Role Of Violence In Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: The Second World War

During the twentieth century, Europe was the stage of an exceptional amount of violence, experiencing numerous wars. In the course of these wars and interwar periods, millions died both in battle and as a result of governmental policies. Notably, the years leading up to World War Two and the several years following the Second World War, saw a great amount of violence in Eastern Europe. While a globally dominant Western perspective usually sets Western Europe as the stage for the atrocities which occurred during this period of violence, it was in fact in Eastern Europe where considerably more of the violence war endured. The novel Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder, Snyder examines, primarily through secondary sources, (Ahonen 6), that the area which he titles the “bloodlands”, which includes Poland, the Baltic States, Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine and western Soviet Russia, (Snyder xi). It is here, Snyder argues, that the vast majority of casualties, approximately 14 million non-combatants between 1933 and 1945, (Snyder 411), in and around the Second World War occurred. The text offers a unique standpoint, …show more content…
This enabled the Nazis to expand their violent political policies into even more territory. During this period of time, the Final Solution, to cleanse all of Europe and eventually the world of Jews was able to be enacted, (Snyder 187). Nazi concentration and death camps were all within occupied territory within Poland. In addition to the mass killing of Jews, Roma, and Slavs, killed in the Holocaust, Soviet prisoners of war were also often sent to concentration or death camps by the Nazis. Upon the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union resulted in approximately 9.4 million deaths within the bloodlands. Of those deaths, approximately 5.4 million were victims of the Holocaust, (Snyder