Timothy Snyder, The Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture #16: Colonization, Extermination, Ethnic Cleansing: The 1940s
For those who are not familiar with Timothy Snyder, he is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages, including both Ukrainian and Russian.
His book, “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” which I highly recommend, is not only meticulously researched, it is essential reading for a complete understanding of WWII as well as Europe today.
I have undertaken to summarize all of Snyder’s lectures. I am also following along in the reading (see syllabus link below), which has not only been enlightening, but enjoyable. As always, my summaries are meant to be a guide, rather than a substitution for Snyder’s lectures.
I’ve just finished watching Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s 16th lecture for his course, The Making of Modern Ukraine. This lecture, entitled “Colonization, Extermination, Ethnic Cleansing: The 1940s,” covered the relationship between Ukraine and Germany during the 20th century.
Ukraine had no real relationship with Germany before the 20th century, in large part because Germany didn’t exist as a nation-state prior to 1871, when it was unified after the Franco-Prussian War. Like many relationships, Ukraine’s dealings with Germany has had its up and downs. In 1918, Ukraine supplied Germany with a million tons of grain in exchange for recognition of Ukraine as a nation. When WWI ended soon afterward, a series of wars continued to rock Ukraine for three more years. This was a period in which Ukraine repeatedly declared its independence, and was repeatedly thwarted. It was also a period of wide-spread violence against Jews living in Ukraine.
Jews were simultaneously blamed for both capitalism and Bolshevism, two economic and philosophical approaches which are fundamentally incompatible. However, in the minds of people who believe in the “international Jewish conspiracy” everything can be blamed on Jews, because “Jews control everything.” Therefore, Jews could be slaughtered for being “the bourgeoisie,” as well as revolutionaries.
The extermination came to a head in the 1940s, when Hitler implemented the Final Solution. There were relatively few Jews in Germany in the 1940s, but there were millions of Jews in the eastern European territory conquered by Hitler. There were also millions of Slavs. Hitler’s plan was to eliminate all the Jews, and to starve to death 30 million Slavs, in order to create a “German utopia.”
In addition to the tens of millions of Slavs Hitler planned on starving, the Poles had to be eliminated as well. After the simultaneous invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in 1939, Poland was destroyed as a nation, and Poles were deported en masse. Ukraine not only lost its Jewish population (1.5 million), but also its Polish population, numbering in the millions. The effect of this rapid de-population was devastating, especially as it came on the heels of the Holodomor and Great Terror.
A couple of points stood out for me in Snyder’s lecture. One was that colonization was an intrinsic part of WWII. When Poland’s status as a nation was eliminated, it became “unowned” territory, just like all the lands that the European empires colonized in the New World and Africa. For colonizers, a land is not a people, but only what you can extract from it. This explains Ukraine’s difficulty in establishing its independence. It was surrounded by empires that wanted to extract its grain, iron, and coal while denying the existence of its people, its language, and its culture.
Another point (and this is something that I have encountered many times in WWII historical literature) is that ALL of Europe swung towards — not away from — Nazism in the 1930s. (And not just Europe, but the US as well. In the US, the armed forces approved of Hitler’s ability to “organize” Germany.) Western European countries approved of the Nazis’ anti-Bolshevism, and Britain even went so far as to assist in Germany’s rearmament. This approval faded once Germany invaded France. (An invasion that could not have happened if Russia hadn’t supplied the German army with millions of tons of oil.)
I want to make one last observation (mine this time) about colonialism. Snyder elucidated the “racialist” thinking which underlay both Hitler’s colonizing of Europe and the Holocaust. But racialist thought originated long before Hitler set it down in Mein Kampf. In the late 19th century, a new science was born in Britain: Eugenics. Developed by Francis Galton (who was Darwin’s cousin), eugenics proposed to weed out inferior humans in the same way farm animals are bred. Concurrently, the field of anthropology was established to “scienifically prove” that the peoples in colonized lands were “inferior” to European colonizers. (Fortunately, anthropology has changed since then.) Hitler’s brand of Social Darwinism, in which it was only “natural” that those who were not “Aryan” be eliminated for the good of the human species, had a long pedigree before Hitler adopted it. Sadly, that misguided racialist worldview is still with us; we see it playing out in Putin’s attempted destruction of all things Ukrainian.
You can watch the 16th lecture for The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi0wyvuNn4A
The syllabus for the course is here: https://snyder.substack.com/p/syllabus-of-my-ukraine-lecture-class
You can watch all of Timothy Snyder’s lectures for The Making of Modern Ukraine here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_
You can read my summaries of his lectures here: https://ericaverr.medium.com/
Erica Verrillo is the author of the Phoenix Rising Trilogy (Random House). Her short work has appeared in over a dozen publications. She is also the author of the definitive reference guide for treating myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, now in its second edition (first edition, St. Martin’s). She holds degrees from Tufts University (BA — History) and Syracuse University (MA — Linguistics) as well as doctoral work in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Speech Communication. Her professional life includes: Spanish language editor for the journal Mesoamerica, linguistics instructor (Dartmouth), Spanish and ESL instructor (Syracuse University), classical musician (Oxford Symphony Orchestra), Mayan linguist (SUNY Albany), and director of a non-profit NGO for Mayan refugees. She is the president of the American Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to to serving the needs of patients and caregivers through support, advocacy, and education. Her writing blog, Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity, has received nearly 8 million page views. You are welcome to visit.
