Black Earth

Snyder's ecological and colonial reading of the Holocaust — arguing that Hitler's ideology was fundamentally about land, food, and biological struggle, and that statelessness was the key to Nazi mass murder.

Hitler's ecology: Hitler's ideology was about biological struggle for land and resources — Jews were the parasitic anti-race preventing Aryans from achieving their Lebensraum. Statelessness as the enabling condition: the Nazis killed most efficiently in the zone where states had been destroyed — and where Jews had no state protection. Colonial precedent: German colonialism in Africa provided models for Eastern European occupation. A new framework for understanding the Holocaust's geography.