First of all, he is too imperious in sweeping aside alternative theses about why the Holocaust occurred. In Black Earth, he ignores some of the main rival interpretations to such an extent that it is necessary to listen to his views on them given briefly in presentations and lectures available on YouTube (for example, at Stanford on March 13, 2013 and at the London School of Economics on March 12, 2014). In his Stanford lecture, he asserted that the Jewish Holocaust is

an event whose explanations as yet have not attained the kind of . . . penetration one would need. After all, if one were to recite the standard reasons that we give for the Holocaust, none of them really can withstand much more than a moment or two of scrutiny.

If it was because of the way that the Germans are, then one would also have to accept that the Germans are not just good at being National Socialists, they were also very good at being Communists and probably the best in the world at being capitalists.

So, an explanation from German nature or from German history even tends to fall apart very quickly.

Snyder proceeds to the ridiculous conclusion from the facts he cites repeatedly that only 3 per cent of the Jews murdered under Hitler were German and that most killings took place outside German soil:

[T]he idea that this was a breakdown in German civilisation . . . and yet most of the Holocaust didn’t happen in Germany; most German Jews survived; most of the perpetrators were not German; the first Jews who were killed had never been touched by German power until the moment they were killed. And so a story that involves things that happened in Germany certainly can be no more than an introduction.

This ignores the fact that many German Jews survived only because they were pressured to emigrate (in numbers far greater than Snyder states) in the opening years of Nazi rule; it ignores the fact that the proportion of German Jews among Holocaust victims was obviously low because the Holocaust embraced almost all of Europe whereas a small proportion of European Jewry lived in Germany; and it ignores the fact that the non-German killers of Jews were normally acting under German command. Germany’s core involvement in the Holocaust derived not from the number of its Jews who perished compared with the number of Polish Jews but from its status as the main perpetrator. That Snyder should deliberately ignore all this in his rhetoric is perverse. Using the same logic, the United States’ role in its military operation against Saddam Hussein deserves “no more than an introduction” because it took place in Iraq and the Normans were only peripherally involved in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings because Hastings is not in Normandy.