Bloodlands, English edition

Besprechung
A hugely important historian of this nightmarish era. Nobody has explained it this way before William Leith Evening Standard

Kurztext / Annotation
Zwischen Stalins Russland und Hitlers Deutschland, in der Mitte Europas, starben in den Jahren von 1933 bis 1944 vierzehn Millionen Menschen, fast alle Zivilisten. Hier, in den heutigen Staaten Ukraine, Weißrussland, Polen und an der Ostseeküste, trafen die Kräfte der Roten Armee und der Wehrmacht aufeinander. In diesen Ländern lebten die meisten Juden, die Interessen Stalins und Hitlers überlappten, sowohl NKWD als auch SS schlugen zu.

Beschreibung

A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944.

In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat.

In this book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and re-think our past.