Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 8, 2015 by Timothy Snyder (Tim Duggan Books)

This book sets out to uncover some of the most important lessons to be learned from what really drove the Jewish holocaust to such cataclysmic murder rates. After researching aspects of the political circumstances immediately surrounding eastern Europe and Russia, and the social desires driving Hitler and his Nazi ideologies, the author reveals the truth about what can happen to citizens who live in areas where statehood has been demolished (due to war, occupation and so on), how all citizens are more vulnerable to being victims of mass genocide in holocaust proportions when the rule and protection of a state is lost or in great upheaval, much more so than citizens who dwell in a functioning state. Jews living in Germany, for example, which still existed as a state, were more likely to survive the holocaust than Jews living in European states that had been demolished by Russia or Germany, such as Poland and Ukraine.

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 resources they desperately needed.  Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself.  In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died.  A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions.  Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals.  The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic.  These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so.  


By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future.  The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order.  Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was -- and ourselves as we are.