Bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010. In the book, Snyder examines the political, cultural and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass killings of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region that is now Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia, is the area that the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in western history. Snyder notes similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and also the enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and the suffering that were brought to bear on noncombatants. Making use of many new primary and secondary sources from Central and Eastern Europe, Snyder brings scholarship to many forgotten, misunderstood, or incorrectly-remembered parts of the history, and he particularly notes that most of the victims were killed outside the concentration camps of the respective regimes. The book earned many positive reviews and has been called "revisionist history of the best kind". It was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.