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FORUM Conflicting Perspectives on Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth ✣ Reviews by Michael Berenbaum and Jeffrey Herf Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015. 462 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Michael Berenbaum, American Jewish University Timothy Snyder’s much-acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, published by Basic Books in 2010, aroused serious concern among many Holocaust historians. They feared that his emphasis on dou- ble genocide—German and Soviet—was a backdoor attempt to diminish the uniqueness and singularity of the Holocaust. In Black Earth Snyder’s emphasis on the Holocaust and its lessons should assuage these critics. Early in the book he writes: “The History of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal and its lessons have not yet been learned. The Holocaust is not only history but warning.” He makes good on this promise, perhaps too good. He treats the Holocaust as the axial event of modern history, thus giving testimony to its centrality. Jews are central to the history he narrates. He begins the same way many histories of the Holocaust must begin—with Adolf Hitler (no Hitler, no Holo- caust) and what he considers to be the two defining elements of Hitler’s world- view. Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum, defined not only as living space but as space to live well, makes the Ukraine a natural German target, for it is the breadbasket of Europe. For Hitler, the Volga was Germany’s Mississippi, and he admired the U.S. doctrine of Manifest Destiny. According to Snyder’s understanding of Hitler, Jews were opposed for the values they brought into the world. Compassionate justice and assistance to the weak stood in the way of what Hitler saw as the natural order. In nature, he believed, the powerful exercise their power without restraint, and he advocated social Darwinism in it most extreme form. Jewish values were held not only by Jews, however. Christians who revered Jesus spread those values widely, but nowhere does Snyder explain why Christian churches did not see Hitler’s attack on the Jews as a masked attack on them. Nor does he indicate why the Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 226–233, doi:10.1162/JCWS_c_00772 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 226 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00772 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum churches offered their formal and often enthusiastic support for the regime. An emphasis on Hitler is warranted up to a point, but in overemphasizing him Snyder seems to ignore the legions who supported him, enabled him, and carried out his vision. Black Earth is also a Zionist book, insofar as Snyder explores the cooper- ation between right-wing Zionism and right-wing Polish nationalism in the post-Pilsudski age. Both movements wanted the Jews to leave Poland, the for- mer by “ascent to the land” and the latter by self-deportation. Neither could imagine how the Nazi regime would ultimately get Jews off Polish soil, and a reader of Black Earth who was unfamiliar with the history of Zionism would not know of the more important efforts of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann (compared to Avraham Stern and Yitzhak Shamir) to establish the Jewish state. But in the deepest sense of the term, this is a Zionist work. Sny- der describes the vulnerability of those who were stateless and concurs with Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer’s judgment that “the murder of the European Jews seemed to vindicate the Zionist argument that there was no future for Jews in Europe.” The future of the Jews could take one of two forms: an end to landlessness and powerless in a state of their own or a secure place in pluralistic, democratic states that valued their participation as citizens. There is much to admire in this book. Snyder writes clearly and com- pellingly about complex subjects. He personalizes the story and thus gives it a human voice even as he writes of massive depersonalizing violence. He probes the perpetrators, their victims, the bystanders and rescuers, the resis- tance fighters and the diverse native population. Not surprisingly, Snyder centers this history on the badlands of Eastern Europe and returns to his consideration of double occupation, double destruc- tion, and double genocide, here adding the notion of double collaboration, the participation of the local population first in the Soviet enterprise of state destruction and then in the German occupation. Like Polish-American histo- rian Jan Gross, Snyder dismisses the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, which he sees as an all-too-convenient proposition useful to the Nazis, who depicted all Jews as Communists and all Communists as Jews, but equally useful to the local population to mask their role in Soviet collaboration—or to atone for it— and still retain the rewards available to the them from abandoned and looted Jewish possessions first confiscated by the Soviet Union and never returned because their owners were annihilated or because governments would not en- force property rights. Non-mobile possessions that German troops could not loot and that the German apparatus could not ship back to Germany were available as the spoils in lawless, stateless societies. Snyder gives Iosif Stalin his due in the state destruction and treats not only the SS but the Soviet state 227 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00772 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum security organs, which, because they were more efficient and disciplined, may have been less lethal. Poles were no different from other native populations in tending to hate those from whom they stole because they had stolen from them. In occupied Poland, theft of Jewish property did not make the Poles allies of the Germans, but it did make them seek to justify what they had done and support any policy that kept the Jews from returning. In lands of double occupation and double destruction, the Germans’ and local residents’ claims about Jewish involvement in the Soviet occupa- tion glossed over the role of non-Jews, who in fact played an indispensable role for the Soviet occupation regime. The myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, which endures even now insofar as it is needed to exculpate the locals, thus had the effect of allowing the.vast majority off Soviet collaborators (the non-Jews) to get off scot-free. Clearly but subtly Snyder takes sides in some of the major historical debates. He is far more of a functionalist than an intentionalist. Nazi en- trepreneurs of violence took local initiatives, finding creative violent solutions for problems as they emerged Unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who writes extensively of the movement from “eliminationalist” anti-Semitism to “ex- terminationist” anti-Semitism as a uniquely German phenomenon, Snyder maintains that the vast numbers of perpetrators who agreed to kill the Jews were just as eager to kill Gypsies or homosexuals or Soviet soldiers. “Einsatz- gruppen shot others besides Jews and others shot people other than Jews.” His focus on the badlands limits him to one chapter on the death camps, which primarily considers Auschwitz as a symbol of the event and considers historiography and historical memory rather than actual history. Such major campsasBelzec,˙ where some 500,000 were murdered in ten months, and Tre- blinka, where some 900,000 were killed in thirteen months, are barely men- tioned, and Snyder does not give significant weight to the industrialization of the killing process. The Wannsee Conference gets but one mention, in part because Snyder is focused on the collapse of bureaucracy and the destruction of the states in the east rather than the operation of the complex bureaucra- cies of the Nazi German state. To fortify his thesis that bureaucracy protected Jews, he notes that at the lakeside Berlin mansion where the conference was held, a good deal of time was spent considering the responsibility of German bureaucrats for the German crime of mischlinge. Sovereignty and bureaucracy, Snyder argues, helped the Jews to survive, whereas statelessness and anarchy yielded increased percentages of Jewish dead. What this leaves out, however, is that a sovereign state with multiple levels of bureaucracy initiated and sustained the mass murder. Citizenship, 228 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00772 by guest on 27 September 2021 Forum Snyder writes, “is meaningful only when recognized in reciprocity. Hitler was destroying the principle of citizenship when he destroyed a neighboring state, moving Germany along with Europe toward lawlessness.” Snyder forces students of the Holocaust to consider the role of the state- less and the vulnerability of those who live in areas where the state has been destroyed. The implications for the contemporary Middle East are not dif- ficult to fathom. Snyder’s emphasis on local collaborators and the way the Germans used the political and material aspirations of the native population offers a more nuanced understanding of the motivations for collaboration and their participation in the murder of Jews with the Germans than merely at- tributing all this to native anti-Semitism. This approach underscores that how the past is recalled is often shaped by the contemporary agenda of a given so- ciety. We know that was true under Communism, and it may be no less true today under resurgent nationalism. When Raul Hilberg was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah,he said, “I never asked large questions because I was afraid that I would get small answers.” Snyder has asked large questions, and his last chapter could be rewritten as events in the Middle East and elsewheree unfold, recrafted again to accommodate debates over global warming and the accusation that science is merely disguised politics.

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