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Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2012

THOMAS KÜHNE
THOMAS KÜHNE*
Affiliation:
Clark University, Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA; tkuehne@clarku.edu
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Extract

Scholarship is not only about gaining new insights or establishing accurate knowledge but also about struggling for political impact and for market shares – shares of public or private funds, of academic jobs, of quotations by peers, and of media performances. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands fights for recentring contemporary European history.1 No longer, his new book implies, should the centre of that history be Germany, which initiated two world wars and engaged with three genocides; even less should the centre be Western Europe, which historians for long have glorified as the trendsetter of modernity; and the Soviet Union, or Russia, does not qualify as ‘centre’ anyway. Introducing ‘to European history its central event’ (p. 380) means to focus on the eastern territories of Europe, the lands between Germany and Russia, which, according to Snyder, suffered more than any other part from systematic, politically motivated, mass murder in the twentieth century. The superior victimhood of the ‘bloodlands’ is a numerical one. Fourteen million people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the territories of what is today most of Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic States did not become just casualties of war but victims of deliberate mass murder. Indeed, this is ‘a very large number’ (p. 411), one that stands many comparisons: ten million people perished in Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the Nazi death camps, which were located within the ‘bloodlands’), 165,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust (p. ix), and even the number of war casualties most single countries or territories counted in the Second World War was smaller.

Type
Forum: Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , May 2012 , pp. 133 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

2 Bartov, Omer, ‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), 557–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Bartov, Omer, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 Nolte, Ernst, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propylaën Verlag, 1987)Google Scholar; cf. Baldwin, Peter, ed., Reworking The Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Evans, Richard, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989)Google Scholar.

5 See Efraim Zuroff, ‘A Dangerous Nazi-Soviet equivalence’, guardian.co.uk, 29 Sept. 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/29/secondworldwar-holocaust; Dovid Katz, ‘Why Red is not Brown in the Baltics’, ibid., 30 Sept. 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/30/baltic-nazi-soviet-snyder (both last visited 15 May 2011).

6 Timothy Snyder, ‘The Fatal Fact of the Nazi-Soviet Pact’, ibid., 5 Oct. 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/05/holocaust-secondworldwar, accessed 15 May 2011.

7 Efraim Zuroff, ‘The Equivalency Canard’, haaretz.com, 11 May 2011, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/books/the-equivalency-canard-1.361051, accessed 15 May 2011.

8 See the list in Snyder, Bloodlands, p. xv.

9 See for instance, Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997)Google Scholar; idem, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); Figes, Orlando, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

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12 Grosman, Vasily, Life and Fate (London: Collins Harvill, 1985)Google Scholar, and Everything Flows (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

13 This particular meaning is mentioned only in an appendix at the end of the book, 413, where Snyder dismisses the term, partly because it has given ‘rise to inevitable and intractable controversies’. Are we really to dismiss a concept (and with it a broad range of enormously powerful research) because it has invited controversies? See also the misleading remarks on the concept of ‘genocide’ in Snyder, ‘The Fatal Fact of the Nazi-Soviet Pact’.

14 Groscurth, Helmuth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1938–40. Mit weiteren Dokumenten zur Militäropposition gegen Hitler, ed. Krausnick, Helmut and Deutsch, Harold C. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1970), 534–42Google Scholar; Müller, Rolf-Dieter and Volkmann, Hans-Erich, eds, Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999)Google Scholar; Heer, Hannes and Naumann, Klaus, eds, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000)Google Scholar; Lieb, Peter, ‘Täter aus Überzeugung? Oberst Carl von Andrian und die Judenmorde der 707. Infanteriedivision 1941/42’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 50 (2002), 523–57Google Scholar; Hartmann, Christian, ‘Verbrecherischer Krieg—verbrecherische Wehrmacht? Überlegungen zur Struktur des deutschen Ostheeres 1941–1944’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52 (2004), 1–76Google Scholar; Wette, Wolfram, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Kühne, Thomas, ‘Male Bonding and Shame Culture: Hitler's Soldiers and the Moral Basis of Genocidal Warfare’, in Jensen, Olaf, Szejnmann, Claus-Christian W. and Davies, Martin L., eds, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 55–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kühne, , Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918–1945 (Yale University Press, New Haven), 95–136Google Scholar.

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17 A starting point was the critique of the ahistorical and deindividualising interpretation by Sofsky, Wolfgang, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, see Bartov, Omer, Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 99–121Google Scholar; see also von Trotha, Trutz, ed., Soziologie der Gewalt (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997)Google Scholar, and the comments in Kühne, Thomas, ‘Massen-Töten: Diskurse und Praktiken der kriegerischen und genozidalen Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Gleichmann, Peter R. and Kühne, Thomas, eds, Massenhaftes Töten: Kriege und Genozide im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen: Klartext, 2004), 11–52Google Scholar.

18 Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide’, 576.

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20 Gourevitch, Philip, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998), 95Google Scholar. Cf. Doubt, Keith, Understanding Evil: Lessons from Bosnia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bloxham, Donald, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, and idem, The Years of Extermination.

23 Kühne, Belonging and Genocide.

24 ‘Plunder and social advancement’ as (sort of universal?) concomitant of mass killing is briefly mentioned only in the conclusion of the book, 395.

25 See the project description of Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires Since 1848, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, http://www.watsoninstitute.org/borderlands/ (last visited 12 May 2011).

26 For instance: Gaunt, David, Levine, Paul A., and Palosuo, Laura, eds, Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Berne: Peter Lang, 2004)Google Scholar; Dean, Martin, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rein, Leonid, ‘Local Collaboration in the Execution of the “Final Solution” in Nazi Occupied Belorussia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20 (2006), 381–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide’, 571–7. For a (cruel) anecdote on how the desire for community and purification fuelled local collaboration, see Kühne, Belonging and Genocide, 80–1.

27 Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)Google Scholar; Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See, for instance, Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Gellately, Robert, eds, Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

29 An excellent contribution to this task is Prusin, Alexander V., The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands 1970–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.