Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

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.