Bloodlands

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder, first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010. In the book, Snyder examines the political, cultural and ideological context tied to a specific area of land, under which the regimes of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass killing of an estimated 14 million non-combatants between the years 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region which comprised what is modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states, is the area where the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than any seen in western history. Snyder notes similarities between the two totalitarian regimes, while also noting enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and suffering brought to bear on non-combatants. Making use of many new primary and secondary sources from eastern Europe, Snyder brings scholarship to many forgotten, misunderstood, or incorrectly remembered parts of the history, particularly noting that most victims were killed outside the concentration camps of the respective regimes. Snyder estimates that the Nazis were responsible for about twice as many noncombatant killings as Stalin's regime.