Timothy Snyder has done something very unique in Bloodlands:
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. He has
combined the history of these two totalitarian states, and their murderous political,
military, and social policies, into one.
In the process, he shows how National Socialism and Communism, despite their
antipathy, were complimentary in many, if not most regards. Both were driven by the Utopian visions of Stalin
and Hitler, who had no compunction of building their visions on piles of
corpses.
Both men, and their systems, were also selective in their
culling and creating of facts to justify failure.
You could never lose, even if it was your own fault, when your enemies
were always ready to destroy you; when you could find people to accuse and murder. Poland, Belarus, the Ukraine, and Jewish people, become both the
enemy and the victim. The numbers of victims are staggering.
For anyone interested in Holocaust studies, this book is
vital. By studying the wider range of
Soviet and German mass murder in the 1930s and 1940s, Synder provides a new
view to an already well-researched topic.
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