Black Earth

A deep exploration of the ideas and politics of the Holocaust – and the uncomfortable lessons it holds for us today.

The Holocaust is often viewed through the death factories of Auschwitz and the bureaucracy of mass murder. Yet by the time the first gas chambers became operational, more than a million Jews had already been shot over pits and ravines in the lawless killing zones created by the German colonial war in the east.

Black Earth places the Nazi extermination of the Jews inside the political destruction of eastern Europe. It asks why Jews were more vulnerable in some places than others, and how citizenship, institutions, occupation and the removal of state protection shaped chances of survival.

Timothy Snyder also returns to Hitler’s obsession with land and food showing how racial ideology and the pursuit of Lebensraum turned eastern Europe into bloodlands.

By making the political conditions of mass murder more intelligible, Snyder challenges our comforting belief that the Holocaust belongs to circumstances that can never recur. As ideological and environmental challenges mount today, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to think.

'Wholly readable and utterly persuasive’ Observer