Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (Basic Books, 2011)
New Books in Eastern European Studies
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The Historical Strike and the Holocaust
Some of the ideas that we're running in the Nazi, it's precisely what's going on in the Soviet Union during the 30s that to some extent is provoking and pushing Germans in a direction of to accept fascism. In my view, the Holocaust only becomes worse the further east we go. The degree of German responsibility only becomes greater the more that we know about the Holocaust and about other crimes. But I also think that we can't understand the entire event by leaning on a taboo which prevents us from investigating the Soviet Union or Russian citizens. If we hamstring our historical work because we're afraid of the moral consequences then ironically our work becomes morally much less useful.
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