Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder

* In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes starved, shot and gassed fourteen million people in a zone of death between Berlin and Moscow. * These were the bloodlands - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast. In a twelve-year period - 1933 to 1945 - as a result of deliberate polices unrelated to combat, an average of more than a million civilians were murdered annually. At the end of the Second World War the bloodlands fell behind the iron curtain, leaving their history in darkness.* In this revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a groundbreaking investigation of Europe's killing fields and a sustained explanation of the motives and methods of both Hitler and Stalin. He anchors the history of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Terror in their time and place and provides a fresh account of the relationship between the two regimes. Using scholarly literature and primary sources in all relevant languages, Snyder pays special attention to the testimony of the victims: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.* Brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original, Bloodlands re-examines the greatest tragedy in European history and forces us to rethink our past.

Reviews

The stunning contribution of Tim Snyder’s book is to present a synthetic account by an East European historian in which the focus is on the geographic zone where the lethal policies of Hitler and Stalin interacted, overlapped, and mutually escalated one another. As Snyder vividly demonstrates, their combined impact on the people living in the 'bloodlands' was quite simply the greatest man-made demographic catastrophe and human tragedy in European history
Christopher R. Browning, author of 'Ordinary Men' and 'The Origins of the Final Solution' 

In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. Bloodlands – impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material – is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field
Tony Judt 

Timothy Snyder has written a nuanced, original and penetrating analysis of Europe’s twentieth century killing fields between Russia and Germany, drawing on many little-known sources. History of a high order, Bloodlands may also point us towards lessons for our own time
Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, and author of The File 

Combining formidable linguistic and detective skills with a fine sense of impartiality, he tackles vital questions which have deterred less courageous historians: Where and when were the largest casualties inflicted? Who were the perpetrators, and which ethnic and national groups were victimized? How can one calculate and verify the numbers? This is a book which will force its readers to rethink history
Norman Davies, F.B.A, and author of Europe: A History