Snyder’s chapter in Black Earth on “The Auschwitz Paradox” propagates the view that “while Auschwitz has been remembered, the rest has been largely forgotten”. This remark certainly does not apply to many previous works, including classics such as Sir Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy or to Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s differing and much-discussed interpretations of the mass shootings of Jews in the Baltics in Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners.  Fourth, the book gives only scant credit to historians such as Christian Gerlach, who have already explored much of the territory covered now by Snyder.

Fifth, Black Earth includes chapters which string together moving stories about rescuers of Jews — “The Grey Saviours” and “The Righteous Few”. These are written in a compelling style and they are informative about the tangle of good and evil acts in extreme circumstances. But they seem to be appendages added to create human interest with little relevance to Snyder’s professed explanatory task.

Sixth, this brings us to one of Snyder’s two explanations of the Holocaust, namely that the mass murder of Jews was facilitated by Hitler’s creation of “stateless zones”. It is the only point calling for review. Snyder’s other explanation, Hitler’s “ecological panic” and the danger of another holocaust caused by global warming, wanders too far from an analysis of the mass murder of European Jewry to require discussion here. The author’s concluding chapter about global warming even strays into a critique of United States policy in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Following Hannah Arendt, Snyder stresses the protection offered by citizenship and a passport even in circumstances where the authorities of the issuing countries were in no position to offer direct protection. For example, the Nazis did not venture to murder Jewish Americans who became their prisoners of war. Anti-Semitic allies of Hitler such as Ion Antonescu in Romania protected their Jewish citizens from deportation by the Nazis provided they lived in the country’s undisputed territory. By contrast, Antonescu indulged in the mass murder of Jews living in territories such as Bessarabia and Bukovina (“stateless zones”) which had been lost to the Soviet Union and had then been retaken following the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. In German-occupied France, Jewish refugees from other countries were at far greater danger than Jews who were French citizens. While Hungary remained allied to Germany and refused until 1944 to permit Hitler to deport its Jewish citizens, Jews living in Hungary’s extended territories without Hungarian citizenship were deported in their thousands in 1941 to Nazi-occupied Galicia where they were murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen at Kamenets-Podolsk.

Snyder is undoubtedly correct in pointing to the travails of statelessness, especially in dangerous times. He is realistic as well in stressing that the chaos of war made it far easier to commit mass murder. Jews were in the gravest danger in areas such as the Baltic countries, which were occupied in short succession by the Soviet Union (following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939) and then by Nazi Germany in June 1941.