It is impossible to address all of these issues within the framework of this review. Instead, Snyder insists again and again that Nazi camps in Europe-which grew to over 40,000, including not only the death camps, but also various concentration camps, forced labor camps and camps for POWs-were not that big of a deal. Also all but ignored is the massive forced labor complex that the Nazis established, which, in total, involved over 20 million slave laborers from across Europe, including not only the occupied Soviet Union and Poland but also countries like France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The state-led arrests and mass murder of communists and socialists by the Nazis in Germany and countries they occupied is not mentioned. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Archiwum Dokumentacji Mechanicznej The genocide of between a quarter and half a million European Sinti and Roma is not mentioned at all.Ī group of Romani prisoners in the Bełżec concentration camp. The systematic mass murder of an estimated 200,000 mentally ill and handicapped people, first in Nazi Germany and then in occupied Europe, is skipped over by Snyder in a single paragraph. Other victims of the genocidal policies by the Nazis are all but ignored as well. The murder of Dutch, French, Greek and Yugoslav Jews, as well as the annihilation of Hungary’s Jewish community of half a million people, are mentioned in a few sentences, if at all. Snyder persistently downplays the persecution of the Jewish population of Western and Southeastern Europe by the Nazis. For all the detailed descriptions of gassings and mass shootings in Bloodlands, Snyder offers the most systematic right-wing historical revision of the established understanding of the crimes of fascism in decades, outstripping anything that Ernst Nolte dared to do in the late 1980s. Perhaps the most disturbing component of the relativization of the crimes of fascism in Bloodlands is Timothy Snyder’s systematic distortions of the Nazi-led genocide of six million European Jews. Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books, 2022. There is also an accompanying timeline reviewing the critical historical background. This is part four of a five-part review of Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands.
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