September 9, 2015

Yale historian Timothy Snyder is among the world’s leading scholars of Eastern Europe. Educated at Oxford, he is the author of five award-winning books, including the acclaimed “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” about Nazi and Soviet mass killings in the 20th century. The book received the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Snyder’s latest work, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” explores the events, ideology and political machinery that made mass extermination possible. 

Danielle Berrin: What drew you to the subject of Eastern European history?

Timothy Snyder: The revolutions of 1989. That was the moment that drew me into Eastern Europe and I just stayed. With time, I came to realize that this thing — the Holocaust — was also an Eastern European history, and that it was the responsibility of people who work on Eastern Europe to make sense of the Holocaust; that this was, in a way, the central subject; that there was this kind of dark center to everything. 

DB: What has the world most misunderstood or not understood well enough about Hitler and his thinking?

TS: Hitler’s anti-Semitism is not really about Jews so much as it is about making sense of the world. So when we say that he’s an anti-Semite, that’s true, of course, but in some sense it’s not sufficient. He placed the responsibility on the Jews for all ideas of ethics, all ideas of science, anything that got in the way of making the world the bloody, competitive place that he thought it always was and should be in the future. His anti-Semitism is the matter of a complete worldview; he sees the world as a terrain with finite resources and life as a bloody, racial competition for those resources. He was a kind of anarchic thinker; he wasn’t concerned with making the German state big, strong, precise, bureaucratic and administrative — all these stereotypes we have in our heads — his view is that the state is secondary; the race is what matters. 

DB: How was Hitler able to sell this primitive race ideology — that basically ascribed all of humanity to a dog-eat-dog competition for resources — to a modern, civilized nation such as Germany? Was it his political genius or a more deeply rooted malaise in German society?

TS: Hitler was a very gifted politician. He was good at not revealing the extremity of his views when it wasn’t necessary to do so; it’s all there in the book [“Mein Kampf”], but in his public speeches, he would often be much less radical. Part of his idea is that German patriotism is a force that one has to manipulate in order to [compel] the Germans into the racial war. The second thing is, although Germany in the 1930s was a modern society, there was a very real and legitimate concern about food supplies. The country had been blockaded during the first world war, suffered during the Great Depression and was dependent upon international freight and food. [So] it’s a scenario where a functioning state has a population which is used to a certain standard of living and which is afraid of losing it. 

DB: You claim that the breakdown of states and institutions is what, on a practical level, enabled the mass extermination of Jews. Does that mean part of the answer is to shore up the nation-state system? Because in many parts of the world today, the nation-state is under attack.

TS: If we look at it statistically, we see that in places where the state was destroyed, Jews had a 1 in 20 chance of surviving. In places where the state wasn’t destroyed, it was about 1 in 2. Whenever you wipe out states, it is always ethnic minorities who end up getting treated the worst. I come to the conclusion that it’s important that states — even imperfect states — stand, because the process of destruction is harmful for everyone, but especially for minorities. 

DB: Any thoughts on why Jews, in particular, are subjected to history’s hatreds and persecutions repeatedly?

TS: The Jewish international conspiracy, although it is ridiculous as a factual matter, is a way of making a globalized world make sense. You have to think in planetary terms. Hitler’s anti-Semitism is not so much about the Jews in Germany, because there aren’t that many Jews in Germany — and they’re basically all assimilated — it’s about turning these individuals into a symbol of a world plot that one has to fight against. And that is characteristic of certain moments in world history.

DB: The Soviet Union plays an ambivalent role in the book. On the one hand, you write that the USSR “taught” the Nazis a lot about mass murder. But, on the other hand, the Red Army ultimately did more than any other force to stop them. How should we understand its role?

TS: Since the Soviet Union ended up fighting against Nazi Germany and also ended up being an American ally, the 1939 part of the story about the Soviet-German alliance generally gets swept under the rug. During the war, Americans obviously had no reason to point that out, because the Soviets were our most important ally. And then after the war, the Soviets themselves did a very good job of building up this myth of the liberation of Europe. But looking at this scientifically, you’re going to find all kinds of pieces that don’t really fit together, because that’s the way life is. Before the war, the Soviets had a policy of eliminating anti-Semitism and all other forms of ethnic discrimination. [But] when Germany actually invades the Soviet Union, it turns out that Soviet citizens are willing to collaborate in large enough numbers that the Holocaust can take place as a major shooting campaign [there]. Then it turns out that the major force resisting Hitler is the Red Army, and that [it] actually wins the war in large measure. It’s complicated. 

DB: Poland figures as an interesting case as well — sharing in the prevailing anti-Semitism of the day, but also, actively Zionistic, providing arms and military training to Polish Jews who eventually emigrated to Palestine and became the Irgun [a pre-Israel Defense Forces fighting force]. 

TS: The story about the relationship between the Polish government after 1935 and the origins of the State of Israel was a story worth telling, because it’s not very well known. In the Nazi case, you have this anti-Semitic elite that wants to destroy states, whereas in Poland, you have anti-Semitic politics, but the idea is never to destroy states, the idea is to support the building of a state for Jews. 

DB: Elie Wiesel once said that the lesson of the Holocaust is that you can get away with it. What would you say is the lesson?

TS: One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it’s not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we’re not so far away from the people in question. For me, it’s very important that we have a sense in human history how these things arise, because without that sense, we’re going to be vulnerable in the future.

DB: That’s exactly why “Never forget” became the post-Holocaust mantra of the Jews.

TS: Remembering is very important, but there’s the question of remembering “what?” And that’s where history comes in to complement memory. Remembering has to be more than just the individual and collective experience; it has to be an event that people can understand. 

DB: So what, then, do the historical realities of the 1930s tell us about the world we live in today?

TS: I see a couple of things that trouble me a lot. The first thing is ecological panic: What the 1930s show is that a developed, competent, modern, educated society can get into a situation where worries about standards of living can justify horrifying bloodshed. And we are now drifting toward a world where that kind of thing can very well become likely again, as [we see] poor societies becoming richer societies. The second trend is the state. Everyone seems to take the state for granted. In 2003, we casually did away with the Iraqi state, without really having anything to replace it with, and look how wonderful things are now. And Russia is nihilistically casual with the Ukrainian state, thinking it’s not really a real place. And if you look at our political dialogue in the U.S., there isn’t very much respect for the state either. And [all this] worries me. There is an atmosphere of dread, wherever you go almost — whether it’s Beijing or Tokyo or Kiev or Moscow or Berlin — there is this sense that things are making a turn in the wrong direction.