The fatal fact of the Nazi-Soviet pact

Stalinist gulag prison camp in Siberia
Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, deported not just Poles and Balts, but tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941. Photograph: Hulton/Getty/FPG FPG/Getty

I'm honoured that Efraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz chose to respond to my article about the 28 September 1939 treaty on borders and friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I agree with them that the Holocaust must be regarded as central to the war and the century; I have just published a book, Bloodlands, that seeks to anchor the Holocaust, along with the other mass killing campaigns of the time and place, in European history. Though we share this concern, I find myself troubled by the form that their central argument takes.

Zuroff more stridently, and Katz more gently, reason thus: first, it is right to resist Baltic supernationalists and Holocaust obfuscators who equate Stalin and Hitler; second, when Snyder writes an essay about the Soviet-German alliance of 1939-41, he gives comfort to such people; third, it is therefore legitimate to (falsely) claim that Snyder equates Stalin with Hitler, take a strong stand against that proposition, and associate him along the way with the Baltic supernationalists and the Holocaust obfuscators.

I didn't and don't equate Hitler and Stalin. Katz puts "somewhat equal" in quotations, but I never use any such phrase. Zuroff says that I "posit" that the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany; I most certainly do no such thing.


I quite agree with Katz that the current political climate in the Baltics (and not only there) obfuscates the role that local populations played in the Holocaust. Where I would beg to disagree is with the legitimacy of associating my argument about the importance of the treaty on borders and friendship with current politics – not least since, as Katz very likely knows, I write about the participation of Balts and other locals in the Holocaust, and my work has not had an easy reception in Lithuania. I worry that arguing in the way that Zuroff and Katz do confirms the pattern of polemic that has persisted in discussions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for decades: scholarship is ultimately politics, and politics is ultimately a matter of being on one side or the other. What matters then, unfortunately, is not what we actually say, but our imputed ideological commitments or perceived political agendas.

Katz and Zuroff claim that there was only one genocide in eastern Europe, the Holocaust. The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated. The Holocaust was, of course, a genocide, but calling it such is not the best way to stress its special character. Genocide – by the UN definition – involves "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". Genocide is committed by "killing members of the group", "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group", "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" and "forcibly transferring children of this group to another group".

So, the Germans committed genocide not only when they sought to murder all of the Jews, but when they gassed and shot the Roma. When Germans shot Belarusian women and children to take men as workers, that was genocide; in part, because their war plans assumed the violent depopulation of that country.

Zuroff mentions Hitler's dream of Lebensraum: German colonial planning to create living space in the east explicitly foresaw the starvation, shooting, physical removal or assimilation of tens of millions of Slavs. So, when the Germans starved 4 million of so Soviet citizens to death, most of them prisoners of war held in starvation camps, that too was probably genocide. When the Germans, like the Soviets, specifically targeted educated Poles in 1939-41, that was genocide. When the Germans shot tens of thousands of Poles in 1944, with the intention of making sure that Warsaw would never rise again, that was genocide, too. Far less dramatic measures, such as the kidnapping and Germanisation of Polish children, were also, by the legal definition, genocide.

As for the Soviets, Rafal Lemkin, who gave us the term "genocide", saw Stalin's application of famine and terror to Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s as a "classic case" of genocide. During the campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture, Stalin spoke of "liquidating the kulaks as a class". Soviet agitators send to enforce collectivisation spoke of beating prosperous peasants "into soap".

It is hard not to see the Soviet "Polish Operation" of 1937-38 as genocidal: Polish fathers were shot, Polish mothers sent to Kazakhstan, and Polish children left in orphanages where they would lose their Polish identity. As more than 100,000 innocent people were killed on the spurious grounds that theirs was a disloyal ethnicity, Stalin spoke of "Polish filth". During the second world war, the Soviets deported entire peoples from the Caucasus and Crimea, in some cases burning down villages and shooting people who were difficult to move.

To be clear: I am not saying that these events were equivalent to the Holocaust. I am saying that a number of German and Soviet policies meet the standard of genocide.

I am awed by Zuroff's work seeking surviving Nazi criminals. Katz's choice to teach Yiddish and rebuild Jewish studies in Vilnius, which, before the Holocaust, was a world centre of Jewish life and scholarship, deserves a world of praise. I agree with both of them that the Holocaust is more important than the treaty on borders and friendship. My article, however, enquired about the relationship between the two, and that found little echo in their responses.



How well would the Gestapo have dealt with Polish and Jewish opposition without the de facto help of the more experienced and effective Soviet NKVD? The NKVD deported not just Poles and Balts, but tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941. Had these Jews remained in Poland rather than suffering and dying on the steppe or in the gulag, would Jewish resistance to the Germans have been more significant? Anyone who believes that Stalin's alliance with Hitler is irrelevant to the Holocaust must have answers to such questions; Katz and Zuroff don't provide any.

As I wrote, and as Zuroff stresses, Stalin had strategic reasons for choosing an alliance with Germany in 1939. My respondents have chosen a moral tone, and in moral discussions of the war, strategic justifications are not usually admitted as legitimate excuses for collaboration with the Nazis. Between 1939 and 1941, Stalin was Nazi collaborator number one. If we examine the war in terms of the Holocaust, why should Stalin's strategic actions be exempt from moral interrogation?

To recall the treaty on borders and friendship is not to minimise Hitler's atrocious intentions, but rather to enquire into Stalin's role in helping or hindering their realisation. Though I do not see an equivalence between the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, I do see an interaction between German and Soviet power, one which is crucial to the history of all the east European peoples, including and, indeed, perhaps especially, the Jews.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Moscow reversed its alliances. Katz is quite right to recall that the Red Army, three and a half years later, liberated Auschwitz. But we ought not to romanticise. The Red Army paused on the Vistula river for months in 1944, while a few days' march to the west, the Germans transported the last significant population of Polish Jews from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz and gassed them.

And how did Auschwitz, previously the Polish town Oswiecim, come to bear that infamous name? After the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, it had been assigned to Germany in the treaty on borders and friendship in September 1939.