Overlooked atrocities

Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
By Timothy Snyder
(Basic Books, 2010,524 pages)

Does the world really need another book on the mass killings and crimes of the Second World War?  After reading Timothy Snyder's new book Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin the answer is a definite yes.  This powerful new book argues that there is more to understanding the mass killings of World War II than just the murder of Jews at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.  This engaging and well-researched piece of scholarship offers us a survey of the killing fields where more than 14 million people lost their lives as victims of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes between 1933 and 1945.  As Snyder states;  ''the image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over an unknown desert.''

Despite the countless investigations into Nazi mass killings and Soviet atrocities during World War II, Snyder feels that a central element in explaining such events has been underexplored.  This concerns the lives and deaths of the victims of mass killing who were not soldiers, or even concentration camp victims, but instead innocent and unarmed civilians in lands occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis and again by the Soviets.  They died as a result of the deliberate Ukrainian famines, the Great Terror of 1937-38 against the educated classes, and the mobile German hit-squads hunting in league with local militias.  It is these lands that Snyder defines as the Bloodlands:  more or less central and eastern Poland, St. Petersburg, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states.

By focusing on human geography rather than political geography, Snyder seeks ro replace the political uses of history with a humanistic account of the terrible sufferings that occurred there.  Bloodlands brings together Soviet and Nazi history, Jewish and non-Jewish history.  It is the story of the passage of 14 million people from life to death at the hands of two brutal authoritarian regimes.

Bloodlands offers us a chilling account of what happens when people lose control of their own destiny at the hands of tyrannical and ruthless government bureaucracies.  Snyder's diligent research offers us hundreds of emotionally wrenching individual snapshots of suffering, such as the story of the Polish children who begged their German captors not to unnecessarily cane them before being loaded onto the mobile death trucks which were waiting to take them to their graves.  Despite the massive numbers of dead, Snyder offers us not an abstraction, but a collection of personal stories, lives led, and then lost, under the assault of tyranny.  ''People were alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment.''

One of Snyder's key intentions in the book is to shatter what he calls the ''myths'' and ''overtheorising'' that has taken hold of World War II scholarship.  He wants us to understand the millions more deaths in the Bloodlands alongside those at Auschwitz.  He wants us to forget about comparing whether Stalin was worse than Hitler.  He wants us in the West to encounter the victims between the two regimes so that these myths will not distract us from understanding the lives and ultimately the deaths of a forgotten people.

On the whole he succeeds.  For example, unlike the suffering of Jews in films such as Schindler's List, most people who arrived at Auschwitz were never interred as labourers.  Instead, they were sent immediately on arrival to the gas chambers.  It is because of the harrowing survival stories of some survivors that the Holocaust registers as the apex of evil.  Yet the majority of Auschwitz victims never had a chance to tell their stories.  Neither did the half a million Poles and Ukrainians killed during Stalin's Great Terror.  Nor the three million Ukrainian peasants starved during Stalin's drive for collectivisation.

For Snyder, the preeminence of the Holocaust overshadows even more horrific forms of conceived mass killing -- the destruction of Poland and the Soviet Union as states, and the extermination of Slavs who had the gall to live on German agricultural ''lebensraum''.  They were not casualties of war as such, but in fact victims of their own regimes who sought to master history in pursuit of utopia.

The deadliest part of the Soviet Union was not the gulags of Siberia but its non-Russian periphery.  The well-known siege of Stalingrad starved thousands but was less deadly than the shootings and gassings in the Ukraine carried out by the SS Einsatzgruppen.  The concentration camps (as distinct from death facilities) are not where most of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism died.  Most people who laboured in the concentration camps and the Gulag actually survived.  Such ''misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century''.  None of the mass shooting sites and none of the gassing facilities were liberated by Americans.

These histories were consigned to obscurity as the Iron Curtain fell over Europe.  As the fourteen Soviet states began to reorganise themselves after the Cold War, they called upon their own national histories of victimhood for inspiration and strength.  These however were political stories.  Less well explained are the stories of the lives of the anonymous dead.  Bloodlands takes us on that journey.

Snyder successfully attempts to overcome the notion that the Nazis were efficient and industrious killers from the outset of the war.  It was only when the Germans could not transport Jews and other undesirables to the east following the unsuccessful Operation Barbarossa that German priorities changed definitively from military victory and transportation to racial extermination.  Industrial killing is too ''clean'' an image of mass killing, he says.  The giant crematoria did not arrive at Auschwitz until 1943 and most of its victims died in 1944.  In the Bloodlands the methods were more primitive.  Half of the 14 million victims died because of starvation.  The next most likely cause of death was shooting, then gassing.  Jews in the Holocaust were about as likely to be shot as gassed.  It was not just the SS but also the Wehrmacht and local militias that hunted down civilians.  Stalin's purges before the war were far more destructive than the well-known Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 in Germany.

Since World War II there has been a growing and controversial trend to incorporate other viewpoints in ''the history'' of nations.  These include women's histories, indigenous histories and other ''histories from below'' in the words of the famous Brirish historian EP Thomson.  Historians have proudly proclaimed themselves to be ''revisionists'', whilst others have lambasted attempts to ''rewrite history''.

''Subaltern histories'' often use oral sources and other ''fragments'' of documented information from victims to piece together an appreciation of life in a given time.  Often labelled ''selective'' by critics, memories of victimhood have not had the same esteem amongst scholars as more traditional sources such as archives and contemporaneous written accounts.  In selecting which memories to include in a work of history, writers such as Snyder choose what becomes history based on what best fits their line of argument or what is most convenient for their narrative.

The influential American literary theorist Hayden White even wrote that ''if it is not written, it is not history''.  To overcome such objections Bloodlands invites us to imagine that each and every victim of Nazi and Soviet atrocity had a personal story, regardless of whether it has been put to paper.  Rather than 680,000 people being killed in the Great Terror, Snyder refers instead to the 681,690 victims plus one.  Bloodlands harrowingly takes us through just a few hundred.  The identification of victimhood for each nation is consequently one of the central themes of the book, although Snyder becomes explicit on this point far too late in the book to give us sufficient time for reflection.

The well-documented historical memories and powerful activism of the Jewish community have helped place the Holocaust at the forefront of people's minds as the epitome of evil in the 20th century.

Recognition of suffering has also been a topical issue here in Australia ever since the 1997 Bringing them Home report into the separation of Aboriginal children from their mothers.  Scholars such as Raymond Gaita and Inga Clendinnen have argued that the dispossession of Aborigines should be considered genocide for a number of reasons, among them the recognition that would come from comparison with what is considered the ultimate genocide, the Holocaust of the Jews.

Critics of the ''genocide project'' have questioned however, whether such classifications would actually improve our understanding of what took place.  History seeks to explain the past, whilst politics uses history in the pursuit of power.  Some scholars have argued that the crimes of the Nazis were so horrendous that they should ''stand outside of history'' and historical comparison.

Bloodlands argues this is inappropriate given another ten million people died at the hands of Nazism and Stalinism and have had fewer advocates to tell their story.  More people died brutally at the hands of Stalin than did those cut down by Zyklon-B in the gas chambers, yer such stories do not register as clearly in the collective memory of the Second World War for us in the West.

Bloodlands successfully helps us recognise that if Hitler's war against the Soviets had gone to plan, some thirty million more lives would have been cut short.  This is the major achievement of this book.  For the political purpose of reconstituting nations such as Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states after both the Second World War and the Cold War, the ledger of horror has been kept alive in the fragmented accounts and stories of the victims.

Credit must go to Snyder for overcoming the limitations of individual ethnic or national histories in telling the stories of a region devastated by two horrendous alternative visions of the future.