My Random Bloodlands Notes

Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe

Notes from reading Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Originally written in 2010, but with a new Afterword that was published after the 2020 election.

Stolpenstein: Small street plaques with the names of Jews who were taken from their homes and murdered

Preface - describes the difference between the concentration camps and killing sites. (he makes a big distinction because some times the terms become interchangeable and they shouldn't be.

Mass killing is usually associated with rapid industrial killing.

xix - the mass killing of the twentieth century is of the greatest moral significance for the 21st century.

p.42 According the propaganda, the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he Stalin was the victim.

p.182. As many Soviet POWs died a single day in Autumn 1941 as did British-American POWs in the course of the 2nd World War

p.390. In the Nazi and Soviet party systems the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accept rules, it became the group that determined the rules.

p. 263. Jews more likely to die in a food shortage less likely in labor shortages. There was always a gruesome calculus balancing the Jewish manpower needed for forced labor and food supplies.

Auschwitz

Page 276

p. 383. Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue. I.G. Farben was the corporate sponsor of Auschwitz. Auschwitz had good supplies of water and connectivity to the rail network. (I.G. Farben would produce rubber there.)

Poland

p. 407 More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than the atomic bombing of Japan. The Germans murdered 4 million Poles during World War II.

Final Pages

In the final chapters, Snyder explains the importance of what he has written -- he cannot allow people to turn into numbers. (He includes grisly narratives of the few that survived mass shootings and death camps intermixed with his numbers). There numbers were very incomplete until just recently. Until the fall of the Berlin wall, these archives were not available. (Poland, Belarus, Ukraine). Sometimes these numbers were greater than actually were because of those who wanted to claim additional victimhood.