Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0047TAQQ8 | Format: PDF
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin Description
Americans think of World War II as "The Good War", a moment when the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was not decided by D-day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and Joseph Stalin.
While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of World War II in the six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality is even grimmer. In 13 years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed 13 million people in the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.
In the groundbreaking long-view style of Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson, Tim Snyder, one of America's foremost historians of Eastern Europe, has written a new history of Europe that focuses on the battleground of Eastern Europe, which suffered the worst crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Based upon scholarly literature and primary sources in all of the relevant languages, Bloodlands pays special attention to the sources left by those who were killed: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.
This is a new kind of European history, one more concerned with suffering than with intention, one that recognizes how stories of progress or victory have excluded the most salient human experience, and one focused on the extreme predicament of the tens of millions of Europeans who found themselves between Hitler and Stalin.
The scale of destruction in the lands between Germany and Russia has eluded historians and baffles the cynicism of our new century, but for these very reasons, Bloodlands offers the way forward to a sensible reconstruction of European history. Ultimately, in Snyder's matchless telling, the German and Soviet regimes appear not so much as totalitarian twins, but as rivals whose ruthless pursuit of similar goals doomed millions of innocents.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 18 hours and 15 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: October 18, 2010
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0047TAQQ8
"Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder, is a book about the intentional mass murder of over 14 million people between 1930 and 1947 in a general area that encompasses what is now Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia. And by murder, I mean that. As part of that 14 million number, Mr. Snyder counts only those that were outright killed, intentionally starved, or otherwise were put to death outside of military actions or by being worked to death. If you were to include the deaths that could have been predictably forseen as a result of certain actions taken, that number jumps to between 17 and 21 million people who were killed.
The author breaks the killing periods into 5 general subsets ... Stalin starving the Ukrainian kulaks in 1932-1933, Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, Hitler and Stalin murdering and otherwise removing Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian intelligentsias from 1939-1941, Hitler's murdering the Jewish population and "undesirables" of many countries, intentionally starving Russian POWs and Soviet civilians, and executing civilians as part of partisan reprisals in 1941 - 1945, and people who died as a result of forced resettlements in 1945-1947.
While I've read extensively about World War II, I learned a great deal from this book. As one example, there were no purely death camps in Germany proper, the Germans built those in occupied Poland. While there were concentrations camps in Germany and many of these camps contained extermination chambers, their primary function was as forced-labor camps. Personnel assigned to the labor camps had a slim chance of surviving. There were 6 death, or extermination, camps set up in Poland ... Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzed, Majdanek, Soribor, and Treblinka.
I would suggest taking a careful look at the Kindle edition of this book (the free sample) before ordering it: I downloaded the sample of this book and quickly discovered that the maps in the Kindle version were almost illegible. The book looked fascinating, and the maps are important, so I ordered the hardbound version instead.
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I have now owned the hardbound edition of this book for a week or two, and, although the book is excellent in every way, my reading progress has been slow because the subject matter is both terrifying and depressing. So far, the book has demolished many of my hazy ideas about what happened in the Bloodlands.
For example, I had a never-closely-examined "picture" of how Hitler killed six million Jews. That would be as follows: he rounded up the Jews living in Germany, took them to concentration camps like Auschwitz, and gassed them. We have all seen the film footage, which makes an indelible impression.
It turns out that my "picture" is completely wrong. Germany simply did not have enough Jews, and a huge number escaped through emigration while it was still allowed. The total of German Jews killed was 175,000. That is (don't mistake my meaning) in itself an incomprehensible, enormous number, but it does not account for six million dead. What Hitler did, in fact, was to conquer Poland (with the connivance of Stalin) and begin massacring Polish and East European Jews. A huge number were simply shot and tossed into unmarked mass graves. There were also "killing camps" (NOT concentration camps) where the average "stay" was just a day or two, and the victims were gassed without any pretense of work whatsoever.
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