Nazi, Soviet Killing Policies Presented in Bloodlands

By John Pidkowich

In his most recent book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, presented at St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto on January 26, Yale history professor and keynote speaker Timothy Snyder provides a history of Nazi and Soviet deliberate mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. The talk presentation and discussion was chaired by Dr. Olga Onuch, Petro-Jacyk Post-Doctoral Fellow, who moderated the academic discussants and questions from the audience which followed.

The presentation of Bloodlands was sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute (NYC), Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the University of Toronto, Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine (UofT), and Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (UCRDC) in Toronto.

In the presentation of his findings, Prof. Snyder’s investigation looks at the methods and policies put in place to carry out these mass atrocities, killing some 14 million people in the “bloodlands” and 17 million dead overall shared by both regimes between 1933-1945 and just after the end of World War II.  The Nazi and Soviet regimes side by side at their height reached across Europe and Asia from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans. German killing took place primarily on invaded lands beyond pre-War German Territory. Soviet killing predominantly took place on Soviet home territory with some occurring in wartime upon invasion of the Baltics, Poland and Western Ukraine.

Prof. Snyder divides the policies for killing into three periods. Pre-War Soviet policies between 1933-1939 is highlighted by a chapter on the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Soviet Ukraine, (1932) 1933 with victims in the millions. Then, particularly the landed Kulak peasantry, not only suffered through the famine and survived their “political experience”, but many returned from Siberia after five years in the Gulag, only to find themselves victim’s of Stalin’s Great Terror purging between 1937-39. The second period is defined by the duration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact starting WWII and the invasion of Poland in 1939. Both Soviet and German allies took joint action to eliminate the Polish military officer and “intelligentsia” classes. The Polish model of modernization was understood by both the Soviets and Germans, who each were trying to modernize their own regime and not stagnate, albeit approached differently. The third period of killing policies began with the breaking of the Soviet-Nazi pact and Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Between 1941-1945 until the end of the War, the “bloodlands” saw predominantly German killing of Jews, Slavs and others on invaded territories.

Upon Barbarossa, German assumptions made for the remainder of the War were recalled by Prof. Snyder in his presentation remarks: 1) war will be waged only for 9-12 weeks; 2) 30 million “colonial” people will be starved; 3) in the tens of millions, move in Germans on gained territory and move out remaining surviving Slavs beyond the Urals to be ruled over; and 4) exterminate the Jews. From the Soviet example of the Holodomor, and by the experience of captured POWs, Germans knew well that starvation worked only under effective total control. Hence, the great effect of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). In concentration camps, over 3 million captives not starved could be easily shot, including thousands of French Black soldiers from North Africa. Of note, it was not until the latter half of 1941 that Heinrich Himmler started to articulate the destruction of millions of Jews, first by shooting, and then increasingly by gassing and cremation.

Bloodlands ending chapter returns to Soviet atrocities in the Post War period (1945-47, approx.) by executions and Gulag sentences of Nazi “collaborators”, POWs and “repatriated citizens” from previously occupied German territories. Then Prof. Snyder brushes upon the rise of Soviet-era anti-Semitism and resultant ethnic cleansing in the former Soviet East Bloc, particularly with the collapse of Yugoslavia.

During remarks made by discussants, Prof. Doris Bergen said the reader of Bloodlands has to keep perspective on the intertwined nature of Nazi expansionist aspirations through colonial destruction, and Jewish extermination as “the final solution” for Jews to return no more. She underlined the position that German deliberate killing was the solution to “people problems” beyond that of the Jews, and included others such as partisans in Yugoslavia, Italy, etc. [and could be extended into the “bloodlands”]. Prof. Piotr Wrbel praised Snyder’s book but thought of it as a fine “History of Poland”. In his remarks, Prof. Paul Magocsi made some observations on Bloodlands, notably that the book raises the awareness of Central and East Europe and enhances the historic record on WWII. He warned, though disturbingly, that if any contemporary commemoration of victims brings more meaning to their killing, there is the risk that more killing could bring more such meaning.

In what followed, Prof. Snyder replied to a question taken from the audience on a “totalitarian comparison” of the Soviet and Nazi regimes.  He strssed that the book's central theme addresses the German and Soviet killing policies and offers comparisons and numbers in the final chapter. However, even to make the judgement that the two regimes are incomparable, itself would require that comparisons be made. Both Hitler and Stalin looked at people’s death simply as numbers. Statistical sources show these death numbers were annotated as a war event loss. Snyder added that the challenge is to turn “numbers” back into “people”, millions deliberately killed and not some casualty of war. When asked why in his book he does not refer to the Holodomor as genocide, Snyder took care to state that, in general, the “term has become inherently confusing and publicly useless”. By common popular definition of “genocide” – kill every man, women and child – NO; but by the UN legal definition coined by Rafael Lemkin – YES, the Holodomor is genocide of the Ukrainian people by Soviet perpetrators.

 
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Prof. Timothy Snyder