1장
Between Dictators and Death: How Fourteen Million Perished in Europe's Killing Fields
When Vasily Grossman entered the ruins of Treblinka in 1944, he found "earth that is as unsteady as the sea" - ground literally shifting from the buried remains of nearly 800,000 murdered Jews. This haunting image captures the essence of Timothy Snyder's groundbreaking "Bloodlands," which has transformed our understanding of 20th-century European atrocity. Named one of The Economist's Books of the Year and winner of multiple prestigious awards, this work forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union deliberately murdered fourteen million civilians in the territories between central Poland and western Russia. These weren't casualties of war but victims of calculated policies - people starved, shot, or gassed in what Snyder calls "the bloodlands." While history often treats Nazi and Soviet crimes separately, Snyder reveals their deadly interconnection, showing how these regimes, though ideologically opposed, created a zone of death unmatched in modern history.
2장
The Architects of Mass Death: Hitler and Stalin
In the aftermath of World War I, two men with radically different visions rose to power amid the ruins of old empires. Joseph Stalin, consolidating control of the Soviet Union by 1927, pursued "socialism in one country" through brutal collectivization of agriculture. Believing rapid industrialization required sacrificing peasants, he transformed farming from private to state-controlled enterprise. Stalin methodically eliminated rivals through what he called "democratic centralism" - a system where society was subordinate to the state, controlled by the party, and ruled by a small elite. He outmaneuvered political opponents like Trotsky by controlling party bureaucracy, then purged both leftist and rightist allies after adopting their policies.
Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler built support through charismatic leadership rather than bureaucratic maneuvering. The Nazi vision rejected democracy for a Leader expressing racial will, blaming Jews for controlling both capitalism and communism. After failing in his 1923 Munich coup, Hitler practiced parliamentary politics while building support. When the Great Depression struck, his message resonated with desperate Germans - by July 1932, Nazis won 37% of votes, and Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933.
Both regimes offered radical alternatives when liberal democracy seemed impotent during the Depression. Their agricultural policies were particularly revolutionary - Stalin taking land from peasants for collective farms, Hitler planning an eastern frontier empire where German farmers would colonize Slavic lands. Their visions of transformation overlapped especially in Ukraine, which both saw as a breadbasket to exploit for building modern industrial states.
3장
Stalin's Killing Fields: The Ukrainian Famine and Great Terror
In 1933, Ukraine became the epicenter of a catastrophic artificial famine. While cities saw thousands queuing desperately for bread, the countryside experienced mass death. Starving peasants fled to urban areas seeking food, only to be turned away or arrested. Children were rounded up by police to die in "death barracks," while train stations were overwhelmed with the famished. Witnesses observed horrific scenes - mothers dead at marketplaces with infants still suckling at cold breasts, children with "enormous wobbling heads" and "sticklike limbs."
By late 1932, Stalin had declared the famine a "fairy tale" spread by enemies. He insisted that seemingly innocent peasants were actually saboteurs working for capitalist powers. This tortured logic forced Ukrainian communists to interpret starving families as political opposition. Stalin rejected all outside help, including money gathered by Ukrainians abroad. Though he could have saved millions by suspending food exports, releasing grain reserves, or allowing peasants access to local storage, he chose none of these options.
Instead, Stalin deliberately implemented seven lethal policies specifically targeting Ukraine: forcing peasants to return previously earned grain advances; imposing "meat penalties" requiring those who couldn't meet grain quotas to surrender livestock; implementing a "black list" system requiring failing farms to surrender fifteen times their normal monthly quota; framing the famine as a nationalist plot; affirming impossible grain quotas; sealing Ukraine's borders to prevent escape; and continuing grain collection even after quotas were met, taking the seed grain peasants needed to survive.
The countryside fell silent as people died alone. As one survivor recalled, "they went on dying, dying, dying." The few outsiders who witnessed the horror, like journalist Gareth Jones, found "famine on a colossal scale" and heard the same phrases everywhere: "Everyone is swollen from starvation" and "We are waiting to die."
4장
Class Terror: The Great Purge and Nazi Consolidation
By 1937, Stalin had transformed the Soviet Union into a country where no one was safe. The December 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov gave Stalin his opportunity to assert control over the NKVD (secret police). Like Hitler with the Reichstag fire, Stalin exploited this murder to target political opponents, forcing through a special law for swift execution of "terrorists."
Beginning in August 1936, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov orchestrated show trials of Stalin's former opponents, starting with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who confessed to terrorist plots after being beaten and intimidated. The newspaper Pravda explicitly linked them to both Trotsky and the Gestapo, an absurd connection many outside the USSR nevertheless accepted.
The Great Terror of 1937-1938 began with Stalin and the Politburo ordering mass repressions against "kulaks" and "anti-Soviet elements." Regional NKVD offices were instructed to register kulaks and recommend execution and deportation quotas. When initial numbers came in, Stalin rounded them up, signaling officers to find more victims.
Three-person commissions called troikas implemented the terror, transforming quotas into executions across sixty-four regions. Dominated by NKVD chiefs, these troikas processed hundreds of cases nightly, deciding life or death in under a minute per person. Confessions were extracted through torture - the "conveyor method" of uninterrupted questioning and the "standing method" of forced sleeplessness, complemented by brutal beatings authorized by Stalin himself.
Executions occurred secretly at night in soundproofed rooms, garages, or forests. Victims were shot in the back of the head with Nagan pistols, buried in pre-dug pits, and the sites camouflaged. In Soviet Ukraine, where "kulak resistance" had been widespread during collectivization, the terror was especially severe with 70,868 people shot. In some districts, troikas sentenced everyone to death.
Like Stalin, Hitler used violence to assert control over power institutions, though on a much smaller scale. His most prominent target was Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA brownshirts who had helped Hitler rise to power. In the "Night of the Long Knives" of June 1934, Hitler ordered the SS to murder Rohm and at least 85 others, claiming they had been planning a coup. This purge elevated Heinrich Himmler's SS to become the most powerful Nazi party institution.
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National Terror: Stalin's War on Ethnic Minorities
By the late 1930s, Hitler's regime was notorious for its racism and anti-Semitism. Yet it was Stalin's Soviet Union that undertook the first shooting campaigns targeting internal national enemies. In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. The most persecuted European national minority during this period was not German Jews but Soviet Poles.
Stalin pioneered national mass murder with Soviet Poles as the preeminent victims. The fictional "Polish Military Organization" provided a rationale for scapegoating Poles for Soviet policy failures. After the German-Polish nonaggression declaration in 1934, Poles were blamed not only for the famine but for the worsening Soviet international position.
On August 11, 1937, NKVD chief Yezhov issued Order 00485 mandating the "total liquidation of the networks of spies of the Polish Military Organization." This order radicalized the Terror by targeting a national group rather than a class-based enemy. This contradicted the Soviet Union's public image of multicultural tolerance during the Popular Front years.
With the "album method," investigating officers would compose brief reports on prisoners recommending either death or the Gulag, which would be compiled by regional two-person commissions and sent to Moscow for approval. Though supposedly reviewed by Yezhov and prosecutor Vyshynskii, they merely initialed thousands of death sentences in a single day with minimal scrutiny. Even minor connections to Polish culture became evidence of espionage - owning a rosary could mean ten years in the Gulag, while production shortfalls could mean death. Stalin delighted in these results, encouraging Yezhov to "keep on digging up and cleaning out this Polish filth."
The Polish operation proved the bloodiest chapter of the Great Terror. Of 143,810 people arrested as Polish spies, 111,091 were executed. Poles suffered disproportionately, with approximately 85,000 executed in 1937-38 - one-eighth of all Great Terror victims despite constituting less than 0.4% of the Soviet population. Soviet Poles were forty times more likely to die during the Great Terror than average Soviet citizens.
The Polish operation became a model for other national actions targeting diaspora nationalities or "enemy nations" - groups with real or imagined connections to foreign states. In total, the national operations killed 247,157 people - 36% of Great Terror fatalities - though these targeted groups represented only 1.6% of the Soviet population.
6장
Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe: The Deadly Partnership
On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shocked the world by signing a non-aggression pact. Beyond the public agreement, they signed a secret protocol dividing Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. With this stroke of the pen, these ideological enemies became partners in conquest.
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Soviets waited until September 17 before attacking from the east. Together, they crushed Polish resistance and divided the country between them. In their respective occupation zones, both regimes began implementing their systems of terror and mass killing, targeting Polish civilians in comparable numbers for similar reasons.
The German terror began with experimental bombing of Wielun, a city with no military significance. Throughout western Poland, 158 settlements suffered similar fates. Warsaw endured seventeen air raids on September 10 alone, and on September 25, Hitler ordered 560 tons of bombs and 72 tons of firebombs dropped on the capital, killing 25,000 civilians.
German soldiers, indoctrinated to view Poland as "not a real country," committed numerous war crimes, including burning prisoners alive, using POWs as human shields, and executing at least 3,000 Polish prisoners. Wehrmacht officers operated under Hitler's instruction to "close your hearts to pity," with the intention "to destroy and exterminate the Polish people."
Meanwhile in eastern Poland, the Soviets emptied prisons, put communists in charge of local government, and encouraged class violence. The NKVD made 109,400 arrests in eastern Poland in twenty-one months - more than in the entire Soviet Union - with typical sentences of eight years in the Gulag and over 8,500 death sentences.
West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, German methods were even more brutal. The Einsatzgruppen, special task forces created by Reinhard Heydrich, were deployed as "ideological soldiers" to eliminate Poland's educated classes. In Operation Tannenberg, they aimed to murder 61,000 Polish citizens to "destroy Poland" as a functioning society. Though lacking the NKVD's methodical approach, the Einsatzgruppen killed about 50,000 Polish civilians.
In February 1940, during temperatures of forty below zero, the NKVD deported 139,794 Poles - military veterans, foresters, civil servants, policemen and their families - to special settlements in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Packed into unheated freight cars without proper facilities, about 5,000 died during the journey and another 11,000 by summer's end.
The most notorious Soviet crime came in April 1940, when approximately 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were executed in the Katyn forest and other locations. This "lesser Terror" killed 21,892 Polish citizens, mostly ethnic Poles but also Jews, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The families of the executed were punished too - Beria ordered 60,667 family members deported to Kazakhstan.
7장
The Economics of Apocalypse: Operation Barbarossa
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 marked the beginning of an unprecedented calamity. Operation Barbarossa initiated a conflict that would kill over ten million soldiers and a comparable number of civilians, while the Germans deliberately murdered some ten million people, including more than five million Jews and three million prisoners of war.
Under Himmler's supervision, SS Professor Konrad Meyer had drafted "Generalplan Ost" - a plan to eliminate between 31-45 million people, mostly Slavs. Germans would establish "pearls of settlement" - utopian farming communities producing food for Europe. Hitler explicitly compared this vision to America's westward expansion: "In the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America."
By May 1941, German planners had formulated the "Hunger Plan" - a deliberate strategy to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving conquered Soviet populations. Ukraine's fertile soil would feed Germany rather than Russia, while cities would be destroyed and about thirty million people would starve in the winter of 1941-1942.
As Operation Barbarossa extended beyond its planned twelve-week timeline, Germany's food strategy shifted from the original Hunger Plan to desperate improvisation. In September 1941, Goring ordered German troops to live "off the land" as "in the colonial wars," with food allocated first to German soldiers, then to Germans in Germany, then to Soviet citizens, and finally to Soviet prisoners of war.
The Wehrmacht's treatment of Soviet prisoners of war represented the Hunger Plan in its most direct implementation. By the end of 1941, Germans had captured about three million Soviet soldiers. Unlike traditional POW camps designed to preserve life, German camps were deliberately designed for death. Prisoners weren't registered by name, no provisions were made for food, shelter or medical care, and calorie rations were intentionally below survival levels.
Soviet prisoners endured horrific death marches to the camps, with the exhausted shot on the spot. When transported by train in open freight cars, death rates reached 70%. Perhaps 200,000 died just in transit. The camps themselves were often nothing more than open fields surrounded by barbed wire. In Belarus camps like Stalag 352 near Minsk, prisoners were packed so tightly they couldn't move and had to relieve themselves where they stood - 109,500 died there alone.
8장
The Final Solution: From Bullets to Gas Chambers
As Hitler's grand utopias crumbled against Soviet resistance in late 1941, his inner circle scrambled to salvage what they could from the ruins of their fantasies. The lightning victory had failed, the Hunger Plan proved impossible to fully implement, and Generalplan Ost for colonization had to be postponed.
Himmler proved most adept at extracting practical value from Hitler's utopian thinking. He repurposed elements of the failed Nazi plans: from the Hunger Plan, he adopted the concept of "useless eaters," offering Jews as those from whom food could be spared; from the lightning victory, he extracted the Einsatzgruppen, originally tasked with killing Soviet elites; from Generalplan Ost, he deployed Order Police battalions and local collaborators. These forces, supported by the Wehrmacht, enabled Germans to murder approximately one million Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line by the end of 1941.
When Germans invaded Lithuania in June 1941, many Lithuanians welcomed them after the brutal Soviet occupation. The Germans arrived with handpicked Lithuanian nationalists who encouraged the belief that Jews were responsible for Soviet repressions. With the Soviet deportations fresh in memory and NKVD killings just days earlier, Lithuanian mobs murdered approximately 2,500 Jews in early July pogroms.
Einsatzgruppe A found willing collaborators throughout Lithuania. In Kaunas, Einsatzkommando 3 (just 139 personnel) supervised Lithuanian units killing Jews by July 4th. By December, they reported 133,346 persons killed, including 114,856 Jews. In Vilnius, the "Jerusalem of the North," Einsatzkommando 9 and Lithuanian auxiliaries marched Jews to the Ponary Forest where about 72,000 Jews and 8,000 non-Jewish Poles and Lithuanians were shot.
By December 1941, the word "resettlement" shifted from description to euphemism, no longer meaning relocation but execution. As one German document starkly revealed: "Resettlement site: on the resettlement site eight trenches are situated. One squad of ten officers and men are to work at each trench and are to be relieved every two hours."
Throughout 1942, Germans systematically killed most remaining Jews under their occupation. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, they used gassing facilities; east of it, they continued mass shootings and deployed gas vans tested on Soviet POWs. In Ukraine, killings resumed as soon as the ground thawed enough for digging pits.
The destruction of these communities was methodical. In Rivne, 17,000 Jews were shot at Sosenky woods in November 1941, with the remaining 10,000 confined to a ghetto. By July 1942, Reichskommissar Erich Koch demanded a "100% solution," and the survivors were transported to a quarry near Kostopil and executed. In Lutsk, Jews were forced to dig their own graves while Germans mockingly told them their families would "rest" there the next day. Women were forced to recite "Because I am a Jew I have no right to live" before being shot naked over the pits.
9장
The Nazi Death Factories: Industrial Killing
About 5.4 million Jews died under German occupation, nearly half murdered east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line (usually by bullets, sometimes by gas) and the rest west of this line (usually by gas, sometimes by bullets). West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, Jews came under German control earlier but were killed later. The mass murder of Polish Jews began after more than two years of German occupation through six major gassing facilities operating between December 1941 and November 1944: Chemno, Bezec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.
By late October 1941, SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik had chosen Bezec as the site for his new gassing facility. The location revealed the shifting Nazi utopias - from exterminatory colonization to pure extermination. Originally established in 1940 as a slave labor site where Globocnik imagined two million Jews would dig anti-tank ditches, it was repurposed a year later for extermination.
Bezec represented an innovation in killing technology - combining the permanent gas chambers of the "euthanasia" program with carbon monoxide generated from internal combustion engines. Unlike Chemno in the Wartheland, which used parked gas vans to kill 145,301 Jews in 1941-1942, Bezec featured purpose-built gas chambers connected to engines by pipes, surrounded by fences and linked to population centers by rail.
In March 1942, Himmler and Globocnik launched their systematic campaign to destroy the Polish Jews of the General Government - the largest Jewish population in Europe. After Himmler's visit to Lublin on March 14, deportations began two days later. The Germans exploited Jewish institutions to facilitate destruction. Jewish police forces, who outnumbered their German supervisors but had no firearms, were forced to assemble fellow Jews for transport, sometimes under daily quotas.
After Eberl's disastrous management at Treblinka created chaos and drew unwanted attention, Franz Stangl took command in August 1942. Stangl, who later admitted he "enjoyed" his "profession" of mass gassing, quickly restored order by halting transports temporarily while Jewish laborers buried the accumulated corpses. When operations resumed in September, Treblinka functioned with brutal efficiency.
To maintain deception, Treblinka was transformed into a mock train station complete with a clock, timetable, and ticket counters. An orchestra led by Warsaw musician Artur Gold played as Jews disembarked. The weak were taken to a fake "clinic" marked with a red cross where they were shot by Germans dressed as doctors. The rest were separated by gender, stripped naked, and women had their hair cut for use in German submarine crew slippers and railway worker stockings.
The victims were forced through "the road to Heaven" - a tunnel leading to gas chambers marked with a Star of David and Hebrew inscription: "This is the gateway to G-d. The righteous shall pass through." Trawniki men locked them inside and pumped carbon monoxide from a tank engine. After twenty minutes, Jewish laborers removed the intertwined corpses, "dentists" extracted gold teeth, and bodies were initially buried, later burned on massive pyres of railway rails.
10장
Resistance and the War's End: The Bloodlands Liberated
The night of June 21, 1944 belonged to Soviet partisans in Belarus, who laid thousands of explosive charges on rail lines to support Operation Bagration. The following day, over a million Soviet troops attacked German forces, delivering one of the war's most decisive Soviet victories. Two weeks earlier, Americans had joined the European battle with the Normandy landings, but Soviet forces in Belarus achieved an even more dramatic breakthrough, destroying Army Group Center and opening the way to Poland.
By July 24, the Red Army had discovered Majdanek, and in early August, writer Vasily Grossman encountered Treblinka, where he found "earth that is as unsteady as the sea" - the burial ground of Poland's Jews, with remnants of their lives scattered among ashes and bones.
For Warsaw's Jews and Poles, Operation Bagration represented different hopes and fears. While surviving Jews welcomed Soviet forces as liberators, non-Jewish Poles saw them as a questionable ally - a second Soviet incursion into Polish territory. This difference defined their wartime experiences: Polish Jews had no choice but to resist German extermination, while non-Jewish Poles could sometimes choose which occupier to resist and when.
When the Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, the Home Army hoped to liberate the capital before Soviet forces arrived, establishing the legitimacy of the Polish government-in-exile. Despite initial successes, the uprising faced overwhelming German firepower. Stalin deliberately halted the Red Army at the Vistula River, allowing Germans to crush the resistance. SS units, including the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade, engaged in systematic mass murder of civilians, with estimates of forty thousand killed.
As the uprising was crushed, Himmler ordered Warsaw's complete destruction, with special units methodically burning the city block by block. After the uprising's defeat, surviving civilians were expelled from the city, with many sent to concentration camps. The city's cultural heritage was deliberately destroyed, including the last remaining library.
While the Red Army halted at the Vistula from August 1944 through January 1945, the Germans continued killing Jews just west of Soviet lines. When Soviet soldiers finally crossed the Vistula on January 17, 1945, they found Warsaw in ruins. Two days later, they reached odz, and by January 27, Auschwitz. As the Red Army advanced, SS guards forced Jews on brutal death marches to German labor camps, killing thousands more.
11장
Ethnic Cleansings and Stalinist Anti-Semitism: The Postwar Bloodlands
By January 1945, Stalin had determined his vision for Poland: a communist state with ethnically homogeneous borders. Though he wouldn't undertake mass killings in his East European empire, Poland would become the center of a zone of ethnic purity where Germany would be for Germans, Poland for Poles, and western Soviet Ukraine for Ukrainians.
At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin made his intentions clear to Roosevelt and Churchill, who raised no objections to his reclaiming territories received from Hitler: half of Poland, the Baltic States, and northeastern Romania. Poland would be compensated by shifting westward, absorbing German territory to the Oder and Lusatian Neie Rivers - lands inhabited by ten million Germans.
By March 1945, the Red Army had conquered all German lands Stalin intended for Poland, and by May was in Berlin. Six million Germans had already fled or been evacuated, creating conditions for Stalin's ethnic reconfiguration. During the Berlin campaign, Red Army soldiers followed a brutal pattern in eastern German territories intended for Poland: they raped German women and seized German men and some women for forced labor.
The Soviets seized about 520,000 Germans for forced labor - roughly a tenth of what Germans had taken from the Soviet Union. They also took 287,000 laborers from other East European countries and deported at least 40,000 Poles considered threats to Soviet power. About 600,000 Germans taken as prisoners or laborers died after the war.
Poland's new communist government established itself through ethnic cleansing. On May 26, 1945, the Polish party central committee resolved to remove all Germans from Polish territory - including the million who had returned after initially fleeing the Red Army. Between June 20 and July 20, 1945, the army marched approximately 1.2 million Germans across the border.
After the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, where the Allies accepted Stalin's proposed Oder-Neie border for Poland, Polish authorities deliberately created inhumane conditions to force "voluntary repatriations." They banned German language in public, closed German schools, seized property, and forced men to work in mines. By late 1945, Germans were leaving "voluntarily" on freight trains, sometimes in open cars. About 600,000 Germans reached Germany this way in late 1945.
In January 1948, Stalin ordered the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and director of the Moscow Yiddish Theater. Mikhoels had become problematic for Stalin because he refused to let the Holocaust pass into historical oblivion. After the war, he continued to speak openly about Jewish death pits and had brought ashes from Babi Yar in a crystal vase to a lecture in Kiev.
Stalin needed everyone in the communist bloc to understand that Russians had suffered more than any other group in the war. This narrative faced challenges in territories like the Baltics, western Ukraine, and Poland, where Soviet occupation bookended the war. The Holocaust posed a particular challenge to this narrative - Jews had been specifically targeted for extermination, making their suffering unique.
In early 1949, Soviet public life veered toward anti-Semitism. Pravda denounced "stateless cosmopolitanism," triggering purges of Jews from every professional sphere. Jewish writers using Russian pseudonyms had their birth names published in parentheses. Those who had documented Nazi atrocities faced arrest. Soviet Jews now risked being labeled both "rootless cosmopolitans" (supposedly insincere in their Soviet attachment) and "Zionists" (potentially loyal to Israel).
12장
Humanity in the Face of Inhumanity: The Bloodlands' Legacy
Each victim had a name and story. Jozef Sobolewski was the starving toddler who imagined wheat in the fields before dying with his mother and five siblings in Ukraine in 1933. Stanisaw Wyganowski foresaw meeting his arrested wife "under the ground" before both were shot by the NKVD in 1937. Adam Solski wrote of his wedding ring before being executed at Katyn in 1940. Eleven-year-old Tania Savicheva kept a diary in starving Leningrad before dying, while her sister escaped across frozen Lake Ladoga. Twelve-year-old Jewish girl Junita Vishniatskaia wrote "Farewell forever" in a letter to her father before being killed with her mother Zlata in Belarus in 1942.
Between them, Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered more than fourteen million people in the bloodlands between 1933-1945. This included Stalin's Ukrainian famine (3+ million), the Great Terror (700,000), joint Soviet-German destruction of Poland's educated classes (200,000), German starvation of Soviet POWs and Leningrad residents (4+ million), and the Holocaust (5.4 million Jews). These regimes provoked each other to ever greater crimes, as in partisan wars where Germans killed about half a million civilians.
Only by accepting the similarities between Nazi and Soviet systems can we understand their differences. Both opposed liberalism and democracy, inverted the meaning of "party," and created one-party states where economic planners viewed certain groups as superfluous. Both relied on collectives to control social groups and extract resources - collective farms for Stalin, and ghettos for Hitler. Both built extensive concentration camp systems.
Yet their visions fundamentally differed. Nazism embraced inherent inequality between groups, while Soviet communism imposed its version of equality on everyone it encountered. Stalin's liquidations always claimed to defend socialism or the Soviet state, while Nazi colonization depended on conquering vast territories and destroying tens of millions as a precondition. Soviets typically killed their own citizens; Germans generally killed non-Germans. The Soviet system was most lethal during peacetime, while Nazi Germany killed few before the war but murdered millions at unprecedented speed once war began.
Europeans didn't have the luxury of choosing whether to compare Nazi and Soviet systems - they had to weigh what they knew about both regimes to make life-or-death decisions. From German workers in 1933 deciding how to vote, to starving Ukrainian peasants hoping for German intervention, to Polish officers choosing which invader to surrender to in 1939, to Jews deciding whether to flee to the forest or remain in ghettos - millions faced impossible choices between these systems.
The Holocaust's 5.7 million Jewish deaths must be understood not as an abstraction but as 5.7 million times one. We might better grasp 780,863 Treblinka victims by thinking of Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after gassing, and Ruth Dorfmann who cried with the man who cut her hair before entering the gas chamber. Similarly, we must see the million Leningrad siege victims, 3.1 million Soviet POWs, 3.3 million Ukrainian famine victims, 681,692 Great Terror victims, and 21,892 Polish POWs as individuals with unique stories. Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers. If we cannot transform these numbers back into people, Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world but our humanity.
