T
he story of the gallant people of Denmark saving their Jewish fellow citizens from the Nazis is one of the 20th century’s most heart-warming. It also administers an implied rebuke to other nations whose Jewish populations perished: Why didn’t your rulers volunteer to wear the yellow star, as Denmark’s king reputedly pledged to do? Black Earth, Timothy Snyder’s important and troubling new study of the Nazi Holocaust, seeks to refute the rebuke.
The Netherlands, for example, had a history of tolerance and liberalism unrivaled anywhere on the continent of Europe, Denmark included. In February 1941, Dutch workers actually went on strike to protest the deportation of Jews, an astounding act of courage and humanity. Yet the overwhelming majority of Dutch Jews were murdered at the hands of the Nazis.
By sorry contrast, French history was notoriously disfigured by anti-Semitism. The Vichy collaborationist authorities sympathized with Nazi ideology and willingly handed over to the Nazis thousands of Jewish refugees. And yet, of those Jews who held French citizenship in 1940, a majority survived the Holocaust. Despite the abundant anti-Semitism of Bulgaria’s ruling regime, three-quarters of that country’s Jews survived. So did nearly 80 percent of the Jews of Fascist Italy. In Hungary, an active Nazi ally, nearly all Jews survived until the spring of 1944. Almost half of Hungary’s Jews remained alive at the end of the war.
Conversely, the Jews of Estonia suffered the highest murder rate in all Europe, notwithstanding Estonia’s prewar record of outstanding toleration and equal rights for Jewish citizens.
Snyder wants us to understand that what determined whether a nation’s Jews lived or perished in Nazi-dominated Europe was not the sympathy of the local people, but the amount of autonomy retained by the local government. No matter how little a Nazi ally cared for Jews, it cared a great deal that it be sovereign over its own territory. So long as that Nazi ally hoped to sustain any independent authority at all, it had to insist that its own officials and its own police deal with its own citizens, including its Jewish citizens. It might choose to murder those citizens itself, as Romania chose. It might choose to withdraw its protection from some residents, and hand them over to the Nazis, as Vichy France chose. It might enact its own discriminatory laws but halt at murder, as Fascist Italy did. But the moment a government allowed Nazi forces to maraud at will over its territory, that government had surrendered its independent existence. Only where the Nazis ruled directly—as they did in the Netherlands after 1940 and in Italy and Hungary after 1943 and 1944 respectively—could violence be loosed without limit. That bureaucratic fact meant the difference between life and death for the Jews of Denmark and the Netherlands, for those of Bulgaria and those of Estonia.
And where the Nazis smashed and overthrew the state altogether—as was the case in Poland and the western Soviet Union—there was the center of the Holocaust.
In Snyder’s words: “The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity of prewar citizenship. These structures created the matrix within which individual choices were made, the constraints upon those who did evil, and the possibilities for those who wished to do good.” Those who did the most good in Holocaust Europe were precisely those who could offer access to the rights of citizenship. Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese consul in Vienna, issued at least 1,000 visas good for travel to Shanghai after the Anschluss of 1938. In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, saved some 8,000 lives (two-thirds of them Jewish) by issuing travel visas that allowed the bearers to traverse the Soviet Union and exit for the Dutch island of Curaçao. After the fall of Paris in 1940, the Spanish and Portuguese consuls in Bordeaux issued many thousands of visas to fleeing French Jews. Most famously, Raoul Wallenberg issued Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews and offered them sanctuary within Swedish embassy buildings. The Nazis did not respect much, but they respected paperwork.
These bureaucratic “gray saviors” are the lurking protagonists within Black Earth. Their story forms the necessary counterpoint to Snyder’s understanding of the zone of total murder in what he called the “bloodlands” between Berlin and Moscow in his famous 2010 book of that name.
In the bloodlands, where there were no states and no law, mass slaughter could occur on a scale that was precluded even within Germany itself. It was not only Jews whose legal rights were annihilated. By expunging states altogether, the Nazis could impose total power on everyone, which enabled them to recruit local allies for their killing projects. A German soldier or policeman who refused to shoot Jewish women and children—or who shot some before becoming sickened by the task—would be excused to some other duty. A Ukrainian auxiliary who tried the same would be shot. A German civilian in Berlin who sheltered Jews would face imprisonment. A Polish civilian caught for doing so would be forced to witness the murder of his own family before his own death.
A world without a state was a world without property rights. The movable property that had belonged to the Jews of eastern Europe was seized by their killers. Their homes and apartments and farms were left behind for their neighbors, who thereby were made complicit in the killing and who might resort to anti-Semitic violence after the war to protect their acquisitions.
Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, does not blink at the complicity of many of those neighbors. But he wants to defend the peoples of eastern Europe from postwar insinuations that they shared in the guilt for the murders committed upon their lands. As Snyder stresses again and again, the nationalisms of eastern Europe proved to be as much a protection to Jews as they were a source of discrimination. Jews in turn often showed loyalty to the states in which they lived. The fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto raised the Polish flag alongside the blue-and-white Zionist banner. By Snyder’s estimate, more Jews would fight with the Polish Home Army in the uprising of 1944 than fought and died in the ghetto in 1943.
After the war, however, Soviet propaganda would accuse all eastern European nationalists of Fascism. Snyder writes:
In the Stalinist world of discourse, a “fascist” was not a Nazi or someone who had helped the Nazis; a “fascist” was someone who was deemed by the Stalinist regime not to be working in the interests of the Soviet Union. . . . The actual facts of the matter—who had fought against whom and who had collaborated with whom between 1939 and 1945—were largely irrelevant….Polish soldiers who had spent the whole war fighting the Germans were classified as fascists and sometimes even executed along with German prisoners. Meanwhile, Poles who had tortured and murdered Jews during the war joined the Polish communist party, which was re-established under Soviet tutelage, and became supporters of the new Soviet-backed communist regime in Poland.
Snyder recapitulates in Black Earth a point painstakingly documented in Bloodlands: The Nazis in 1941 recruited their local thugs from the ranks of former Soviet collaborators. The Soviets would do the reverse in 1945, and for the same reason: The guiltiest needed protection most.
Snyder’s subtitle describes his book as both a history and a warning. Black Earth is a very present-minded work, and Snyder’s last chapter seeks to develop from the Nazi experience a series of lessons for our own time. His contention here is unfortunate.
Since, he writes, Hitler’s ideology arose from Hitler’s (mistaken) vision of a planetary ecological struggle between races for survival, the possibility of future ecological crises threatens a revival of Hitlerian ideologies. Snyder is both a great historian and a lively journalist, but his adoption of this speculative notion marks the chapter in which it appears as one of his less successful projects.
Yet there are some contemporary lessons in his book very worth developing. For obvious reasons, certain ideologues like to represent their ideology as the precise opposite of and antidote to Nazism. Some of those who want to argue for minimal government represent Nazism as the ultimate embodiment of Big Government. Some of those who reject nation-states and national borders identify Nazism as the most extreme form of nationalism.
But while Hitler’s party was unquestionably named “National Socialist,” Hitler himself was something else entirely. As Snyder writes:
Although Hitler needed to control the German state, its expansion was not really his goal; although he understood the uses of nationalism, he was not really a nationalist…The Nazi party was founded on the assumption of endless racial conflict, whereas any traditional state asserts the right to control and limit violence….After the takeover of 1933, [the Nazis] became entrepreneurs of violence, looking for ways and means of murder that would serve the larger project of racial empire….German institutions were altered in part to transform Germans, but mainly to prepare the way for an unprecedented kind of violence beyond Germany….The German army would prepare the way by defeating armies, and then the SS would restore the natural racial order by destroying states and eliminating human beings.
It was not only non-German states whose governments were to be destroyed. It was in Austria, not Poland, that the Nazis discovered that “the most effective way to separate Jews from the protection of the state was to destroy the state.” Despite later stereotypes, the Nazis had zero patience for the punctilious Prussian way of doing things. The Third Reich was famously uncertain about who had power to issue orders, or even who had issued such orders as had already been executed.
This may sound bizarre at first hearing, but Snyder insists that Hitler was not a “statist.” From 1933 onward, Hitler and his followers systematically weakened the institutions of the state: not only the police, but also social-welfare agencies—and even ultimately the army. The state-builders of Europe’s past sought to curb the power of non-state actors, especially the church and the feudal nobility. The Nazi regime encouraged the flow of power from the state to non-state actors, like Himmler’s SS empire. His vision for the future was both strikingly modern and grimly premodern: a technological consumer society supported by a feudal slave empire stretching toward the Volga, a society in which the right to command would be decided always in the last resort by the ability to deploy violence, rather than by the rules and bureaucracy of the pre-Hitler German state.
Nor was Hitler a nationalist. As defeat loomed, he accepted catastrophe as the Germans’ just deserts. Snyder says that Hitler himself learned from the results of the war that “the Germans were not, in fact, a master race.” He says Hitler viewed the war as a test of German character, and that the Germans failed it: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man,” he quotes Hitler saying. “I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Snyder writes: “In the end, Hitler decided, ‘the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.'” Indeed, so disgusted was he by the behavior of the failed master race that he issued final orders to destroy every bridge, power plant, and other facility necessary for postwar survival and reconstruction in the Reich—an order mercifully ignored.
Nationalism was instead the force that inspired resistance to Nazi power throughout Europe—including the uniquely maligned form of nationalism known as Zionism. The essence of nationalism is the acceptance of the reality of other nations. This fundamental grammar of nationality undergirds one of the most fascinating sub-narratives in Black Earth: Snyder’s highly detailed account of the long clandestine collaboration between the Polish state and Zionist militants. He reports that “anti-Semitism likely had more popular resonance in Poland than in Germany, at least before 1933, but no one with ideas similar to Hitler’s came close to achieving power in Warsaw.” This led to a nationalist paradox: “Whereas German policy involved the destruction of states where Jews lived, Polish policy sought the construction of a state for the Jews. The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by a League of Nations Mandate to the British Empire.”
In the summer of 2015, we heard much talk of how Germany was rehabilitating itself by overriding the sovereignty of other European countries to open Europe to a nationality-transforming mass migration from the Middle East. Ironically, this project—so widely praised as an atonement for Nazi crimes—will do injury to the very institutions and ideas that had impeded and annoyed the Nazis when they were on the loose: the right of states to define citizenship, self-government within national boundaries, the rule of law, and bureaucratic procedures. If we understood the Nazi horror more clearly, we might be less susceptible to those who misremember the past to mislead us in the present. Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth, like Bloodlands before it, is an indispensable contribution to that clearer understanding.
