Bloodlands.

• Author: Brown, John H.
• Position: Book review

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, New York: Basic Books, 2010. ISBN-13-978-0-465-00239 -9, hardcover 524 pp., list price $29.95, Kindle Edition, ASIN: B0042F2XZ6, 2012, $9.88.

When I was posted in Krakow, Poland, 1986-1990, as Branch Public Affairs Officer with the now-defunct USIA (United States Information Agency) few Washington dignitaries on official tours to that part of the world failed to pay the obligatory visit to nearby Auschwitz, the former Nazi concentration camp, part of which was converted into a Museum in 1947 by the Polish Communist authorities with the stated purpose of honoring victims of Nazism.

Had these VIPs--and the Foreign Service officers accompanying them, including this reviewer--read the book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder (published in 2010), their understanding of this Nazi horror would have greatly increased.

For, as he contends in his brilliant, profoundly unsettling volume, Auschwitz (as propagandized through film and photographs disseminated to the outside world) was not, in fact, the ultimate incarnation of Nazi evil. It was only one more illustration (not the worst, in his view) of the tragic nature the "bloodlands," a geographic area under switching Nazi/Soviet domination, between 1933 and 1945, extending "from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States."

At Auschwitz, both a concentration and extermination camp, registered laborers "had a chance of surviving," whereas in Nazi death factories like Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec (also in Nazi-dominated Poland), "almost everyone died." "Still more Jews, Polish or Soviet or Baltic Jews," Snyder adds, were "shot over ditches and pits." Indeed, Auschwitz was among the least horrendous of the horrendous: "[A]lthough no one survived the gas chambers at Auschwitz, more than a hundred thousand people survived the concentration camp known by that name."

In this volume--so tempting to put down because of the tragedies it describes, so impossible to dismiss because of its revelations--Snyder has, as I see it, four purposes in mind: Get the record of the totalitarian horrors straight; give the troubling statistics he cites an (even more troubling) human dimension; explain the reasons behind the Hitler-Stalin bloodlands from a concrete, historical perspective; and draw moral lessons from this nightmare of European history.

First, as an indefatigable researcher who for years mined archives in...