According to Snyder, Hitler was driven by the philosophical conviction that race is the fundamental feature of human life on earth. History, according to Hitler, was the perpetual struggle of one race over another. We don't relate to one another as humans, and we certainly don't relate to one another as nationalists or as societies of laws. Instead, for Hitler, humanity had to be reduced to a natural state of nature, sweeping aside the claims of modernity that we, as humans, were aspiring to ever-higher and ever-greater goals. Interfering in nature, for example by improving crop yields in order to overcome the food supply deficit in Germany that had led to the deaths of half a million people during the allied blockade in the Great War, was wrong: The way to achieve this aim was to conquer the vast arable lands of eastern Europe in a parallel action to the American colonization of the West. Both in his view were populated by inferior subhumans who should be eliminated.
Race, therefore, for Hitler, according to Snyder, replaced the notion of the modern nation-state. What Hitler desired was a kind of political anarchy, a stateless society, in which the "Aryans" ascended to their natural place as the height of humanity.
The only way that could happen, according to Snyder, was the murder of the world's Jews.
While Snyder has given us one of the most comprehensive accounts of Europe's collaborations with Nazism, he fails to understand the historical streams which fed into the genocide. Instead, Black Earth is a book with a thesis, not a comprehensive historical account of the Holocaust. So I'm not so sure that the lessons Snyder wants to draw for those of us in the 21st century are really as strong as he thinks they might be. It's a compelling read, but it's hardly convincing.
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.