Basic Books paperback, 2022
Occupation & resistance
Bloodlands
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Timothy Snyder brings Nazi and Soviet policies of mass killing into a shared geographical history of Eastern Europe. The book centres the people living in the territories where the two regimes’ ambitions and violence overlapped.
On This Shelf
The wider geography of mass violence, reaching beyond battlefields into occupied communities and civilian lives.
World War II: The Eastern FrontISBN 9781541600065
Selected Passages
From Bloodlands
The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps. But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century.
The true Nazi agricultural policy was the creation of an eastern frontier empire. The German agricultural question would be resolved not within Germany but abroad: by taking fertile land from Polish and Soviet peasants—who would be starved, assimilated, deported, or enslaved.
Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food.