A Critique of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands

Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands is all about murder – the murder of about 14 million people by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin in an area comprising "in today’s terms, St. Petersburg, and the western rim of the Russian Federation, most of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine" (page 384), which the author calls the "bloodlands".



In policies meant to kill civilians or prisoners of war, Nazi Germany murdered, by Snyder’s count, "about ten million people in the bloodlands (and perhaps 11 million people in total)" , while the Soviet Union under Stalin murdered "over four million people in the bloodlands (and about 6 million in total). If foreseeable deaths resulting from famine, ethnic cleansing and long stays in camps are added, the Stalinist total rises to perhaps nine million and the Nazi to perhaps twelve." (Bloodlands, page 384). But foreseeable deaths resulting from famine, ethnic cleansing and long stays in camps are not included in Snyder’s count of 14 million murder victims, which is broken down as follows (page 411):

The count of fourteen mortal victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following approximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; thee hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles an Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937-1938; two hundred thousand Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944; and seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in reprisals chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944.

Neither does the count include collateral casualties of combat actions or refugees who lost their lives trying to get away from advancing enemy armies, as Snyder points out on page 324:

In the final four months of the war, Germans suffered in one of the ways that other civilians had during the previous four years of war on the eastern front, during the advance and the retreat of the Wehrmacht. Millions of people had fled the German attack in 1941; millions more had been taken for labor between 1941 and 1944; still more were forced to evacuate by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Far more Soviet and Polish citizens died after fleeing Germans than did Germans as a result of flight from Soviets. Although such displacements were not policies of deliberate murder (and have therefore received almost no attention in this study), flight, evacuation and forced labor led, directly or indirectly, to the death of a few million Soviet and Polish citizens. (German policies of deliberate mass murder killed an additional ten million people.)

and again on pages 410/411:

With a few exceptions, this is a study of the dying rather than the suffering. Its subject is policies that were meant to kill, and the people who were their victims. In a deliberate mass killing operation, mass death is the desired goal of policy. It is an end in itself or a means to some other end. The count of fourteen million people is not a complete reckoning of all the death that German and Soviet power brought to the region. It is an estimate of the number of people killed in deliberate policies of mass murder.
I therefore generally exclude from the count the people who died of exertion or disease or malnutrition in concentration camps or during deportations, evacuations or flight from armies. I also exclude the people who died as forced laborers. I am not counting people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, or civilians who died in bombings or as a result of other acts of war. I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle of the Second World War. In the course of the book I do discuss camps and deportations and battles, and provide figures of those killed. These are not, however, included in the final figure of fourteen million.

Snyder’s book has been called "path-breaking and often courageous" and "the most important book to appear on this subject for decades" by Tony Judt, quoted on the back cover of the edition (The Bodley Head London 2010) in my possession. The same back cover features a statement from Norman Davies whereby "This is a book that will force its readers to rethink history".

What exactly is supposed to be so "path-breaking" about this book? Does it provide any hitherto unknown evidence or information about Nazi or Soviet crimes? Maybe to the general public, but not (at least as concerns Nazi crimes) to who has read the works of historians like Götz Aly, Christian Gerlach, Christian Hartmann, Dieter Pohl, Christian Streit and others referred to in Snyder’s book, from whose research Snyder derived most if not all of what he writes about the Nazi starvation plan for the occupied Soviet territories, the criminal nature and purpose of the siege of Leningrad, the murderous treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the Nazi occupiers’ exterminatory anti-partisan operations, especially on the territory of present-day Belarus. I presume that readers of detailed studies about the Ukrainian famine of 1932/33, the Great Terror of 1937/38 and other crimes of Stalin’s will also find little if anything in Snyder’s book that they didn’t know already.

Wherein, then, lies the merit of Snyder’s book? In my opinion it lies in his putting together in one volume the current status of research about the other crimes in the context of which the Nazis’ biggest and best-known single crime, their killing of 5 to 6 million European Jews, took place and must be studied and understood. It also lies in its frontal contextualizing of the Nazi Holocaust with Nazi crimes against non-Jews as well as Soviet crimes (apparently offensive to people like Efraim Zuroff, as mentioned in my previous blog about Snyder’s book), especially as it demonstrates (largely drawing on the research of the aforementioned German scholars, especially Gerlach) how the decision to implement the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" still during the war resulted from the Nazis’ failure to bring down the Soviet Union and implement a policy of exploitation and mass starvation foreseen to bring about the death of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. The Holocaust as a substitute for a much larger killing program essentially aimed at non-Jews (the downscaled partial implementation of which against the inhabitants of Leningrad and Soviet prisoners of war, or even against the latter alone, moreover killed more people than the Nazi extermination camps) must be a bitter pill for who sees the Holocaust as a uniquely evil crime not to be compared or contextualized with any other. Such frank contextualizing seems to be the reason why Snyder’s book has been attacked and is considered "controversial", and it is also the main reason why I consider it praiseworthy.

Less praiseworthy is the criterion of deliberate versus not-so-deliberate mass killing whereby Snyder decides what victims of Nazi and Soviet crimes to include or not in his 14-million estimate.

It is a fact that about 3 million out of about 5 ½ million Soviet prisoners of war were executed or succumbed to starvation, disease and exposure in German captivity. It is also a fact – ably demonstrated by Christian Gerlach in his books Kalkulierte Morde and Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord - that in the autumn of 1941 and in the winter of 1941/42 Soviet prisoners of war were purposefully allowed to die by high-ranking Nazi government officials (especially Hermann Göring) and Wehrmacht officers (especially General Quarter Master Eduard Wagner), and that this led to the most of the about two million deaths (out of about 3.3 million Soviet POWs taken) until the spring of 1942. But it is disputable whether the Soviet prisoners of war who perished in German captivity after that time (roughly one third of total deaths) fell victim to a policy of deliberate mass killing – in which, according to Snyder, "mass death is the desired goal of policy", "an end in itself or a means to some other end" – rather than to brutality, callousness and neglect resulting from the Nazis’ contempt for the "subhuman" Soviets. German scholar Christian Streit, author of the reference work Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, wrote the following about what became of Soviet prisoners of war after the mass dying of 1941/42 had ended (Keine Kameraden, pp. 244-249, footnotes only included where considered of particular interest, my translation):

The Development of Mortality 1942-1945

Although in the years 1942 to 1945 prisoners of war were constantly being transported from the eastern parts of the Wehrmacht High Command area for labor service on the territory of the Reich, the manpower shortage of the German war industry could not be done away with. It is true that the number of prisoners of war employed on the territory of the Reich increased from 487,535 in October 1942 over 505,795 in July 1943 and 594,729 in February 1944 to about 750,000 on 1 January 1945. When one compares this with the total number of prisoners who fell into German hands and with the total number of prisoners present at the respective times, however, it becomes clear that a great part of the transports only served to replace the losses that had occurred through death or work incapacity. The total number of prisoners had increased from 3,350,000 in December 1941 over 4,716,903 in mid-July 1942, 5,003,697 in January 1943, and 5,637,482 in February 1944 to 5,734,528 on 1 February 1945. The number of prisoners present in the Wehrmacht High Command and Army High Command areas, on the other hand, had grown from 976,458 in March 1942 to 1,675,626 in September 1942, but then dropped over 1,501,145 on 1 January 1943 and 1,054,820 on 1 May 1944 to 930,287 on 1 January 1945. While the total number of prisoners increased by 1,017,625 between July 1942 and February 1945, the number of those remaining in captivity in the same period dropped by 745,000 – despite all efforts to increase the number of workers.
The steady diminution of the number of prisoners was partially due to releases – almost exclusively of "auxiliaries" and volunteers for the "eastern troops". Until 1 May 1944 818,220 prisoners had been released in the Wehrmacht High Command and Army High Command areas; until the end of the war another 200,000 may have been released in the course of the efforts to strengthen the "eastern troops", so that in total one may count on about a million released.
What mainly decimated the number of prisoners, however, was the continuing extraordinarily high mortality of the prisoners, which in the winters of 1942/43 and 1943/44 and then from the summer of 1944 onward reached new peaks. Exact data cannot be provided here either. If one deducts from the total number of Soviet prisoners who fell into German hands those who were still in captivity on 1 January 1945 – 930,287 -, the estimated number of releases – 1,000,000 – and the estimated number of prisoners who got back to the Soviet side through escape or during the retreats – 500,000 –, there results a number of about 3,300,000 prisoners who perished in German captivity or were murdered by the Einsatzkommandos, i.e. 57.8 per cent of the total number of prisoners.
[…]
The mortality of Soviet prisoners between 1942 and 1945 can not be described in as much detail as the mass dying between October 1941 and March 1942, but more general statements are possible. In the period between 1 February 1942 and the end of the war, i.e. at a time when the value of Soviet prisoners for the German armament industry had been clearly recognized by many among the German leadership, there died about 1,300,000 Soviet prisoners. This leads to the assumption that the ideologically motivated priorities set for the war in the East in the spring of 1941 remained determining to a much higher degree than could be expected on account of the continuously repeated endorsements of the need to improve the working capacity and thus the survival chances of the prisoners by a better treatment.
From the available data about the development of the total number of Soviet prisoners as well as the numbers of prisoners in the Army High Command area, in the Wehrmacht High Command area and on the territory of the Reich it can be seen that, after relaxing in the early summer of 1942, mortality again increased sharply at the latest in August 1942. In the prisoner of war reports of the General Quarter Master for the Army High Command area the number of "other losses", which can be taken as an approximate indication about the number of deaths, was given as 19,535 for April 1942, 13,142 for May, 16,736 for June, 32,977 for July and 65,814 for August. On the whole the number of prisoners of war increased by 1,096,241 between 1.6.1942 and 1.1.1943. The number of prisoners in camps in the Wehrmacht High Command and Army High Command areas, however, increased only by 313,292. Even if one assumes that a higher number of prisoners were released as "auxiliaries" and that there were errors in the reports in the magnitude of several thousand, the difference of 782,949 necessarily leads to the assumption that deaths in this period reached a high six-digit figure. This can also be concluded for the already quoted Army High Command order of December 1942, in which it is mentioned that mortality has again "increased considerably".
The sources available for the Wehrmacht High Command area harden this assumption. Despite constant transports from the Army High Command area the number of Soviet prisoners in the Wehrmacht High Command area, according to the monthly reports of the prisoner of war department, steadily diminished between 1 October 1942 and 1 August 1943 – from 1,118,011 to 807,603. In August 1943 it slightly increased [to 811,663, as becomes apparent from a graph on page 245, translator’s note], but then continued to drop to 766,314 until 1 December 1943, which means that on the whole there was a reduction of at least 355,757. As in the Wehrmacht High Command area releases of prisoners did not reach a very high volume, the number of deaths in the Wehrmacht High Command area between 1 October 1942 and 1 December 1943 must have reached an order of magnitude of at least 250,000 to 300,000, especially as in this calculation the arrivals from the Army High Command area, which reached at least a six-digit number, are not taken into account.
The temporary sequence of the mortality becomes a little clearer through the numbers available for the territory of the Reich. Also here the data are insufficient for a more detailed description, as in the fewest cases something can be found out about the increase due to transports from the East. Drastically diminishing numbers make clear, however, that in the autumn of 1942 and in the spring of 1943 mortality was especially high. Thus the number of prisoners on the territory of the Reich dropped from 713,325 to 636,219 (minus 77,106 = 10.8 %) in November alone; in January 1943 the number dropped by 7,220, increased in February due to new transports, to again drop by 12,605 (1.88 %) in March and 22,028 (3.35 %) in April 1943 to 634,942. The lowest point was reached on 1 August 1943 with 623,999 prisoners on the territory of the Reich. From then on the number slowly, but continuously grew until 1 December 1944. The presence numbers are misleading also in this respect, however; while according to them the number of prisoners on the territory of the Reich increased only by about 50,000 from 630,000 to 680,000 between 1 July and mid-November 1943, the German coal mining industry alone received 88,790 additional prisoners in this period.
For the year 1944 the presence numbers on prisoners of war no longer allow for conclusions, given that in the effort to provide manpower to the German war industry and to evacuate the prisoners from the combat zones before the advancing Allies transports of prisoners were constantly rolling into the camps of the Reich. The high mortality of the Soviet prisoners did not diminish, however; on the contrary much speaks for the assumption that in the last months of the war it again increased considerably.
A minimum number results from the listing of the prisoners registered at the Wehrmacht Information Bureau. There only a small part of the Soviet prisoners were registered, the maximum being reached with 647,545 in July 1943. After this time obviously no additional prisoners were recorded. In the time from 18 December 1943 to 21 August 1944 the number of these registered prisoners diminished by 21,730 from 621,480 to 599,750. The total number of deaths must have been considerably higher, however.
Among the prisoners the consequences of constant undernourishment and excessive physical effort were now beginning to show. Sickness and mortality increased drastically after the turn of the year 1943/44. Some examples may prove this.
The Armament Command Dortmund remarked in its report for the first quarter of 1944 that the feeding difficulties due to lack of potatoes and vegetables had especially affected the working performance of the Soviet prisoners of war, the "eastern workers" and the Italian military internees, and that the sickness rate was up to 50 per cent: "Deaths due to undernourishment are on the rise. "
Interesting in this context is an examination report by the Counseling Hygienist at the Defense District Physician VI of 23 June 1944, which the commander of prisoners of war in Defense District VI, Düsseldorf, sent to the District Group Hard Coal Mining Ruhr. According to this report of the Soviet prisoners in Defense District VI at this time ten per cent were sick to the point of requiring ambulatory treatment and another 8 per cent to the point of requiring hospital treatment. The situation of Italian military internees ("IMIs") was little better. The high number of sick had led to prisoner hospitals being temporarily closed to new admissions. Most of the sick came from mining, which the reporting hygienist considered "all the more noteworthy as the mines receive […] the prisoners best qualified". In the second half of May, he wrote, "a slight reduction of the number of sick" had occurred, but

the arrival of sick, especially emaciated, completely exhausted Russians and Italians suffering from edema and lung tuberculosis continues to be a source of concern.

The number of deaths during the work in the mines itself had also increased considerably, the number of cases where inner diseases were the cause of death tripling between October 1943 and April 1944.
Another source shows that between 1 January and 30 June 1944 alone in the Ruhr mines alone 8,922 Soviet prisoners, eastern workers and "IMIs" were sent back to the camps as "definitively unfit for mining". Included in this number were 7,429 cases of tuberculosis and a number of deaths not mentioned. It must be taken into account that in the camps where these human wrecks "definitively unfit for mining" were taken the mortality was unequally higher.
This high rate of sickness and death was not only present in the Ruhr area. Armament Inspection VIIIb, Kattowitz, which in April 1944 insisted with the commander of the prisoners of war in Breslau that the workforce of Soviet prisoners of war in mining should be better taken advantage of through longer working hours, had to hear that "losses due to undernourishment and tuberculosis" in mining were "especially high". In July this armament inspection remarked that the health situation of Soviet prisoners of war was the cause of "serious concerns", which in August 1944 turned to "extremely serious concerns". In a letter yet to be examined in more detail, in which the Wehrmacht High Command’s prisoner of war department at the beginning of September 1944 complained to the Reich Coal Association about the "extraordinarily high consumption [sic!] of Soviet prisoner of war workers", the "losses" in Upper Silesian mining in the first half year of 1944 were given as 10,963. 818 prisoners had fled, 639 had died in the mines, 7,914 had been taken back to the base camps due to disease, and 1,592 had been taken to prisoner hospitals. The District Group Hard Coal Mining of Upper Silesia pointed out in a memorandum in this respect that the greatest part of the sick prisoners suffered from tuberculosis; according to reports of military entities there had been more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners with tuberculosis in Base Camp 344 Lamsdorf in July 1944 alone, of whom "according to the statements of the doctor treating them 500 to 600 were lost every week through death".
From the mentioned letter by the Wehrmacht High Command’s prisoner of war department of 4 September it becomes apparent that in the first half year of 1944 32,236 Soviet prisoners of war employed in coal mining had been reported as "losses" due to death or incapacity to work – 1,495 more than the number of new prisoners allocated to the Reich Coal Association in the same period. The Wehrmacht High Command’s prisoner of war department on the basis hereof calculated an "average monthly consumption of Soviet prisoners of war in hard coal mining of about 5,000 workers or 3.3 %". It seems, however, that Upper Silesian mining was not even on top, because the manager of the Reich Coal Association, Martin Sogemeier, on 8 December 1944 remarked in a letter to the District Group Hard Coal Mining for Central Germany that he had noticed

the losses of [Soviet] prisoners of war due to complete incapacity to work or death in your area to be far above the average of hard coal mining as a whole.

All available numbers provide no concrete indications about the scale of mortality. The high number of prisoners sick with tuberculosis, however, which as everything indicates still rose, seems to be a sufficient indication that most of the Soviet prisoners were at the end of their strength. Undernourishment over a period of months if not years, lack of vitamins, constant excessive effort, and a life in unhygienic, close quarters badly heated or not heated at all, had contributed to increasing their susceptibility for deficiency diseases, especially lung tuberculosis, to an extent that these diseases now spread like epidemics and led to death considerably faster and much more often than is normally the case with tuberculosis.

What we see here is the callous use of underfed prisoners in backbreaking work under miserable conditions of accommodation and hygiene, regardless of how many died – a situation similar to that of Nazi concentration camps and the labor camps of the Soviet Gulag. What we don’t see, in my opinion, is a policy of deliberate mass killing in the sense of Snyder’s above-quoted definition. If Snyder nevertheless included in his count the about 1 million Soviet POWs who perished between the spring of 1942 and the end of the war, he should also have included civilians who perished in Nazi or Soviet concentration or forced labor camps located in the "bloodlands". In this context it should be pointed out that the majority but not all Soviet POW deaths occurred on the territory of the "bloodlands". According to Streit (as above, p. 135), 72,000 out of 390,000 Soviet POWs on German Reich territory died in December 1941 alone.

As concerns the Jewish victims – Snyder counts 5.4 killed by the Germans, not including those killed by Germany’s Romanian ally -, one can also not say that all of them fell victim to a policy in which mass death was "an end in itself or a means to some other end". The Jews who succumbed to hardship in ghettos and camps before the Nazis decided to murder all of Europe’s Jews - i.e. before the middle or the end of 1941, depending on whether the decision for Europe-wide killing was already taken at the time when mobile killing squads started wiping out entire Jewish communities in the Soviet Union, or only at or after Hitler’s meeting with high-ranking Nazi party officials on 12 December 1941, as Gerlach argues in his article The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitlers Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews – can hardly be counted as victims of a policy of deliberate mass killing, and neither can those who died of starvation and disease in Nazi concentration camps after Himmler called an end to the extermination program. According to Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985 Student Edition by Holmes & Maier New York – London, p. 252), Himmler decided in November 1944 that "for all practical purposes the Jewish question had been solved". The same author provided a chronological breakdown (Destruction, p. 339) whereby about 100,000 Jews died in each of the periods 1933-1940 and 1945. Mortality in the Warsaw ghetto was very high already before the German attack on the Soviet Union.

This takes us to the question whether Snyder’s break-off criterion of "deliberate mass killing" is workable and meaningful. Where does one draw the line between actions in which mass death is "an end in itself or a means to some other end" one the one hand, and on the other hand actions in which mass death is "only" a foreseeable and callously accepted consequence of policies implemented? And does it really matter, for the purpose of a regime’s historical and criminal indictment, whether and to what extent the killers meant to kill non-combatants as "an end in itself or a means to some other end" or simply didn’t care about how many non-combatants would be killed by their criminal actions? Both attitudes are criminal. Both qualify as murder, even if only the former can be considered first-degree murder. Applying the ampler criterion of non-combatants killed by criminal behavior, I arrived at an estimate of at least 12.5 million victims of Nazi criminal violence. German historian Dieter Pohl estimates the number of Nazi murder victims in this ampler sense at 12 to 14 million – without including, unlike Snyder and I do, the about one million deaths in besieged Leningrad.

Snyder himself doesn’t seem to be quite sure about the consistency of his criterion, as suggested by the excerpts from Bloodlands quoted hereafter (italics in the following quotes, like in the preceding ones, are Snyder’s).

Page 403:

The Germans deliberately killed perhaps 3.2 million civilians and prisoners of war who were native to Soviet Russia: fewer in absolute terms than in Soviet Ukraine or in Poland, much smaller countries, each with about a fifth of Russia’s population.

Page 404:

The lands of today’s Ukraine were at the center of both Stalinist and Nazi killing policies throughout the era of mass killing. Some 3.5 million people fell victim to Stalinist killing policies between 1933 and 1938, and then another 3.5 million to German killing policies between 1941 and 1944. Perhaps three million more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in combat or as an indirect consequence of the war.

Pages 405/406:

About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.
[…]
Poland probably lost about a million non-Jewish civilians to the Germans and about a hundred thousand more to the Soviets. Perhaps another million Poles died as a result of mistreatment or as casualties of war.
[…]
Of the more than four million Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, about three million were Jews.

Page 501, footnote 6:

Filimoshin ("Ob itogakh", 124) gives an estimate of 1.8 million civilians deliberately killed under German occupation; to this I would add about a million starved prisoners of war and about four hundred thousand undercounted deaths from the siege of Leningrad. So, with both civilians and prisoners of war included, and very roughly, I would estimate 2.6 million Jews and 3.2 million inhabitants of Soviet Russia killed as civilians or prisoners of war.

Page 505, footnote 15:

The most significant German crime in Soviet Russia was the deliberate starvation of Leningrad, in which about a million people died. The Germans killed a relatively small number of Jews in Soviet Russia, perhaps sixty thousand. They also killed at least a million Soviet prisoners of war from Soviet Russia in the Dulags and the Stalags, These people are usually reckoned as military losses in Soviet and Russian estimates; since I am counting them as victims of a deliberate killing policy, I am increasing the estimate of 1.8 million in Filimoshin, "Ob itogakh", 124. I believe that the Russian estimate for deaths in Leningrad is too low by about four hundred thousand people, so I add that as well.

The 3.2 million Russian civilians and prisoners of war mentioned on pages 403, 501 and 505 include one million POWs of Russian ethnicity, one million Leningrad inhabitants and 1.2 million other civilians, thereof only 60,000 Jews. Of these civilians Snyder includes in his 14-million estimate only those killed in anti-partisan reprisals and killing operations, which according to Pohl (Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht, pp. 296/297) accounted for about 160,000 – 200,000 victims in the Wehrmacht operational area, of which the western fringe of Russia was only a part. Thus the overwhelming majority of these 1.2 million other Russian civilian victims belong to categories not included in Snyder’s count of 14 million murder victims (e.g. the Russian civilians in the area of the Battle for Moscow who froze to death after being deprived of their winter clothing and their homes by the German occupiers, as mentioned in Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad). Yet here Snyder is counting them for the purpose of comparing the number of ethnic Jews and ethnic Russians deliberately killed under German occupation.

The 3.5 million victims of "German killing policies" in Ukraine between 1941 and 1944 may also include a significant number of people who were neither Jews nor Soviet prisoners of war and are also not included in Snyder’s figure of "seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in reprisals chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944" (p. 411, see above quote). On the territory of Soviet Belarus, "some 1.6 million were killed by the Germans in actions away from battlefields, including about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 Jews and 320,000 people counted as partisans (the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians)" (pp. 250/251). That leaves just about 380,000 of the 700,000 civilian reprisal victims for Poland (thereof 150,000 Polish noncombatants killed during the Warsaw Uprising in August and September 1944, p. 308), Ukraine and the remaining Soviet territory, which means that a significant part of the about one million non-Jewish Polish civilians mentioned on page 406 as lost to the Germans or murdered by the Germans are not included in the breakdown of the 14 million murder victims on page 411.

Snyder could have avoided these inconsistencies if he had applied the criterion of non-combatant mass death as a result of criminal policies and actions, instead of his unworkable distinction criterion of "deliberate mass killing" in which mass death is not just a foreseeable and accepted consequence of criminal policies and actions but "an end in itself or a means to some other end". Counting deaths under the former, ampler criterion would also have brought him closer to a complete reckoning of all the death that German and Soviet power brought to the region covered by his study, which I think is what a history of the "bloodlands" should endeavor to achieve. [Edited on 27.04.2012 to replace broken links.]