The evocative title of Timothy Snyder’s new book—Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning—is a reference to the fertile soil of Ukraine, where Adolf Hitler hoped to establish lebensraum, or “living space,” for the German race. And yet it could also be seen as an allusion to what Snyder argues is the underappreciated importance of ecology in Hitler’s worldview. Snyder, a history professor at Yale University, is building on his 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which highlighted the devastation visited upon World War II’s often-ignored but hugely consequential Eastern Front. But whereas Bloodlands examined Nazi and Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe, Black Earth travels inside the mind of Hitler himself—a mind from which sprang the murder of 6 million Jews.Related StoryThe Lies of Adolf EichmannIn Black Earth, Hitler’s quest for lebensraum is placed in a global context. Snyder, for example, asserts that Hitler was inspired in part by the wide-open spaces of the American West, quoting the German leader as complaining, “Neither the current living space nor that achieved through the restoration of the borders of 1914 permits us to lead a life comparable to that of the American people.” The book focuses on the integral role that the state and its institutions played in determining the effectiveness of Hitler’s genocide. Where states were destroyed, Jews were murdered; where the state remained intact, Jews could find some protection in bureaucracies and passports. It was in the stateless regions of Eastern Europe where the Nazis were able to experiment with and calibrate the Final Solution, which they then tried to export back west.One of the most revelatory parts of the book is Snyder’s diagnosis of Hitler’s warped worldview. And it’s perhaps the most relevant today amid a fierce debate, in the pages of The Atlantic and elsewhere, over whether Iranian leaders are anti-Semitic and whether they can be counted on to conduct foreign policy rationally given their professed desire to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. “I think [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s] ideology is steeped with anti-Semitism, and if he could, without catastrophic costs, inflict great harm on Israel, I’m confident that he would,” U.S. President Barack Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in August, in defending the nuclear deal with Iran. “But … it is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their worldviews and still make rational calculations with respect to their limits and their self-preservation.”Hitler is often depicted as the prototypical totalitarian—a man who believed in the superiority of the German state, a German nationalist to the extreme. But according to Snyder, this depiction is deeply flawed. Rather, Hitler was a “racial anarchist”—a man for whom states were transitory, laws meaningless, ethics a facade. “There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings … come[s] from Jews,” Snyder told me in an interview. As Snyder sees it, Hitler believed the only way for the world to revert to its natural order—that of brutal racial competition—was to eradicate the Jews.Last week, I spoke to Snyder at length about the nature and import of Hitler’s ecological anti-Semitism; the spectrum of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s; the intersection between anti-Semitism and rationality, and whether the question of rationality is even worth considering. An edited and condensed transcript of the conversation follows.Edward Delman: In your book, you offer a portrait of Hitler as a brilliant tactician, but one who operated on the basis of a truly warped worldview based around racial struggle. Just so we can lay the framework: What would you say were the basic principles of Hitler’s worldview, and what did that mean for how he viewed the idea of nation-states, or ethics, and other universalist principles we assume as given?Timothy Snyder: So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought—whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific—is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitl
Source: Timothy Snyder’s ‘Black Earth’ Offers a New Theory of Hitler’s Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic