Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

The atrocities that were committed in both the Soviet Union and Germany before and during WWII are staggering. This book does a tremendous job of bringing to light the magnitude of that loss of life. I believe this book should be a must read.

This book is full of statistics about the ways that Hitler and Stalin went about their business of killing millions of innocent people.I for one did not realise that Stalin was in fact the worst of the two..The figures are absolutely astounding .

This book is certainly an "eye opener".

Powerful and comprehensive history, dispelling myths and correcting mistaken perceptions. Snyder maintains the essential "humanity" of this chronicle by interspersing the almost incomprehensible statistics with vignettes of single individuals who typify the statistics. If the result of not knowing history is to repeat it, then this book is essential reading for all of us.

What happened in the East to the people caught between Stalin and Hitler. Documents the pattern of mass killing conducted by both the Nazis and Soviets on an unimaginable scale as the blood slick killing machines ground back and forth across Eastern Europe.

There comes a point in historian Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands when you read about a particular mass slaying and think to yourself 'didn't I just read that a few pages ago?' When you look back you realize that what you just read was another 30,000 people killed and not the 30,000 who were killed in another location a few pages earlier. Eventually the numbers become mind-numbing ... almost as if Snyder had written his history of Eastern Europe caught between Stalin on the east and Hitler on the west with a calculator instead of a computer.

Between Stalin's push for collectivization of Soviet farms and the resulting mass starvation in the 1930s and Hitler's drive for a homeland that would encompass Russia and make possible the eradication of European Jews in the 1940s Snyder estimates more than 14 million people fell victim to one side or the other. Snyder tells the compelling story of the Jews, Poles, and others who were caught between the jaws of two monster regimes.

The killing fields of Central Europe began when Stalin tried to force farms into collectives. Faced with unrealistic goals of grain production and a government that demanded even the seeds held back for the next year's plantings, the result was a famine that Stalin blamed on the peasants themselves. Many were sent to the Gulag but the truly unfortunate ones were left behind to face agonizingly slow deaths from starvation and canibalism. Stalin had perfected the use of famine and starvation as a weapon of mass murder.

When Hitler reneged on a pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Russia in 1941, the bloodlands were once again in the crosshairs of a regime bent on mass murder. Originally planning to relocate Jews to the area until a "final solution" could be developed, Hitler expected a quick victory over Stalin; so quick, in fact, that he sent troops into Russia ill-prepared for the Russian winters. While the Germans ravaged the countryside for food, their prisoners were starved to death. But the Nazis put their time in Eastern Europe to productive use: they began to perfect their own skills at mass murder. First it involved lining prisoners up in front of freshly dug trenches and shooting them so the bodies would fall in and be buried. Then they experimented with trucks in which the exhaust flowed into the enclosed back to kill prisoners. When even that proved ineffective, they moved on to showers that spewed Kyklon B and incinerators that ran day and night and still couldn't keep up with Hitler's appetite for death.

It's not easy to wade through all the death in Bloodlands. To his credit, Synder knows when to focus in on the human part of the story through letters left by victims or the stories told by survivors and when to pull back the focus to the sheer numbers of victims, many of whom still lie in unmarked graves. Bloodlands is a stunning story of a land where two monsters lived out their darkest, most twisted, bloodiest fantasies. And through it all I was reminded of the quote attributed to Stalin: "One man's death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic." In this book Snyder has given those "statistics" a voice.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a well-written, thoroughly-documented investigation into the Hell on Earth that was the "Bloodlands," basically Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine during the era of Stalin and Hitler. Snyder's attention to details - the individual deaths and the grotesque mass murder - focuses the reader's attentions onto the quite literal "enormity" - the extreme evil or moral offensiveness - of which totalitarian societies - whether fascist or communist are capable.

The fact that there were two monsters at work in the Bloodlands has come as something of a surprise to moderns who have tended to ignore the fact that the democratic West was allied with a psychopathic mass murderer of the first water. In his review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil", commented that after reading the accounts of cannibalism during the Ukrainian Famine, which had been engineered by Stalin, he was "jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler." The fact that it took this book to jolt someone who had written a book about the evils out of Hitler into thinking about the evils of Stalin, speaks volumes about why Snyder's book is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in history, or, for that matter, by anyone who is interested in the mystery of human nature or of good and evil.

Snyder does at least five things in this book that make it well worth reading.

First, he breaks down the mostly artificial division that has been made between the experience of National Socialism and Communism for the people who were its chief victims. Most books consider one or the other - with the vast majority concerned only with the former, resulting in the naivety that Rosenbaum expressed in his review. As a consequence of the "fallacy of publicity" - i.e, that which gets the most publicity is most true - the victims of Stalinism, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who were shot for being Polish, have been reduced to non-existence.

As Snyder points out, though, people didn't experience one totalitarian system as if it were hermetically sealed from the other totalitarian system. They experienced them as either really bad "Hobson choices" - should one go East or West? It depended on whether you were Jewish or a Polish army officer, but most people didn't get that choice. They were also experienced simultaneously, as Stalinist policies encouraged partisan actions - or the Warsaw Uprising - which resulted in Nazi reprisals, which permitted Stalin to watch his enemies exterminate the people most likely to oppose him in the future. Or they were experienced as almost seamless transitions from one system to the other, as, for example, when the Nazis took over the collective farms instituted by Stalin for the purpose of starving the peasants so that they could use those same farms to starve more peasants. Or, again, when the NKVD took over "Concentration Camp Warsaw" from the Nazis and used it to torture and murder members of the Polish Home Army after Poland was "liberated" from the Nazis.

By treating the Bloodlands as a single entity between Hitler and Stalin, Snyder forces us to think about both Hitler and Stalin, and, thereby, fights our historical amnesia about the latter and reduces the former to a historical actor, rather than a mere caricature of evil.

Second, Snyder tells an effective horror story. Snyder offers the statistics about Hitler and Stalin's mass murders, but he recounts the individual stories that make up those numbers. It is one thing to hear about 20,000 murdered Polish army officers, quite another to hear about the wedding ring that one wanted to have returned to his wife. It is one thing to hear about the millions killed in the Holocaust, quite another to read of the child taken to fill a quota in the Warsaw Ghetto who pleaded, "I know that you are a good man, sir. Be so kind as to not take me away. My mama left for just a moment. She'll be back in just a moment, and I won't be there, be so kind as to not take me away."

These stories - like the stories of the cannibalism in the Ukraine during Stalin's artificial famine - wear on the reader's soul and cause one to wonder how such things could happen and whether human nature isn't irreparably damaged.

Third, Snyder corrects the popular image we have of the Holocaust. Like most people, my view was that the Holocaust involved the shipping of German Jews to concentration camps where they were gassed. I was surprised to learn that most Jewish victims of the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp; they were murdered by Einsatzgruppen east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. Most concentration camps were not death factories. The death factories emerged later in the war; mass killing of Jews started first east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, and then moved to the west where the death factories were developed. The death factories were developed, in part based, on the experience that the Nazis had garnered in murdering their own disabled citizens. Previously, I had some knowledge of the Einsatzgruppens' activities and of the death factories, but I had no idea how they were integrated, or where the Holocaust began, or how long it took for the Holocaust to move West.

Fourth, Snyder provided me with "big picture" ideas that helped to explain the apparent insanity of German war goals. For example, Snyder explains the German attack on the Soviet Union as part of the German war goal of making itself a continental power that contained within its borders the resources, including food, that would permit it to challenge the continental power of the United States and the oceanic power of Great Britain. So, while Operation Barbarossa seems like a daunting idea, it wasn't per se insane.

Likewise, the insanity of the Final Solution is explained by Snyder as being the only Nazi war aim after 1941 that the Nazis realized they could achieve. The Nazi war aim hadn't originally been mass murder of the Jews, but vaguely involved re-settling the Jews somewhere, perhaps to the East. When such a resettlement was seen as not being possible, and with the slipping away of its other war goals, well, at least Himmler seemed to be able to produce some impressive statistics on the one war goal that the Nazis could achieve, mostly because - unlike the situation with respect to their war goals vis a vis the Soviet Unions - their victims didn't have weapons. So, again, evil, vicious, inhuman, but "insane" only in the way that G.K. Chesterton defined "insanity," namely not as someone who has lost their reason, but as someone who has lost everything but reason.

Fifth, Snyder's book is ultimately a great work of history, like Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. In the last chapter, Snyder tries to come to grips with how such evil things could have been possible. He essays some explanation about Hitler and Stalin's genius at putting people in situations where they had to make immoral choices. He observes that "In 1941 in the western Soviet Union, SS officers, like NKVD officers a few years earlier, competed among themselves to kill more people and thus to demonstrate their competence and loyalty. Human lives were reduced to the moment of pleasure of a subordinate reporting to a superior."

Ultimately, the answer may be that there are no good answers, but to maintain our humanity, we shouldn't pretend either that the stories didn't happen or that the perpetrators of this evil were in no way like ourselves.

This was a interesting way of trying to learn the methodology of histories worst leaders. There thinking was explored to a small degree. The millons of people who perished because of Stalin and Hitler can NEVER be forgotten.

Many millions of people were murdered due to orders from Hitler and Stalin. I have read a great deal regarding this period, but am always left with the same unanswered question: How could this have occurred? And, WHY?

Simply the Best Book Written on non-military death on the Eastern Front. Starting with Stalin's Terror Famine in the Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 through the post-war period of ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, nothing comes close to this book by Snyder. Should be read along with Mosier's Deathride as there is little in Bloodlands about the actual military campaigns by the Germans and Soviets which Mosier concentrates on.

Be warned that the subject (mass murder on an epic scale) is fully discussed and intentionally intended not to subsume individual obliteration by a sea of cold numbers. The point of the book is that 14,000,000 persons were intentionally murdered one by one by one....each murder being a separate catastrophe rather than a corpse in a pile.

While extraordinarily well written, and very up-to-date, a very difficult (emotionally) read.

This book was excellent. I laid out in detail what happened throughout the years under Stalin, Stalin and Hitler, and then Hitler. It shows that for the last 70 years Germany/Hitler started the war, while always neglecting to mention that Stalin invaded Poland two weeks later. Britain and France declared war against Germany but not against Russia/Stalin. However the Allies, USA/Britain, gladly aligned with the number one mass murderer at the time to fight Germany. No scruples here! At the same time it shows how Stalin manipulated everything and everybody to move Russia further west by stealing half of Poland, and by ensuring friendly governments to his west. Roosevelt and Churchill did not liberate Europe from Hitler, but instead they allowed half of Europe to come under Stalin's iron fist. They condemned millions of people. A lot of history happened in the 'Bloodlands" which not only affected the people there directly but much of Europe indirectly. While Stalin and Hitler were directly involved, Roosevelt and Churchill were knowing culprits to this monumental disaster. They are all guilty. But as history books always teach us only the loser is guilty. The winners always justify their actions to look good. It is almost impossible to comprehend how millions can die because of a few leaders who have absolutely no regard for anyone or anything. However, you can see that today in government and corporations with only one or two steps away from similar or the same results. It will happen again !
I can not wait to read his other book/s.

In the book 'The Iron curtain' by Anne Applebaum, 'Bloodlands' was recommended. Reading the book one asks oneself: this is not even a hundred years ago, how could all of this happen? It is important to have knowledge about this part of history, so that this never happens again.

The primary reason that this type of carnage doesn't happen today is the fact that we are a smaller world because of technology and as a global economy more tightly locked. The propaganda machines of Hitler and Stalin could not hide in todays world but North Korea's Kim Jung Un is definitely trying. Of the things that must be acknowledged today that is applicable to the dark ages of Socialism is the belief that Socialism can work. Socialism cannot work because it totally discards the individual and replaces them with the collective which will always be controlled by individuals who believe that they should control everything.

This book contains actual history of how Stalin AND Hitler murdered over (14) million humans between 1932-1945. I was shocked to hear our history being taught was not the whole truth yet far from it! I recommend this book as being part of required reading by every person alive‼️

if you use the terms "former Soviet space" or "final solution" or "Holodomor" then read this book. It gives reason to look at '30s and '40s again. Snyder has resurrected tough facts of contemporary western world history and tells us why we should look at them. I respect his recount of casualties and recasting of the actors of horrors. He gives better perspectives and removes politics of victimhood from accounts of Stalin's and Hitler's atrocities.

Awesome book, this is not something that will only appeal to WW2 buffs or Historians. This is an extremely well researched book, which tells the horrific story of destruction and death in the "Bloodlands" by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Highly recommended.

A very good focal lens on the geographical region and the tyrants whose paranoid world views created the most systematic killing bureaucracies in mid-20th century Europe, whether through military conquest or political machinations. It was a miracle that anyone survived the razor machine destruction of whole ethnic populations.

Mr Snyder gives a good breakdown of the killing "periods" within the years of 1920-1953. As bad as Hilter was, Stalin comes out as the more evil of the two. Mr Snyder provided many examples of the inhuman deeds done at their commands. He provided so many examples of killing that one loses track of the actual numbers. He does provide in his late chapters a summary of the numbers of dead accounted for in each killing "season". He suggests to the reader that the lesser known killings fields of the Bloodlands actually were more destructive in human numbers than those of the better known concentration camp events.

This is a thoughtful, far-ranging history of the unlucky lands between Russia and Germany (Poland, Ukraine and Belarus), as inhabitants are murdered by Stalin on one hand and Hitler, on the other. It puts the Holocaust in a broader context. While clearly written, it is a bit grim, but I learned a great deal from reading this book.

Snyder provides an excellent description of Stalin's brutality toward the people of Russia and the brutality of Hitler toward the Jews and other people in the countries that Germany invaded. This was an excellent title for the book because there was a great deal of blood shed by the people subject to Stalin and by the people murdered by Hitler. Although Russia was part of the Allies in World War II he demonstrated virtually no concern about his own murderous activities. Both men were monsters and Snyder does a great job in showing each man's true character and the character of each man's disciples.

Gives a real comparison on how destructive BOTH Soviet and Nazi policies affected an entire region located between the western border of Poland to the eastern border of the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine.

I first purchased and read "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder for my Kindle Reader. Well written and documented this book presented a view that has long been both overlooked, misrepresented, and almost "censured" from history classes in the United States. Viewing the maps on the Kindle format was somewhat difficult so I had to obtain a hardcopy edition. Daily readings were discussed at length with friends and family. Most people seemed nearly in complete surprise to hear my reference to this tragedy. It became incumbent upon me to obtain sufficient copies to provide this work to each of my adult grandchildren.

Very thought provoking, this book would make an outstanding selection for a book club to consider as its selection for reading combined with an active discussion group.

This book could, and should, easily be introduced as part of a curriculum in World History.

This is an excellent history of the darkest years of the 20th century. The horror of Stalin's collectivisation is especially well told, as are the descriptions of Stalin's mindset and motives throughout his reign. The cooperation and later rivalry between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is especially detailed and interesting.

The book contained many insights and descriptions of historical events which I have never read before. While the author's style is easy and enjoyable, the subject matter is of course anything but. Any book about mass murder is bound to get gruelling at times, but don't let that put you off this excellent and original history.

Much has been written about the mass killings that occurred in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. This has probably been condensed in most people minds to the suffering of Soviets (or more specifically Russians) after the German attack in 1941 and to the deliberate mass murder of the Jews, the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder, in his new book, "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" paints a much more complex picture that should forever change some of our ideas about what happened during those terrible times.
He focuses on an area of Central Europe that includes most of modern Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the very west of Russia up to St. Petersburg. This is the area he calls the "bloodlands", where he estimates, conservatively, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed directly or by deliberate policy during the period 1932-44. This area is marked by the fact that it was controlled at different times during this period by both the Soviet Union and by Nazi Germany.
This is a harrowing tale of individual cruelty and murder and deliberate neglect, beginning with the attempt to enforce collectivized farming in the Soviet Ukraine in 1932-3 during which Snyder estimates over 3 million people were systematically starved by their own government. During the 30's the Nazis were incapable of organizing death on this scale but came into their own after the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, when they allowed over 4 million civilians and prisoners of war to starve to death and instituted the mass killing of over 5 million Jews and many other civilians.
He brings many new perspectives to this horrible situation which has become confused by the re-writing of history by both the Soviet and western historians and politicians e.g. the high percentage of Soviet deaths coming from non-Russian peoples and the inaccurate representation of concentration camps as the major device of the Holocaust. One stunning (and sobering) comment he raises in passing was that in Hitler's plan to produce a land empire to challenge the British empire based on the navy, Hitler saw as his model the USA, "based on exterminatory colonialism and slave labor".
Amid the huge catalog of misery, Snyder does try and keep us in contact with the fact that we are dealing with individual humans, both perpetrator and victim. His final chapter, "Conclusion: Humanity", does try to address how people were able to commit these crimes and how their actions made sense from their own, if twisted, perception. He makes an excellent argument for the danger of using past victimization as an excuse for excess. Hitler's rise to power and subsequent ruthlessness and Stalin's justification for the massive starvation, deportation and purges were both based on a belief that they were victims of the past or current plots. It is a dire warning to all of us today.

Bloodlands represents a massive amount of research and presents a human face to the horrific suffering that occured in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. An important point the author made was that, until 1939, Hitler had hardly killed anybody, while Stalin had killed millions. One wonders why, then, Roosevelt in particular was so eager to cozy up to Stalin as a counterweight to Hitler. They were both bloody-handed, and Hitler did his best to catch up to Stalin in the body count once the war started, but the fervor with which the Roosevelt White House courted Stalin is hard to understand. The book is compelling but could have used some aggressive editing as there is more than a little redundancy, and the geographic focus of the theme is sometimes awkward.

This is a difficult book to read. Not because the author fails in any way, but because man's inhumanity is so clearly exposed. If you had any illusions about man's distressing ability to fall into evil, they will soon be dispelled as you venture into this brave but horrible history of Eastern Europe. If you thought evil is limited only to one nationality, think again. If you thought civilization could never repeat this travesty, think again. Although Holocaust history abounds, historian Snyder reveals the true devastation less familiar to most: the mass shootings of men, women, children and infants; the appalling numbers gassed in camps in the Bloodlands (the land between Germany and Russia); as well as Stalin's systematic starvation of his people in Ukraine during the collectivization of farms in the 30's. Bloodlands explains how people in these vulnerable lands were trapped between the advancing armies of two countries, Germany and Russia, and how they had no choice but to lend their allegiance to one or the other for any hope of survival. The author has researched in multiple languages (in itself an unimaginable task) and cites his sources in a voluminous reference section. The book is dotted with heartbreaking accounts from survivors, making it a unique blend of scholarly research and personal reflection. Given the current situation in the Ukraine, this book becomes even more relevant and important as a study in the rationalization of despots for annexing countries on their borders. Timothy Snyder's book should be required reading for all those who seek power in government.

An extremely thought provoking and moving work. The author seeks to give the 14 million civilians killed by Hitler and Stalin a voice, and he succeeds better than I had expected. This is what it was like to live a long nightmare.

Generally, BLOODLANDS is about the apocalyptic mayhem wrought by the Nazis and the Soviets in the lands that separated them (largely Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine) between 1932 and 1945. More specifically, it is about the deliberate murder of 14 million human beings as a matter of Nazi or Soviet policy (i.e., NOT as war casualties or the unintended "collateral damage" of military action).

What comprises that 14 million figure? (a) 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; (b) 300,000 Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR during the Great Terror of 1937-1938; (c) 200,000 Polish citizens shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; (d) 4.2 million Soviet citizens (mostly Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by German occupiers in 1941-1944; (e) 5.4 million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944; and (f) 700,000 citizens shot by the Germans in "reprisals" chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944. (Note: About half of the 14 million died as a result of deliberate denial of food.)

To be sure, the parameters of the book, both geographical and temporal, are rather arbitrary, and I have seen several critical reviews predicated largely on that point. But I think what Timothy Snyder (a Professor of History at Yale) was trying to do was achieve a better understanding of "Europe's epoch of mass killing", and to do so he focused on the area and time he was already most knowledgeable about, which also happened to be the epicenter of that mass killing. What informs the book methodologically are two premises that I find commendable and, unfortunately, far from universal in recent historiography: (1) "insistence that no past event is beyond historical understanding or beyond the reach of historical inquiry"; and (2) "reflection upon the possibility of alternative choices and acceptance of the irreducible reality of choice in human affairs".

Among the points that emerge from Snyder's study are several conclusions that are somewhat at odds with the prevailing popular conception of World War II and the Holocaust. The most conspicuous example, perhaps, is that we tend to think of the Holocaust in terms of Auschwitz, concentration camps, and such testaments as those of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. In point of fact, the vast majority of the 5.4 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died not in concentration camps but rather very shortly after round-up, either in poisoned gas chambers or, just as frequently, by bullets. There is also a tendency to picture the victims of the Holocaust as Western Jews, perhaps a la Anne Frank, when in fact many more came from Eastern or Central Europe. Further, when we in the West think about the civilian victims of World War II, we are inclined to think about events in Western Europe - the London Blitz or the bombing of Dresden, for example - before such vastly more lethal events as the Nazi starving of Leningrad (about 1 million dead) or the massacres in Minsk and Warsaw. We in the West also tend to think of World War II as the quintessential war in which "Good prevailed over Evil", overlooking not only the Jews but the peoples of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.

In addition, BLOODLANDS contains a wealth of information, both of a general and of an anecdotal nature, that is new to me. The biggest such "factoid", for me, has to do with the Nazis' Generalplan Ost, pursuant to which, had the invasion of Russia gone according to plan, between 31 and 45 million people would have been removed from their homelands - through starvation, deportation, or outright murder. Another has to do with the Nazis' mistreatment of Soviet POWs: The death rate of Red Army soldiers in German POW camps over the course of the war was 57.5 percent and as many Soviet POWs died in a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American POWs in German hands over the course of the entire war. Yet another concerns one of the many ironies that Snyder uncovers in his methodical exploration of his data: By the end of the war, eight million Slavs had been imported by the Nazis to work in the Reich (making it more Slavic than it had ever been in its history). In other words, "German men went abroad and killed millions of `subhumans,' only to import millions of other `subhumans' to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves--had they not been abroad killing `subhumans.'"

Statistics - in one or another gruesome form - seem to dominate the book. At times, Snyder is unnecessarily repetitive, and at times his prose becomes flat and leaden (although, in general, it is more than adequate). I suspect that some of what he relates about Hitler and the Nazis does not accord with the best and latest historical consensus, and as regards Stalin he engages in a little too much mind reading for my taste. But whatever inaccuracies or speculation there may be, they do not detract from or undermine BLOODLANDS as an unrelenting survey of some of the worst horrors of 20th-Century man. Reading it, therefore, will, at a minimum, make you queasy. But it is imperative that we discuss those horrors and consider the reasons underlying them, and it is a necessary condition for doing so that we have as solid an understanding as possible on the precise dimensions of the atrocities in their various demographic permutations. To my mind, then, BLOODLANDS is a major work of history that will inform discussions of World War II and the phenomenon of mass killings for the next generation.

I really can't add anything to the positive reviews of the editorial content. The book is excellent and important. It is very readable and presents a lot of information that I knew about, kinda, but with much more detail and coherence than I've ever seen it presented before. WARNING: DO NOT BUY THE KINDLE VERSION! The book has a number of maps that are important to following the narritive line. The Kindle reproductions have such small type that they are practically unreadable, except with regard to the most major place names. The type-size adjustment feature does not work on the maps. I love my Kindle, but this kind of book is not its forte.

I didn't love the book. First, for whatever reason when I purchased this I was expecting a military/political history of WW2 combat in eastern Europe. Obviously I was mistaken, but I still read the book.

I liked how they covered the atrocities by Stalin Russia/Soviet Union. That is something that I feel gets glossed over a lot. The whole - the enemy of my enemy is my friend (maybe some authors have some socialist leanings also...).

But I still felt the author makes some statements and has an agenda with his book. Besides just explaining the bloodshed, I got the impression he wanted to use the mass death by the Nazis and the Russians to make a political point at times. It seemed really unnecessary and disturbing the quotes that were thrown in.

This is an excellent book: Impressively researched, well written, and at the same time - horrifying. It is almost impossible to understand how much the peoples in the 'bloodlands' suffered because of Adolf Hitler's and Josef Stalin's criminal regimes. An obligatory read if you want to understand European history.