Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

In this epic, haunting, deeply researched, and profoundly original book, Timothy Snyder has written a history of extermination and survival, an explanation of an unprecedented crime of the twentieth century that might serve as a precedent in the twenty-first. It tells the story of the Holocaust based on an array of new archival sources from eastern Europe and the voices of Jewish survivors to present the mass murder of the Jews in comprehensible historical terms--and thus all the more terrifyingly.
     The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the natural resources they deserved. Hitler's worldview could be realized only insofar as Germans destroyed other states, and Hitler's political agenda was to prepare for this new kind of war. In the wake of Hitler's destruction, and in the zones of statelessness where almost all Jews died, they were rescued sometimes by institutions that resembled states, like partisan armies and churches, and sometimes by those who could grant them a semblance of citizenship, the heroic diplomats. A very few people, the righteous few, aided Jews without any connection to an institution and without any selfish motive. Much of the new archival research in this book is devoted to understanding these people. They are exemplary, but in similar circumstances few of us would follow their example.
     If the Holocaust was in fact a result of ecological panic and state destruction, Snyder argues persuasively that we have drawn the wrong lessons from it and endangered our own future. The world of the early twenty-first century is coming to resemble that of the early twentieth, in the growing preoccupations with food and water and in the destabilization of a previous world order. Our world is much closer to Hitler's than we might imagine. Saving our society requires that we see the Holocaust as it was and ourselves as we are. In this chilling, groundbreaking, and utterly absorbing narrative, Black Earth shows that the Holocaust is not only history but warning.