The first part of his argument is to explain the totality of Hitler's thinking when he thought about world conquest. It wasn't just about blonde kids or about hating the Jews. His idea (and Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt's idea, which weirdly I have recently seen referenced in relation to Trump) was that states were irrelevant--the really important thing was race. He believed that it was in the nature of races to fight to the death, such that the last one standing would win, and he further believed that the Aryan race was being jeopardized by two factors: the first was that they were in competition with states that had far more arable land than they did, and as a result, would end up starving. The second was that the most damaging thing to strong races (like the Aryans, who he believed were the strongest race) was the institution of states and norms that essentially involved constraint of violence against the weaker races (non-racist ideas! laws that treated people equally!) and the idea of redistributing goods so that everyone would benefit from them. These policies and ideas, Hitler believed, were ploys created by the globalizing Jews (naturally the weakest race), and this was especially true of Communism. Presumably this was because the theory of Communism has to do with the redistribution of goods. So the problem was that these norms, which one might term "political correctness" were being enforced by the pernicious Jewish conspiracy worldwide, and therefore the stronger races were being prevented from fighting to the death as they had the right to do, and in fact as they HAD to do to survive. (Any of this starting to sound familiar??) It's also interesting to note that Hitler did not really believe in law at all, which is to say he believed that the law was whatever would help the race survive. The idea that law should constrain what people could do to each other was anathema to him (also a little bit familiar?). It wasn't even that might made right. It was that might was right. If you could do it, it was legal. If someone could kill you for doing it, then that person had just made it illegal because you weren't strong enough to kill them first. A nice view of the world.
So now here comes the second part. Hitler's idea was basically to colonize other countries in order to gain arable land and to displace the people who lived there to other, less arable places (there's some further complicated stuff here about his view of America's annihilation of the Native Americans, which he wanted to emulate). And/or to starve them. His primary concern here was about food supply. At the same time, he also wanted to move the Jews out of his territory. A combination of events that involved the early Soviet-German alliance and the way each of them treated occupied territories ended with consecutive mass murders and deportations of different groups, but also with the total destruction of state governments and even institutions in many places, which the Nazis and Hitler learned they could take advantage of. People who are stateless are easy to kill, because there's no one to really object. On the other hand, people who have some kind of citizenship are much more of a problem, because then whatever you're doing comes under the heading of foreign relations, in which states do look out for their own. Even anti-Semitic states didn't allow Nazis to just storm in and kill their Jews--no state can allow that and survive as a state. But that also meant that Jews who the Nazis tried to deport in areas with surviving governments could appeal to state bureaucrats and delay their deportations, and also that people who wanted to save or help Jews were protected by state laws. Snyder gives the examples of Estonia and Denmark, before the war both pretty similar--if anything, Estonia was less anti-Semitic than Denmark. 99% of Jews in Estonia died. 99% of Jews in Denmark survived. Why? Because the Danish government, for a variety of reasons, survived through German occupation, and it had things to say about what could and couldn't be done with its citizens. Even when German police arrested a pretty tiny fraction of Jewish Danes, the Danish government appealed to Berlin and got them released or imprisoned under less deathly circumstances. When neutral Sweden suggested to Germany, over open air-waves so that the Jews of Denmark would find out, that Denmark's Jews should come over to Sweden (the Nazis had been trying unsuccessfully to get Danes to kill them), Danish citizens helped them to escape openly at essentially no risk to themselves. In Poland, the penalty for giving any one of these escapees food would have been immediate execution. That's not to say that what the Danes did wasn't great--it was. But they were protected by the legal system, which did not allow citizens to be penalized for helping other citizens, or killed for refusing to kill other citizens (as would happen to Polish police who refused to kill Jews--or members of other groups for that matter). It's also worth noting that the Danish government treated Jews who were refugees very differently. It wasn't their attitude towards Judaism that mattered so much as their attitude towards Danish citizenship.
The point is that the Holocaust wasn't the product of widespread, exceptional anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jews in the countries where it happened. And the places where non-Jews did and didn't help the Jews weren't differentiated primarily by their level of anti-Semitism. They were differentiated by the survival of state institutions. That makes a whole lot more sense to me than the way Americans view it typically--that everyone except those who saved people were these incredible anti-Semites. Some probably were. But honestly, that assumes that anyone who isn't anti-Semitic has the capacity to be a hero and risk his or her life on behalf of other people, and that just does not ring true to me at all. It also belies what we know about Germany before WWII, which is that it was the place in Europe where the Jews were most integrated. Yes, you can say that people still had anti-Semitic attitudes, but integration is more complicated than that, and so is prejudice. I mean, there was a lot of intermarriage between Germans and Jews, for example. You can use Virginia Woolf's mixed marriage (in England) as a tool to think with here. She was known to make anti-Semitic comments to and about her Jewish husband, Leonard Woolf, so perhaps you could say that she was broadly anti-Semitic. However, Leonard was her husband. There is not a chance she would have willingly let him be taken to a concentration camp....unless, perhaps, it was a choice between him going and her going, and that's when you get into complicated territory about love and self-sacrifice. The point is, once you have a huge chunk of the population in that territory, the state has already failed. That's not about individual prejudice. (Incidentally, German Jews were more likely to survive if they could stay within Germany--mass murders took place outside the country--and many of those who did survive did so because they had non-Jewish spouses who refused to divorce them and who hid them).
It does make sense to me that people of goodwill will help other people in extreme conditions when they themselves are less at risk--like the people in Denmark. There were some people in all areas who put themselves at incredible risk to help Jews and other people out---but they were rare, and honestly, people like that are always rare. People want to survive themselves, and that's pretty normal. Snyder also points out that people who tried to help were substantially more likely to be successful, and for longer, in areas where there were still state institutions---or where they themselves were used to functioning without or in contravention to state institutions even in peacetime. Members of minority religions tended to help more (it didn't matter which religion, incidentally-just that it be the minority in the region. Protestants helped in places where they were the minority and did not where they were the majority). Members of the Communist party helped more where the Communist party had been illegal before the war (while the Soviets killed lots of people, Jewish and otherwise). They already had tested networks, they were used to the idea of being in opposition, they were more savvy about how to do illegal things with a degree of success. That makes a lot of sense to me.
There's a lot more to the book, and I recommend it although I don't agree with all of it--in particular, in his last chapter, I think Snyder is very careful to avoid applying his conclusions about the possibility of genocide in the present day to the actions of the State of Israel, while citing the risk that Muslim states (in an undifferentiated way) will spread anti-Semitism. He talks about the politics of scarcity, and how present day concern in wealthy countries for maintaining surplus supplies of food and oil/gas could lead to a similar rationale to Hitler's original one for destroying states (i.e., acquiring arable land for Germany), but he somehow avoids talking about how that could lead Western countries to rationalize the destruction of Muslim states because they need their gas or oil. He's pretty pro-Zionist, and I think that's why he avoids those obvious (to me) applications. I wish he hadn't avoided them. But I think his general point is pretty important. Here's a useful summarizing quote:
"Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. If we are serious about emulating rescuers, we should build in advance the structures that make it more likely that we would do so. Rescue, in this broad sense, thus requires a firm grasp of the ideas that challenged conventional politics and opened the way to an unprecedented crime." (Snyder 2015: 320-321).Maybe we're already too late. It seems to me that US state institutions have been in the process of being weakened and corrupted for decades. But as Trump draws on racial narratives, depicts the world as an unending catastrophe in which "America" is always getting the short end of the stick, and starts deportation raids, it's worth thinking about what we can preserve that will help us to be more like Denmark and less like Estonia as things proceed.
I also think, (I add as a postscript) that in an era where Trump thinks saying that he is the least anti-Semitic person because he has Jewish grandchildren is a good answer to what the government will do about anti-Semitic threats, it's worth considering this viewpoint. Whether or not widespread violence against a particular group takes place has a lot less to do with personal feelings than the incentives that the situation (or the state, or lack of state) provides. Full stop. That's how structural racism works, and, if we believe Snyder, it's how genocide works too.
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