Soon after the publication of his acclaimed monograph, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” Yale University’s Prof. Timothy Snyder has penned another blockbuster, “Black Earth: The Holocaust As History and Warning.”
Prof. Snyder has gone deep into the mind of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi rationale for the destruction of Jews in Europe. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not the simple consequence of his failures and frustrations as a painter in Vienna. No. It was based on a convoluted worldview that led Hitler to conclude that Jews were “a spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death.”
Hitler, writes Dr. Snyder, strongly believed that world history was little more that the Darwinian triumph of the strong over the weak. Might makes right; “species survive only by unrestrained racial killing.” Morality was not predicated on universal principles of right and wrong, but on the preservation of one’s own race, i.e., one’s own kind.
Jews were an abomination for Hitler because they were responsible for Judeo-Christian ideals such as mercy to the weak. These morals were the antithesis of Hitler’s Darwinian thesis and part of “the ceaseless attempt of Jews to warp” the natural order, to permit the weak to triumph over the strong. “Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child,” Hitler argued. “Both are inventions of the Jews.” Germans were the purest of races and their survival as such was of paramount importance for Hitler’s world. The Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish endeavor – a not uncommon view once held by the likes of Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson. Hitler was a “zoological anarchist,” writes Prof. Snyder, “who believed that there was a true state of nature to be restored.” In Hitler’s mind, “Judeobolshevism” was the 20th century scourge of the world.
If the annihilation of European Jews was Hitler’s first aspiration, his second goal was “Lebensraum,” living space for the German master race. And where was that living space to be found? On the black earth of Ukraine. “I need Ukraine,” Hitler stated, “so that no one can starve us as they did in the last war… It is inconceivable that a superior people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it while amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” Hitler visualized Ukraine as a German colony. The Ukrainian people should be given “scarves, glass beads and everything colonial people like.” They should also be allowed to dance to their heart’s content, making the villagers “grateful to us.”
Poland became a target for two reasons: it had the largest population of Jews in Europe, and it stood between Germany and Ukraine’s black earth. Although he believed Poland had no sovereign right to exist at all, Hitler first tried to persuade Warsaw to join Germany in a military agreement. When this failed, the Nazis persuaded the Bolsheviks to join them. The resulting Molotov-Ribbentrop accord allowed Germany and Russia to invade and to ultimately destroy the Polish government, vanquishing the Polish people.
The Poles had also been concerned with their Jewish population, but their vision was for Jewish immigration to Palestine, not annihilation. Vladimir Zabotinsky’s revisionist brand of Zionism resonated among Polish officials who supported Betar, the Jewish nationalist organization, with military assistance. Avrahim Stern, leader of Irgun in Palestine, was a Polish agent. Betar leaders such as Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, later to become leaders in an independent Israel, revered Polish culture.
It was only after the demise of Poland as a sovereign entity that the Holocaust really began. “Jews were not killed in large numbers first in Berlin,” writes Prof. Snyder, “but on the frontiers of German power …As the tide of war turned, the mass killing moved west from the occupied Soviet Union to occupied Poland and then to the rest of Europe.” Mass extermination of Jews was most successful in lands where no viable government was in place, e.g., occupied Poland, less successful in those nations where a friendly government was permitted to exist, e.g., occupied France. Laws are observed only when a government can assure obedience. No government, no laws, no morality.
Prof. Snyder devotes much of his new book to Jewish rescuers such as Klymentiy Sheptytsky who “hid more than a hundred Jews, many of them children, in the cathedral complex, Saint Jura in Lwow – which they, as Ukrainians called Lviv.” His brother, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky is described as “the only churchman of such high rank to act decisively against the mass murder of Jews.” He protested to Himmler as well as to Hitler himself and asked Pope Pius XII to intervene, describing Nazism as “hatred of everything that is honorable and beautiful.” The metropolitan heard personal confessions and was shocked to learn that Ukrainians were collaborating with the Nazis in the killing of Jews. He issued “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” a pastoral letter condemning such practices as abhorrent.
Prof. Snyder also mentions the UPA and its “ethic cleansing” crimes in Volynia. This is a painful subject for Ukrainians that thus far has been vehemently denied by most veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
The double occupation in Ukraine and the Baltic countries led to a “double filtering” of the elite. Those who served the Soviet occupiers during the first occupation were often eager to clear their name by serving the German occupier. When the occupation shifted again, sides were swapped again. Some former NKVD men joined the Ukrainian militia, for example, and later, the UPA.
In his last chapter, Prof. Snyder takes on climate change and suggests that those who deny its scientific validity are conspiracy theorists who “edge towards Hitler.” As much as I enjoyed the profound intellectual depth of the book, the “final chapter,” in the words of another reviewer, “only detracts from Snyder’s accomplishment.”
Do I think “Black Earth” will become as controversial as “Bloodlands?” Absolutely. Probably more. Be the first Ukrainian in your circle to purchase this latest Snyder book. Remain relevant, dear reader!