Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

The actions were the advance creation of racial or hybrid institutions whose major task was state destruction; the undertaking of aggressive war, permitting these institutions to fulfill their mission beyond their own homeland and in a permissive environment; the fact of state destruction, the removal of political capacity, the murder of leading classes, and the redefinition of such actions as law; the solicitation of collaboration, which was effective when it involved the exploitation of political resources created by an earlier state destroyer, but which always required the exploitation of existing local police forces, cut off from previous authority or eager to prove their loyalty after previous collaboration; the mobilization of psychological resources such as the release from humiliation and the gratification of the desire for revenge; the exploitation of greed, the material resource, enabled by ongoing or prior elimination of property rights; the recruitment of German institutions beyond those originally tasked with killing civilians; the exploitation of fragments of institutions remaining from earlier destructions of states.