The term “revisionist history” is one I don’t like. Yes, there are revisionist histories that try to – for example – argue that the holocaust didn’t happen, but those are just outright misrepresentation, rather than actually revising how we see some historical event or period. Revision may entail completely re-assessing something we thought we understood, based on new facts.
The great example of this, for me, is Howard Zinn’s [recommended book!] A People’s History of The United States. I do not believe Zinn lies or misrepresents anything in his history, but he presents a challengingly different view of events by writing about them from the perspective of the defeated instead of the winner. As Zinn says “history is as much about what you choose to leave out, as what you leave in.”
If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.
– Vaclav Havel
Then, there’s the other form of revision, when the context and interpretation of some event is changed profoundly. Growing up in the US, I learned about the unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pulled the US into WWII – it wasn’t until years later that I learned that US policy toward Japan prior to the attack was an economic and technological embargo, with a strongly racialized element, intended to keep Japan from rising as a technological/military power in deference to whiter European allies. When an understanding like that finally reaches me, I feel as if the world around me has spun, briefly, and resumed its movement in a different direction. Revision, indeed.
I recently listened through the audiobook of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. [amazon] It’s painful and horrifying. You may be familiar with Stalin’s quip, “if one death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” The book is full of statistics of Stalin’s sort. In fact, it’s full of many statistics specifically about Stalin’s choices and their consequences. There were times when I wanted to fast-forward because it started to numb my brain: so many died of starvation in this month, so many in that month, so many in this district, and so many stood on the edge of a killing-pit firing bullets into the necks of teenagers or old people. I suppose if you encounter holocaust denial, this book would be a great source of information to refute it, but Synder takes us down a different path, entirely, by re-framing the holocaust in the context of genocidal Europe from the 1930s until the cold war. Let me say this: there is something horribly fucking wrong with European racists – we ought to be, globally, asking ourselves, “how do we keep these people out of power?” To excuse it, I suppose we’d have to say, “Ghengis Khan was worse” except Ghengis Khan was not as stupid and ineffective as Stalin and Hitler.
Let me back up a bit: what you generally learn in the US is that WWII happened and the Germans went batshit and started industrial-scale murdering Jews. After that, Jews migrated to Palestine and founded Israel. The US and USSR divided Germany and stood glaring at eachother across an iron curtain, or something, and eventually the USSR fell apart because of its inability to sustain a command economy with massive military expenditures; capitalism won. That’s all bullshit, of course. Snyder’s explanation is much more realistic: Stalin began slaughtering Soviet Ukraine as part of a program of resettlement and reallocation, which broadened out to include the entire USSR. Then, he allied with Hitler, who had the same idea regarding Poland and (though Stalin didn’t know it) Russia. Both leaders were practicing a form of settler colonialism: wipe out the domestic population of an area and bring in their own people. “Lebensraum” on one hand, and shifting from an agricultural society to an industrial/agricultural society on the other. Snyder bursts a lot of the myths I learned about the holocaust, that the einsatzgruppen and SS were the profligate murderers of Jews, and musters facts that show that shooting-pits took more lives than the mechanized death-camps, and that it was ordinary policemen and militias that did much more killing (in USSR as well as the Reich). The history Snyder portrays is that Hitler and Stalin both had, basically, the same idea and methods, but couldn’t maintain their agreement because, ultimately, Hitler was greedy. Snyder also goes into agonizing detail about the cost of un-screwing settler colonialism: millions of German colonists displaced from homes that they had taken and occupied in Poland and elsewhere – layers of slaughter and counter-slaughter. The chilling reality is that, for most people trapped in the middle of the nightmare, it didn’t matter which side you were on because both sides wanted to kill you if you were not 100% subservient to them, which was a problem because they traded you back and forth as territory. Stalin wanted to murder anyone who had been successfully invaded by the Germans because you can’t trust someone who’d allow something like that, can you?
It’s a much more accurate view, I think, of events but it no longer allows anyone to be seen as the “good guys” – the key part of the narrative from which Americans hang their insistence that WWII was the “good war” and those that participated in it were the “greatest generation.” Ugh, it sounds more like the 30 years’ war or the Boxer Rebellion: waves of semi-organized military crashing around all over the place, killing anyone they encountered.
Synder does not trade in horrible statistics, he personalizes the nightmare with accounts from those who were caught up in it. Pertinent to the audiobook: the narrator’s voice is even and unemotional, which makes the litany of horror somehow even worse because it’s so dispassionate. It’s entirely appropriate for the subject. Also, the narration has some obvious audio flaws – at several points they appear to have gone back and spliced in the correct pronounciation of some town-or-other, because the audio headspace discernably changes when the town’s name is said. It’s distracting.
“They asked for my wedding ring, which I…” The Polish officer broke off his diary, just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about 200,000 Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country.
Because of the “realpolitik” of fighting the war, the US had to promote Stalin as the “good guy” to counter-balance Hitler, but Synder makes it clear that’s a shameful lie. There were no good guys at all. Or, rather, if there were, they were mostly shot and buried in the killing pits.
It’s a view of WWII that sounds more like the worst parts of the Vietnam War, where the civilian population was either burned out of their villages by US “search and destroy” missions, or terrorized into helping the Viet Cong, as nobody was allowed to enjoy or claim neutrality. The Soviets would shoot you if you even questioned it, and so would the Germans. The whole book is a litany of slaughters and starvation. Snyder also confronts head-on how both the Soviets and later the Germans used starvation as a basic form of genocide; the Soviets deliberately starving 4 million Ukrainians to death until the Germans arrived – and resumed starving them. Both Stalin and Hitler wanted the land, but not the people.
The following summer a 12 year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying goodbye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves, alive.”
She was among the more than 5 million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans. In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people. The place where all the victims died – the bloodlands – extends from central Poland to Western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. During the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism, 1933-1938, the joint Soviet/German occupation of Poland 1939-1941, and then the German/Soviet war 1941-1945, mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region.
It was necessary for the US’ post-war aims to downplay the involvement of “the average German” in the carnage, as well as to downplay the Stalinist purges and genocide by starvation. So American kids grew up hearing about the industrial death-camps and the einsatzgruppen, instead of being told that the majority of the murders were committed by regional police in occupied areas. It is impossible to believe that colonists, moving from Germany to re-settle in Poland, in fully-furnished homes that had been cleared of their former occupants, did not know what was going on. In fact, it is impossible to believe those colonists were surprised when the Soviet police drove them from their homes and shot them, after Germany had fallen. Snyder runs us through the whole bitter play from when the curtain came up till it finally dropped (sort of) instead of just presenting the more sanitary “greatest hits.” Earlier when I mentioned Ghengis Khan: it feels as though Central Europe was trapped between two versions of Ghengis Khan, equally blood-drunk and ruthless, who traded it back and forth as a play-thing while the rest of the world watched. We should not have so eagerly propagandized our monster as a “good guy” compared to the “bad guy” Hitler.
This is an important book, and I’ve added it to my recommended reading list. It’s not fun reading.
Not a single one of the 14 million murdered was a soldier on active duty.
This book fits well with Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s “O! Jerusalem!” which presents a wide-angle view of the establishment of Israel. Most Americans were raised with the notion, by implication, that Israel was established because of the actions of the Reich, when, in fact, ethno-state zionism was thoroughly spun up and active in the 1930s – the time where Bloodlands begins to explain what was happening to European Jewry. It has always seemed to me as though a lot of Americans implicitly assume that Israel is sort of a payment of blood-debt for the Holocaust, but O! Jerusalem! will cure any illusions on that score. It was more like an escape-plan for Polish Jewry who were prescient enough to realize that European anti-semitism was building to an insane crescendo, as it did.
Have you read Richard Rhodes “Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust” ?
If not, I highly recommend it.
The chapter about how they selected and trained the likes of Sgt. Moll was very enlightening.
Thank you for the info, I won’t be reading the book. I do not think I would be able to cope.
That was an excellent review, thank you. It’s a book that sounds like it would pair well with some recent episodes of the Behind the Bastards podcast titled How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible. They discuss how we have been sold this idea that most Germans were unaware of what was happening when this is not the case, and looks at the role of local police in the Holocaust. It was a haunting and thought-provoking listen but felt essential and timely.
Review of Bloodlands at The Grauniad:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/09/bloodlands-stalin-timothy-snyder-review
I assumed it was a con whereby the European powers could get rid of the Jews without the bad PR of genocide.
“There’s your holy land. Now fuck off! Oh, the people who used to live there want their stuff back? Well, that’s YOUR problem now, isn’t it? Have fun with that.”
LykeX@#5:
There’s a lot of that. The British and Americans exported their antisemitism problem without confronting it directly.
One of the things I learned from O! Jerusalem was that many of the toughest, most intransigent zionists were members of paramilitary units in Poland. Several future Israeli prime ministers came from Poland and changed their names later, e.g. Ben Gurion. The Polish paramilitaries organized collections of weapons and shipped them over, as well as settler colonialism-style “send our young men, to create children.” It was an outright colonialist project – always was and still is.
British anti-semitism and American anti-semitism seem to get lost in the noise of other racist and imperialist policies they put forward. In my opinion, everyone is covered in shame.
Historically, the Muslim world was a place of refuge for Jews fleeing Xtian persecution. It’s sad what has happened between them.
Hey, don’t forget French anti-semitism — the Dreyfuss affair and all that. Vichy didn’t come out of nowhere, after all.
“The British and Americans exported their antisemitism problem”
Can you expand on that? I don’t get it. Right now 42% of the Jews in all the world are in Israel, and 39% are in the USA. How is that “exporting their antisemitism”?
The UK, meanwhile, has considerably fewer Jews than Jedi (per the official census of 2001) and less than 2% of the world population… but how big did the UK Jewish population ever get? Is there a big population in Israel of people who moved there from the UK? Or have I misinterpreted the quote?
Israel is stolen land.
Thanks for the tip, went out and purchased it for the Partner. The Partner just happens to be reading O! Jerusalem right now, as well as another book. I’m not sure I’ll be able to read this one, but may try.
brucegee1962@#8:
Hey, don’t forget French anti-semitism.
I didn’t. They were not prime movers of zionism and collaborated fairly happily with the Nazi genocide. Their role in the holocaust has been down-played because, you know, post-war “good guys”, croissants, and all that.
The USA has similar history — the forced removal and genocide of the indigenous people of North America (the ones that European diseases didn’t kill) which is still going on, the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, police killings, etc. None of this was ever a secret from the white population — I learned about much of it in my high school history classes in Virginia, or in news reports, though there were details I only found out later. But we were raised with the idea that our leaders were Good People and must be doing the right thing, and “indian” and “negro” lives weren’t all that important, so almost all of the non-marginalized (=white) people just turned the page and forgot about it. You have enough problems and you don’t want to rock the boat. Just like most Germans.
When I lived in Germany, I used to speak with a co-worker who lived through WW II, and as she put it, you knew stuff was going on, but you didn’t actually see it, and you also knew not to inquire too deeply. And most people just shrugged their shoulders and preferred to assume that the rules knew best. Just like in the USA, when they hear about what the USA does in Iraq or Vietnam or Central America, people prefer to cover whatever happens with a layer of patriotism and not want to look too deeply.
sonofrojblake @9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#After_World_War_II
(The Brits washed their hands)
… the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people.
I question that number.
When you read up on the Nazis’ murders, you come up with a total of 11-13 million (depending mostly on whether you count ~2M Soviet POWs from Operation Barbarossa, quietly starved to death by the German army). Add in just those 4M Ukrainians, even with the lower estimate of Nazi victims, and you’ve left Snyder’s 14M behind – and you still have the rest of Uncle Joe’s body count to go.
And virtually all of these calculations omit the military deaths (fair game, by international rules) and the collateral civilian damage from military ops.
… the more than 5 million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.
That’s the first time I’ve seen a non-holocaust-denialist challenge the canonical 6M tally. ??? Does Snyder exclude the worked-to-death et alia?
I probably won’t be reading it but it does your summary is just a bit different from my reading of Soviet history.
Stalin was a monster at times, probably a sociopath but not genocidal. At times he had whole ethnic groups deported, for example the Tartars in the Crimea, but there was no genocide as practiced by the Nazis.
Snyder’s explanation is much more realistic: Stalin began slaughtering Soviet Ukraine as part of a program of resettlement and reallocation, which broadened out to include the entire USSR.
Sounds like complete bullshit to me. I have read several “explanations” of varying credibility but not resettlement. Does Snyder point to just who Stalin was planning on resettling there?
Depending on exactly what the term “reallocation” means this could well be true. Stalin was continuing the Soviet drive, started under Lenin, to turn a backward, mainly rural/agricultural nation into an industrial powerhouse and was not fussy about how he did it.
The treaty with Hitler seems to have been a desperate attempt to buy time and space after the Soviet Union failed to establish defensive alliances with France or Britain—I don’t know if they ever tried to talk to the US but doubt it.
With the officer purges in 1938–1939 and the horrible performance of the Red Army in the Winter War the USSR need every minute it could buy to rebuild the Soviet military.
The Munich Agreement and the fall of Czechoslovakia had made it clear that the West would be of no help if it came to a Germany–USSR war. And Stalin and the Politburo were under no illusions about Hitler’s future intentions.
BTW even the officer purges often sent those purged officers to the Gulag rather than shooting them. During the Great Patriotic War (USSR term for their part of WWII) many were recalled to duty.
There is the famous example of Konstantin Rokossovsky who was purged, “rehabilitated”, commanded the Don Front at Stalingrad that wiped out the German Sixth Army, ended up as a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and, somewhat bizarrely, was Defense Minister of Poland for a while.
This is something of an aside, but:
“I learned about the unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pulled the US into WWII – it wasn’t until years later that I learned that US policy toward Japan prior to the attack was an economic and technological embargo, with a strongly racialized element, intended to keep Japan from rising as a technological/military power in deference to whiter European allies”
HmmmMMMmmmMMMmmm sorta? I have something of a different way of thinking.
I mean, there was a big back-and forth in ~1936 where the USA and Europe refused to allow the Japanese Navy to reach parity for reasons soaked in racism and supremacy. Practically every interaction from Perry (1852) to then was steeped in racial superiority and manifest destiny garbage…. but also by this time very practical concerns were rising which would overtake all others by about mid 1940.
My read on the situation was that the embargoes were created from a basically correct assessment of exactly where things were heading; the beginning of the embargoes in 1938 was not a co-incidence.
The 1933 invasion of Manchuria and opening of the 1937 Sino-Japanese war, as well as the statements made by Japan in relation to it, made a pretty conclusive argument that Japan was trying to expand. Not super popular in the west, but mainly because they wanted the stuff that Japan was taking. So far, so normal. Dominance of nations, the usual.
The enormous number of atrocities in China, especially the infamous Nanjing Massacre from December 13 1937, pushed a lot of different elements in the US and its territories together, and pushed them toward containing Japan. I mean, there were people outraged by the atrocities (good for them, I mean that genuinely), and I’m actually pretty sure it unnerved a lot more people besides, but it also drove up the investment many people had in not allowing Imperial Japan to claim territory.
With much more brittle lines drawn, the US began embargoes as an opening step against Japan, the demand that Japan remove its forces from China became central sticking point in negotiations, and war became inevitable a long time before it started.
tl;dr: Atrocities and resources made the war happen far before Pearl Harbor; the US racism provided the background of aggression but not the aggression itself, they got pipped by Japanese racism.
jrkrideau:
Just to be clear, Winter War occurred while Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was already in effect. Undoubtedly, other developments by summer 1939 had made the Soviets see that the situation was dire enough. Part of their preparation was annexing East Poland and Baltic countries for a buffer zone immediately after the MR treaty made it safer w/r to Germany. In the same vein, Finland was manipulated toward accepting a “peaceful” occupation and a Soviet-friendly puppet government. It was largely a coincidence that this escalated into a major war, and that even that effort failed to subdue Finland.
I don’t know when exactly Red Army purges ended and/or aggressive (re)building of Soviet military began, but I understand it was before Winter War started in late 1939. That war may have made the Red Army look even weaker than it actually was, considering the constrained logistics and difficult weather. Perhaps it made Stalin even more alarmed than before, or contributed to Hitler’s idea that invasion of the USSR was feasible. Obviously, the real lesson should have been that you don’t fight an offensive war in winter.
Patrick Slattery@#1:
Have you read Richard Rhodes “Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust” ?
Yes. I went through a phase where I really dug into the history of mechanized carnage. Rhodes’ book is excellent.
I think the most upsetting book I read on the topic is Eugene Kogon’s “The Theory and Practice of Hell” and Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” was the most thought-provoking. “Bloodlands” probably has shifted my views the most. It’s not as though I’ve had a big “oh!” change so much as that my whole understanding of what happened is different now.
Allison@#13:
The USA has similar history
Yes.
When my great great grandparents immigrated from Norway and wound up in Lyle, Wi, they were given farm land that had been cleared of the Lakota that lived there. I know that, at the time, the newcomers knew.
The German settlers who moved into the cleared areas were told to pick a house and move in, so you’ve got a family moving into a furnished house that looks like it was just suddenly abandoned. It doesn’t take a lot of challenging introspection to wonder, “this room looks like it was lived in by a 12 year-old girl who suddenly left. I wonder where to?”
I think that a lot of my tendency to push back against humanist ideas is the awful history of humans even in recent times. When one of my fellow atheo-skeptics tells me that humans can make moral judgements, I immediately reject the idea. Humans don’t think carefully about our decisions, we just stumble around in a haze of post facto self-justification. The Bloodlands story makes a mockery of the idea that there is a moral calculus anyone can access.
sonofrojblake@#9:
“The British and Americans exported their antisemitism problem”
Can you expand on that? I don’t get it. Right now 42% of the Jews in all the world are in Israel, and 39% are in the USA. How is that “exporting their antisemitism”?
When I wrote that I was thinking of England’s shameful history of pushing away and finally interning in concentration camps Jews who were trying to escape Europe. Balfour, obviously, happened well before that, but I can’t interpret the British attitude as anything other than an anti-semitic policy of the governments – using European Jewry as a weak soak-off to punish the Ottomans (everyone was punishing the Ottomans at the time) I don’t think that the British were trying to “do the right thing” as much as grabbing an expedient way to fob a problem off on someone else.
I don’t remember the exact dates, but one of the reasons England may not have had large Jewish populations was because Jews were expelled in the 13th century. That law remained in effect until the 18th century. I guess that’s one way of solving the European Jewery “question” – shout “it’s not our problem.” In the 1930s it gets more complicated because the British simply classified Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and put them back on boats to the continent. In that context, I see the Brits’ “why don’t all you Jews just go to Palestine” as a great big “fuck off OK?”
but how big did the UK Jewish population ever get? Is there a big population in Israel of people who moved there from the UK? Or have I misinterpreted the quote?
It never got big. The British answer to the “Jewish Question” (as Dan Carlin says, whenever someone frames it that way it means someone’s going to get killed) was to keep them out and export them to Palestine.
The Americans also had their anti-semites including powerful and wealthy, and established various immigration laws that favored European immigrants from Ireland, England, Norway, Sweden – that did not specifically call out Jews like the anti-Chinese immigration acts, but had the effect of reducing Jewish immigration dramatically in the 1920s-30s. The M.S. St Louis [wik] is an example of US policy toward Jewish refugees from Europe: “not welcome here.” At the time, Henry Ford was promoting ideas that were Hitlerian: WWI was instigated by international Jewry, as was the depression.
I’m also going to note that if you look at the population of Jews, worldwide, it’s a bit off to observe that it’s largely divided between the US and Israel. Yeah, those are the survivors. It’s as if the Balfour Declaration turned on the valve or more likely Jews realized it was time to get the fuck out of Europe:
aquietvoice@#17:
HmmmMMMmmmMMMmmm sorta? I have something of a different way of thinking.
I mean, there was a big back-and forth in ~1936 where the USA and Europe refused to allow the Japanese Navy to reach parity for reasons soaked in racism and supremacy. Practically every interaction from Perry (1852) to then was steeped in racial superiority and manifest destiny garbage…. but also by this time very practical concerns were rising which would overtake all others by about mid 1940.
True, though the US also had a history of diplomatic brushes with the Japanese government(s) of the time, regarding racist treatment of Japanese-American settlers in California. I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that the American empire’s attitude toward Japan was heavily tinged by racism.
That said, yes, the main axis of diplomatic stress was over Japan/China once Japan appeared to not be planning to move further against Russia. That’s sort of my point: as soon as the Japanese were willing to join in the looting of China, they were asking for a seat at the grown-ups’ table along with England, France, and the US – and that was just laughable. The British were OK with selling the Japanese military ships but were then horrified when they used them so effectively; that was unexpected. Japan was treated as a small upstart nation, which is about right, really, in the logic of the great powers.
My read on the situation was that the embargoes were created from a basically correct assessment of exactly where things were heading; the beginning of the embargoes in 1938 was not a co-incidence.
The US was providing Japan with most of its oil and steel and cut that supply off when they realized that Japan had ambitions to be a great power. I don’t think it was because of Nanking so much as keeping them in their place (lots of racist epithets about the Japanese were slung around at all levels of the US. I don’t think we can say it was entirely racism but it was racialized imperial politics.
tl;dr: Atrocities and resources made the war happen far before Pearl Harbor; the US racism provided the background of aggression but not the aggression itself, they got pipped by Japanese racism.
I think it’s nice that you believe the US has ever given a shit about atrocities, especially committed against the Chinese.
Stalin, at various times, worried about a Japanese/Polish alliance against the USSR (!) and that the Japanese were eyeing resources beyond what they had managed to grab in Manchuria. It seemed clear to everyone that Japan wanted to play the game of great powers on the world stage and the European powers and the US tried to put them back in their place without war. I read somewhere that the Japanese first strike plan was partly premised on “use it or lose it” because the embargo was threatening to make their very expensive navy into a hood ornament. The oil shortage was so severe that Tokyo was full of coal-fired and wood-fired taxis. The Japanese had just conclusively demonstrated what an oil-fired navy could do to a coal-fired navy, and their addiction to oil was unbearable.
Re: Jewish immigration to Palestine: The east-European immigration from 1882 onwards started in response to the 1881 pogroms in the Ukraine and southern Russia. This happened in parallel with a much greater wave of Jewish immigration westwards. A second wave followed the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Something I learned somewhat recently was that many of those who chose Jaffa over New York were motivated either by suspecting they might get rejected on Ellis Island for health reasons or because they realized home prices were cheaper in Jaffa. Only a small proportion were the ideological Zionists we learn about in elementary school – the socialist Zionists that worked in agriculture and started the first kibbutzim. The immigration from eastern Europe between WW1 and 1933 was mostly from Poland, mostly following antisemitic policies and attacks that were part of Polish nationalism. The proportion that went to Palestine rather than the US increased in 1924 following tightening of US immigration laws. These were the people who made Tel Aviv into a city (though a small proportion of them formed the communes that paved roads etc). The immigration from 1933 to 1939 was mostly from Germany.
Marcus Ranum @22:
This is the country that gave the Russian Empire a beating in 1905! Somebody should have been paying more attention.
It sounds like an interesting, albeit a thoroughly depressing book.
One theory I’ve read regarding the Nazi-Soviet agreement of 1939 is that Stalin agreed to it not just to buy time and territory for the Soviet Union, but also because he hoped that Hitler would get involved in a protracted World War I style struggle with France and Britain, which would exhaust and weaken both sides and allow the Soviet Union to become the dominant power in Europe by attacking a weakened Germany and/or encouraging uprisings in war-exhausted countries. Stalin was then horrified when the German army defeated the French and pushed the British off the continent quickly. Of course, that was a horrifying development for him no matter what his plans were.
During the almost 2 years that the Nazi-Soviet agreement was in effect, the Soviets provided the Germans with a lot of raw materials, ironically more than the Germans ever got from Soviet territory after they invaded the Soviet Union. If Hitler hadn’t been so obsessed with attacking the Soviet Union, the Germans and Soviets probably might have been able to force Britain to seek peace by moving against Britain’s position in the near and Middle East, and the two totalitarian empires could have dominated most of Europe and Asia for a long time. I guess things always could have been even worse.
Another review of Bloodlands:
https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2010/12/soviet-snyder-history-europe