Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
by timothy snyder
tim duggan books, 462 pages, $30
F
aced with the challenge of finding something new to say about the Holocaust, a lesser author will offer a picture of Nazism that resembles his present-day political opponents. In a strange reversal, Timothy Snyder opens Black Earth by presenting a Nazism that resembles his own side. He claims that the only way to understand the Holocaust is to grasp that “Hitler’s thought was ecological,” his dominant theme not race but the “planetary ecosystem.” A bizarre argument, all the more so because Snyder is a green himself—the second half of the book’s subtitle, the Holocaust “as warning,” refers to his thesis that we can avert the next genocide by taking drastic action on climate change. Having made Hitler out to be a radical environmentalist, Snyder then has to pirouette like a dervish to explain that climate skeptics are Hitler’s real modern-day heirs. Fortunately for Snyder and his fellow environmentalists, he never succeeds in painting Hitler green in the first place.
