A New Theory for Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism – It wasn’t about German nationalism, the historian Timothy Snyder argues. It was about the whole world. | The Atlantic

The evocative title of Timothy Snyder’s new book—Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning—is a reference to the fertile soil of Ukraine, where Adolf Hitler hoped to establish lebensraum, or “living space,” for the German race. And yet it could also be seen as an allusion to what Snyder argues is the underappreciated importance of ecology in Hitler’s worldview. Snyder, a history professor at Yale University, is building on his 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which highlighted the devastation visited upon World War II’s often-ignored but hugely consequential Eastern Front. But whereas Bloodlands examined Nazi and Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe, Black Earth travels inside the mind of Hitler himself—a mind from which sprang the murder of 6 million Jews.