The function, if not the intention, of Snyder’s dismissal of any need to inquire into the factors which may have led German citizens into acquiescence with Hitler is to provide the country with an historical free ride.

Snyder is then dismissive of anti-Semitism as a cause of the Shoah:

[W]e fall back then to the anti-Semitism among the people among whom the Jews lived and to be sure there was a great deal of anti-Semitism among the peoples among whom the Jews lived in Eastern Europe. Jews lived for five hundred years in Eastern Europe. This was the demographic homeland of the Jewish people for five hundred years . . . and they lived among a great deal of anti-Judaic and modern anti-     Semitic feeling. However, there’s so much of it that to explain . . . there’s so much of it. It’s so ubiquitous that it can’t really be the explanation. You see, to explain the Holocaust by the presence of local anti-Semitism is like explaining a hurricane by the presence of air.

This reduces what surely should be the core issue of Holocaust explanation to a slick debating point. It also ignores the importance of examining anti-Semitism as a motivation of the German architects of the Holocaust rather than “local” anti-Semitism (presumably among Baltic, Polish and Ukrainian and other populations).

Second, Snyder devotes an undue amount of space, including an entire chapter, to pre-war contacts between Poland’s anti-Semitic government and Zionist Revisionist Jews, the precursors to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel. Poland was willing to train and arm Zionist hardliners so that they could expel the British from Palestine by acts of terrorism, create a Jewish state and enable millions of Polish Jews to emigrate there from Poland. Though this is an interesting and already much recorded episode, it is open to question why Snyder gives it such prominence in a book that sets out to explain the Holocaust. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, some members of the Irgun (later the main Jewish terrorist organisation in Palestine under Menachem Begin) received clandestine training in Poland, but the numbers were small. Crucially, the alliance of convenience between the Irgun and the Polish authorities had few effects and had no significant influence on the Shoah. Certainly, it was not a cause of it.

Third, Snyder returns yet again in Black Earth to a theme he has explored several times before: namely that the Holocaust was about much more than Auschwitz and that millions of Jews were shot rather than gassed. To some degree, he is justified in pointing out that Auschwitz is far better known than other major killing sites. But he greatly exaggerates the novelty of this observation. As Sir Richard Evans rightly states in a highly critical review of Bloodlands, republished in his recent collection of essays The Third Reich in History and Memory (Little Brown, £20), “We know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don’t.”