Black Earth

Historian Timothy Snyder advances a central thesis: The Holocaust was made possible not by the excessive power of the German state but by the destruction of states beyond Germany's borders. Where political institutions were annihilated, Jews lost the protections of citizenship, law, and bureaucracy, and mass murder became feasible. Where states endured, even under German pressure, Jews were far more likely to survive. Snyder treats this argument as both historical explanation and contemporary warning, contending that ecological panic, state destruction, and the conflation of science with politics remain present dangers.

Snyder begins by reconstructing Adolf Hitler's worldview as a coherent ecological and racial ideology. Hitler regarded the planet as a finite space in which races, equivalent in his mind to animal species, competed endlessly for land and food. Nature was the only truth; all political, religious, and philosophical traditions that suggested otherwise were Jewish inventions designed to weaken stronger races. For Hitler, struggle was not a means to an end but life's essence. His deputy Heinrich Himmler grasped the conclusion: Ethics as such was the error, and the only morality was fidelity to race. In Hitler's scheme, the Jew was the serpent who corrupted Eden by introducing the knowledge of good and evil. The elimination of Jews would restore the planet to its natural state of racial struggle.

Snyder traces how Hitler converted this theory into a political program through the concept of Lebensraum, a German word meaning both "habitat" and "living room." Hitler argued that only the conquest of a vast land empire, modeled on the United States, could guarantee German food security. The fertile soil of Ukraine was the prize. Hitler identified eastern Europe's Slavic populations as racial inferiors whose land Germans had a right to seize, drawing on the history of European colonialism for justification. The Judeobolshevik myth, the idea that the Soviet Union was a Jewish creation, united all of Hitler's aims: A single attack on the USSR could eliminate Jewish power, create an eastern empire, and replay American frontier history in Europe.

The book's middle chapters trace how the divergent political systems of Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union set the stage for war. Poland's post-1935 leadership, following the death of Józef Piłsudski, the authoritarian leader who had championed Jewish civic inclusion, shifted Jewish policy toward international emigration with Palestine as the focus. Polish military intelligence secretly trained members of the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary organization, in sabotage and guerrilla warfare to support a Jewish state. Hitler repeatedly sought to recruit Poland for war against the Soviet Union, but Polish leaders refused. When Foreign Minister Józef Beck rejected these proposals in January 1939, Hitler decided to destroy Poland entirely. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, which secretly divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres, cleared the way for invasion.

Snyder tracks Germany's progressive destruction of neighboring states, arguing that each episode advanced the persecution of Jews. The annexation of Austria in March 1938 demonstrated that destroying a state was the most effective way to strip Jews of legal protection: Violence against Austrian Jews in five weeks exceeded what German Jews had endured over five years. The destruction of Czechoslovakia followed in stages. The German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought the most radical state destruction yet: Germany declared Polish statehood null and void, treating the country as a colony. Three catastrophic consequences followed for Jews. The end of national authority meant they were no longer citizens of anything. The destruction of local authority unmoored administrations from prior law. The subordination of the police to German racial ideology turned law enforcement into an instrument of persecution.

The book's most original argument concerns "double occupation," zones where the Soviet Union destroyed states in 1939-1940 and Germany then destroyed Soviet institutions in 1941. Soviet occupation created three resources that Germans later exploited. Nationalization of property raised questions of ownership that Germans could racialize. Jews received the appearance but not the reality of power under Soviet rule, making them vulnerable to charges of Judeobolshevism when Germans arrived. Most potently, the destruction of nation-states generated a desire for their restoration, which Germans could promise in exchange for collaboration against Jews.

These dynamics proved most lethal in Lithuania and Latvia, where the Soviets destroyed independent states in June 1940 and the Germans arrived a year later. In Latvia, Franz Walter Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, a mobile killing unit of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the Nazi paramilitary organization responsible for racial enforcement, developed a new model of mass murder. Rather than relying on pogroms, he identified willing killers and organized them into the Arājs Kommando, a shooting unit that killed approximately 22,000 Jews. Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln innovated industrial-scale shooting; at Babyi Iar outside Kyiv in late September 1941, Germans shot some 33,761 Jews in two days. These techniques were applied further east, where the death rate among Jews in the occupied prewar Soviet Union reached 95 percent. By late 1941, the German offensive had stalled, and Hitler declared that because the "world war is here," the "annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence" (196). In occupied Poland, SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik assembled elements for a new killing method: Starved Soviet prisoners of war became guards at death facilities, ghettos and Jewish councils provided administrative infrastructure, and carbon monoxide gas, adapted from the "euthanasia" program that had killed people with disabilities inside Germany, supplied the murder technique. Between March and December 1942, approximately 1.3 million Polish Jews were killed at the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

Snyder then advances the "Auschwitz paradox." While Auschwitz symbolizes the universal intent to murder all Jews, it demonstrates that statehood protected them. He compares Estonia, where the state was destroyed twice and 99 percent of Jews were killed, with Denmark, where sovereignty was preserved and 99 percent of Jewish citizens survived. Surveying Jewish fates across Europe, Snyder finds sovereignty to be the strongest predictor of survival. In France, where the Vichy regime preserved elements of sovereignty, Jews without French citizenship were about 10 times more likely to be deported than those with citizenship. In the Netherlands, where the queen and government fled and the SS controlled domestic policy, about three-quarters of Dutch Jews were killed. Hungary resisted deportations until the German invasion of March 1944, when approximately 437,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz.

The final chapters examine rescue. Snyder argues that the most effective rescuers possessed some connection to a state. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat sent to Budapest in 1944, issued approximately 15,000 "protection passports" and probably saved more Jews than any other individual. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, aided by Polish intelligence officers, issued approximately 3,500 visas to Polish citizens, about two-thirds of them to Polish Jews. Żegota, an umbrella rescue organization in Warsaw funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, aided approximately 4,000 Jews in hiding. Snyder also examines individuals who rescued without institutional support, finding that such rescuers described their actions as simply normal, invoking norms that no longer existed around them.

In his conclusion, Snyder connects the Holocaust to contemporary threats. Climate change could produce ecological panic exploitable by demagogues, and the dominant stereotype of Nazi Germany as an all-powerful state is factually wrong: Almost all Holocaust victims were citizens of other countries, and all major German crimes took place where state institutions had been destroyed. The answer to totalitarianism is not anarchy but thoughtful, plural institutions; confidence in duration is the antidote to panic.