Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

welcome to the Macmillan report I'm Marilyn Wilkes your host and our guest is Timothy Snyder professor of history at Yale University professor Schneider teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history he is the author and co-editor of several award-winning books today we'll talk with Professor Schneider about his most recent book a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller entitled blood lands Europe between Hitler and Stalin welcome professor Schneider very glad to be here let's begin with an overview of your book tell us about it well this is a book about the greatest moral and demographic catastrophe in the history of the West it begins from the observation that in a very short period of time between 1933 and 1945 in a relatively small part of the world between the Baltic and Black Seas between Berlin and Moscow about 14 million people were deliberately murdered so the question naturally arises why I look at these territories rather than looking at the places that occupied them rather than looking at just the countries the way that we've investigated this horror previously has always had to do with particular political systems either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or with particular victim groups the Jews the Ukrainians the poles the Russians what I've done it that in this book as I've looked at the entire territory and that all the victims and I've looked at both of the regimes as they crossed into the territory and tried to investigate each murderous policy of each of these two regimes this subject has been the subject of many many books you take a little actually a very different look at it why did you feel it was important to write the book well I mean one thing which is which is which is striking is that no one has ever made the point that I just made it seems like a very simple point 14 million people are killed in a certain time in place that's never been noticed has never been noticed that of all the killing that the Germans did during the 30s and 40s all of it was in this zone for all practical purposes all of it of all the killing that the Soviets did a disproportionate amount was in this zone and this was a zone where both the Germans and the Soviets were present sometimes at the same time sometimes one right after the other so the initial goal of the book was to try to give a sense of the entirety of this catastrophe another goal the book was to try to get us out of thinking in the channeled ways that we have that this is just about poles or it's just about Jews and to try to get us to understand also it's important to understand that the Germans and the Soviets were interacting with each other sometimes we read about Nazi Germany or about Stalin Soviet Union it's about who usually have the impression of these things are happening on different worlds on different planets in fact these powers were primarily influencing the same sets of territories in the same sets of peoples so there hasn't actually been a book which looked at the totality of this catastrophe before there hasn't been a book which looked at which looked at it from the point of view of all of the victim groups before and there hasn't been a book which looked at the two systems not in isolation but in their actual presence in this region and sometimes in their interactions ok let's talk about the interactions how how did Stalin and Hitler work together and what was their rationale for killing these millions and millions of people right that's where things get a little bit difficult because there's some simple answers and those simple answers are wrong so one simple answer is that Stalin had Hitler were basically the same when here's a lot about when here's a lot about that especially into very American political life they're basically the same they're just they're socialists or something they're the same that answer is incorrect they were quite different they had different ideologies they had different visions of the future Hitler was interested in a race war which was going to come in the future which would allow the Germans to create a huge agrarian empire in the east bereft entirely of Jews with the Slavs reduced to a condition of slavery or expelled Stalin was interested in a world socialist revolution mom who's interested a bright future for the working class in order to get there he was he was willing to carry out vast policies of coercion and territory on his own territory so you have two rather different views of the world two quite different ideologies what they have in common chiefly is territory so the territories that Hitler wants for his future agrarian colony in the East are the same territories that Stalin has to master in order to build up his own vision of socialism in what he calls socialism in one country so the visions are very different where they overlap is territory and we tend to forget about this because territory for us is not important unless there happens to be oil underneath it and in the 1930s food was for the Germans and for everyone else roughly like what L is us but what is is for us today back then food was a kind of natural resource you had to try to control territory in order to control food because big important industrial countries like Germany were not self-sufficient in food so the two regimes had these different visions and then they begin to interact they begin to interact most importantly at the beginning that kind of the intellectual level what Stalin does create the socialism in one country this industrialization on the scale of the Soviet Union Hitler wants to undo Hitler's thinking about the East is a kind of reversal the Soviets build up cities we shall destroy them the Soviets create factories we will knock them down the Soviets increase their own population will decrease the population of those territories by tens of millions of people the second point of interaction is 1939 when these two regimes are de facto military allies they find the thing which they can agree upon which is that there's no purpose in the existence of independent Poland so they both invade Poland which is the only important country between them in September of 1939 they destroy it and along the way the Soviets destroy three other countries Estonia Latvia and Lithuania this creates a kind of no man's land a kind of new territory for conquest for both the Soviets and the Germans and this is the beginning really the beginning of massive violence on the German side and that's important because the Soviets have been killing on the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions all the way through the 1930s it's the war it's this point of can't in the 19th in late in 1939 the disruption of States in 1939 which allows the Germans to catch up to the Soviets so that's a very important point of contact and then there's the final point of contact is 1941 when the Germans invade the Soviet Union when they try to carry out try to execute this policy of imperialism to colonize the Western Soviet Union it doesn't work but you still have polka moments of interaction the two sides provoke each other to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done conditions are worse on both sides because the two countries are at war precisely so in the Soviet gulag in the Soviet system of concentration camps these are the years when people die in large numbers people are in the gulag because of Stalin but they die in large numbers because the Germans have invaded the Soviet Union what the Germans do in the East is a kind of mixture of what they wanted to do this Oviatt Union they wanted to destroy the state starve tens of millions of people eliminate the Jews somehow they weren't quite sure how yet even as late as summer 1941 and build up their own colony what they were able to do was kill Jews where they lived and so this colonization project in the Soviet Union becomes the mass murder that we then understand as the Holocaust and you know that is very interesting because for instance when I think of this time period I do think of the Holocaust and Jews in particular and you know and Frank hiding but the thing that struck me in your book you write during the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the blood lands or in Europe or in the world so my question is why don't Westerners what why don't we really understand that because it was a surprise to me and and why you know how do you explain that yeah the sad truth is that our image of the Holocaust and of German killing and of the whole tragedy is complete we have we have an image of the Holocaust we think we understand the Holocaust but it's actually a very small fraction of what happened and Frank was a German Jew German Jews were in general bourgeois middle class people like you and me people who might have known people in other countries people who often escaped about half of the German Jews actually survived Anne Frank didn't she represented this group which was exceptional in fact but which we take us typical why are they exceptional because the German Jews are such a small small small small percentage of Holocaust victims in 1939 only about a quarter of 1% of the German population is of Jewish origin the the Jews live in places like Poland where there are three and half million almost they live in the Soviet Union worth even more they live in Hungary they live in the Baltic States these are the real populations of Jews these are the these are the serious historical homelands of European Jews so the Holocaust is not primarily a tragedy that strikes German Jews although the tragedy of German Jews is horrible it's primarily a tragedy that strikes the Jews of Eastern Europe and so in order to understand the Holocaust one has to get beyond the image that we have of people going on long train trips to camps and then being killed that was exceptional what generally happened was that people were shot about two and a half million people were shot very close to where they lived in the occupied Soviet Union or they were gassed in facilities in Poland which were also generally not terribly far away from from where they lived what we have is that is is the outer edges of the Holocaust and we've confused it with the whole thing and I found that very fascinating because it's a whole new way to look at that period of time yeah and you ask why I mean a lot of it has to do with what's familiar to us I think and Frank is a much more I mean I read that when I was her age right when she died that's an accessible book for for everyone much less accessible for us I think are the experiences of Yiddish speaking Polish Jews or Russian speaking Soviet Jews people who are further away perhaps culturally but also those lands fell behind the Iron Curtain there's a strange way in which the memory of what the Germans do is cut off by the Cold War the one way to think about where the blood lands are is that they're east of what used to be Iron Curtain the Iron Curtain falls at the western border of the blood lands right after the war and so the very places were the Germans killed not just where the Soviets killed but the places where the Germans killed fall out of view they fall into the shadow of the iron and they become abstract and when we built up in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s an image of German killing it tended to be based upon things in the West like Anne Frank for example in hiding in the Netherlands rather than on the East which is my subject I'm an East European historian that's where I could write a book like this that's why I felt I had to write a book like this okay let's talk about your methodology how did you do the research for the book well the first thing I keep returning to this but the first thing which is different about this book is that it focuses on territory it's not it's not a history of Hitler history of Stalin it's not just a history of the Soviet Union or of Nazi Germany it's not just a history of Estonia Latvia Lithuania Belarus Ukraine Poland and Russia which of the country is concerned it's not just a history of the Jews of the poles of the Ukrainians are any people and is instead of history of everyone who lives on a certain territory as they are affected by these two murderous regimes that seems very simple but when you do that you were able to keep all the victims in view you're able to make your subject humanity rather than this person or that person or this group or that group now it matters who people are it matters to which group they belong but if your subject is everyone that gives you an entirely different view than if your subject is one person or one group also you get to see the regime's I think in a more interesting light normally books like this jump back and forth in a way which is kind of induces intellectual jet lag from Moscow to Berlin one chapter Moscow the next chapter Berlin by keeping my eyes of the readers eyes on these territories I see both Moscow and Berlin as they are in action I see the institutions the groups they killed they send to these regions in order to kill people or in order to control people and that gives you a view back through the institutions to Moscow and Berlin but it's not this distinct separate view of the two it's that's the two regimes in action or sometimes in in interaction I then follow all of the policies that emerge whether they're from the Soviet side or whether from the German side it's all the same to me whether the two sides are interacting which they sometimes do or whether they not that's also all the same to me I'm just trying to observe and note what each of the policies are so what does that require well I've spent an awful lot of time in East European archives and some of the work on particular policies does come from my own are I will work but a lot of it comes from taking the research of historians from Israel or Germany or Russia or Ukraine or Poland whatever it might be and putting it together and trying to show what they're trying to give a more complete picture of each of the killing policies whether it's the famine in Ukraine or 1933 or whether it's the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945 but also trying to show how these policies fit together as sometimes they did so this means using an awful lot of languages it also means opening oneself up to a lot of different and often very competitive discourses about what what happened back then in the hope of fulfilling the promise of all history which is that you can tell us you can tell one sensible story which brings in every perspective and which is faithful to the facts okay and in doing the research did you come in did you come across anything that really surprised you what was the most surprising thing in writing the book think yeah things surprised me all the time that's that's what I would say things I mean the book the book surprises people one of you you you you mentioned one of those yeah many people have said things to me about this book before they've read it to the effect that oh I know sure book was gonna be about no one has ever said that to me after reading the book that is no one has ever said this book was about what I thought it was gonna be about or this book said what I thought it was going to be said what I thought I was going to say and the reason for that is that so much of what we think is actually so constrained and so limited by the national or by the ideological perspectives so I was surprised all of the time and I tried to make what surprised me seem natural and plausible to readers because I think in order to rescue this in order to understand this we have to have a completely different perspective from the perspectives that we have so my research was continual surprising if it weren't for that sense of surprise I wouldn't have felt that I had to write the book one reason why I felt I had to write the book was that the scale the tragedy is just so great another reason I felt I had to write the book was because I thought that only an Easter pianist would be able to do something like this I think the Russian estándar - have told us things that are very important historians of Jewish life with all those things that are very important but only an Easter pianist is going to be able to bring all these different territories into the picture and in mediate as it were among all of these different perspectives but it was the attempt to try to make my own sense of surprise about how little we know or how what we hope how partial our knowledge is to try to make to try to undo that to try to reverse that that was one of the reasons why I wrote the book so I can't really point to any particular moment of surprise I think one of the things which came clear to me in writing this book that is crucial is the the density of suffering in certain places you mentioned Ukraine Ukraine was the worst place to be between 1933 and 1945 the worst place to be in the Second World War 41 to 45 39 to 45 was be others and no one knows that I think that might be something which I figured out early on which continues to surprise people the places our images of the war turned out to be totally inadequate to the actual suffering and the places where the suffering was the worst Belarus are almost totally alien to us so there's so much rebalancing to be done and when you say suffering and in reading the book many people were starved to death versus gassed or shot is that correct that's right yeah so just complete and utter lack of food yeah no that's a really important point for a couple reasons one of them is that it reminds us how different that world was from our world okay so you know you know I'm sure you don't count calories I count calories and and I count with the reason I count calories is the reason you know right German economic planners also counted calories but not because they're worried that people were going to be too fat because they were worried literally about having enough calories so that oxen and mules and horses and cattle and human beings working on farms or in factories would have enough energy and calories a unit of energy they were concerned about food quite literally the way we are concerned about energy if not more so food was a way to imagine future development for both the Nazis and for the Soviets in the Soviet Union trying to control Ukraine the place which was very fertile was like trying to control say Saudi Arabia or Iraq or more so because this is a place which is within your own country if you can control those people you can control their soil then you can induce realize you can do what you want with them you can do what you want with the future that's the way Stalin thought and when they don't seem to be doing what you want you then take everything from them and allow them to starve and this is a extremely painful and this is the second thing why this is worth stressing to whites such a good point this is an extremely horrible way to die it's so horrible that in a way it's just flowed away from our own accounts of these things we understand I don't think we really do but we think we understand gassing we think we understand shooting but what it's actually like to starve or to make someone else starve to death it really it's a really difficult thing to describe it's been a lot of effort kind trying to get that right and it is such a central experience more people were starved in Europe in the middle of the 20th century than were either shot or gassed it was actually the leading method of deliberately killing people and both the Soviets and the Germans did it on the scale of millions final question conclusions what do you conclude in your book what do I conclude well that there's there's an overall argument about the presence of two different very different but competing ideological visions of radical change there's an overall argument about the relevance of territory for the people who live upon it and for the people who wish to conquer it but and in the conclusion I work my way through some of what I take to be the misunderstandings about the various individual policies whether it's Soviet terror or Soviet Famine German deliberate starvation the Holocaust but where I take the reader I try to take the reader in the conclusion is where I begin the book namely with what I take to be the fundamental task of history as a humanity when dealing with a subject like this so we started with with the number of 14 million which is a colossal number it's an overwhelming number I think it's much more than we can really process I don't think we can process 1 million or 3 million or 6 million let alone 14 million and that 14 million is a kind of inheritance it's what we have from national socials and it's what we have from Stalinism is what we have from Hitler in Stalin's but we have from this experience but the experience is so horrifying that we don't have a way of getting into it so where I return to in the conclusion is the method not of beginning from these huge numbers but if we're beginning from trying to break the big numbers down into smaller numbers in the individual policies and then breaking the individual policies down into individual actions and not treating the actions only from the point of view of those who did the killing but trying to understand also the lives up to the moment when they are killed of the people who will be murdered so that insofar as we can we treat the individual the victim not just the victim but primarily the victim the victim in the first place the victim as an individual human being so that the the pros of the book is a kind of effort of recovery and that's a method you asked about method earlier that's a method that I'm taking the unit of concern in the book as the individual human life as opposed to an ideology or a nation that's the unit of concern but it's also the moral conclusion of the book that we ought to try in my way of trying to do it as history other people have other ways but we ought to try to turn these huge numbers back into people one person at a time insofar as we can okay thank you so much for being here today and sharing some of your work thank you for more information about professor Snyder and his research please visit our website at Yale edu backslash Macmillan report be sure to join us again for another episode of the Macmillan report made possible through funding from the Whitney and Betty Macmillan Center for International and area studies at Yale

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 33,035

Rating: 4.8346457 out of 5

Keywords: Timothy Snyder, Marilyn Wilkes, The MacMillan Report, The MacMillan Center, Yale University, holocaust, The Holocaust, Ww2, Germany, World War II, Wwii

Id: UpabpmjsULk

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2011