Reddit reviews Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Hitler sincerely believed that the natural state was for all races be in conflict over limited resources, a collective Darwinian struggle, a view inspired by the starvation of roughly a half million Germans during WWI. If the German race could not seize and keep agricultural lands (lebensraum) in the East and was defeated, then in his view the German race was doomed to extinction in any case.

The first chapter of Tim Snyder's Black Earth clarified a lot of Nazi ideology that to me previously just seemed an incoherent dumpster full of racism, genocidal violence, pseudo-science and anti-intellectualism.

> Ordinary German soldiers were massacring, raping and burning everything just like their SS brethren.

Tim Snyder, too, makes that point in his book and how the Nazis discovered non-SS Germans would behave in atrocious ways (soldiers, police) w/o special indoctrination (and non-German collaborators too). He goes on to point out that the staff who behaved OK in the Nazi-occupied West could get an Eastern assignment and turn into monsters.

The lesson from this is not about Germans, IMHO, but about human behaviour in general. Many people stress this about other occasions too, and for good reason. Civilization is fragile regardless of nationality or ethnicity.

I'm in the middle of Homo Deus currently. Its great so far, Yuval is a great writer and his books are a lot more accessible than traditional history books. I'm sure there are a lot of liberties taken with some of the history but I think Sapiens is a must-read. Homo Deus is more assumption based on current reality but its very interesting so far.

Gulag Archipelago is one I read based on the recommendation of Jordan Peterson. Awesome book if you are into WW1-WW2 era eastern europe. being an eastern european myself, i devour everything related to it so this book tickled my fancy quite a bit. good look into the pitfalls of what peterson warns against.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is another history book discussing that time period and how it all transpired and the lesser known reasons why WW2 went down the way it did. some surprising stuff in that book related to hitler modeling europe around how the united states was designed at the time.

apologies for inundating with the same topic for all my books so far but Ordinary Men is an amazing book chronicling the people that carried out most of the killings during WW2 in Poland, Germany and surrounding areas. The crux of the argument which I have read in many other books is that Auschwitz is a neat little box everyone can picture in their head and assign blame to when in reality most people killed during that time were taken to the outskirts of their town and shot in plain sight by fellow townspeople, mostly retired police officers and soldiers no longer able for active duty.

for some lighter reading i really enjoy jon ronson's books and i've read all of them. standouts are So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test. Highly recommend Them as well which has an early Alex Jones cameo in it.

Bluntly stated, not really. As /u/TheGuineaPig21 stated, the closest thing to a "kernel of truth" the myth has is that Jews were overrepresented among the Communists, simply because they had been oppressed by the former Russian Empire. However, the same applied to many other ethnic groups as well--there were more Jews than you'd expect in the NKVD, but there were also more Latvians, for instance.

Indeed, Timothy Snyder has pointed out that the USSR became more anti-semitic, not less, as its persecutions heated up. Check out Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Earth-Holocaust-History-Warning/dp/1101903473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479164517&sr=8-1&keywords=black+earth

And read chapters 5, 6, and 7. Here's an ace quote from page 119:

>In 1938, Stalin was able to turn the Soviet communist party, an early target of the purges, against the NKVD...As a consequence, the nationality structure of the NKVD was altered. It was no longer an exceptionally cosmopolitan elite with revolutionary prestige in which Jews (and Latvians and Poles) were highly represented. Polish officers were removed and often executed in the Polish Operation...By the end of 1938, the NKVD had become an organization dominated by Russians (65 percent of high officers) and Ukrainians (17 percent of high officers). Russians were now overrepresented in the NKVD by comparison to their share in the general Soviet population. The percentage of Jews was down from nearly forty percent to less than four percent. (my emphasis added) There were no longer any Poles at all.

As we can see, if the NKVD ever was a "Jewish" organization (spoiler: it wasn't), Stalin made it as Gentilicious as you could want by the end of the 1930s. Guess all our Wehraboo and neo-Nazi bonehead friends ought to start defending it as a bulwark against da joos, eh? Top lel.

I highly recommend Black Earth by Timothy Snyder.

It's mainly concerned about the Holocaust, but it also details very nicely the aspects of Nazism that generated German expansion into Eastern Europe, and their subsequent attempt to exterminate everyone who was already there.