Timothy Snyder: Hitler’s world may not be so far away

It was 20 years after I chose to become a historian that I first saw a photograph of the woman who made my career possible. In the small photograph that my doctoral supervisor, her son, showed me in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J radiates self-possession, a quality that stood her in good stead during the Nazi occupation. She was a Jewish mother who protected herself and her two sons from the German campaign of mass murder that killed almost all of her fellow Warsaw Jews. When her family was summoned to the ghetto, she refused to go. She moved her children from place to place, relying upon the help of friends, acquaintances and strangers. When first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, she thought, was the “faultless moral instinct” of the people who chose to help Jews.

Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct”. Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realised. A historian must be grateful to Wanda J for her courage and for the trace of herself that she left behind. But a historian must also consider why rescuers were so few. It is all too easy to fantasise that we, too, would have aided Wanda J. Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we can dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. It is our very forgetfulness of the circumstances of the Holocaust that convinces us that we are different from Nazis and shrouds the ways that we are the same. We share Hitler’s planet and some of his preoccupations; we have perhaps changed less than we think.
The Holocaust began with the idea that no human instinct was moral. Hitler described humans as members of races doomed to eternal and bloody struggle among themselves for finite resources. Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Hitler specifically, and quite wrongly, denied that agricultural technology could alter the relationship between people and nourishment.
Hitler’s alternative to science and politics was known as Lebensraum, which meant “habitat” or “ecological niche”. Races needed ever more Lebensraum, “room to live”, in order to feed themselves and propagate their kind. Nature demanded that the higher races overmaster and starve the lower. Since the innate desire of each race was to reproduce and conquer, the struggle was indefinite and eternal. At the same time, Lebensraum also meant “living room”, with the connotations of comfort and plenty in family life. The desire for pleasure and security could never be satisfied, thought Hitler, since Germans “take the circumstances of the American life as the benchmark”. Because standards of living were always subjective and relative, the demand for pleasure was insatiable. Lebensraum thus brought together two claims: that human beings were mindless animals who always needed more, and jealous tribes who always wanted more. It confused lifestyle with life itself, generating survivalist emotions in the name of personal comfort.
Hitler was not simply a nationalist or an authoritarian. For him, German politics were only a means to an end of restoring the state of nature. “One must not be diverted from the borders of Eternal Right,” as Hitler put it, “by the existence of political borders.” Likewise, to characterise Hitler as an antisemite or an anti-Slavic racist underestimates the potential of Nazi ideas. His ideas about Jews and Slavs were not prejudices that happened to be extreme, but rather emanations of a coherent worldview that contained the potential to change the world. By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler channelled and personalised the inevitable tensions of globalisation. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth; the means to these ends would be the destruction of states.
* * *
The state stood at the middle of the story of those who wished to kill Jews, and of those who wished to save them. Its mutation within Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, and then its destruction in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938 and 1939, transformed Jews from citizens into objects of exploitation. The Final Solution as mass murder began in a zone of double state destruction. Hitler finally got the European war that he wanted by treating his ultimate enemy as his temporary friend. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east just after Germany attacked from the west. The German-Soviet Treaty of Borders and Friendship arranged a final division of Poland and endorsed the Soviet occupation and destruction of the three Baltic states. The USSR then proceeded very quickly to deport or murder the social and political elites in its new western territories. When Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German soldiers and then special SS-led task forces known as Einsatzgruppen first encountered populations that had been subject to the Soviet version of state destruction.
It was this double assault upon state institutions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland, at first by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany, that created the special field of experimentation where ideas of a Final Solution became the practice of mass murder. The Germans found political allies among antisemites and people who wished to restore statehood or undo the humiliation of national defeat. They found pragmatic allies, and these were likely more numerous, among people who wished to shift the burden of their own prior collaboration with the Soviets upon the Jewish minority. The Germans also found that they themselves, far more than their leaders expected, were capable of shooting Jews in cold blood. Not only the Einsatzgruppen but German police and soldiers killed Jews in huge mass shootings over pits.
In the encounter of German with Soviet power, the Nazi idea that Jews were responsible for all evil took on powerful resonance: for local Slavs and Balts seeking revenge for the loss of statehood or an alibi for their own Soviet collaboration or an excuse for stealing from Jews, for Germans themselves who associated Jews with all real or imagined resistance, and then for Hitler after the tide of war turned against him. In December 1941, when the Red Army counterattacked at Moscow and the United States joined the war, Hitler blamed the global alliance on global Jewry and called for their total eradication. By this time, the Holocaust as mass shooting had extended through Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and into Soviet Russia. In 1942 the German policy of total killing then spread back west into territories that the Germans controlled before 1941: the subject nations of western Europe, the allies of central and southern Europe and indeed to Germany itself. German Jews were not murdered inside prewar Germany, but deported instead to zones of statelessness in the east, where they could be killed.
The Holocaust spread insofar as states were weakened, but no further. Where political structures held, they provided support and means to people who wished to help Jews. Throughout Europe, but to different degrees in different places, German occupation destroyed the institutions that made ideas of reciprocity seem plausible. Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered. When Jews were saved, it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained, and the pale light of the individual rescuers shone.
* * *
As Hitler himself knew, there was a political alternative to ecological panic and state destruction: the pursuit of agricultural technology at home rather than Lebensraum abroad. The scientific approach to dwindling resources, which Hitler insisted was a Jewish lie, in fact held much more promise for Germans (and for everyone else) than an endless race war. Scientists, many of them Germans, were already preparing the way for the improvements in agriculture known as the “green revolution”. Had Hitler not begun a world war that led to his suicide, he would have lived to see the day when Europe’s problem was not food shortage but surpluses. Science provided food so quickly and bountifully that Hitlerian ideas of struggle lost a good deal of their resonance – which has helped us to forget what the second world war was actually about. In 1989, 100 years after Hitler’s birth, world food prices were about half of what they had been in 1939 – despite a huge increase in world population and thus demand.
The compression of politics and science into Lebensraum empowered a Führer to define the good of the race, mutate German institutions and oversee the destruction of neighbouring states. His worldview also compressed time. There was no history for Hitler: only a timeless pattern of Jewish deception and the useful models of British and American imperialism. There was also no future as such: just the unending prospect of the double insatiability of need and want. By combining what seemed like the pattern of the past (racial empire) with what seemed like an urgent summons from the future (ecological panic), Nazi thinking closed the safety valves of contemplation and foresight. If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather than seeing the ecosystem as open to research and rescue, Hitler imagined that a supernatural factor – the Jews – had perverted it. Once defined as an eternal and immutable threat to the human species and the whole natural order, Jews could be targeted for urgent and extraordinary measures.
The test that was supposed to confirm Hitler’s idea of nature, the campaign that was to rescue Germans from the intolerably claustrophobic present, was the colonial war against the Soviet Union. The 1941 invasion of the USSR threw millions of Germans into a war of extermination on lands inhabited by millions of Jews. This was the war that Hitler wanted; the actions of 1938, 1939 and 1940 were preparation and improvisation, generating experience in the destruction of states. The course of the war on the eastern front created two fundamental political opportunities. At first, the zoological portrayal of Slavs justified the elimination of their polities, creating the zones where the Holocaust could become possible. Then, with time, Germany’s uncertain fortune revealed the deep political logic of Hitler’s thinking – the practical relationship between Lebensraum and planetary antisemitism. It was when these two ideas could be brought together – territorially, politically, and conceptually – that a Holocaust could proceed.
In the Nazi mind, war was both colonial (to seize territory from the Slavs) and decolonial (to weaken the global domination of Jews). As the colonial war for Lebensraum faltered, Nazis emphasised instead the struggle to save the planet from Jewish domination. Since Jews were held responsible for the ideas that had supposedly suppressed the stronger races, only their extermination could ensure victory. The SS men who had begun as state destroyers, murdering members of groups thought to be the bastions of enemy polities, became the mass murderers of Jews. Wherever German power undid Soviet power, significant numbers of local people joined in the killing. In occupied Poland in 1942, most Jews were deported from their ghettos and murdered by gassing, as at Treblinka. Yet even at this extreme the colonial, material element never entirely vanished. In Warsaw, hungry Jews were drawn to the deportation point by promises of bread and marmalade. Himmler issued the order to kill them at the moment he decided that the labour they provided was less valuable than the calories they consumed.
Ecological panic and state destruction might seem exotic. Most people in Europe and North America live in functional states, taking for granted the sovereignty that preserved the lives of Jews and others during the war. After two generations, the green revolution has removed the fear of hunger from the emotions of electorates and the vocabulary of politicians. The open expression of antisemitic ideas is a taboo in much of the west, if perhaps a receding one.
Yet we like our living space, we fantasise about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world.
* * *
Hitler’s programme confused biology with desire. Lebensraum unified need with want, murder with convenience. It implied a plan to restore the planet by mass murder and a promise of a better life for German families. Since 1945, one of the two senses of Lebensraum has spread across most of the world: a living room, the dream of household comfort. The other sense of Lebensraum is habitat, the realm that must be controlled for survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterised as not quite fully human. Once standard of living is confused with living, a rich society can make war upon those who are poorer in the name of survival. Tens of millions of people died in Hitler’s war not so that Germans could live, but so that Germans could pursue the American dream.
Hitler was right to believe that, in an age of global communication, notions of prosperity had become relative and fluid. After his pursuit of Lebensraum failed with the final German defeat in 1945, the green revolution satisfied demand in Europe and much of the world, providing not just the food needed for bare physical survival, but a sense of security and an anticipation of plenitude. Yet no scientific solution is eternal; the political choice to support science buys time, but does not guarantee that future choices will be good ones. Another moment of choice, a bit like the one Germans faced in the 1930s, could be on the way.
The green revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the 21st century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. During the drought of 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing and revolution in the Middle East. The civil war in Syria began after four consecutive years of drought drove farmers to overcrowded cities.
Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life.
It seems reasonable to worry that the second sense of the term Lebensraum, seeing other people’s land as habitat, is latent. In much of the world, the dominant sense of time is coming to resemble, in some respects, the catastrophism of Hitler’s era. During the second half of the 20th century, the future appeared as a gift that was on the way. The duelling ideologies of capitalism and communism accepted the future as their realm of competition and promised a coming bounty. In the plans of government agencies, the plotlines of novels, and the drawings of children, the future was resplendent in anticipation. This sensibility seems to have disappeared. In high culture the future now clings to us, heavy with complications and crises, dense with dilemmas and disappointments. In vernacular media – films, video games and graphic novels – the future is presented as post-catastrophic. Nature has taken some revenge that makes conventional politics seem irrelevant, reducing society to struggle and rescue. The earth’s surface grows wild, humans go feral and anything is possible.
Hitler the politician was right that a rapturous sense of catastrophic time creates the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural and demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore.
* * *
The planet is changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space and time more plausible. The expected increase of average global temperatures by 4C this century would transform human life on much of the globe. Climate change is unpredictable, which exacerbates the problem. Present trends mislead, since feedback effects await. If ice sheets collapse, heat from the sun will be absorbed by seawater rather than reflected back into space. If the Siberian tundra melts, methane will rise from the earth, trapping heat in the atmosphere. If the Amazon basin is stripped of jungle, it will release a massive pulse of carbon dioxide. Global processes are always experienced locally, and local factors can either restrain or amplify them.
Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.
Hitler was a child of the first globalisation, which arose under imperial auspices at the end of the 19th century. We are the children of the second, that of the late 20th century. Globalisation is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history. It brings a specific intellectual danger. Since the world is more complex than a country or a city, the temptation is to seek some master key to understanding everything. When a global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third and fourth decades of the 20th century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural or the conspiratorial. When the normal rules seem to have been broken and expectations have been shattered, a suspicion can be burnished that someone (the Jews, for example) has somehow diverted nature from its proper course. A problem that is truly planetary in scale, such as climate change, obviously demands global solutions – and one apparent solution is to define a global enemy.
* * *
Americans, when they think about the Holocaust at all, take for granted that they could never commit such a crime. The US army, after all, was on the right side of the second world war. The reality is somewhat more complicated. Franklin D Roosevelt sent racially segregated armed forces to liberate Europe. Antisemitism was prominent in the US at the time. The Holocaust was largely over by the time American soldiers landed in Normandy. Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the east. The American trial of guards at the Mauthausen concentration camp, like the British trial at Bergen-Belsen, reattributed prewar citizenship to the Jewish victims. This helped later generations to overlook the basic fact that denial of citizenship, usually by the destruction of states, permitted the mass murder of Jews.
A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early 21st century: that the US was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the second world war.
Mass killings generally take place during civil wars or regime changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards Jews. Destroying states without such malign intentions produces more conventional disasters.
The invasion of Iraq killed at least as many people as did the prior Iraqi regime. It exposed the members of the Iraqi ruling party to religious cleansing and prepared the way for chaos throughout the country. The American invaders eventually sided with the political clan they had initially defeated, so desperate were they to restore order. This permitted a troop withdrawal, which was then followed by Islamist uprisings. The destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003 and the political disturbances brought by the hot summer of 2010 created the space for the terrorists of Islamic State in 2014. A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.
The dominant stereotype of Nazi Germany is of an all-powerful state that catalogued, repressed and then exterminated an entire class of its own citizens. This was not how the Nazis achieved the Holocaust, nor how they even thought about it. The enormous majority of the victims of the Holocaust were not German citizens; Jews who were German citizens were in fact far more likely to survive than Jews who were citizens of states that the Germans destroyed. The Nazis knew that they had to go abroad and lay waste to neighbouring societies before they could hope to bring their revolution to their own. Not only the Holocaust, but all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled or seriously compromised. The German murder of five and a half million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, and about a million civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations all took place in stateless zones.
Since the Holocaust is an axial event of modern history, its misunderstanding turns our minds in the wrong direction. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the 21st century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the left and the right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence.
In an era of climate change, the rightwing version of anarchy, economic libertarianism, may pose the more pertinent danger. As all economists know, markets do not function perfectly at either the macro or the micro level. At the macro level, unregulated capitalism is subject to the extremes of the business cycle. In theory, markets always recover from depression; in practice, the human suffering induced by economic collapse can have profound political consequences, including the end of capitalism itself, before any recovery takes place. At the micro level, firms in theory provide goods that are desired and affordable. In practice, companies seeking profits can generate external costs that they do not themselves remediate. The classical example of such an externality is pollution, which costs its producers nothing but harms other people.
A government can assign a cost to pollution, which internalises the externality and thus reduces the undesired consequence. It would be simple to internalise the costs of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. It requires a dogma to oppose such an operation – which depends upon markets and in the long run will preserve them – as anticapitalist. Supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. Since the science of climate change is clear, some Americans deny the validity of science itself by presenting its findings as a cover for conniving politicians.
Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic. The direct consequences of climate change will reach America long after Africa, the Near East and China have been transformed. By then, it will be too late to act.
The market is not nature; it depends upon nature. The climate is not a commodity that can be traded but rather a precondition to economic activity as such. The claim of a right to destroy the world in the name of profits for a few people reveals an important conceptual problem. Rights mean restraint. Each person is an end in himself or herself; the significance of a person is not exhausted by what someone else wants from him or her. Individuals have the right not to be defined as parts of a planetary conspiracy or a doomed race. They have the right not to have their homelands defined as habitat. They have the right not to have their polities destroyed.
* * *
The state is for the recognition, endorsement and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognised, endorsed, and protected. When states are absent, rights – by any definition – are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefully fragment the state from the right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the left. Political thought is neither destruction nor critique, but rather the historically informed imagination of plural structures – a labour of the present that can preserve life and decency in the future.
One plurality is between politics and science. A recognition of their distinct purposes makes possible thinking about rights and states; their conflation is a step toward a total ideology such as National Socialism. Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy – which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind.
A final plurality has to do with time. The state endures to create a sense of durability. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defence of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates scepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space”. Time, the fourth dimension, can make the three dimensions of space seem less claustrophobic. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. A sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life.
In the case of climate change, we know what the state can do to tame panic. We know that it is easier and less costly to draw nourishment from plants than animals. We know that improvements in agricultural productivity continue and that the desalination of seawater is possible. We know that efficiency of energy use is the simplest way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We know that governments can assign prices to carbon pollution and can pledge reductions of future emissions to one another and review one another’s pledges. We also know that governments can stimulate the development of appropriate energy technologies. Solar and wind energy are ever cheaper. Fusion, advanced fission, tidal stream power and non-crop-based biofuels offer real hope for a new energy economy. In the long run, we will need techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All of this is not only thinkable but attainable.
States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought, thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can compete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth.
But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and politics, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but its handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labour of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity and survival.
• Timothy Snyder is the Housum professor of history at Yale University and the author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, published this week by Bodley Head, from which this essay is adapted.

(The Guardian 16. 9. 2015)