Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

In Hitler’s “struggle for the riches of nature,” it was a sin not to seize everything possible, and a crime to allow others to survive. Mercy violated the order of things because it allowed the weak to propagate. Rejecting the biblical commandments, said Hitler, was what human beings must do. “If I can accept a divine commandment,” he wrote, “it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’

For Hitler the bringer of the knowledge of good and evil on the earth, the destroyer of Eden, was the Jew. It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves. It was the Jew who introduced the false distinction between politics and nature, between humanity and struggle. Hitler’s destiny, as he saw it, was to redeem the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the paradise of blood. Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.

Hitler’s basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption.

Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.

Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion. Both capitalism and communism were Jewish.

Nature had only two variants: the paradise in which higher races slaughter the lower, and the fallen world in which supernatural Jews deny higher races the bounty they are due and starve them when possible.

In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control.

When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany’s only opportunity for colonization was Europe, he discarded as impractical the possibility of a return to Africa. The search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in eastern Europe as well. In the nineteenth century, after all, the major arena of German colonialism had been not mysterious Africa but neighboring Poland.

Yet in one respect, colonialism in eastern Europe had to differ from the American slave trade or the conquest of Africa. It required two feats of imagination: the wishing away not just of peoples but also of political entities that were similar to the German state. Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both nations and their governments. It was always legitimate to destroy states; if they were destroyed, that meant that they should have been destroyed.

Hitler’s interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish project was far from unusual: Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson saw it the same way, at least at first.

second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.

The Jews behind the lines, in places under German control, would have to be exterminated. This latent potential within Hitler’s ideas was realized in practice: Jews were not killed in large numbers first in Berlin, but on the frontiers of German power in the Soviet East. As the tide of war turned, the mass killing moved west from the occupied Soviet Union to occupied Poland and then to the rest of Europe. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to justify a preemptive strike on a certain valuable territory against an inherently planetary enemy. It linked the elimination of the Jews to the subjugation of the Slavs. If this connection could be established in theory and Germans thrust eastward into war, Hitler could hardly fail in practice. Failure to conquer Slavs would make the case for exterminating Jews.

A single attack on a single state, the Soviet Union, could solve all the problems of the Germans at the same time. The destruction of Soviet Jews would mean the removal of Jewish power, which would allow the creation of an eastern empire, which would mean the replay of American frontier history in eastern Europe. The racial German empire would revise the global order and begin the restoration of nature on a planet polluted by Jews. If the war was won, Jews could be eliminated as convenient. If Germans were somehow held back by inferior Slavs, then Jews would bear the consequences. Either way, the pursuit of racial empire would bring the politics of Jewish eradication.

The most important aspect of the camps was the precedent they set. The concentration camp system within Germany in the 1930s was not very expansive—German colonial facilities in the 1890s were comparable, and the contemporary Soviet Gulag was more than a hundred times larger. German camps were chiefly important as a demonstration that organs of coercion could be separated by the Führer’s will and barbed wire from the law and the state. In this sense the concentration camps were training grounds for the more general SS mission beyond Germany: the destruction of states by racial institutions.

Most Germans did not see Jews in their daily life, and were not particularly good at distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. To make a new racial optic was to consolidate the German national community, the Volksgemeinschaft.

As of 1938, Jews could not exercise any commercial, medical, or juridical function in Germany. The steady disappearance of Jews from public life was meant to spur Jews to leave Germany and to revise the worldviews of Germans. In everyday life, measures directed against Jews forced Germans to think about Jews, to notice Jews, and to define themselves as “Aryans,” as members of a group that excluded the Jews with whom they shared the country.

With a few hundred exceptions, Germans would not kill German Jews on the territory of their common prewar homeland. Germans beyond Germany, invading and occupying neighboring countries, and meeting Jews in places where political authority had been removed and the Jews had no protection, often described them in the impersonal way prescribed by propaganda. Jews beyond Germany were the overwhelming majority of the victims of the Holocaust. The globalization of racism succeeded when combined with world war.

the redefinition of war. His version of militarism went beyond preparation for conventional wars, as in the Balkans. He intended not just to take territory that might be portrayed as ethnically contiguous, as in the Balkan Model, but to destroy entire states and master entire races. “Our border,” as the SS slogan went, “is blood.” In 1938, Hitler did away with the position of minister of war, and took personal command of the armed forces. Himmler, Göring, Heydrich, and the other Nazi leaders planned a war of extermination, starvation, and colonization in eastern Europe.

In the five years between the signing of the German-Polish declaration in January 1934 and the clear break in German-Polish relations that would come in January 1939, Poles in the Soviet Union were subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The first wave of deportations of Soviet Poles from border regions of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus began a few weeks after the German-Polish declaration was signed and continued until 1936. Then Polish communists in the Soviet Union were depicted as participants in a vast Polish conspiracy to undo the Soviet order. Their interrogation led to the “discovery” of this “plot,” which then became the justification for the Polish Operation of 1937 and 1938—the largest and bloodiest of the Soviet ethnic actions during the Great Terror of those years. More than a hundred thousand Soviet citizens were shot as ostensible Polish spies. This was the largest peacetime ethnic shooting campaign in history. As the Polish Operation began, Stalin said that he wanted the “Polish-espionage slime” to be destroyed “in the interests of the USSR.” When the chance came to destroy the Polish state itself, he would seize it. Poland was the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population, more than three million people. The annihilation of their polity would be crucial to their fate.

Unlike the Nazi regime, the Polish government did not present Jews as the hidden hand responsible for global crises and therefore for all of Poland’s woes. Jews were portrayed, rather, as human beings whose presence was economically and politically undesirable. The vision of a future Poland without most of its Jews was certainly antisemitic, but this was not an antisemitism that identified Jews with the fundamental ecological or metaphysical evils of the planet. Unlike in Germany, there was meaningful opposition. The Polish Socialist Party, the largest political party in Warsaw, opposed the government line, as did the mayor of Warsaw. The Jewish political party known as the Bund, committed to socialism in Europe and to Jews remaining in Poland, did extremely well in the 1938 local elections. For that matter, the Jewish share in the Polish economy was greater in 1938 than it had been when the Great Depression began. The undeniable liveliness of Jewish commerce and politics as the 1930s came to an end made Poland quite different from Germany.

Most important was what the Poles did not understand. They could not grasp a special feature of Nazi thought: the aim to do something difficult or even impossible, in the secret knowledge that failure would prepare the way to something still more radical. The geopolitical vision of the Poles failed them here. They could not see that for the Nazis “Madagascar” was not simply a place, but a label, a bookmark in a burning book. It was synonymous with a Final Solution; or, in Himmler’s words, with “the complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” For the Poles, Madagascar was an actual island in the actual Indian Ocean, an actual possession of the actual French empire, an actual site of an actual exploratory mission, a subject of actual political discussions, one of two places (along with Palestine) that were seriously considered as destination points for a mass migration of Polish Jewry. Polish leaders did not grasp that for the Nazis the issue was not the feasibility of one deportation plan, but the creation of general conditions under which Jews could be destroyed one way or another. Given their own obsession with the idea of statehood, Poles could not see that a bloody whirlwind of improvisation was coming, where German aggression would destroy polities, opening pathways toward the unthinkable. German leaders would later continue to speak of “Madagascar” even after their men had killed the Jews who were supposed to emigrate there.

There had been no Austrian Nuremberg Laws, no restrictions of Jews in public life, no exclusion of Jews from society. Until the day of Schuschnigg’s address, Jews had been equal citizens. Jews had an important role in the economy, and some had performed important functions in the regime. The end of the Austrian state brought violence against Austrian Jews in five weeks that was comparable to the suffering that German Jews had endured under Hitler over the course of five years.

In July 1938, representatives of thirty-two countries, led by the United States, discussed Jewish emigration at Évian-les-Bains in France. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to take any Jews.

Hitler’s notion that a threat to exterminate Jews would influence the future policy of the great powers was erroneous. The January 30, 1939, “prophecy,” as Hitler would call it in later speeches, had no resonance in Paris, London, or Moscow. What did matter was the continuation of German aggression in Czechoslovakia a few weeks later.

The joint invasion of Poland, Stalin said, meant a friendship with Germany sealed “in blood.” Much of the blood shed in wartime Poland would be that of Jewish civilians, including three hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw.

The creation of ghettos in the cities meant a basic transformation of the Polish landscape. Jews, who had been almost everywhere in prewar Poland, were now concentrated in a small number of urban neighborhoods. This made possible the theft by Germans of all of the Jewish property that they could take (as well as the rape of Jewish girls and women). The signal to the surrounding population was unambiguous. Jews had often been beyond the world of moral concern in interwar Poland; now they were beyond the reach of law and indeed the ambit of daily life. By the time ghettos were established and Jews deported to them, their Polish neighbors had been pauperized by German rule for about a year. This presumably made Poles more likely to steal from Jews when the opportunity arose. As was the case everywhere, people in Poland tended to hate those from whom they stole because they had stolen from them.

the black hole for the Jews migrated from one obscure and exotic imperial locale to another, from the tropical maritime south to the frozen tundra of the north. Hitler imagined that the Soviet state would be crushed in a few weeks, and that its Jews, and perhaps other Jews as well, could then be dispatched to Siberia. About this, too, he was mistaken. But erring was an essential part of Nazi logic. The Führer could never be wrong; only the world could be wrong; and when it was, the fault would be borne by the Jews.

When the Germans and the Soviets undertook their joint invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Soviets were the senior partners in political violence. The Soviet secret state police, the NKVD, had experience in mass killing that was unrivalled by any German institution. Some 681,692 Soviet citizens had been arrested, shot, and buried in pits in the operations of the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present, and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.

As Germany undid Austria and Czechoslovakia, as the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and as the two together destroyed Poland, Schmitt prepared the legal theory of statelessness. It began from the axiom that international law arises not from norms but from power. Rules are interesting only insofar as they reveal who can make exceptions to them.

Affirming the end of the state meant applying the law of the jungle and presenting it as actual law. Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle. The same case was made, in different ways, by other Nazi legal thinkers, such as Viktor Bruns and Edgar Tartarin-Tarnheyden.

The Holocaust has ingrained racial stereotypes in our own minds; but no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered. A stereotype of Germans is that they are orderly and follow plans. Yet when the invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, Berlin had no plan for the mass extermination of Soviet Jews, let alone for all Jews under German control. One notion was that Soviet Jews would be sent to Siberia after a quick and triumphant military campaign against the Red Army. There was no discussion of a Final Solution to take place during the war, nor could there have been, since German leaders took for granted that the war would take weeks and the Final Solution years.

Antisemitism cannot fully explain the behavior of the members of the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen sent into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 did not kill Jews. The Einsatzgruppen sent into Poland in 1939 killed far more Poles than Jews. Even the Einsatzgruppen sent into the USSR killed others besides Jews. Throughout the occupation of the Soviet Union they murdered the disabled, Gypsies, communists, and, in some regions, Poles. There were for that matter no Germans (or collaborators) whose only task was to shoot Jews; everyone who was expected to shoot Jews was also expected to shoot others, and did so. Among the thousands of members of the Einsatzgruppen and the tens of thousands of Germans who shot Jews there is no known perpetrator who agreed to kill Jews but refused to kill Gypsies or Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war. Nor were there perpetrators who agreed to kill Belarusian civilians or Soviet prisoners of war or Gypsies but not Jews. The people who killed people, killed people.

the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded.

The notion that local east European antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe confers upon others a sense of superiority akin to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to think. Not only does this account fail as an explanation of the Holocaust; its racism prevents us from considering the possibility that not only Germans and Jews but also local peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and the lifting of individual agency.

The lie that the Germans told to the Poles through posters and megaphones—that Jews were communists and communists Jews—was told back to the Germans by the Poles in cinders and ash.

It was in the consecutively occupied lands of Lithuania and Latvia that the Holocaust began. Unlike in eastern Poland, in Lithuania and Latvia the apparently chaotic killing did escalate to a systematic Final Solution. At the end of 1941 the vast majority of Polish Jews were still alive, but almost all Lithuanian and Latvian Jews were dead.

Lithuanian communist youth held in prison were told that the price of freedom was a certain demonstration of loyalty to their country: They had to kill one Jew. Jewish communists, like Jews in general, could not join the Lithuanian Activist Front. No matter how patriotic or loyal to Lithuania a Jew might have been, he was now excluded from Lithuanian politics. In summer and fall 1941, large numbers of Jews who had little to do with the Soviet occupation were murdered by large numbers of Lithuanians who had participated in it.

The Nazi conviction that Jews were inhuman and east Europeans were subhuman could not provide anything like a technique to destroy the former and subjugate the latter. Only through politics could people be brought to do what the Germans could not do on their own: physically eliminate large numbers of Jews in a very brief period of time. Lithuania had shown what was politically possible; Latvia would reveal what was technically feasible.

Of the sixty-six thousand or so Jews living in Latvia in summer 1941, the Arājs Kommando shot about twenty-two thousand, and then assisted in the killing of some twenty-eight thousand more. Like other murderers serving German policy, and like the German murderers themselves, they killed whom they were assigned to kill. Like all of the mass murderers of Jews, they also murdered non-Jews. As they moved through the country, they shot patients of psychiatric hospitals, for example. After most of the Latvian Jews had been killed, the Arājs Kommando was dispatched to combat Soviet partisans, which in practice meant shooting Belarusian civilians.

The policemen learned to kill Jews very quickly, some writing letters home within weeks in which they took for granted the necessity of the murder of all Jews. The Germans themselves probably did not expect such rapid self-radicalization.

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, women, and men were shot behind the lines, on what had been Soviet territory, as the German army battled the Red Army. The method of killing was perfected in late 1941, as the German attack upon the supposedly Jewish state was halted. The war on the Jews was being won, as the war against the USSR was being lost. The state destroyers of the SS could say that they were succeeding where all others had failed.

It transpired after June 1941 that almost every German who was ordered to shoot a civilian, Jewish or otherwise, would obey that order—even though asking to be spared from such duties brought no consequences beyond peer pressure.

The main political lesson of those experiences, however, had been submission. For the most part, the people who made the murder of Jews possible were simply products of the Soviet system, following a new line, adapting to a new master. The hunt for surviving Jews, ordered by the mayor, was carried out under the banner of the elimination of “Jewish-Communist and bandit-Bolshevik trash.” This language is a hybrid of Soviet form and Nazi content.

Later, when Soviet power returned, people switched sides again. From that point forward the memory of typically Soviet places such as the Donets Basin has been dominated by a Soviet myth of anti-fascism, in which all Soviet citizens suffered equally under and struggled valiantly against German rule. This is just as true, which is to say just as false, as the wartime myth of anti-communism. The myth of Judeobolshevism in 1941 allowed Soviet citizens to separate themselves from their Jewish neighbors; the myth of the Great Fatherland War against Nazi Germany allowed them to separate themselves from their murder of their Jewish neighbors.

To shoot Jewish babies in Mahileu was, as one German (Austrian) explained to his wife, to prevent something worse: “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.”

By the end of 1941, the Germans, with help from Soviet citizens, had killed some one million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The Einsatzgruppen had improvised techniques of killing and perfected their political approach to local populations. Along with the Order Police and the Wehrmacht, they were moving imperceptibly toward a full implementation of the Judeobolshevik logic—which imperceptibly had become a way of covering defeat rather than of bringing about victory. They could not bring down the Soviet state, but they could kill Jews where they had demolished Soviet institutions.

The war of colonization against the Slavs, though it continued, was yielding to the war of elimination of the Jews.