Read By: Ralph Cosham

Americans think of World War II as 'The Good War', a moment when
the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was
not decided by D-day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and
Joseph Stalin.

While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of World War II in the
six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality
is even grimmer.

In 13 years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed 13 million people in
the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths
occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.

In the groundbreaking long-view style of Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson,
Tim Snyder, one of America's foremost historians of Eastern Europe, has
written a new history of Europe that focuses on the battleground of
Eastern Europe, which suffered the worst crimes of Hitler and Stalin.

Based upon scholarly literature and primary sources in all of the
relevant languages, Bloodlands pays special attention to the sources
left by those who were killed: the letters home, the notes flung from
trains, the diaries found on corpses.

This is a new kind of European history, one more concerned with
suffering than with intention, one that recognizes how stories of
progress or victory have excluded the most salient human experience,
and one focused on the extreme predicament of the tens of millions of
Europeans who found themselves between Hitler and Stalin.

The scale of destruction in the lands between Germany and Russia has
eluded historians and baffles the cynicism of our new century, but for
these very reasons, Bloodlands offers the way forward to a sensible
reconstruction of European history.

Ultimately, in Snyder's matchless telling, the German and Soviet regimes
appear not so much as totalitarian twins, but as rivals whose ruthless
pursuit of similar goals doomed millions of innocents.

Download File Size:711.06 MB

---