Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 7: How was mass killing possible?

Our subject today is the question of how is mass killing possible? A grim and always timely subject. I want to start in a general way, which is that when we think about mass killing, or we think about government actions which lead to large numbers of deaths of people, and we're asking how it's possible, a very broad way to begin, which I'm just going to suggest to you, is to ask how life is possible.

All right. So, if the point is to put an end to the life of a large number of people, then the way that you do so very often depends on how life is possible or how organized life is possible. And so, in our subject today, when we talk about mass killing, we're talking about mass killing in modern organized societies. The cases that we'll be discussing have to do with the 20th century. You know, they have to do with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union because that's what this class is about, but I just want to make the more general point that they have to do with the 20th century. They have to do with a time in which life was already organized politically and socially in certain ways. So, for example, the division of labor, if you were actually self-sufficient, right? If you're a pastoralist or you're a nomad, it's harder for me to kill you because I have less control over you in the first place. And this is going to be directly relevant to an example from Kazakhstan that we're going to get to.

Another way that modern life is organized has to do with the state. Most of you, perhaps even all of you, are citizens of one or more countries. You may take this for granted, but the whole notion that every individual is a citizen of a country and every state decides whether everyone on its territory is a citizen or not, this is quite modern. This only goes back a couple of centuries. And the idea of a passport, of a particular document that connects you to the state, is even younger. That's an idea which basically goes back to the post-First World War period.

And so, what I'm trying to suggest is that the way that you take things apart has to do with the way that they were put together in the first place. If you're in a pre-modern situation and you want to kill large numbers of people, you would generally have to approach them face-to-face. You would have to be in direct contact with them. And of course, a lot of modern mass killing also is face-to-face, horribly. But in the pre-modern period, that would be essentially your only choice.

The other thing I want to point out is that one way to understand the shift from earlier periods of history to the modern period of history has to do with health. It has to do with the accidental or non-accidental ways that people die. So, until about 150 years ago, almost all death would have been understood as being somehow out of control. There was very limited medical knowledge. There was very limited hygienic knowledge. And most medical practices, I mean, to summarize all of medical history unfairly in one sentence, but most everything that people did up to that point didn't work.

So, the idea that your health is under your control is also a modern idea or a modern lived reality. Of course, it's not completely under your control. Probably, you know, most of us are sick more often than we want to be. Some of us perhaps would like to live forever. But the notion that these things could be organized, right? That there could be vaccinations, there could be public health, that there could be medical treatments that actually work. This is also a modern reality. And so, I just invite you before we begin to consider how modern states could bring about large numbers of deaths, to just remember that we're in a certain period of history. And that the specific thing that I'm going to define as policies of mass killing takes place when two basic things have already happened, which, by the way, our political thinkers have talked about. And those two basic things are the division of labor, that you're not actually raising your own food, and membership in modern states, where states have the ability to include you or exclude you.

Okay. And the first point about division of labor, I just want to stress this. It's much more important than we generally think because even in the 20th century, when we associate mass killing with industrialization and mechanization, when we'd like to think about it as something which essentially has to do with institutions, the main way that people are killed is still starvation. Starvation is still the number one way that people are deliberately done to death. So, our dependence on food, and I mean, it's again, I'm starting with the very basics, right? But if you're distracted during this class, and you're like, I was about to say you're not addicted to drugs, but I definitely shouldn't be talking about things like that in class. So, if you're distracted during this class, like it might be because you're hungry, right? Or you're thinking about like, oh, you know, which lovely U of T dining hall am I going to go to to, you know, have my lunch. That's the kind of thing we as humans think about.

But notice the way that it's set up for you, right? None of you is thinking after this class, I'm going to maybe one of you, I don't know, has a garden or something. But none of you is thinking like after this class, I'm going to go to my incredibly self-sustaining, self-sufficient garden where I grow all of my food and I have chickens, right? That's none of you, I imagine, because that's the way that modern life is organized. And given that that's the way that modern life is organized, you can also imagine it being disorganized, right? You can imagine that there are various choke points. There are various ways that that could all be cut off intentionally or not intentionally. So, the food point, I just wanted to stress that most people who were done to death deliberately in the 20th century by governments were killed by starvation. Or technically not by starvation because usually you die as a result of diseases associated with malnutrition before you actually get to literal starvation.

And while I'm on the topic, I should note that the largest of these events is the mass starvation in communist China in the early 1960s. This is the biggest by far, on the order of 40 million people. It doesn't come directly into our class, but I want to mention it because if it hadn't been for the Stalinist mass starvation in the 1930s, which we will discuss, there wouldn't have been the Chinese repetition. If there hadn't been the Stalinist version of how you build a communist country, which Mao essentially followed, there wouldn't have been this central event in Chinese communist history, which is the starvation of tens of millions of people in the Great Leap Forward.

Okay. So, that's the first point I just wanted to make, that how we are killed also has to do in a fundamental way with how our lives are organized, how they have been organized for us, how we organize them ourselves. Okay. So, what do I mean by mass killing? This is somewhat arbitrary. There are a lot of other terms that one could use. Genocide is a popular term. A lot of the discussion of these events is organized around whether something is or is not a genocide. I don't find that particularly fruitful for a couple of reasons. One is that genocide is a legal term, and so there is a specific definition of genocide, which I invite you to read. It was codified in 1948 in a convention on genocide. But genocide can involve things that are not mass killing at all. So, for example, mass kidnapping of children is clearly genocidal by the definition of genocide, but it's not exactly what we're talking about in this class. It's not a policy of mass killing. The deliberate extirpation of a culture without killing anybody could also be genocide, but it's not the same thing that we're talking about in this class.

So, it's not that we're not talking about genocide, and I'm happy to talk about genocide, but genocide is a specific legal category, and what we're after here is the political phenomenon of killing, and again, this is slightly arbitrary, but just to give it a general sense, of more than 100,000 people. So, the policies that we're talking about are policies in the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. And the third thing that I want to make clear is that we're not talking about battlefield deaths. So, episodes of mass killing are very often connected to a war in some way or another. Most likely they're connected to a war. Either they happen during a war or in one way or another they are rationalized as being like a war. But these are not battlefield deaths. These are the deliberate deaths either of civilians or of prisoners of war.

Okay. So, in this lecture, and I guess as you're thinking about it, there are three levels of consideration to this question. So, if the question is what makes mass killing possible, there are three levels to think about it. The one is just something that I hope you are better able to think about after this class than before, which is how is it possible in general? Given that it happens on a fairly regular basis, how is it possible in general? That's one level of the question. And the second level of the question for us, given our subject, is what was the interaction between the Soviets and the Germans? How did that interaction matter in the 1930s and the 1940s? Because in our very specific case and in your reading, we have this, we're confronted by the basic reality that between 1933 and 1945 on the lands, putting it roughly between Berlin and Moscow, something like 14 million people were deliberately killed. Mostly by German policy, some by Soviet policy, some in events in which the agency of the two states is mixed up or confused or in some way there's an interaction. But this is a very specific example of a large amount of mass killing, you know, more than a million people a year over a period of 12 years, 13 years. That's unusual. And so, we have to think about the ways in which the Soviets and the Germans interacted, and I'll talk about that. And then the third level is, I really should be able to count to three. The third level is specific German policies and specific Soviet policies, and trying to understand specific Soviet policies and specific German policies.

Okay. So, most of this lecture, obviously, is going to be concerned with those last two levels, the Germans and the Soviets together, the Germans and the Soviets apart. However, I do want to just introduce a few general ideas about what makes mass killing possible in modern societies before we get down into the specifics. Hopefully, you'll see that the general ideas are consistent with the specific cases, but the general ideas might also help you to evaluate other cases or other examples or perhaps even other events that are taking place in the world now. So, when we consider mass killing in general, there are about half a dozen things that I think are worth keeping in mind. The first is ecological transformation.

Okay. So, I said, like, I tried to set this up at the very beginning by explaining that the way that you can do a lot of people to death is dependent upon the way that people are kept alive, right? And keeping people alive is actually incredibly difficult. It requires a huge amount of effort, individual, collective, political, social. It's not easy at all. But so what I mean by the ecological is a sense that somehow the world is threatening us so that me, my group, our people are going to lose the things that they have, right? So, somehow the world is changing so that we are going to be starved out. Something terrible is going to happen to us. So, this sense of ecological transformation, it could be correct or it could be incorrect. It doesn't really matter, but if it's subjectively true that I believe that I can be starved out or that my people are about to be starved out, that can be a powerful source of episodes of mass killing.

So, this of course, I mean, not to push the point too obviously, but this is one of the reasons why one should be concerned about climate change is that we have, not everybody, I'm sure, but most of us in this room are accustomed to a situation in which food supplies are fairly predictable. That situation has only obtained on planet Earth, and not for everybody, obviously, but it's only obtained for large numbers of people on planet Earth for about 80 years, which is a very, I mean, given that our species have been around for a million years, it's a very short period of time, and climate change threatens to interrupt that. So, one of the reasons one might be concerned about climate change is the sense of ecological threat or ecological peril. As we'll be talking about, Hitler had a subjective sense in the 1930s that Germans could be starved out, that Germans could be at the receiving end of some kind of a famine.

Ecological transformation, though, can also mean something slightly different, the notion that I have to transform the environment around me in order for some future goal to be achieved or in order for us to survive in the future. So, I have to get hold of the natural environment. I have to transform it. I have to change it for things to be right. And that would be closer, as we'll talk about, closer to the Stalinist view of the future, that nature is something which is there for us to grasp and to change, and we have to do it in a certain way. It's absolutely required of us that we do it in a certain way.

Second and related is a sense of time. So, there's a politics of time in the world which one doesn't always necessarily grasp because your own politics of time probably seems very natural to you. So, I don't know what your politics of time is. It might be something like we're all doomed in 20 years and like, why did they do this to us? I don't know. But if that's how you see things, that's a politics of time, right? Another politics of time is called progress. Progress says that things are gradually getting better, right? Over time things will get better. It's a politics of time. Another politics of time would be Marxist politics of time. Every so often there are contradictions and there are revolutions, right? So, there are various ways to think about time and usually your own way of thinking about time is so natural that you don't think of it as a politics. You just think of it as the way things are. So, another politics of time is the idea that time is running out.

Time is desperately short. We have to do things very quickly for some reason, okay? And that politics of time is associated with mass killing. The notion that for whatever reason the crisis is here, things are very urgent. We have to achieve what is to be achieved immediately. So, that's another marker. And of course, it's related to the sense of ecological crisis or ecological transformation.

A third thing to keep in mind when we're considering mass killing is statelessness or artificial statelessness. So, if it's right that in modern polities people are generally connected to states, one way to make it much more likely that they will be killed or to prepare the way for them to be killed is to sever their connection with the state. So, if you can dilute the connection to the state. You can, as the Germans did for Jews or to Jews in the 1930s, or as many American states did to African Americans for the better part of a century, you can dilute the connection to the state. You can also sever it. You can cut it completely.

But cutting it completely is actually, as we're going to talk about, it's rather hard inside your own state. The easiest way to cut someone's connection to the state completely is to destroy their state. So, if I can destroy your state, then I can say you're not a citizen of anything. You're just a subject. You're just kind of there. You're part of the landscape. And by the way, and we'll talk about this as well, but this is very closely connected to the global history of imperialism and the way that imperialism works. So, the way that imperialism works is that I show up at your state in Africa or whatever, and I say, well, this thing that you have, it's not a state. And therefore, I'm not destroying it because it was never there. And these people that you have, they never had any rights. They're just a tribe. They're just part of the landscape. You know, they're like animals essentially. And so, the European imperial way of looking at the world, not only European, but the Europeans were the most efficacious at this, is to say, we have a state. We have international law. Things bind us and protect us. But whatever you've got, that's not a state. That's a tribe. That's a clan. You know, that's something. It's an empire. It's oriental despotism. Whatever, it's something, but it's not a state. And so, we can just roll over it. We can just destroy it. And when we do that, we will say that these people are just separated from politics.

Okay, so that's an important part of imperialism, but it spills over into 20th century episodes of mass killing, as we'll see. So, one way of making it more likely that people can be killed in large numbers is to sever their connection to the state. Related to this, a close relative of this, is the notion of a state of exception. The state of exception. There was a very important German Nazi legal theorist called Carl Schmitt, S-C-H-M-I-T-T, who began an important argument with the words that he who rules, I'm paraphrasing, but this is the general idea, he who rules is he who can make an exception.

Which is a very powerful idea. So, the exception is the moment when I say there's a war on or there's been a terrorist attack or something, something, something, and so now none of the rules apply. And it's a very powerful way of doing politics because it gets everyone's attention and it draws people together and it can be exciting to say, oh, this is exceptional. Something exceptional has happened. There's a threat and so because of this threat we have to drop the normal rules. We have to allow one person to be in charge. And of course this is exceptional, that it will pass, right? We'll go back to normality at some point. Won't we? So, this notion of an exception is very important for both the Soviet and the German cases of mass killing, but in general it's something to watch out for. Because the idea of an exception is what allows you to get out of the normal rituals, protocols, routines, protections of law and bureaucracy and into something else. And into something else. So, the politics of exception is something else to be closely associated with mass killing.

And then more practically, isolation. Policies of mass killing usually take place in some degree of isolation from other people. Now, the zone of isolation could be very large. It could be an entire Soviet republic, as we'll see in the case of the famine in Ukraine. It could be on the scale of a very large concentration camp, as we'll see in both Soviet and German examples. Isolation could also just mean we take you out of your village to some ravine or some ditch that we've dug and we shoot you. But it's some kind of isolation. And this is not because humans can't kill other humans. I mean, one of the conditions of mass killing is that we can. I mean, I'm taking that as a, I'm not even introducing that as a factor here because it's just, that's just, I mean, I hope that's just obvious. But there is a certain amount of hesitation about anybody being killed right in front of you at any time. And so therefore, usually a certain amount of isolation or separation is generated in order to allow mass killing.

So, for example, German Jews were not murdered, for the most part, in Germany at all. They were sent to the east to places like occupied Latvia or occupied Belarus, and they were shot there because that meant that it wasn't, I mean, everybody in Germany, as a first approximation, had a pretty good idea of what was happening. But one way to allow it to happen was to have it happen somewhere else. And incidentally, in those zones in the east, it wasn't just that they were isolated from Germans, it's that there was statelessness and things were possible that were impossible elsewhere.

So, isolation. And then another technical consideration, which is usually relevant, is the creation of some kind of special institution. It's very often an institution which is not quite the police and not quite the army either. And it's often, it's a paramilitary, is it? And it's often an institution which is not quite the state and not quite private either. So, to give the classic example, the SS. If I say SS, you might think, oh, that's the German police. But it wasn't. The SS was not part of the German police. Eventually, they were merged in a complicated way, but the SS began as a private military, as a bodyguard essentially. And it's crucial to its functionality that the SS was connected from the beginning with exception, with places of exception, right? I should have mentioned this. Isolation and exception, those two ideas work together.

So, what is a concentration camp? A concentration camp is something that you create usually when you declare there's some kind of exception, an exception in time. This is an exceptional moment. But it's also a place of exception. Why? Because a concentration camp is a zone where the law doesn't function. That's a pretty decent first approximation definition of what a concentration camp is. It's a place where the law does not function. So, you have a country and in the country the rule of law may function more or less, but there are zones called concentration camps where it does not function. Where once you're behind that barbed wire, once you're across that line, you're not treated the same way. You don't have rights.

And so, my point with the SS was the first institutional job that the SS was assigned once Hitler came to power was to guard the concentration camps. And that's not a, that's not a, the concentration camps were zones of exception. They were outside the state. They weren't regular prisons. They were just, they started out in warehouses and factories. Warehouses and factories. And so they were zones of exception beyond the state. And the SS wasn't the state. The SS was more like Hitler's private bodyguard or a party, it was a party institution. It was an institution of the National Socialist Party. And so that kernel of an ever-broadening network of repression begins not directly from the state, not exactly from the state, but more as a kind of expansion of exceptionality, as an expansion of a kind of deprivation of the state or the removal of the state by certain kinds of actors.

The example of the NKVD in, and sorry, in English, NKVD. The example of the NKVD in the Soviet Union is not exactly the same, but there's a certain amount of similarity. The main Soviet secret police organ, which goes, it's confusing because it goes by different names. It's the Cheka and then it's the NKVD and the GPU and the OGPU and the KGB. It goes under different names over different times. I'm just going to call it the NKVD because that's the relevant name for the late '30s, but it begins as an organization of revolutionary discipline. It begins during the revolution as a way to enforce revolutionary norms. In other words, it's not born as a police force to enforce, for good or ill. It's not born as a police force that enforces already existing laws in an already existing state. The NKVD, on the other hand, is created during the revolution, during a moment that's exceptional, right? In order to transform the world.

So anyway, the general point is that if you're looking for how mass killing is possible, another marker is, is there a special institution like that, which isn't quite the government, it is but it isn't the government, it isn't the police force, it isn't an armed force, it's somewhere in between. It's an exceptional institution that prospers in and perhaps is formed during moments of exception for places of exception.

And then finally, and this shouldn't be dropped, and it's because it's very important, and in some way it's decisive, although it's the hardest thing to talk about, is ethics. Language. Ethics. How we talk about other people, how the state talks about other people, but also how the citizens, the population, people in general talk about other people. Because very often at the beginning of a policy of mass killing is something else. And not every policy of discrimination, and not every policy of exclusion, of course, leads to mass killing, but some of them do. And it's only possible to get to the level of mass killing if you go through various kinds of steps along the way. And always at some point there are humans who are involved in this, who have some amount of agency and some ability to talk in one way or another way about what is happening around them.

So when I go through this lecture, I will mostly be talking about states and policies and high-level kinds of actors, but it's very important to remember that one of the reasons that we do history is to remember that high-level actors, parties, states, secret police forces, paramilitaries, these are all made up of human beings, and the human beings were not deterministically forced into the situations that they found themselves in. And very often afterwards, for example, after the Nazis lost the Second World War, the people who did these things were in a certain way very inarticulate, not all of them, but some of them were quite inarticulate about why it was that they actually ended up in the situation that they were.

And Hannah Arendt has a famous point about this, which I think is valuable, that you can't stop thinking about these things. That one of the preconditions for mass killing is ceasing to think, which seems like a very banal point, but I think it's actually a very profound one. Because what Arendt meant by thinking, and I think she's also right about this, is thinking also from the point of view of other human beings. That we're only truly thinking about the world when we're thinking about the world not just as I see it, which obviously has to be inadequate, but also as you see it, as other people see it. And when we don't think about the world that way, we cease to think, says Arendt. And when we cease to think, we're much more vulnerable to being the kinds of people who end up on the perpetrating side of mass killing operations.

And by the way, I just want to emphasize before I get into the cases, how important thinking about the perpetrating side is. That's really the relevant side for all of us. Because the moral danger and the political danger, the, okay, I'll put it a different way. The human danger is that you'll be the victim, and that's a natural thing to be concerned about. And depending upon where you are in a given society, it'll be more or less natural to think about it. It's humanly natural to think of yourself as victim. However, in terms of the politics of all this, it's much more important to think about yourself as a potential perpetrator. And if that's a surprising idea, then I would suggest to you that we're just at the beginning of this whole consideration, right? Because if the notion is that, well, other people might possibly have done this in the 1930s, but there's no way that I or anybody I know would do this in the 2020s, then we have a lot of work to do. Right? Then we have a lot of work to do. The politically relevant question is not victimhood, but perpetration.

All right. And this I want to stress this because if you only think that you could be a victim, you're not going to be thinking very hard about how these things actually come about. And if you only think that you could be a victim, when you're confronted with possibilities of becoming a perpetrator, you will continue to think of yourself as the victim. As the perpetrators in fact did. Not without exception, but as a general matter. So, it's very important to, the one reason to recognize this last factor, this question of agency or ethics is this, that there is a human capacity to think of yourself as the victim almost no matter what it is you're doing, right? So, Hitler's account of what the Germans were doing to the Jews was an account of victimhood all the way to the end. The Jews were persecuting us. All the way to the end. And people believed that, right? So, this question of ethics has to involve thinking about things not just from the point of view of oneself, but also from the point of view of others in part in order to recognize that others might have reason to think of you as a potential perpetrator. That others are right to think of you as a potential perpetrator, even if that's not a direction that your own mind would have gone.

Okay. So, let's now talk about the cases. All of this connects. All of this connects to the general background of this class, which is the imperial world, which is the global world. There's a reason, I mean, apart from just sort of general education and historical centrality. There's a reason why we spent time on the global imperialism from roughly 1500 to roughly 1900. And the reason for that is twofold. The first I've already mentioned is that global imperialism set up a certain structure of statehood and statelessness, which is then going to be pursued, as we will see, inside Europe itself.

And but the second reason is that if we don't understand the global character of imperialism, it's very hard to understand where Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and others were coming from. From the point of view, and this is just a very general point. There will be, the differences between these two systems will be apparent and they are of course vast. But from a very general point of view, both Hitler and Stalin, or both Hitler and Lenin, were always already inside an imperial world. They grew up in an imperial world. And insofar as they have a geopolitical problem, it is how do I survive or thrive within, or how do I overcome? How do I topple this imperial world which is already there, right? It's already there. It's been there for hundreds of years.

And in the period in which Hitler and Stalin, or Hitler and Lenin, are coming of age in the early 20th century, the dominant imperial power, and this is another thing which is a little to remember, unless you're perhaps from certain parts of the world, but in the early 20th century, the dominant imperial power was Great Britain. And to a degree which is hard again to understand when one thinks about, you know, England and Brexit and like the tiny eensy-weensy provincial politics they have now. But to a degree which is hard to understand, Great Britain was the bête noire of anyone who was aspiring to change the world system. Great Britain set the rules. Great Britain had the navy. Great Britain was the lone superpower.

People who thought a little bit ahead, and this was true of actually both the Soviets and the Nazis, people who thought a little bit ahead believed, and they were correct, that the United States was coming across the horizon. And that at some point later on the United States might also be a global superpower. So, this is the absolute backdrop. And then, you'll remember in the First World War, the system rearranges itself. In a kind of, in a surprisingly elegant, that's the wrong word, but in a way which is easy to remember, which is that in the First World War, the land empires in Europe lose, and the maritime empires win. So, as of 1918, we're in this interesting situation where the United States is victorious and is more powerful. The French and the British have suffered a lot, especially the French, but their maritime empires continue and indeed expand at the expense of the Ottomans and the Germans who lose.

And then, the Russian Empire is in this very special situation, which is that it was on the winning side, but a revolution took place in the Russian Empire during the war, the Bolshevik Revolution, as we've discussed. So, this leads to a very peculiar situation in Ukraine. And again, now I'm reviewing and I'm hoping that like the previous lectures and the current lecture in some way are coming together in your minds. I'm hoping that like we all remember things that happened more than a week ago. I mean, I try to, yeah. And I know the people in the front row do. I know, that's why you're in the front row. I get it. It's that like you want to nod when I say stuff, and that's cool. The people in the back row are like, what was that joke even about? Okay.

So, but in a very specific way, as we've discussed, and I hope this is coming together, Ukraine is at the center of all of this. Because Ukraine is both, it's a battlefield in the First World War in a very significant way, but also the First World War in Ukraine, so to speak, continues all the way to 1922 or 1923. It doesn't end in 1918. There's a continuum of struggle for this territory, which goes all the way into late 1922, early 1923, when the Soviet Union is established, and most of what is now Ukraine becomes a Soviet republic. And Ukraine is also very specific or very central in all of this because Ukraine then becomes the place that both the Germans and the Soviets are going to be striving after. So, in order for, and this is again, I just want you to think about this before I get into the specifics in the global context. If you are going to challenge Great Britain,

If you are going to break out into the world, if you're going to be a superpower, controlling Ukraine is very convenient for you. Because Ukraine, and this is a very old-fashioned point, right? And it's a point which is hard to make because after a lecture you can go and get a snack and it's very easy. But Ukraine can be, in Hitler's term, the breadbasket of the world, right? And for Lenin and for Stalin, Ukraine, because of its fertile soil, that fertile soil which has attracted so much history to it, because of its fertile soil, Ukraine can be the source of the surplus calories, the investment capital which allows Lenin, Stalin, the Bolsheviks to transform the entire Soviet Union.

So, when the world order changes after the First World War, what we have is the Soviet Union controlling most of Ukraine. And the Soviet Union seeking to transform the world to some significant degree on the basis of Ukraine. And in the background, we're going to get to this, but in the background is also German awareness of Ukraine.

So, if you come from a British or a French or an American, and I would guess a Canadian educational background, you probably think about the First World War in terms of the Western Front. But on the Eastern Front, the First World War was largely about control of Ukrainian grain. And on the Eastern Front, this is significant, the Germans never lost. They never lost. They were defeated in France. The Germans were defeated in France. They had to surrender because of what happened in France in the summer and fall of 1918. But the Germans in Eastern Europe were never actually defeated. They came home to Germany having not experienced defeat.

And one of the last things they were trying to do in 1918, and I can tell when you look at screens, by the way, just so you know. I mean, if you have any sense of... One of the last things German soldiers were trying to do was to extract grain from Ukraine. They never really managed to do it with any great effect, but for many German soldiers, including Adolf Hitler, the idea that Ukraine was this granary, this breadbasket, there's a German word, Kornkammer, which is the word they use, that Ukraine was this inexhaustible miraculous source of food. That idea remained, right? And so the idea that if we could just get back there, then we could transform everything. Then we could change everything.

Okay. So, but let's, for now, we're going to stick with Stalin. And again, I'm hoping that the various kinds of arguments that you've seen in the previous lectures will now come together and this will start to make sense. So, speaking of time, [sighs] the Soviets were in a hurry, right? They're in a hurry. Why are they in a hurry? And this is like again, this sense of time, like this, it's that everything has to be done. It's a very powerful kind of politics and it's so easy to mobilize and it's so hard to see. But the Soviets were in a hurry. Why were they in a hurry? Why were they so sure they were in a hurry? Because they were sure of the way that history worked.

They knew how history worked. They knew that there were stages of development. They knew that there was supposed to be a bourgeois revolution. And they hadn't had one yet. And they knew that there was supposed to be a proletarian revolution. And they hadn't had one yet. They didn't have the middle classes that they needed to have the first bourgeois revolution. They didn't have the working classes they needed for the second proletarian revolution. They didn't have all of that stuff.

And that, because there's so, notice the two points here which are very important, that you know how history has to work, right? You know it and you know what the stages are and so therefore you have to catch up. You have to catch up with the way history is supposed to be. And the particular reason why the Bolsheviks have to catch up has to do with an error in calculating, so to speak, that Lenin made. So, Lenin has this quite brilliant idea about the coherence of world revolution, which is that if Marx is right and capitalism is a world system, then the revolution is going to be a world revolution. And if it's a world revolution, it doesn't matter where you start it. You can start it anywhere. And if it works, then it works. And that proves it's right.

And so, Lenin was able to start a revolution in Russia, but the notion of the revolution in Russia was never a revolution in Russia. The notion of revolution in Russia was always powder keg that we light the fuse here and then the whole world explodes and then everything changes. And that's the part that didn't happen. So, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and all the rest, their idea [cough] their idea was that if we have our revolution, then the German comrades and the British comrades and all the comrades from the more advanced countries, and that's how they did see it, are going to come to our aid. That's the thing that doesn't happen.

So, then they're left on their own. They're left on their own to build socialism in one country. And that's why they're in a hurry because they've made the revolution, but from their own point of view, they are behind the capitalist countries who have already had a bourgeois revolution and have democracy and all that stuff and technology. And the only way to catch up to the capitalist countries is to do the stuff that they did just at a faster pace, okay? So, in one of, I mean, you could see it, and if you were an anarchist, you did see it as a great historical irony. As one of the great historical ironies, the way that Lenin and especially Stalin tried to build socialism was to imitate capitalism.

But just to do it faster, right? To do it faster and to make it guided by the state. And again, like you see the fatal mistake of all this, right? The notion that things have to go one way. There's only one way for things to go. And once you know that, then there can't be anything wrong with going faster, can there? Because if I have to get from A to B, and let's say millions of people are going to die anyway getting from A to B. I know that. Millions of people are going to die. It doesn't matter then if they die faster, because they were going to die anyway. And I'm speaking in particular about the peasants.

So, if you know that in the transformation to a complicated, you know, quasi-capitalist economy, the peasants are going to have to be flushed out of the countryside. If you know that's going to happen anyway, then it's not, you're not really doing anything if you make it happen faster, are you? I mean, that's a rhetorical question. I'm not trying to persuade you of this, but I'm trying to give you insight into a way of seeing things. And that in essence is where the Leninists and then the Stalinists were in the 1920s.

They were sure about where they had to get to. They had to go through the capitalist stage in order to get to the socialist stage. And to go through the capitalist stage, they had to build big factories and build big mines. And capitalism, and this was, I mean, capitalism was there for them to look at, right? Like Henry Ford, the American car maker, Henry Ford, he was incidentally a hero to both the Soviets and the Nazis at the same time. Because he was a pioneer of mass production. And so that was a model which the Soviets celebrated, I mean, in their agitprop. But he was also a tremendous anti-Semite, and he published anti-Semitic material, and so he was a hero for the Nazis as well.

But the point is that capitalism was there in a certain form. And again, note like, note the mistake or like the anarchist, this is the kind of thing where like the anarchists were pointing this thing out the whole time. Just because capitalism exists in this form doesn't mean you have to imitate it. You could do something else, right? But the big factories and the big mines were what capitalism had. And so under Stalinism, you had to have the big factories and the big mines. And how do you get there quickly? Okay, you get there quickly by moving out of feudalism. You get there quickly by moving out of the period of history where there are peasants and the peasants own the land. You get through that just as fast as you can and you exploit whatever is there on the countryside to build the mines, to build the cities, to build the factories.

Okay, so after some political negotiating and some purges which happen after Lenin dies in 1924, it's Stalin who tries to bring this about. He brings it about in something which is called the first five-year plan. And the notion of a five-year plan was that in five years, you would essentially move history forward by 50 or by 100, right? History's going to be accelerated. The essence of the five-year plan was that the Soviet Union is going to transform itself from a backward feudal country dominated by peasants into a modern industrial country with big cities and factories and mines. And the way this was to be carried out was to take control of the land.

Okay. Here I have to just take a step to the side and talk about Kazakhstan, the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan, which was, which under various names was also part of the Soviet Union. And the reason I mention Kazakhstan is because it just allows us to see, just kind of opens a window a little bit. It helps us to see how history works in different ways. So, we ourselves, I think, to a significant degree, might be trapped in a, as Marx was, might be trapped in a certain way of seeing history where like there's this stage and there's that stage and there's the other stage, right? So, like we all know what stage is coming next. We know, right? The robots are going to come and they're going to strap us into machines, you know? Like we all know that that's what's coming, right? But maybe we're wrong. Maybe something else is, who knows?

But there we are, I think, to a large extent trapped also by the notion that there are stages in history and one stage unfolds into the next stage and so on. So, I mentioned Kazakhstan partly for that reason because Kazakhstan was at that point a country mainly not of peasants, not of workers, not of capitalists, but a country of nomads. And that was the way that many human beings lived for much of our prehistory and into our history. Nomadism or nomadic pastoralism, moving across, not without private property, moving with small groups of people, larger groups of animals, either seasonally or changing locations. That's the way a lot of us have lived for a long time, right?

And I mean, not to get too emotional about it, but when you realize that you feel better taking a walk than you do staring at your phone, like that's the nomad talking to you, right? That's the nomad saying, 'There's another way to go through life besides being sedentary.' Okay. And that's actually what the Soviets called it. So, the Soviets had a notion of what the stages of history were and nomadism, in their view, came before being a peasant, which came before, you know, being a worker, right? So, what they did with the nomads in Kazakhstan was they sedentarized them. And that is the word they used. They sedentarized them.

So, first they cut them off from their herds, they made them settle down, they tried to make them farm, which is not a simple thing, right? Like, learning how to be a pastoralist or learning how to be a farmer or even learning how to be a worker, like these are things often that take generational knowledge. So, the first thing the Soviets did was they made them settle down. And then once they had made them settle down, then they took all the land away from them. That was the next stage, okay?

And I mention this, I mean, it partly this helps you see the absurdity of it all, but also I mention this for a very serious reason, which is that in 1930, as a result of this sedentarization and then collectivization, okay? Collectivization means the state takes the land away from the individuals and creates collective farms in which rather than owning your bit of land or controlling your bit of land, you're employees, or I run the farm and you're employees, or you run the farm and we're all employees. That's collectivization.

So, in Kazakhstan, the combination of sedentarization and collectivization killed about 1.1 million people in about a year, which is a very large number and a very significant percentage of all the people who were living in Kazakhstan at the time. It's relevant for the famine in Ukraine, which starts about a year later, in part because the famine in Kazakhstan meant that the Soviet leadership knew that its policies could lead to famine. They couldn't possibly have been surprised by it. Okay, shifting back then to Ukraine.

Ukraine was meant to be the breadbasket. Ukraine was very central to the transformation. And when collective farming didn't work very well in Ukraine, as it didn't in 1931, 1932, there had to be an explanation, okay? And here again, we see the particular danger of everyone agreeing that history has to go a certain way. Because then when history doesn't go a certain way, someone has to be to blame. And it's not history. History is always right. And it's not the scientists of history. We're always right.

It's people who somehow manage to get history off track, right? It's people who are reactionaries, who are wreckers, who somehow have this incredible power to get history off track. So, in 1931, 1932, when Ukraine is not, putting it in a very impersonal way, when Ukraine is not meeting its grain requisition targets, the reaction is to understand this politically.

Okay, and so that very language that I just used, it's important to notice when language like that is used, like language of targets and quotas and so on, because that language of targets and quotas, it transforms human beings and their efforts and their means of subsistence or their means of life into, you know, a chart, into a graph, into numbers. And that can be a very important part of mass killing, and in this case it was, because in order to carry out the five-year plan, there was, you know, not an Excel spreadsheet, of course, because that didn't exist yet, but there was a list, there was a graph, right? There was a notion of how much each district of Ukraine was supposed to yield to the central state. There was a quota, and the quotas went down to the lowest level, and people were supposed to meet the quotas.

In early 1932, it was very clear that Ukraine could not meet its quotas. And the local communist officials sent missives upwards to Moscow saying what they were seeing, that people were hungry, that the quotas were unrealistic, right? And the reaction that came back down was to punish those party members.

Okay, and here I have to take a step away and say something about the party. Because the Soviet Union was constructed as a one-party state. And this, by the way, is one thing that the fascists got from the communists was the notion of the one-party state. The notion of the one-party state is a very specific way of doing modernity. So in modernity, you have a powerful state, right? There's a bureaucracy, there's a connection between the state and the individual. The state operates, so to speak, impersonally, it has its own rhythms, it has its own civil service, it's more or less permanent.

The idea of a one-party state is that all those mechanisms are vitalized, animated, controlled by one party, right? And so the dead, impersonal organizational thing, which is the state, is animated by people who know the future, who have some glorious idea. And obviously that's, so that's the positive side as they would see it. The negative side is what one-party state means: we're not going to have elections, right? Like the other parties aren't coming to power. So the one-party state is an important political idea of the first part of the 20th century. It's also something to notice in other historical periods.

So the communist one-party state was meant to be the ruling body of the country. And we've gone over this before, I'm just going to repeat it. The Soviet state existed, the Soviet state had institutions, but those institutions were meant to be subordinate to the party. And then the party was organized in a certain way where, you know, you guys are all party members, right? Or whatever, you know, you're all party mem... Some of you are not in already, okay? Some of you probably are party members. So you're all party members, but sadly, you know, you're the proletariat.

And of course, so you understand history. But as comrade Lenin has shown, you don't really understand history. It's just the party that understands history. And what is the party? Well, you're members, but the party is actually the central committee, you know, which is probably older people wearing suits. And then the central committee isn't really the party either. It's actually the Politburo, which is a small hand-picked group by Stalin. And so, what's meant to be history, it turns out to be in effect just a few people.

And the party is a vertical organization, right? It's a vertical organization. It's meant to be the instrument of history, but in fact, what history actually means is defined by a few people in Moscow. And so, when these, and I had to say all that because so you can see the dynamic here. When these reports come up from, you know, local party members in Ukraine saying, 'Hey, people are starving. This isn't working out. Could we reduce the grain quotas?' They go up, and then the response comes back down. And the response back down is, 'You have been removed from the party or you have been deported to Siberia.' And those responses are the first part of the politicization of the famine.

And people learn very quickly, right? So, if one of you reports there's actual hunger here, and that person gets deported, then it's very unlikely that the rest of the party members are going to do the same thing. Instead, they're going to start following orders, most of them, which is what they do.

So, there's a dominant interpretation of what happens in Ukraine. And that dominant interpretation comes from the center. It comes from Moscow. And as I said, it can't be that history is wrong. History's never wrong. And it can't be that the main scientist of history, Stalin himself, is wrong. He's never wrong. So, it has to be that something else, some mysterious force, is to blame. And what is this mysterious force? Well, in the broadest possible way, this mysterious force is capitalism.

There's the general idea that, and it's a very convenient idea, that as we approach socialism, the capitalists get desperate. And so that things that look like they're going wrong in our system, it's not that they're going wrong in our system. They're actually going very well. It's just that because they're going so well, the capitalists got nervous and then they started doing things inside our system. That's the general explanation, which takes on the particular form that there is, you know, behind all of this is British imperialism.

But then closer to the surface is Polish nationalism. And then closer to the surface still is Ukrainian nationalism. So the notion is that the official interpretation in the summer and fall of 1932 is that the reason why there's famine in Ukraine is because there are Ukrainian nationalists who are somehow in control of the Ukrainian party and they're backed by the Polish military who in turn is backed by British power around the world. There isn't any truth to any of that. It's an explanation which only makes sense from thousands of miles away and when you can't be wrong and also when you have the power to enforce your interpretation.

And so the power to enforce your own interpretation means that since it's political, Ukraine is not to have its grain quotas lowered. They're to be enforced and if they're not met, then certain kinds of punishments will ensue. And that set of policies in late 1932, early 1933 are what ensure that rather than hundreds of thousands of people dying, millions of people die. It's about 3 and a half million or 4 million, 3.9 million I think is the latest count. People die in 1932 and 1933 in Soviet Ukraine.

And those policies are things like: if you're a peasant, you can't buy a train ticket to go to cities because you might go there and beg. If you are a peasant in the cities, you are to be apprehended by the police and put in special barracks out of sight of everyone else. Note the isolation. Out of sight of everyone else. If you are in the Ukrainian Republic, you're not allowed to leave the Ukrainian Republic. I don't just mean leave the Soviet Union. Of course, you can't leave the Soviet Union, but you can't go to Soviet Belarus, you might beg.

If you don't fulfill the quota as a village, as a little region, you'll be put on what's called a blacklist. If you're on the blacklist, that means that you can't trade at all with any other part of the Soviet Union. Nothing can come into your village, so you're going to die. Another one of these rules was something called the meat quota. So, if you have any kind of agricultural background, you can see the significance of this. If you have a bad year, if the crops don't go well, you can get milk from the goat or from the cow. Or as a last resort, you can slaughter the goat or the cow.

But the government comes and takes the goat and they take the cow away from you because you didn't meet your quota. And so, you don't have that last resort. So, all of these things and other measures were implemented in the second half of 1932 leading to huge starvation then and in 1933.

Okay. So, you might be asking, what did the world do about this? Or maybe you're not asking that. I don't know. Like, but you know, what did the world do about this? Because it's not that people didn't know. People did know. And it's an interesting reception history. And actually the reception history has a lot to do with one of the themes of this class and maybe one of the themes of history in general, which is the ability to think of things as having more than one track. Like that your life might go in more than one direction, your society might have more than one possible future, and that we know this because there's so much variety in history.

That's not how people saw this at the time. I'm just trying to make an argument about what history actually is. But what people thought of history as being in the relevant time and place was history with a capital H. You might have seen this if you've been reading around in communist contexts or reading critics of communism. The people who do this are most often, by the way, former communists writing history with a big H, right? History as something which is certain, which is irresistible, like a locomotive. The Russian poet Mayakovsky talked about it this way. [snorts] But like history as being like a locomotive, history is a train, it's on a track. You could get in front of it if you want, but you're not going to stop it. It's going where it's going.

So, in the reception history of the famine in Soviet Ukraine, the New York Times is very interesting. And like if it's something like, if you're writing, it'd be a good paper topic, you know, if you ever write papers on this sort of thing. But the reception history in the New York Times is very interesting because what the New York Times basically treated it as was a story of progress. That was it.

So, Walter Duranty, who was a New York Times correspondent in Moscow, he didn't go... The problem wasn't so much he didn't go to Soviet Ukraine. Almost nobody went to Soviet Ukraine because you weren't allowed to, except a young Welshman called Gareth Jones, who jumped on a train and then jumped out of the train and observed it himself and then wrote about it and was literally the only journalist in the English-speaking world to write about the famine under his own byline. There were a couple of others who wrote about it anonymously or pseudonymously, but Gareth Jones was the only witness from the Western world to write about it under his own byline, which I just mention as an example of how significant investigative journalism is.

Like, if there isn't actually a person who jumps on a train and jumps off a train and writes the article, you know, then you just don't know, you know, much less. But people did know. People did know. So, Duranty knew. He had a pretty good notion. He actually had an angry argument with Gareth Jones about this stuff. But, Duranty knew roughly what was happening. But, Duranty's view was, 'Yeah, they're starving, but they have to starve because progress.'

Because we know that this is what industrial development looks like. And so, yeah, we're not denying that they're starving, but we're going to call it hunger. We're going to euphemize it a little bit. And we're going to use the same kinds of metaphors that the Bolsheviks used, which are let the chips fall where they may, or which usually translated as to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs, right? So, like eggs are being broken, or, you know, cut trees are being cut down, and chips were flying. Euphemisms and metaphors were deployed, but the basic reception history of this was story of progress.

Story of progress. And progress in the Soviet Union seemed all the more plausible in much of the West in 1932 and 1933 because of the context there, which was the Great Depression. So, if you look at Fortune magazine, I think it's March or maybe April or May of 1933. There's the cover of Fortune magazine, okay? Fortune magazine is a May 1st, it must be May of '33, is a May 1st parade in Moscow. And it's a beautiful May 1st parade in Moscow. It's not a critical portrayal, right? So, story of progress was a big part of the reception history.

More narrowly, though, there's foreign policy. So, who knew the most about this, besides Soviet citizens themselves? Poland. Tens of thousands of refugees come into Poland. The Poles have a wide network of agents, members of the Polish minority who come to the Polish consulates, embassy, consulate in Ukraine because they want to flee to Poland. They want to go to Poland because they don't want to die of starvation. They show up malnourished, right? The Poles know all about this. I've read the intelligence reports. I've read the diplomatic traffic. The Poles know all about this. So, there's now a big huge thick edited volume about this.

They knew. They didn't say anything, though. Because they were worried about the Soviet Union. And in July of 1932, they managed to sign a non-aggression declaration with the Soviet Union. And as a result of that rapprochement, they didn't publicize it. They didn't say anything about it.

Who did say something about it? This is also quite problematic. Hitler. In March 1933, Hitler goes to the Sportpalast, which is a very big venue, and he gives a speech. And one of the things he says in his speech is that in a place which could feed the world, millions of people are being starved. And he's talking about Ukraine. And the fact that Hitler talks about it is, of course, not particularly helpful for the suffering people in question because it helps Stalin to make the move that Stalin makes, which is to say, 'Anyone who talks about this must be on the side of Hitler.'

Anyone who talks about this famine is a fascist. And then the Soviet propagandists abroad referred to any attempt to provide aid to Ukrainians or people in Soviet Ukraine as Hitler Hilfe, as like help from Hitler, right? So the whole issue was associated with the Nazis beginning in early 1933 as a result of Soviet propaganda. And of course this propaganda was itself an element of the mass killing itself because part of the mass killing was that they didn't allow any assistance to come in from the outside. And there were people who were trying to organize it.

But here's the place where we can now make the transition to Germany. So Hitler knows about this. Hitler knows about collective farms. Hitler sees that food is being diverted from the collective farms to elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Hitler sees that Ukrainians are starving by the million. And for Hitler this is essentially a positive example. So of course he uses it to criticize the Soviet Union, but for him it's a positive example of how that terrain can be transformed. So let me explain about this because that will lead us then into the two main German policies of mass killing that we want to talk about.

So going back to the fundamentals, Nazi Germany, [snorts] like the Soviet Union, is in an imperial world. And Nazi Germany, like the Soviet Union, has the aspiration of transforming that imperial world into something else. Of limiting British and American power and becoming more powerful themselves. Right? So that's a fundamental common feature of the two of them.

The other one I've already mentioned, which is the one-party state. So Mussolini, who's not a big character in this class, but he's the person who invented the word fascism, he's the person who founded fascism. If you want to ask whether somebody is a fascist, Mussolini would be your go-to comparison. But Mussolini, who is somebody who came from the left and ended up on the fascist new right, what Mussolini took from the Bolsheviks was the idea of the one-party state. And what he took from Lenin in general was this notion of voluntarism. That like you know what's going to happen, so you just make it happen yourself.

So, those are the two things that they have in common, this imperial predicament and this notion of the one-party state. And in a very broad way, they have in common the notion of what to do with Ukraine, which is to exploit it. But in practice, this requires them to take opposing views because they have different views of the way that history is supposed to work.

In the Soviet Union, Ukraine is an instrument of modernization, right? So, we take the peasants, we take the fertile soil, we use them to build our modern society. That's not how Hitler sees things. I mean, Hitler also has a view, but it's essentially the opposite view. And the view is that in Germany, we already have cities. We already have industry. That's not the issue. What we need is vast expanses of fertile farmland that will balance the cities. We need huge colonies that spread eastward.

And here, by the way, his main model was the American expansion to the west. That's what he talked about. He talked about India some, too. He talked about Africa some, too. But the notion of a kind of frontier expansion where you just wipe out the natives and they disappear and you replace them with nice settlements, the basic model for that was the American expansion. And again, if you think about this historically, it's important when Hitler grew up, right? So, Hitler grew up literally with stories about the American Wild West and the American spread across the North American continent.

Not to let you guys off the hook, by the way, because like Canada was also spreading across the North American continent, but it didn't figure as broadly in Hitler's imagination. So, the American spread across the North American continent was one of the last big moves in the colonization of the world. And that's how Hitler saw it. But, Hitler didn't think it was the last. He thought there was going to be one more, and that was German spreading eastward across Ukraine, Belarus, and into Western Russia as far as the Urals.

And by the way, Hitler's view of America was that the reason why America worked was because so many Germans and Swedes and Nordics had migrated to America, and they ran everything, and they ran everything except when the Jews got in the way. They ran everything, and they were the ones who organized this huge colonization across the country. And that was too bad for Germany because Germany had lost some of his best people, but it proved that Germans could do the same thing. Just they were now going to do it in Eurasia.

So, where Stalin wanted to take a country which was too agrarian and make it more industrial from his point of view, Hitler had a country which he thought was already industrial, but which needed to be more agrarian by taking a vast colony into the East. And the notion was that as we move to the East, we will control this territory, and we will deport people, and we will starve them out.

Now, another thing which is different, of course, between the USSR and Nazi Germany, I was going to say I should finish with the ideology. Sorry. The ideology. So, Stalin is aiming for a future that he knows about. With Hitler, it's more like he's aiming for what he thinks is [sighs and gasps] the state of nature. And this is all in the first couple of chapters of Mein Kampf. This is a state of nature. It's not about a future, it's not about a path of development, it's about stasis. It's about the way the world is supposed to be.

And for Hitler, the way the world is supposed to be is Darwinian. So, the way, and this is not exactly what Darwin says, but it's an understanding which comes from biology as Hitler understood it. The world, says Hitler, is full of habitats. Lebensraum,

Right? Lebensraum just means habitat. It used to be a fairly innocent word at one time. So, the world is full of Lebensraum. It's full of habitats. And these habitats, these ecological niches, are occupied by species. And these species are there because they have won competitions with other species. They've defeated other species, they've driven them out of these habitats, they've taken them over. That's the way of nature, that's just how things are, and that's good.

Next step of the argument: humans are the same. We are just like animals, we're no better, we're no worse. And we are also divided into different species. So, Hitler's notion of a race is that human races are as different as animal species are. But as humans, unfortunately, have this capacity—again, this is all Hitler, okay? I'm not telling you about the world, I'm telling you how Hitler saw the world—humans, unfortunately, have this capacity that even though they're different species, they can interbreed. And this is terrible. That's very bad, it should be stopped. But who encourages that kind of thing? The Jews, okay?

So, the Jews play a very special role in this scheme for Hitler. They're the ones who make nature unnatural. And it's important to grasp this because in many accounts of this, the Jews are presented as untermenschen, and that's not true. That is not how Hitler saw the Jews. He did not see them as one more inferior race. The Ukrainians, the Slavs, and so on, they were inferior races. The Jews were not that. The Jews were something else. They were something which was not quite—they were not human, but not because they were subhuman. They were different. They were to the side or they were maybe even above.

What Jews did to humans was that they wrecked human nature by persuading human beings that there was something going on in the world besides racial struggle. So, what we're supposed to be doing, we're not supposed to be like, you know, having university lectures and learning about things. We're not supposed to be—we're not supposed—I mean, Toronto would actually be a total hellscape for the Hitlerian worldview, right? Like this city is just about the exact opposite. Like this thing that we're doing, like being in Toronto and having university, this should be impossible. It shouldn't be happening. What should be happening is just racial competition. We should all be identifying one another as racial enemies, and we should be trying to starve each other out.

Why are we not doing this? And again, this is all Hitler: we're not doing this because of the Jews. All the ideas that prevent us from seeing who we really are are Jewish ideas. So, Christianity, right? The idea of the good neighbor, right? The idea of neighborliness, the parable of the Good Samaritan, who is thy neighbor? That's Jewish propaganda. Communism, the idea of proletarian solidarity, Jewish propaganda. Capitalism, contracts, they bind you, they bind me, Jewish propaganda. Constitutions, you have rights, I have rights, Jewish propaganda. That's all Jewish mind control for Hitler.

Okay, so I mean, and so the way the Jews are unnatural is because everyone is supposed to be content with territory. So it should be that, like, if my group gets my territory and your group gets its territory, like we sit happily in our Lebensraum and every so often we have a war of destruction against each other, but we're basically happy. That's the way we're supposed to be. The Jews are not content, says Hitler, with land. They want to control the whole world. And the way they control the whole world is with these ideas—the communism, the capitalism, the Christianity, the rule of law—which are all basically one idea, says Hitler. Which is why it's not surprising for him that London and Moscow and Washington could be in alliance in 1942, because it's all really the same thing.

So the Jews conspire—oh, this is the important thing. The Jews fight in a way which Hitler says is unfair. We should be fighting wars, we should be starving each other out with our weapons, but the Jews use their minds and that's not fair. They use their minds to create ideas like constitutionalism or communism or capitalism or Christianity and they put those ideas in our minds and that makes us something other than what we are. That disempowers us, it makes us weak, it prevents us from struggling with each other because we start to see humans as humans, which we shouldn't do because there aren't humans, there are only races. Okay, so I have to take a step back and explain that very important thing because not only is it a difference between the Nazis and the Soviets, it also is necessary to explain how we get to certain kinds of mass killing.

But the political difference I wanted to get at is that the Soviet Union basically starts in a revolutionary situation. It starts with the First World War still going on. The Bolshevik Revolution of November of 1917, it happens while the First World War is still going on. Millions of men are still fighting. Men are coming back from the front. People are interested in revolutionary changes. People have already taken part in revolutionary changes. They've already killed their neighbors and taken their things. A lot of stuff is happening already, which the Bolsheviks manage to get hold of, and they build their institutions in a revolutionary setting. Their secret police, the idea of the party, the idea of what they call democratic centralism, namely that a few people are in charge—all of this is more plausible because they come out of a revolutionary situation.

The Nazis don't. The Germans lose the war. Germany re-begins as a republic without colonies. And this is why, by the way, Germany comes up so often as the paradigmatic comparison point for countries that fall into authoritarianism. Because in Germany, there's a process. It's a familiar process. Republic, too many political parties, people get impatient. There's a Great Depression. There's a leader. He has all the answers. He wins elections. He transforms the system. He starts a war. There's mass killing. That whole pattern—I mean, so far as that is a familiar set of events to you, that's all from the Nazi pattern. But the difference between the Nazis and the Soviets is that when Hitler comes to power in 1933, there's already a republic that's there. It's flawed. It's been hollowed out by the idea of the exception. It's already being ruled essentially by decrees rather than by laws. It's in the middle of a Great Depression, but it's still a republic.

And so Hitler—so if we start the clock in 1933, Hitler coming to power, March 1933, giving the speech at the Sportpalast about what's happening in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviets have already killed 3 million people at that point. More, in fact. The Germans aren't going to have killed 3 million people until 1942, until almost a decade later. So, the starting point is different. The number of people killed in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 is very, very, very small compared to the number of people who will be killed in the Soviet Union in the famine and in the terror which comes afterwards, which also kills about a million people. There's an evolution which is taking place. It's a radical evolution, but it's an evolution.

And I mention this because the German crimes—the mass killing part of the crimes—aren't going to be possible until another war starts. There's a great deal of repression they can carry out between 1933 and 1938, and there's a great deal of planning, but much of the radicalness of the intention is disguised. It's disguised in the electoral campaign of 1932 and 1933. It's disguised even after Hitler is in power, and it only starts to become clear during the war itself. But there are plans, and these are the plans. The basic idea is to reverse what has happened in the Soviet Union.

So, everything which has happened in the Soviet Union is obviously, from the Nazi point of view, artificial and undesirable. That revolution shouldn't have happened. Those Jews—again, this is how Hitler sees it, right? Those Jews shouldn't be in charge. None of this Stalinist transformation should have happened. It's an artificial situation in which Jews have done the thing that they do. They've taken over the minds of people with their communist ideas, and they've built this empire for themselves in which they're exploiting the Ukrainians and everyone else. So, and then they've done something which shouldn't have happened, which is they've built cities where these inferior people live. They don't need cities.

So, the fundamental Nazi idea is that we're going to come in and we're going to reverse all of this. We're going to destroy the cities. They're not necessary. They don't need the factories, they don't need the mines, they're primitives. We're going to get rid of all of the Jews. Somehow, this hasn't been decided yet. And we're going to put the people in the right kind of subjugation because they are inferior. So, Hitler's preoccupation is that the Ukrainians and other Slavs, these are inherently inferior people and it's a cosmic injustice that they are sitting on this land, which is very fertile. We, the Germans, should have control of that land.

And the only reason we don't is because the Jews are in the way, right? The Jews have accumulated—again, this is Hitler—the Jews have accumulated this artificial power using this idea of communism, but as soon as we strike the Soviet Union, they will run away, the Soviet Union will collapse, and we will inherit Ukraine and all of the Western Soviet Union. We will control that land, and we will bring history back to nature. We will restore nature to the way it should be. We will be the master race. The Ukrainians will be happy to be our slaves. They'll enjoy this because they're inferior. I've talked about this. We'll give them beads, you know, we'll put a stick—we'll put a pole in the middle of the village, we'll put a radio on top of it. They'll be astonished, they'll dance around the pole, this kind of thing. Right? So, that's the fundamental notion.

And then, once the war begins, there is some pretty specific planning of what they mean to do. There are two particular plans that I want you to know about which have to do, again, with land and hunger. The first is something which is called Generalplan Ost. So, General Plan East, Generalplan Ost, which is the overall colonization plan. And in the overall colonization plan, the notion is that in the first 10 or 15 years after the victory, we will deport or starve on the order of 30 million to 45 million people who are living west of the Ural Mountains, and then we will in waves of colonization bring in Germans who will control the remaining Slavic populations. And so Generalplan Ost has this huge ambition, and then there were also aspects of it which are very particular, like what kinds of fences the Germans would have and what color they would be painted. But the basic idea was a kind of idealized settler colonialism in which almost everybody would be starved out and deported. Some would remain, but just enough to do the work for the Germans.

The second plan, which was a bit more specific and narrow, is called in the historiography the Hunger Plan. And it was laid out between 1940 and 1942. The idea of the Hunger Plan was—it's a bit more specific. The Germans are going to come into the western Soviet Union, and they're going to take over the collective farms. Okay, and this is important. The collective farm is the heart of the five-year plan. The collective farm is the instrument of collectivization. The collective farm is the centralized little unit where you are all working instead of owning your own land. You've lost your land. Now you just work for the collective farm director, right? Machine tractor station, it's one of the terms for these.

So what the Nazis thought was we're going to come in and we're going to take advantage of the collective farm. The collective farm has been extracting grain from the Ukrainians and sending it east into Russia. We're going to do the same thing, except we're going to extract the grain and send it west to Germany and also to Western Europe. We're going to feed Western Europe with the grain from Ukraine rather than Eastern Europe. And sure, when we do this, again, tens of millions of people will starve in the Soviet Union. That was the plan. On the order of tens of millions of people. I want you to note a couple of things about this though.

Okay, it didn't happen this way as we'll get to, but there's a very specific arrogance about this. And it's not just the idea that the Ukrainians are subhuman and they'll like it when we colonize them. It's also the idea, which turns out in real life not to be true, that the Germans are so incredibly well organized about everything that of course they'll be able to run the collective farms better than the Soviets did. That in practice turns out not to be true at all. It turns out that the Germans are not able to control the collective farms anywhere near as closely as the Communist Party was. And so when the Germans came into the Soviet Union and killed Communist Party leaders and tried to replace party rule with their own colonial rule, the collective farms did not yield nearly as much of a surplus as they expected. Okay, but that's not the most important in practice exception. The most important in practice exception is the war.

So the war also had a plan. And like, if you learn anything about the history of war, the thing to learn about the history of war is it never goes the way you expect it. That's pretty much the definition of war, is that when you start a war, you're entering into a zone of unpredictability. And whatever ideas you had on the first day of the war, like within, you know, days, weeks, months—The only exception to this, of course, is if you didn't have any ideas when you started the war, right? That's the exception.

So, the Germans had an idea about this war. Okay, sorry. By this war, I don't mean the whole Second World War, right? I don't mean the Japanese in China. I don't mean 1939 in Poland. I don't mean 1940 in France. I don't mean the Battle of Britain in 1940. From the Germans' point of view—I assume you guys have all studied those things or you know what I'm talking about. But from the point of view of the Nazis, all that stuff was just distraction. The British were not supposed to fight at all. Why would they fight? We're letting them keep their maritime empire. The French, you know, we had to knock them out so we could fight the war in Eastern Europe. I mean, from the French point of view, obviously, the whole war took place in France and it took a completely different course, whatever. But from the point of view of Hitler, that was just distraction, right? The French had to be gotten out of the way.

And then the notion was once we get the French out of the way, the British will come to a deal because why wouldn't they, right? And while we're on that subject, I just want to mention the two ways that Britain and the United States were important in this war because we're going to focus on Eastern Europe now. The British are very important in this war because they stay in. Hitler thinking that Britain would come to a deal in 1940, that was not unreasonable for him to think that. In 1940, the situation was Nazi Germany and its Soviet ally, because in 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany came into an alliance and divided Poland, right? In 1940, it was Great Britain against the Nazis and the Soviets.

And the British didn't have any allies. Their big friend France was supposed to have the best army in the world. France had been knocked out in 7 weeks. The British were on their own. And they were powerful. They had this big empire, but they were on their own. The Americans were not in the war yet. And so, the thing that the British did was they stayed in the war. And that is very significant because if the British do make a deal in the summer of 1940, it's pretty hard to see how the Americans get into the war at all after that. Okay. So the thing the British do which is significant for the outcome of the Second World War is they stay in.

What the Americans do which is significant is they give a huge amount of economic material, economic aid, logistical support to the Soviet Union. That's the main thing that the Americans do which is consequential. The Americans in 1941, '42, '43 have by far the most impressive economy in the world. And what they do at that time is they send a huge amount of automobiles, jeeps, when they get around to making them, armored vehicles to the Soviet Union across the Pacific which the Soviets then use to fight the Germans. That's the main thing the Americans do. It's probably the main thing they do in the war period. I mean, again, when you do the history of warfare, you talk about the engagements and the battles, right? No, you're always going to sell more books writing about D-Day than writing about the Americans sending Studebakers across the Pacific Ocean. But the Studebakers across the Pacific Ocean were probably more significant.

Okay, so American economic power comes into the war and that's what allows the Soviets to defend themselves in large measure. Neither the Americans nor the Russians like to remember this now because everybody likes to remember martial glory and the Russians don't like to admit they had help, right? But whatever.

So the point though is—okay. The Germans had a plan and here's their plan. So the reason I went off on all that is that when I'm talking about the war, I'm talking about the main part of the war, which is the German-Soviet War. The essence of the Second World War is the German-Soviet War. By the time the Germans invade the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, the French are out, the British are just hanging on by a thread, and the Americans are not in yet, right? So it's the Germans and the Soviets, and even after the Americans come in, 80% or more of the casualties in this war in Europe are going to be on the Eastern Front, right? So that is the war of consequence in Hitler's mind, but also in terms of the outcome.

In Hitler's mind, you now know why it's the war of consequence because it's about control of—I should have also mentioned it's about control of the oil fields in Azerbaijan. It's about creating a huge zone of self-sufficiency and it's about controlling the grain fields of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine. That's why it's of consequence. Okay, how is this war supposed to go? General proposition you already know, it's not going to go the way that I'm about to say, okay? The Germans think it's going to be over in 10 weeks on the outside. That's the plan. The German notion of this war is that they're going to be in Moscow in 10 weeks. The Soviet state is going to collapse and by the autumn of 1941, they will already be collecting Soviet resources. So all of these plans, like the Hunger Plan, was supposed to kick in in the winter of 1941. Roughly 30 million Soviet citizens were supposed to starve in the winter of 1941. The notion being that by that time the Germans would have achieved full political control over the western Soviet Union.

Okay, doesn't happen. The Germans invade the Soviet Union with 3 million men, 1 million horses. They also bring with them—well, Finland also invades. Romania enters with a very large force. There's some Slovaks. There are other people as well. So it's a huge invasion force. And if you're following it day by day in the newspapers, which is an interesting exercise, by the way, it seems like it's going incredibly quickly. It seems like this lightning war is going to be successful. But from the German point of view, it's not going quickly enough. So, they're covering huge amounts of territory quite quickly, but 10 weeks into the war, they haven't won. And things start to turn on them.

One of the things that turns on them is that Stalin figures out that the Japanese aren't going to invade. So, the Second World War—this is not part of this class, but I want you to know it and it's in the reading. The Japanese and the Germans are allies in the Second World War, but they're pursuing quite different goals, and their goals aren't even really coordinated with one another. If the Japanese had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, this war would have taken a very different turn, most likely. But they didn't. Instead, the Japanese, as you all know, I'm sure, went south. They carried out an incredibly well-coordinated attack on the American colony in Hawaii—and I say colony because it was a colony, it wasn't a state. They destroyed the American military base at Pearl Harbor, but they basically chose south rather than north.

Which is very consequential for everything, of course, because that allows the Americans to enter the war, but it's consequential for the Soviet Union in a different way because going south means not going north. And Stalin, by the autumn of 1941, was sure that the Japanese weren't going to go north, and so the Red Army troops from Asia begin to go west towards Moscow. Very important.

The next thing, which is very important, is that the Americans enter the war in December of 1941. Okay? So, by the end of 1941, three things have happened. The Germans have not made as much progress as they expected. The Red Army—they have not gotten to Moscow. Like, they literally get as close that they can—scouts can see the Kremlin with their binoculars, but they get no closer than that. So, they're met by a counterattack in October of 1941 at the outskirts of Moscow. The Americans come into the war in December 1941, start supplying the Soviets. And so, they get very far. They control most of Soviet Ukraine, all of Soviet Belarus. They've taken the three Baltic states. They control some of Western Russia.

But they haven't destroyed the Soviet Union. And so, all of these plans, the Hunger Plan, Generalplan Ost, that assumed total control, those plans are not implemented or they're implemented in bits and pieces. What does happen is a much more direct, practical form of starvation where, number one, they besiege Leningrad. They besiege Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. Roughly a million people die there, largely by starvation, malnutrition. They starve out a number of Ukrainian cities in which tens of thousands of people die.

And most significantly, they take large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war. So, they do advance quickly and they take lots of prisoners, millions of them, and they put the Soviet prisoners of war into improvised—one hesitates even to call them camps because essentially what they were was, you know, I put you in a factory and I just let you sit there, or I put you in a field and I put barbed wire around it and then I just leave you there. And then it goes back to the thing I was trying to introduce at the beginning of how, like, what effort it takes to sustain a life, what you have to do to keep people alive, and how easy it is therefore to kill them in certain ways. As the way that the Germans killed the Soviet prisoners of war was they just left them. They just left them to starve. That was it. They left them to starve. They murdered some of them directly, like people that they thought were officers or Jews they shot, but for the most part they just put them in confinement and they let them starve.

And that was the policy from the autumn of 1941 into early 1942. And as a result of it, something on the order of 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died inside these very primitive encampments. Why did that change? Why did that change? It changed because by early 1942 the Germans themselves realized they needed some of these people to help them and so they changed the policy. They recruited people from inside these camps, some of whom participated in the last policy we're going to talk about, which is the Holocaust.

So, the Holocaust of European Jews in a way it follows the same pattern. There is an overall idea of anti-Semitism which we talked about. There was a vague plan for what was meant to happen, which was that the Jews are going to be deported. And the deportation idea—it makes sense within this notion of an imperial world. Because where were the Jews going to be deported? They were going to be deported to Madagascar. And if that sounds strange to you, it's because you're no longer inside this European colonial world where you can just send people anywhere you want, right? So, the idea was to send all the Jews to Madagascar, where they would, you know, the notion was they would then have to fend for themselves like everybody else and they would eventually die.

That didn't happen because the British didn't concede and the British controlled the sea lanes. So, the notion after that was that after we invade the Soviet Union, we will deport the Jews to Siberia. We'll put them in the gulag. They'll die there. That can't happen because the Germans don't defeat the Soviets. They don't control the Soviet Union. That's impossible. And so, what does happen instead is that as the Germans fight their way into the Soviet Union, they carry out progressively more radical policies of extermination of Jews.

They start with killing. Okay, the initial perpetrators are people in something called Einsatzgruppen, which just means task forces. The Einsatzgruppen are special units led by the SS that carry out the special political mission of killing people who might be thought to be potential resisters. So, in Poland in 1939, the Einsatzgruppen killed the intelligentsia, they killed educated people, they killed military officers, they killed priests, they killed civil society activists. In 1941 in the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen killed members of the Communist Party, Communist leaders, but also male Jews of military age from the beginning of the war.

But as the war continued, the Germans moved very quickly by September to a policy of killing not only the male Jews of military age, but all the Jews in villages and towns and cities by shooting. And this is important. The first technology and the most important technology of the Holocaust was not gassing. It was actually shooting. Gassing comes later on. By August of 1941, they'd already killed more than 20,000 Jews in the southwest Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilskyi, more than 30,000 in Kyiv in September of 1941. But those are just the most horrifying, largest examples of what had become a general policy.

So, the Jews couldn't be deported. They had to be eliminated from the Nazi point of view. They were killed where they were. And they were killed where they were partly in connection to the failure of the war. When Hitler gives an explanation of all this, as he does several times in December of '41 and January '42, the notion is that the Jews are stronger than we thought they were. Look how they're coordinating the world against us. The British and the Americans are in the war. Why is that? It's because of the Jewish international conspiracy. We have to wipe out the Jews where they are, so this kind of thing never happens again. That's essentially the rationale that Hitler gives.

The part of the Holocaust that you might be more familiar with, the death camps, comes later on, and it comes essentially as a way of making this practice of mass killing of Jews easier for the Germans. That's why the death facilities are invented. The first technology of the death facility is carbon monoxide gas, so automobiles. You see them all around you all the time. The carbon monoxide gas was used at Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. And it was literally an automobile engine. That's all it was. It started with cars, and then they moved to tank engines. But the way they killed people—so this is incredibly high-tech, right? What they did was they just created cement encasements, which were airtight, and then they pumped in the exhaust from a tank engine. That's how they killed people at those places. Roughly 2 million people.

And that technology, this is also worth noting, like there are various genealogies of how you get to the death facility. And one of them is the Nazi policy towards the disabled. So, the Germans killed—they record killing around 100,000. The figure was probably more than double that. They record killing around 100,000 of their own citizens who were classified as disabled in a project called T4 in the late 1930s into 1940. That was in fact the largest killing policy inside Germany itself. These other things that I'm talking about happen in countries that are controlled by Germany or added by Germany. But in pre-war Germany, the largest killing policy was the policy of killing the disabled. And the technology which was used to kill them was carbon monoxide. And so that is the genealogy of using carbon monoxide on the Eastern Front as well to kill the Jews.

So, I say Eastern Front advisedly because the Eastern Front was the center of the Holocaust because essentially that is where the Jews lived. It was triggered for Hitler because of his notion that the Soviet Union was a Jewish state, and if the Soviet Union was still resisting, that had to be because of the Jews. It was triggered for Hitler because of the idea that the Jews ran the world, and if the Soviet Union was still resisting and had allies, that was because of the Jewish allies. But the brute fact is that in order to get to Moscow, the Germans were crossing the part of the world where at that time the vast majority of Jews in the world lived, which was Eastern Europe.

So, the first stage of the Holocaust is the Soviet Union, the second stage is Poland, where the Jews are already in ghettos, and those Jews are then sent to the gassing facilities at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. The third stage, and again, is probably the most familiar one, is the Auschwitz stage, where the large concentration camp at Auschwitz, which is established as a concentration camp for Poles, is transformed into a death camp as well.

And the reason why Auschwitz is familiar, by the way, is that it was both a concentration camp and a death camp. So, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, these places were much deadlier than Auschwitz in the sense that nobody survived them. I mean, a few people, a few dozen, but essentially no Jews survived them because you were taken off the train, and you were taken immediately to the gas chamber. Whereas Auschwitz was a concentration camp, and people were separated for labor, and some people actually survived it, which is why Auschwitz is more familiar than the places which were statistically much more lethal.

The other reason why Auschwitz is known is that Auschwitz was a place where West Europeans were sent, and Southern Europeans were sent. So, many of the famous memoirs or records of the Holocaust have to do with a Dutch person like Anne Frank, or an Italian person like Primo Levi. They have to do with Westerners. That skews our version of what actually happened because most of the Jews were in Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of East European Jews, like on the order of 95%, were murdered. There were far fewer Jews in Western Europe, and more of them survived, which means that our familiar documentary record of the Holocaust is skewed towards Auschwitz and skewed towards West European survivors.

The other reason why our view is skewed is the Cold War, which we'll be talking about the next couple of lectures. The reason the Holocaust stops, and the only reason that other German policies of mass killing stop, is that the Germans lose the war. The killing stops a few days or a few weeks before the Red Army arrives from the east. The Red Army arriving from the east, of course, doesn't end the story. The Soviets and Soviet power bring with them their own policies, but the arrival of the Soviets and the fall of the Iron Curtain and the beginning of the Cold War do profoundly shape how we see all of this, because for the years from 1945 until 1989 or '90 or '91, all of this history that I've just talked about—the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, the Holodomor, and even to a large extent the Holocaust itself—were stuck behind an east-west divide. Okay. Thank you very much.