Graeme Newell's Reviews > Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

This was an outstanding book that really had me reconsidering my assumptions about the Holocaust. The circuitous trail that led me to this book started when I watched PBS's American Experience documentary, “America and the Holocaust.” Timothy Snyder had some amazing insights that I had never heard before. He shared entirely new thinking based on an intimate understanding of Eastern Europe & Russia’s role in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust cliché that I learned as a child was that Germany set out to destroy the Jews during WW2. Snyder's book reveals that this overly simplistic history belies a far more complex story that encompasses all of Eastern Europe. Snyder is an eastern European historian and he methodically shows how the travesties of the Holocaust were a dance of many countries, and many cultures that enthusiastically joined in the genocide.

Sure, Hitler and the SS set up an industrial machine to murder people, but that system would never of been possible without the state destruction initiated by the Russians and other eastern European governments. Once the bureaucrats were gone, murdering Jews became exponentially easier. Conquered countries with functioning bureaucracies (like France) were far more successful at protecting their Jewish populations.

The German’s most effective genocide strategy was not directly killing Jews. Their most fiendishly effective strategy was motivating local inhabitants to do it for them. The Germans were often the puppet masters who tapped the disturbingly pervasive anti-semitism that lived in the hearts of average people throughout Eastern Europe.

Images of the Holocaust are typically accompanied by railroad cars of people arriving at mass death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. But the surprising truth is that most of the killing was local, primarily instigated by local police and local citizens who took it upon themselves to shoot Jews in their own communities. Most of the murders were instigated through the many countries and the local towns of Eastern Europe. Most of the time, it was done with a bullet to the head, not a gas chamber.

Many times these murders were motivated by simple greed, situations such as when a neighbor covets a Jewish family's home. Official policy gave them carte blanche to simply massacre that family and move into a spacious new apartment completely unchallenged.

I also had no idea just how huge a role Russia played in the Holocaust. In the beginning, the Russians and the Germans were allies in the killing. Russia’s goal wasn’t the extermination of the Jews, it was decapitating the leadership of the existing states it annexed. Kill all the leaders and revolt becomes far less likely.

It was a one-two punch. The Russians killed or imprisoned all of the intellectuals, soldiers and public officials. This created a lord-of-the-flies world where average people were forced to do terrible things just to survive.

When the Germans overran the Russian front lines in Eastern Europe during 1941-42, former Soviet collaborators were rounded up. All of them were desperate to save their own skins. The German’s provided them with a clear loyalty test - if they truly supported Germany, they must prove it by wiping out the Jews in their own community. It was a win-win. The local murderers proved their loyalty to their new German overlords and these local people also acquired a bounty of the possessions from their victims. In a time of war, a secure place to live and food to eat was often the difference between life and death.

The insights of this book have me rethinking my beliefs on the Holocaust. Snyder has done outstanding research that uncovers a whole new chapter of this tragedy I never knew.

That being said, this book was tough to get through. It is DENSE, filled with an often mind-numbing avalanche of information. Storytelling is rudimentary at best, and the author has a maddening tendency to repeat himself. Still, I give it a five-star rating simply for its revelational information.