snyder sees. This is a mere conclusion chapter conflating Lebensraum and stateless anarchy with issues of climate change, limited resources, and failed states from today's headlines.

What makes this work unique to those on the topic that I have read, its the deep and comparative analysis of the policy motivations of Germany, Poland, and Stalin's Russia. Germany sought to re-colonize by deportation, destruction, and destabilization of Europe's nations. "The epoch of statehood has come to an end", proclaimed German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Poland, recovering from WWI sought a post-colonial world and thus the safety of being on in a community of nations under the rule of Law. Stalin was intra-colonial or self-colonial, redistributing the population of a greater, Soviet Russia about its vast landscape (p. 53). For Jews, only Poland had a positive impact. As part of exporting nationalism by supporting an independent Ukraine, etc. Poland actively supported such Zionist causes as The Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948. Their arms were largely purchased from a willing Poland. In 1943 the Polish II Corps, release of many thousands of Poles from the Soviet Gulags, following the signing of the Polish-Russian Military Agreement on August 14, 1941, allowed for the creation of a Polish Army on Soviet soil, arrived in Palestine from Iraq. The British insisted that no Jewish units of the army be created. Eventually, many of the soldiers of Jewish origin that arrived with the army were released and allowed to stay in Palestine. One of them was Menachem Begin, whose arrival in Palestine created new-found expectations within the Irgun and the similar Betar. Begin had served as head of the Betar movement in Poland, thus Poland impetus was behind the impetus for Israel from its earliest conception as a post-Mandate reality.

Snyder also does much to explain how the memory and extremity of the Auschwitz distracts from the understanding the breadth and development of the extermination practices ("The Auschwitz Paradox"). That death camp was the third, final stage of a development from the open pit shootings in Lithuania and other mostly Eastern locales to asphyxiation from carbon monoxide fumes in trucks and fixed locations to finally Zyklon B and cremation.

It

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