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Snyder’s book is the most detailed and startling up to the date account of the Shoah. He shows it was no last minute plan, but key to Hitler’s whole colonial ideology and that millions of Slavs would have been murdered next in his Hunger plan. But he proves something else too.1/6
Snyder and Tony Judt discuss in another book how misinterpretations about the centrality of Auschwitz Birkenau, and missing the killings out East, have skewed political thinking, particularly among the Austrian school of Economists led by Hayek amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BCZY2HY/… 2/6
The Austrian school saw Auschwitz and the Shoah as symptoms of an overweening state - Eichmann’s train timetables, bureaucracy, industrialised killing, and therefore heavily influenced the Small/No Government philosophy of Reagan and Thatcher. 3/6 washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-di…
But Snyder’s book shows something different. He looks the fate of the Jews in various Central European countries, especially the ‘Bloodlands’ of Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States where survival rates were the lowest. 4/6
It’s conveniently forgotten by some that these very states had been invaded by Stalin in 1939 and their intellectual and political leaders purged and killed. In the wild east, Jews had no papers, no state to appeal to, little civic society to rely on, and their fate was worse 5/6
The conclusion Snyder draws is the opposite of that of Hayek. It was not the overweening state that led to the greatest killing, but the lawlessness, disruption from non functioning or destroyed polities. Worth pondering as we circle around never ending lessons of the Shoah 6/6
