On the Issues: Timothy Snyder

and hello again everyone and welcome to Exin Hall at Marquette University. I'm Mike gu and this is about the themes. This is our ongoing series of conversations with news and policy makers, people who are doing interesting and important work in this region and beyond. accompanied by author Timothy Snider, he is the Bird White House professor of history at Yale University, he is the author of more than half a dozen books, award-winning books, the most recent in 2010, wrote the seller, called Bloodlands, which examined the Soviet Union. and the Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe and continued with the release of this book last year that is called Black Earth, the Holocaust as history and warns that it is a new explanation of the Holocaust, an explanation of the world's greatest tragedy of the century past, so would you please welcome Professor Timothy Snyder to Marquette Law School?

I wanted to start with the name of the book Black Earth, which refers to the fertile land of Ukraine and, let's start there, why Ukraine is central to the The story you tell in this book okay, so the Black Earth has several meanings in this book, but it starts with the most concrete, the most specific, the idea of ​​fertile soil and it starts there because this is the element that perhaps we forget the most. the second world war the holocaust the german war of colonialism in the east that led to the holocaust you and i most of the people in this room grew up in a bubble we grew up in the only time in history when food didn't matter in politics and for that same reason we do not understand what it would be like to be complex and sophisticated people in the developed country and yet be worried about food and resources, we do not know how, ideas, how ideologies that appeal to conquest and control. of scarce resources, even food, how that could work as politics, how that could reach our minds and hearts, so I start with the idea of ​​the Black Earth because the Black Earth, the Black Earth, the fertile soil of Ukraine was the central objective, the main objective of Hitler's war. in the East, but of course I also have something broader in mind: when we start thinking about the world that way, our own vision of the future might become a little darker too, as you say in the introduction to this book. that our intuitions about the Holocaust fail us, what do you mean the Holocaust is an interesting event in the US?

I think it's one of the two things that most Americans think we understand and the other is the First Civil War. I don't know anything about American history, so I'm not going to judge whether we understand the Civil War. I have my suspicions about it, but the Holocaust is very interesting because we have some confidence that we understand it and, certainly, as a memorial presence, it is very strong. There are a dozen museums or more. There are monuments and in many cities like my own New Haven and We have there was a television miniseries or a television movie in the 1980s there have been many major Hollywood films since and as As a result of all this and as a result of our attention to the survivors we also have a picture of what it was like and our image is something we call a camp although in reality it was not.

We have an image. of the icon of train tracks leading from a place we cannot see to another place we cannot see. The strange thing about this image is that, and it's sad to say, and they hug a little, but The sad thing about this image is that it minimizes the Holocaust, it separates us from the Holocaust. What we don't see is how the Holocaust could actually begin. Aitz was the end in which the Germans developed equipment with which they developed these extermination facilities. gas so that not so many Germans had to personally participate in the shooting of Jews that is the end aitz is the death of a million Jews but six million were murdered and how the Holocaust began the Holocaust began because the Germans realized in the summer 1941, when they invaded the Soviet Union, that not only the SS, not only the people who were trained for it, but also people who were not police officers, soldiers, civilian occupation authorities and not only the Germans, but also the local population of those areas would join in the mass slaughter.

The operations could be involved in something that was clearly an industrial slaughter, although the factories of death are still years away, so what we don't get to see and I think the reason we don't get to understand Outfitz is that they don't we could see it started. with the Revelation that people who are not very like us can kill other people very like us for no particular reason in very large numbers and that this was face Toof face this was intimate that this was that this was brutal The Another thing we don't see, uh, goes back a little bit to your first question is where did this happen.

When we think of Aitz, we think of the survivors and this is again another way in which Aitz is truly unusual. Aitz, the extermination center was. t a camp if if you were if you were on one of those trains and you were selected to kill aitz it was not a camp for you it was a place where they killed you but next to the aitz extermination center there was a and in that field there were some survivors and Those survivors wrote Memoirs and in the Cold War world of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, those Memoirs of people like Primo Levy were able to reach us and this is very important. but it only gives us a very partial idea of ​​what was happening and those Italian people like Primo Levy um or Germans like Anne Frank, those people whose Memoirs or whose Memories reached us, were generally exceptional because the Italians and the French and even the Germans They are a very, very small part of the victims of the Holocaust, the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust were Polish Jews, Soviet Jews, people whose lives and deaths were largely forgotten because right after World War II the Cold War begins. and the Cold War locks us in. from access to documents and memories and death pits, which is how the Holocaust began and how about half of it continued.

I want you to mention where this starts and I think there's this notion that this starts with Adolf Hitler being this German nationalist and him. He rises to power during a time of economic difficulties in Germany, but his point is that he does not see Hitler as a German nationalist. He has called him a racial anarchist or a zoological anarchist. What does he mean by that? what do I want to say with that? was that Hitler was both a politician and an ideologue, I mean, often when we are faced with people who have powerful and dangerous ideas, we dismiss them one way or another, we say well, he was just a pragmatist, he just said those things to come to power, you know, and then they come to power and then they do terrible things that they do well or we say or say that he was crazy, right, he was a crazy man, but if he had been a crazy man, he wouldn't have won the elections, would he?

TRUE? If he had been a madman, he would not have been able to transform the German state. If he had been a madman, he would not have been able to command, you know, a very successful war in many ways. He wasn't crazy. he was not a pragmatist, he was a good politician, he was someone who knew how to manipulate the very real political emotions of the Germans, he himself was not a German nationalist, he did not care about the Germans as such, but he knew what the Germans cared about. . He may know some politicians like this.

He didn't care at all about his own Society, but he knew how to talk to the Society's emotions about him. He was a very good technician of power and had a vision of the world, as you say, no, no. a vision of nations, but a vision of races, he had a very clear vision of the world, his vision of the world was this: the planet had a limited amount of fertile soil, only a limited amount of resources, it was a finite space That is what it says on the first page of minec, it is a finite space, we are not human beings, Humanity does not exist, we are members of races and the destiny of races is to fight for that land in the same way that he thinks species fight. in the natural order the races must fight for that is what we do and if we are doing something else if we are having a civilized conversation if we have political institutions if we have laws if we believe in human solidarity if we believe in Catholic Mercy if we believe in any idea of reciprocity that allows me to see you and you to see me as human beings that idea says that Hitler is Jewish, okay, so his vision of the world as a world of racial strife is the same as his anti-Semitism, how can you not with Hitler say oh.

He was a nationalist, but more like a nationalist, that's not right, he was a kind of anarchist who thought that you had to clean up the institutions and then see who won, and you with Hitler and also with his anti-ISM, of course, it was an antisemite. but to say that he was an anti-semite in some ways doesn't cover it because he wasn't just an anti-semite who then turned the knob a little bit more and more until he got to Hitler, you know the guy at the golf club you know who doesn't like Jews and you go around and around and you get to Hitler it's not that his anti-Semitism says that the Jews have destroyed the planetary order because the Jews have transformed human beings into something that they are not what we are they are they are they are races um we are machines of killing we are people who seek land and kill others and starve others on their way we are not doing that because the Jews have stripped our souls and our minds and therefore and this is chapter 2 of my composition, therefore Therefore, the Jews have to be eliminated from the planet, so he is not a nationalist who has some prejudices, he is someone who has a coherent worldview, a worldview that can only be represented in a colonization war where there are many political conflicts.

The institutions are destroyed, he found some inspiration. I think you're right, about America and what happened to the Native Americans in this country. Yes, one of the beautiful things about history is the way you're always working against what people think I mean, I like to contrast history and memory. I had a friend, a colleague named Tony Jet, who used to talk about history as if he were memory's ugly sister. True, memory is much more attractive because memory is the way we would like it. Thinking that things turn out right, like you honestly ask yourself what the way you use your own memory most of the time is to explain how things had to turn out the way they did or why you were right and someone else was right. mistaken.

I mean, unless you're a very thoughtful person, and since nations and societies generally weren't very thoughtful, national memory and national history even tend to veer toward justifications and explanations and apologies, smoothing out the rough corners and, therefore, So, it can be a shock. when we really make history, which is actually its core, never national and always international, always transnational. Hitler in the 1920s looks at the United States and sees a success story in Hitler's vision. We are a country of Scandinavians and Germans, he called them Aryans, who triumphed. we use slave labor to exterminate local populations on a vast and fertile terrain and then apply technology to create the most prosperous society in the history of the world Hitler, that is the positive example of Hitler, not only that what we call the American dream is at the core of Hitler's idea and this is what I really mean, it is disconcerting that he sees so clearly the things that we did not see at the time and that we often still do not see, that is, the history of African Americans and the history of Native Americans in this country, but perhaps more disconcerting is what he thinks of the American dream because what he thinks of the American dream is completely normal, in fact, you should never think about people who suffer and They die for your right way of life because racial solidarity is the only thing that matters, Americans were absolutely right to exterminate people near and far to become not only a right to survive but to become rich and this is where things become they become disconcerting because it blurs what we would call the American dream uh what we would call a way of life in the idea that he calls laan which means uh what living space means to him laan ra is on the one hand it's biological he says we are like races They are like species that we have to compete for a habitat, but it is also sociological, it is also cultural.

SW is not just about physical survival, it is about having the highest standard of living in the world, so in the end Hitler says that we must, the Germans, must conquer Ukraine by going back to our first era. question: we must conquer Ukraine the same way the Americans conquered the Great Plains, this is your analogy and they had more time, they had decades to do it, we must do it in a few months and we have to do it to catch up with the Americans, so This is what I have discovered upon returning to the United States, this tends to be disconcerting to Americans sometimes, but it's not that I'm right about the American history of the United States, I mean, it'smisses certain important aspects of American history. history, but it gives pause for thought, uh, statelessness, this is a topic in your book about why things happen where they happened and I want to start this part of the conversation by talking about Hitler's decision to go to Austria so that the Nazis enter.

Austria, what lessons did you learn from the Austrian experience that you applied as you moved forward with Hitler's planning? Well, let me go back to your very good question earlier about our image of the Holocaust because that has to do with this when we think about The Holocaust if we have a kind of canonical sense of how the Holocaust happened, it has to do with the rise of Hitler, so Of course, very important, it has to do with the uh. the growing oppression of the Jews within Germany, we could remember the boycotts of the spring of 1933, the Nurmberg laws that turned the Jews into second class citizens, we could remember the expropriation of Jewish property that peaked in 1938, we might recall Christal um the Nationwide. pgom of November 1938 in which some 200 Jews were murdered, we might remember these things and then think that they are somehow the beginning of the Holocaust.

That's not entirely bad, but it's not enough either because there is another way to see everything. that if you forget for a moment that you know the Holocaust is going to happen, the magnitude of Jewish suffering in November 1938, although terrible by the standards of the time, is nothing like a holocaust, 200 people murdered in street violence, I mean , let's face it. Americans like this is not an event of a completely unknown scale, right, 200 people murdered in the streets is not the same as 6 million people murdered, there is a big jump from one to the other or, to stretch the logic, even a little.

A little further, the Holocaust simply did not happen in interwar Germany, it was simply not right if Germany had not started a second world war, if German power had not moved beyond Germany, we would be looking at an anti-Semitic state. among other anti-Semitic states we would say that Nazi Germany was really much worse than interwar Romania and we will say how it is different and how it is similar to interwar Poland the Holocaust is something that happens only after German power leaves Germany and Now I'm going to try to answer your question because this is the part we miss when Germany enters Austria in March 1938.

It's not that Austrians are worse anti-Semites than Germans, which would be ABD. It is not that the Austrians have passed the same anti-Semitic laws as the Germans because they do not have them, the difference is that from one day to the next the Austrian State ceases to exist, which means that the Jews suddenly and completely float free of the protection of the State and it means that their neighbors, literally, their neighbors, especially in Vienna, who know that now that German Nazi power is coming, they do everything they can to separate themselves from the Jews symbolically, physically, politically, so these famous ones are these Notorious scenes you may have seen. yourself these photographs of Jews cleaning the streets in March 1938 in Vienna, what are they doing, are they being humiliated, yes, this is a step towards the Holocaust, of course, but it is also politically significant because what they are cleaning from the streets It's not just in the streets that they are erasing the word Austria from the streets.

There was going to be a referendum a few days later on the independence of Austria now that everyone knows that Osri is not going to exist. The Jews are associated with the previous system and its destiny. It is associated with their future, which is no future, that the Jews scrub the streets is a humiliation, we understand it because we understand the symbols, what we do not understand is the politics, that this is the moment when Austria will cease to exist and the Germans will triumph. in the increasingly radical destruction of the States Austria Czechoslovakia Poland the Soviet Union then the final solution this idea that we have discussed in Hitler's Mind of a world without Jews of a world that is saved thanks to the extermination of the Jews that idea can become in practice the final solution, let's touch on that because there was a time when the Soviets and the Nazis were cooperating, they had their non-aggression pact and they were dividing the loot, but that ended in 1941, I think in June of '41, when Hitler decided to gather 3 million German soldiers and advance towards the Soviet Union um but that didn't go as planned uh the final solution really came about because of his military failure wasn't the German military failure okay?

There's certainly something to that, but I would ask us to think about what you're describing in military terms and also in political terms, between Vienna and Austria that we were talking about and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, what happens in Europe, what is happening in Europe is the end of the European political order Austria is destroyed Czechoslovakia is destroyed Munich um uh Poland is destroyed but also Estonia lvia Lithuania is destroyed this is the result of the Malto ventro pact where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union arrive to a military alliance in August in September 1939, so six European states have been removed from the map and if six states can be removed from the map, that means the order no longer works.

Ideas of territorial integrity, sovereignty, the things we take for granted, no longer work. which means that by the time Germany invades the Soviet Union, which as you say is the main turning point, many things have changed in people's lives, so where does the Holocaust really begin? And here I have to focus on our really weak point, which is what is the geography when Germany invades the Soviet Union what is it invading is invading the places that the Soviet Union just invaded right, Americans, we have problems with the occupation, which is Well, I mean, I don't want us, I don't want that.

It's a familiar concept unless it's a Canadian occupation, in which case you absolutely know, but generally you like the notion of what life would be like under the occupation. I mean, unless some people here are immigrants, it's something that's pretty foreign to us, but the occupation. it changes your relationship to the law, it forces you to make concessions imagine an occupation that is not just a normal occupation, but one that says your state does not exist, your previous laws do not exist, you are not a citizen of anything you have. without rights, including property rights, their behavior, I am sad to say that all our behavior would change a lot, that is what both the destruction of the German state and the destruction of the Soviet state did, that is what the Soviets did in 39 and 40 when the Germans invaded. the Soviet Union in 41 here comes the difficult part: first they are invading the places that the Soviet Union had already invaded the Soviet Union destroys the political apparatus the political apparatuses install their own and then the Germans destroy the Soviets and it is in this place so special where the destruction of the state is double, the Germans discover that they can do things that they themselves did not expect they could do, for example, shoot large numbers of people, for example, persuade the local population to help them do it.

You've called some of those people. I think that um entrepreneurs um explains that that phrase entrepreneurs is violence. I'm trying to remember, yes, entrepreneurs of violence, so the SS, the German SS, what are the SS if we see if we see the SS in a movie? We see men in uniform and when we see men in uniform we think of the law of the State, we think of the forces of order, but that is not what the SS were. The SS were not simply glorified police or a paramilitary force. The SS were the people who believed in the type of ideas we were discussing above, the SS were racial anarchists in the way we have described within the German state from '33 to '39, from 1933 to 1939, what did the SS do? concentration camps why it is so important because concentration camps, as they teach you in law school, are places where the law does not work that is the definition of a concentration camp is a place is a is a lawless place it is a lawless zone or it is a zone without state law the SS is not a state institution they are a party organization they do not believe in the rule of law they represent something totally different they do not represent an oppressive law they represent the idea that the only law is the law of nature, they represent the idea that racial struggle is the only reality, so these concentration camps that they guard, why am I insisting on this?

Because the concentration camps, as horrible as they are, are just a kind of small model for the way the SS is going to govern Europe where they can govern governs the wrong word where they can govern where they can exercise power they are entrepreneurs of violence in the sense that they believe that the law of the jungle is where we should go and when they are released in places like Poland, the Baltic states or the Soviet Union, they very quickly find ways to exploit the disorder they find and transform it into the kind of destruction who think it's normal. so the destruction of the state is not just something that happens, it's everything, it's not just a situation that is inherently very dangerous and if you can't imagine what I'm talking about, think about a few days in New Orleans, right away. a few days in New Orleans, a few years in Iraq, right, that's just a small sample of what we're talking about, but there can be situations like this that are consciously exploited by people who think that this is good, that it is a step towards a kind of Utopia, those are the SS.

There's a line in your book that stuck with me and and and and and you talked about how we explain the barbarity of what we saw in some of these countries and uh or stateless places at the time um You talked about the barbarism and we want to attribute that to I think you're saying anti-Semitism. extravagant but you say it would be a mistake, it would be a mistake for us to simply attribute this barbarity to that, what would be the mistake in looking at it that way, okay, then let's be very clear that anti-Semitism is a bad thing, we should condemn it.

It was C. You know it was fundamental to Hitler's worldview. You can't imagine war without anti-Semitism. Can't you imagine the Holocaust without anti-Semitism? It's a central part, but it's not the only thing that happens and the idea that we like or are attracted to that the Holocaust was caused by anti-Semitism and that you can line those things up in a simple way that is too optimistic is too optimistic historically is too optimistic because many people who killed Jews were not anti-Semitic or at least they were not anti-Semitic until they killed Jews and After they killed Jews, they expressed anti-Semitic views because, although we are very good at lying and we are very good at killing as a species, once we kill, we have to have some story that we believe is true to explain why.

I have killed, but many people who killed Jews were not historically anti-Semitic. Some of the main collaborators in Eastern Europe, including the most important one, there is no sign that they were anti-Semitic. Many of the people who collaborated with the Germans had already collaborated with them. the Soviets and as soon as you understand that, you realize that it can't have been an ideological commitment in all cases, the reason it's too optimistic in contemporary terms is that we think it's okay as long as it's not a anti-Semitic and you are not anti-Semitic, then everything is fine, everything is not fine because views like this can change very quickly.

Anti-Semitism can become much more important in a place like Germany, which is, let's face it, just as sophisticated and probably better educated. They're probably better at delaying gratification than we are. Opinions on things like anti-Semitism can change very quickly. A war can become much more prominent, but the people who in 1945 believed that Jews ruled the world and that this was a Jewish war did not necessarily think that in Germany in 1935 or 1925 in terms of an explanation of the Holocaust, True, we would like that to be the explanation because it is very elegant, but in a way the whole question forces us to think in a more complex way and in a way that I think is more useful for the present and the future.

The places that we think are most anti-Semitic are not the places where the Holocaust occurs, that's the main problem for this line of reasoning or the places where anti-Semitism was not a major problem or the places where it is. This happened in the Soviet Union, for example, which was the only anti-anti-Semitic country in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Anti-anti as a crime. Mixed marriages are very popular, etc., mortality rates. in the occupied Soviet Union it is 95%, which is exactly the same as in Poland, where public anti-Semitism was a major problem, where a major political party was anti-Semitic, where the government openly said that 90% of Jews should leave and yet the result in the Holocaust is exactly the same, or if you look at France and the Netherlands, the Netherlands was the only country in the Europeinter-world, in Western Europe, where people would have said that Semitism is not a major problem and yet 75% of Jews die. in France France is the Western European country where almost everyone would have agreed that anti-Semitism was a problem, and yet 75% of Jews survive.

I could continue like this with almost all countries. It's amazing how if you tried to predict where the Holocaust was going to happen from the point of view of 1938, you would have gotten it all wrong, that's what you know, the places where antisemitism was prominent are now where actually even Germany, right? , you would think well 100% of Jews must have died in Germany, but that is not the case, most Jews in Germany survive, so if you are going to look for a reason why the Holocaust happens where it does, you have to have something more and that something more.

It is the destruction of institutions to kill a Jew, yes, there has to be this worldview that imagines a world without them, but for that to become a reality, what must be eliminated are the institutions and the laws that connect the Jews with their neighbors and with the State. The Nazis, this is kind of surprising, but the Nazis only killed Jews who became stateless when they killed the Bulgarians. Jews, you have ikman writing to Bulgaria saying please reassure me that you have not given citizenship to these people when Romania in 1943 decides that it will consider its Jews as citizens again, the Romanian Jews who are waiting in the transit camps in D. in France to be deported to Aitz, suddenly they don't go anymore because Romania now sees them as its citizens and the easiest way to separate people from the State and this is what the Germans learn and this is the thing.

We don't understand that because Hana Arent and R Hilberg and all the very intelligent people who started our discussion about the Holocaust didn't understand it. The simplest way to separate the people from the state is to destroy the state, not to have pgrs and boycotts and Nurburg laws, those things are bad enough, but the simplest way to remove people from the protection of the State is to simply destroy the State. I want to spend a little time talking about the personal stories that you tell in this book, and obviously, you felt that was an important component of this story.

Why did you choose to highlight stories of people who rescued Jews and helped Jews? What motivated you to include that in this analysis and explanation? Thank you. for that question is the story of the rescue is really a question of what the story can do and what it can't do, so when you're writing the story of the Holocaust, you're faced with it. with two borders, right, that is very difficult and you have to recognize them and get as close as you can, but not cross them, at one end is the border, which is Hitler's mind, explaining the vision of the world as we will do very briefly here . make the vision of the world understandable and at the same time preserve the distance from it if you do not make it understandable you have not done your job well but it is a very difficult and painful place to be on the other border at the other end of the other metaphysical border is the rescue because you can explain the rescue to a certain extent.

I mean, for me the story is about an explanation that you probably have put together this is not for me it's not about memory it's about a little bit of description it's more about an explanation the rescue is something that we can explain to some extent yes We follow the logic that we have already begun to have to do with States and institutions, in reality we can understand a lot about rescue because rescue is the other side of survival in a place. Like, in a place like France, you know that people in PE were still citizens under the German government, people bravely rescued Jews, but it's not the same courage as someone in Poland or the Soviet Union, where if you try saving a Jew, the penalty is.

Okay, it's just not the same. The people who hid a Frank in the Netherlands were brave, but it wasn't even a crime. What they were doing wasn't even illegal. They were not punished for it. That's why we have In the later books they were not punished because it was not a crime and it was not a crime because the Netherlands was still a state, so we can explain the rescue to some extent institutionally. A very good example of this is actually diplomats. almost all of those who saved more than 100 Jews were diplomats. Because? Because diplomats are better people than the rest of us.

Not because Diplomatic. Because first you can't take away a diplomat's citizenship. It's very difficult anyway. the almost magical power of extending the recognition of the State to other people, therefore, the Chinese console in Vienna saves a couple of thousand people, the Japanese console in Cush, in Lithuania, saves about 10,000 people. There are several Portuguese diplomats in the Spanish port and an American diplomat who also saves hundreds. Ral Hilberg, who wasn't really a diplomat, was kind of a failed businessman who, in the middle of his life, made the dramatic decision to be a Swedish diplomat and go to Budapest. he saves thousands of Jews how by giving them pieces of paper that reconnect them to the state and therefore they can survive properly, the history of the institution can to some extent help us see why people survive by being partisan. armies churches institutions that are a bit like a state a bit not like a state sometimes they kill Jews sometimes they rescue Jews when we get down to the individual Rescuers and try to explain why they did what they did, especially in the worst times and places where they don't they had institutional support sometimes we find reasons why they wanted them not to have children couples wanted the child lonely people wanted wanted someone else in the house sometimes we find human reasons but you can go to a level even beyond that and find individuals where neither Even those reasons apply and then the question is why they do what they do and this is what I mean by the other limit of History because there comes a point where you can't say that's all.

What I have learned about structures or about history no longer explains the actions of these individuals and that is why I finished the book with them because I think that is where the story ends, there are people who rescued even though they were at risk of death . there are people who rescued without any reason in the sense of sociological reason political reason economic reason reason because you know the economy was against this if you are in Poland or the Soviet Union if you are if you try to save a Jew and your neighbor sees you do it a neighbor informs you that they kill the Jew it is very likely that they will kill you the Jew's property goes to the neighbor and it is very likely that your property also goes to the neighbor, so if you are looking at this from the point of view of microeconomics 101, what which many people, of course, or just do with everything in life, if you look at it from that point of view, then no one is going to rescue the Jews, you are acting against your economic interests.

We are acting against almost every kind of interest that you can conceive when you do it and yet some people did that, I think it should be recorded and it should be understood that it happened, even though we can't fully understand it, but there is a Let's point this out, which is what we do very often with rescue: we say aha, okay, someone was rescued and therefore we are all redeemed, and what I'm trying to show is that yes, some people were rescued, but we wouldn't have rescued the vast majority of us. In those situations we would not have rescued if we uprooted the institutions and the laws we would not behave as we behave Now The Rescuers I call the righteous few because they were righteous but also because they were few and then this brings us back to what the political lesson is. politics and then it doesn't become the Hollywood version, which is to wait until the last minute and then do something dramatic, because if you wait until the last minute first you won't do the dramatic thing anyway, you'll fail, but even if you succeed, you'll do it. you are achieving because the catastrophe is already happening, right, the whole idea of ​​rescue means that the catastrophe has already occurred.

The political lesson cannot be the rescue in that sense, the political lesson has to be how we maintain, create, maintain the structures, what which means we didn't get to the last minute, well, let's get into it because the book is called Black Earth, the Holocaust has history and warning, and the last chapter of this book has been very provocative, many people have had different reactions, but I I would say that the last chapter challenges us to think about what is possible and what we are capable of. What worries them most as we move into the future and the possibility of something similar to this happening again so that the interesting thing about the Holocaust and the present is that almost everyone has an idea of ​​how the Holocaust is related with the present and the future.

I, as you say, have been challenged to draw lessons from the Holocaust for the present and the future, but everyone Is that the question is what lesson and what do I find and you can correct me later if you know examples, but what I find is that Do people generally take the Holocaust to confirm the way they see the world? True, it's not that often that you say that you find someone who says I went through life as a libertarian, then I learned about the Holocaust and now I'm a social democrat or you know, I went through life like that and I learned about the Holocaust and now I'm that in People generally find ways to make the Holocaust fit into whatever ideas they already have for other reasons.

I'm sorry to be cynical, but I'm afraid that's what I find, whereas I believe that the Holocaust was such a rupture, such a central event of the century that full knowledge of its scope and its causes does not challenge us to use your very good word if it doesn't challenge us then we have missed something true if learning about it doesn't change the way we see things and we haven't really learned about it so I accept the lessons that everyone accepts I accept that the Holocaust means that antisemitism is something bad I accept the kind of lesson that this is the lowest common denominator lesson of American museums, as you may have noticed, one must be tolerant and stand up for one's neighbor when the majority turns against one's neighbor, of course I think that's true.

I also accept the lessons that the Germans learn. I agree. Germans should be nice. I agree. Germans should have a democracy. I agree that they should have the rule of law. I'm just not sure that these things, these kinds of lowest common denominator lessons that are acceptable to everyone in a given society, exhaust what can actually be learned. I understand, I am sure that those things do not exhaust what can be learned, if I am right about the Holocaust, there are three basic characteristics, all of which we have talked about, one is Hitler's vision of the world, his idea. that everything is a racial struggle that resources matter that the only thing that matters in politics is solidarity with those who are racially closest to you enmity with everyone else if someone tells you something else that person is Jewish true anti-Semitism the second thing the destruction of states, which, by the way, is not just my argument, that's what scholars of ethnic cleansing and genocide say, the study of hi is often separated from other episodes of mass killing, but There is a whole body of social science that says it is not strong states that kill people, it is generally states that are falling apart, it is generally under conditions of state failure that ethnic cleansing is carried out and what What's really special about Nazi Germany is that it was a state that cultivated an institution, the SS, to destroy other states. and then take advantage of anarchy, it is not a strong state but a state that destroyed other states, so statelessness is lesson number two and lesson number three is how we think about ecology, how we think about the world around us .

Reasons to worry about access to food How will we do it or perhaps more specifically how will the Chinese behave when they find themselves in a similar situation? Is it true that China, which is like Germany, is a rising economic power that depends on exports and has much bigger problems with food than Germany had and has problems with water, which is something completely new , is it possible that your massive investments in East Africa could be a problem in the future? forward to the North, towards the water and natural gas in eastern Siberia, that maybe that could be a problem when I look at all this Mike, I'm not the statement, it's not the point it's not that the Holocaust as such will repeat itself in the future.

In the same way, the point is that if we understand the causes of the Holocaust as causes, we can see where one or two of these things align because in Rwanda there was the coincidence of ecological and racial

issues

in darur in In Sudan, you had the coincidence of ecological and racial problems in Syria today. What is happening in Syria today. Many things, but part of it is that we dismantled the Iraqi state. One and a half million Iraqis fled to Syria. So heGlobal warming ends one thing. which we always like to call the beautiful phrase of the Fertile Crescent no longer exists, 2 million more internal Syrian immigrants, that is one of the causes of the unrest in Syria, a state element and an ecological element and then, here you are, In Syria, the catastrophe that is with a textbook genocide of the Aidi people in the middle, so what I'm trying to do is not say that the Holocaust repeats itself over and over again, that would be nonsense, right?

What I'm trying to say is that if we really think it's the central event of the 20th century, if we really think that and it's not just something we say to put it behind plexiglass, then because you know, we put important things behind plexiglass or set them up. on the wall. or whatever the things that are really important we don't put them behind plexiglass we don't mount them on the wall we don't turn them into the plates the things that are really important we learn them and if we really learn from them things that we know are horrible things that they are a little unknown they are starting to seem a little more unknown and maybe a little more understandable one last point and that is that you noticed something about this country and I think this is something that is even heard in politics today.

I mean, many people in America feel that freedom is the absence of the state. Does that concern you based on your knowledge of what happened during the World War? Yes, yes, the idea that freedom is the absence of the State is the mistake that you can allow when you have a functional State, it is a vision of luxury, it is B, it is a kind of political adolescence, you know, and then maturity Politics comes when you are faced with how you and your neighbors will behave when there is no state, which does not mean that states are always good.

States can be better, they can, they can, they can be worse, but the idea that freedom is anarchy leads to situations where obviously there will be oppression and bloodshed, so it's very elegant to imagine that yes, we should have a Smaller and smaller state, smaller and smaller state, let's drown it in the bathtub, but if we drown the state in the bathtub, then everyone else is going to drown too. I mean, there's a very simple example of this that we're facing right now, let's imagine that, let's imagine that it's true that our elections are rigged, they don't. means anything what follows from that what immediately follows from that is that we fight in the streets we are freer when we fight in the streets then when then you know maybe it's more fun maybe some of us enjoy it some of us some of us Of us will enjoy fighting in the streets? um, but the thing is that actually freedom is actually the freedom for our political process to be decided by violence in the streets like it was largely in Germany in '32 and '33 because people didn't I didn't take the elections completely.

Seriously, right? It is actually freedom, because that is what it means to eliminate the state. Eliminating the state means saying things like and this is one of the things the Nazis said means saying things like parliament is a joke, elections don't really count well, you eliminate those procedures, okay, there will be a moment of great joy and euphoria, but is that really freedom? You know, Americans and Europeans do it more too, so I can imagine that several things would be preferable to what they have now. because we have forgotten it, we have forgotten it now, this is something interesting about the historical moment.

I mean, we never learned to a certain extent, but we've also forgotten not only things like hunger, which we talked about before, like the Great Depression generation, which I've understood some of the things I'm saying about hunger here, in It has largely been passed on to the generation that remembers the late 1930s, when European states collapsed before the Second World War, it has largely been passed on to the generation that we remember are our abstractions, what we remember. They're usually images, but they're very specific things that we're vulnerable to, just like Europeans were vulnerable to um and and, unfortunately, what I'm afraid is that we will learn those things, but in practice I would.

It's more like we didn't learn them in practice, right? I would prefer that our state institutions continue to function. Let's answer some questions from the audience in the time we have left. If you're in the Seating Bowl down here, you press the edge, no. Put your finger on the ball but on the rim and just hold it down. Well, actually we're going to use a. Well, we're going to use microphones for everything today since we're broadcasting this. Ryan has one. John has one. He raises your hand and we'll bring him a microphone, and please keep your questions brief, if you appreciate it, we'll start over here, how do you think religion affected the Holocaust?

So thanks for asking the question this way. in a general way, um, because we talk about blaming the Catholic Church, yes, other churches, yes, no, it's kind of fascinating, um, and I'm just going to tell you a couple of things that I found, that may be a little surprising. , but I hope it's interesting. One thing to think about is the way Christian religiosity permeates and is perverted in Hitler's worldview. I think this is something that no Christian facing this can overlook, because what Hitler does in mind conf. It's not so much, he takes traditional Christian anti-Semitism and uses it, that's not that important, but what he does, he takes traditional Christian ideas, like martyrdom, right, and uses them for different purposes, so people who are .

Christian, I think you should pay attention to that text as a way to change a worldview, right? Hitler himself is obviously not a Christian, he is not an extreme Christian, nor an extreme nationalist, it is something else, but when I read mind com, I am amazed at the way he very cleverly uses ideas like Redemption, salvation, true, we can, the The world will be saved, redeemed in some way when the Jews are gone. He uses these ideas very carefully. That is a connection to religion that is disturbing. The second connection is. more sociological is when we look at the rescue to return to this question, it turns out that it is not the people, it is not the variety of faith of the people that is important, what is important is, uh, sociologically, I mean, in general, It's whether your experience of a religion was also the experience of being an outsider, so in France and the Netherlands it wasn't that the Protestants rescued and the Catholics didn't or vice versa, what I found so interesting was that the Catholics and the places where Catholics were a minority before the war were more likely to be rescued and Protestants in places where they were a minority were more likely to be rescued if we move further east into Ukraine, to a place I know quite well that one finds and I think this was also true in Poland.

What you find is that the radical Protestant denominations, or places that were seen as radical Protestant dominions in that context, the Methodists, those people were much more Baptist and much more likely to rescue than their neighbors, because they were of a religion that he used to be abroad um which one and therefore and this is the this is the point this is how it fits with the argument when the state disappears his behavior doesn't change much because his behavior wasn't as determined by predictable institutions and laws like this and then , if we look at the individual level, let's take Poland, now the Polish Catholic Church, like the European Catholic churches in general, until the SEC during the interwar period taught that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ traditionally, but also teach something else, which is that Jews are responsible for the problems of modernity, including communism, which was a very useless thing to teach before World War II, as it turns out that that is a view that Hitler himself also espouses.

Hitler's idea that Jews are responsible for all ideas of human solidarity which includes everything that capitalism includes because capitalism has contracts but it also includes communism, so the idea that Jews are responsible for communism and capitalism was a place where Hitler's most extreme vision overlapped. with things that the priests, Poland and Elso were preaching unfortunately that didn't help, but where I'm going with this is the interesting thing about the Catholic Rescuers in Poland is that they were the Bible readers and what they quoted almost what they quoted to a degree really surprising was the parable of the good Samaritan, which is interesting to quote.

I think for many reasons, I mean, on the one hand, they were taking a stance that was different than very often what they were told unfortunately by their own priests because the idea was that the Jews were not our neighbors, but the other thing that The problem men have about the Good Samaritan is that the Good Samaritan is about people helping people who aren't like them, right? I mean, in the Good Samaritan problem, a Jew is not helped by another Jew, he is helped by someone who is from an enemy group, the Samaritans are right and the other thing that is very interesting about that story is that I I mean I may be taking this too far, you know, for my lovely Catholic audience, but the interesting thing is that it's a story of Jews arguing about Leviticus, right?

It's a parable in itself of Jews talking about the meaning of Leviticus, like what commandment. It is the most important commandment after loving God the most important commandment is to love your neighbor who is Your Neighbor the one who showed Mercy go and do the same that is what they tend to quote it is an individualistic thing they are reading it against the grain that from what they have, from what they have been taught and that is the history of the church and the Holocaust in general, people who were somehow out of place, nuns, for example, Catholic nuns, much more likely to rescue why women in a masculine Church are outposts. far from the city, the right people, for some reason or another, had decided to leave their families.

You know that in that situation religious people were more likely to be saved. Answer a question there, yes, considering the theory of the great man of history, in your opinion. or could the Holocaust have happened if Hitler had died in the first world war or if he had not been so charismatic yes, so I am going to agree with your question but I do not agree with It is a premise that the great man of the theory of History I would say that the only thing that matters is the great men, but the way they answer the question is to point out that other things also matter a lot, when and this is something I was working on.

Yesterday I finished with my students, we are doing the history of Eastern Europe and we come to the 17th century and my students are waiting for the moment when everything is about the second war and everything about the Holocaust and I am trying to explain to them that in the 17th century It's not just that people didn't know the Holocaust was coming, it's not just that they lived in a completely different world, but it wasn't going to happen, you know? that's not how history works history isn't just some kind of procession of things that you know happen automatically there's a chance that there are options all kinds of things that we don't know about so I agree with that I agree with you I think I agree with you The Holocaust would not have happened without Hitler, but that is because Hitler was one of several things necessary for the Holocaust.

He didn't achieve it on his own. He was a necessary condition among several other necessary conditions, as you know. the anxiety of the Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Great Depression, such as the ideological conflict between the extreme right and the extreme left, such as the fragility of the European system, etc., etc., etc., was a precondition important, but it was only One of the preconditions, so to take my favorite, my favorite way of saying this would be in November 1939, Hitler was almost assassinated. He was almost killed by a union organizer because of the weather and mud.

He left 45 minutes early. Otherwise he probably would have been killed by a bomb. If that had happened, there would not have been a Holocaust. I think as we understand it well, but that doesn't mean that only great men make history, it means that he was a condition among them. others of this of this that is happening I have time for one last question um let's ask a short question and unfortunately a short answer as well. Have you documented it in your book? What FDR knew before 1941 is in the index of your book. That is hard. What to do briefly because I've really realized that the United States is kind of a zone of freedom for me because I'm not an American historian, right?

I am an American, but I am not an American historian, but there is one thing that What I have noticed as a Holocaust historian in looking at the United States is that this has become highly politicized, with a very interesting and strong current that says that FDR, already You know, he was a terrible human being and he could have done a lot more and then FDR was operating, look, it's a lot worse, it's always a lotworse than we thought. FDR was operating within a very anti-Semitic American society where German propaganda said it is a Jewish war and many Americans believe it is correct and Jewish organizations.

They had to be very careful because they feared that if they said too much about Hitler they would be confirming Hitler's propaganda that the war was a Jewish war, so FDR was operating with a set of limitations that we like to forget because you know we're Americans and we like to forget the bad parts of our own history. That's natural, within those limitations. FDR was much more concerned, I would say, about the fate of the Jews than most people at the time would have been. America really organized. one of the few policies in the world designed to save the Jews, there was no Soviet policy to save the Jews, no one specifically designed policies to save the Jews except Poland which had a very small one called jagot um and the United States , which had something called the war refugee board where you know and it had why it was called the war refugee board why it wasn't called the committee to save many Jews.

I'll leave that to you, why wasn't it called that in America in the 1940s? I called the war refugee board and the idea was to recruit diplomats from neutral countries who we were trying to make feel bad about their cooperation with Germany and basically tell them if they agreed with us on this, we will treat them better after the war, so that we were trying to gather diplomats from neutral countries, the only success was that R was Ral Valenberg, precisely so Ral Valenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest, was paid with American money and was working for the United States and that It was FDR's idea, so under the circumstances, FDR did something right, the whole thing about not caring, as you know, that's not right, it's just not right.

My view of FDR would be that, given the circumstances. He was aware of the problem and therefore, as a skilled politician, he managed to do something at a time when there were major problems in Congress, major problems, as everyone knows, with the State Department, which was an organization Quite anti-Semitic back then, um. on important

issues

, you know, in trying to carry out the rescue in general, he actually managed to do something, yes, we had a policy that saved a few thousand Jews that is woefully insufficient and our record is not something that we can be proud and You know that the United States Holocaust Museum M is about to finally have an exhibit on American anti-Semitism and the reaction to Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and you know it's about time because if we don't understand each other ourselves, then we cannot understand.

Anyone else is right and my central point in this discussion for which I am very grateful is that the Holocaust is something that we not only have to understand but can understand because some elements are simply not that far away. Whether it's the world as we know it or the world we unfortunately might be about to meet, let's conclude, before we go, I want to thank everyone who joined us today in this discussion, thank you for your interest. and your attention, but especially thanks to the author of Black Earth, the Holocaust is history and warning, Professor Timothy Snider, Professor, it is a pleasure to see you again.