Summary of Timothy Snyder's Black Earth

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Hitler’s theory was that humans were simply animals, and the racial struggle for survival was a German campaign for dignity. He understood that Germany did not feed itself from its own territory in the 1920s and 1930s, but knew that Germans would not have starved if they had tried.
#2 Hitler believed that the American dream was the German people’s dream, and that the German people needed an empire that was comparable to the American one. He declared that permanent struggle for land was nature’s wish, but he also understood that a human desire for increasing relative comfort could generate perpetual motion.
#3 The struggle would continue as long as the United States existed, and that would be a long time. Hitler saw America as the coming world power, and the core American population as a world class people that was younger and healthier than the Germans who had remained in Europe.
#4 Hitler believed that the only way for Germany to have a sound agrarian policy was to acquire land within Europe itself. He believed that the fate of Native Americans was a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under German control.

Sujets

• Holocaust
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• History
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822502284
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Timothy Snyder's Black Earth
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Hitler’s theory was that humans were simply animals, and the racial struggle for survival was a German campaign for dignity. He understood that Germany did not feed itself from its own territory in the 1920s and 1930s, but knew that Germans would not have starved if they had tried.

#2

Hitler believed that the American dream was the German people’s dream, and that the German people needed an empire that was comparable to the American one. He declared that permanent struggle for land was nature’s wish, but he also understood that a human desire for increasing relative comfort could generate perpetual motion.

#3

The struggle would continue as long as the United States existed, and that would be a long time. Hitler saw America as the coming world power, and the core American population as a world class people that was younger and healthier than the Germans who had remained in Europe.

#4

Hitler believed that the only way for Germany to have a sound agrarian policy was to acquire land within Europe itself. He believed that the fate of Native Americans was a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under German control.

#5

When Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germany’s only opportunity for colonization was Europe, he discarded the possibility of a return to Africa. The search for racial inferiors to dominate required no long voyages by sea, since they were present in eastern Europe.

#6

After the war, Germans could continue to see themselves as good colonizers, even as the realm of colonization itself became fluid and vague. The experience in eastern Europe established that neighbors could also be black.

#7

Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both nations and their governments. He claimed that the Slavs had never governed themselves, and that the lands east of Germany had always been ruled by foreign elements.

#8

Hitler’s interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish project was not unusual. Churchill and Woodrow Wilson saw it the same way at first. But Hitler’s conclusion was that Germany could gain global power by eliminating east European Jews and overturning their supposed Soviet citadel.

#9

The Judeobolshevik myth allowed Hitler’s plan for a starvation campaign against the Slavs to be implemented. If the Jews were not weakened by a first strike on Soviet territory, the war against them would have to be escalated.

#10

The Judeobolshevik myth, which was a major source of the Second World War, had its origins in the First World War. It linked the elimination of the Jews to the subjugation of the Slavs. If this connection could be established in theory, Hitler could hardly fail in practice.

#11

The Russian Empire deported half a million Jews from their homes in 1917, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 made them equal citizens. However, many did not want to return what was taken from them, and attacked the Jews instead.

#12

After the Russian Revolution, Germany backed the revolutionaries, only to find itself on the side of the counterrevolutionaries not long thereafter. In 1919, Ukraine fell into a complicated civil war in which some hundred thousand Jews were murdered by soldiers on all sides: Bolsheviks, the anti-Bolshevik armies known as the Whites, and above all soldiers of the independent Ukrainian state.

#13

The Judeobolshevik idea, which was the belief that Jews were the cause of the Russian Revolution, was spread by fleeing Russian imperial subjects who brought a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with them. It was not just a myth arising from painful events, but the glimmering light of eternal truth.

#14

Hitler’s ecology involved the idea that the planet was despoiled by the presence of Jews, who had introduced corrupting ideas. The solution was to expose Jews to a purified nature, where they could not manipulate others with their ideas.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Hitler’s worldview was not a plan for taking power. It was a summons to empire, not a military strategy. The German state had to be refashioned, and neighboring states had to be destroyed. The vast majority of European Jews lived beyond Germany, so Poland had to be involved in Hitler’s plans to destroy the Jews and the Soviet state.

#2

The war between Germany and Poland in 1939 was the result of deep differences between Berlin and Warsaw on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy. Berlin saw Poland only as an element in its own master plan.

#3

The foreign policies of Berlin and Warsaw were very similar, and they both wanted to remove millions of Jews from Europe. However, their political mindsets were completely different: the Nazi mindset was based on the rejection of the traditional state, while the Polish mindset was based on the endorsement of the traditional state.

#4

After the failure of his coup, Hitler learned to be politic, using the energy of German resentment to further his own extraordinary ambitions. He exploited the broad German consensus in favor of revising the European political order, even though his own goal was to destroy it.

#5

Hitler emerged victorious from democratic elections in 1933. He used the arson of the parliament building in February to limit the rights of German citizens and create a permanent state of exception that permitted him to rule without parliamentary oversight.

#6

Hitler was a Balkan-style militarist, and he saw in the Balkan states that had emerged from the declining Ottoman Empire the proper relationship between domestic and foreign policies. He built up the German armed forces beyond all previous limits and apparently beyond reason.

#7

Hitler was not a king innovating from established notions of legitimacy and sovereignty. He was a clear-sighted representative of a race doomed to bloody struggle until eternity. The Nazi party was founded on the assumption of endless racial conflict, whereas any traditional state asserts the right to control and limit violence.

#8

The classic definition of the state is the institution that seeks to monopolize legitimate violence. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hitler sought to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not, in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS, functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of violence.

#9

After the Night of the Long Knives, the SS implemented Hitler’s fourth innovation: the hybridization of institutions. They merged crime and racial organizations, and rotated cadres back and forth.

#10

Hitler’s sixth political innovation was the globalization of German Jews. In reality, Jews were a very small part of the population of Germany, under one percent. Most Jews were assimilated to German society in language and culture, and most Germans did not see Jews in their daily lives.

#11

Hitler’s final innovation was the redefinition of war. His version of militarism went beyond preparation for conventional wars, as in the Balkans. He intended not just to take territory that could be portrayed as ethnically contiguous, but to destroy entire states and master entire races.

#12

The German calamity of 1918 was a Polish miracle. Virtually everything about the outcome of the First World War that was threatening for Germans was exhilarating for Poles. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, a symbol of injustice in Germany, was a pillar of the legal order in which an independent Poland could exist.

#13

The question of loyalty to the Polish state was not simply answered by questions about language or religion.