Black Earth

The Holocaust began in a dark place - in Hitler's mind: the elimination of the Jews would restore the ecological balance of the planet and provide Germany with the resources it urgently needed. Timothy Snyder's sensational book begins with how Hitler saw the world. Breathtakingly intense, Black Earth describes what happened, how it happened and why it happened. And it ends with a warning: We should not be too sure. We are not as far away from those fears that made the Holocaust possible as we think. We have become accustomed to seeing the Holocaust as a death factory, set in motion by bureaucracies of evil. But when the gas chambers went into operation, more than a million Jews were already dead: shot at close range in front of pits and ravines. They were murdered in the death zones that had been established in a German colony.