To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviet as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap. The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them. Heinrich Himmler said that it was good to see a hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand corpses lying side by side. What he meant was that to kill another person is a sacrifice of the purity of one’s own soul, and that making this sacrifice elevated the killer to higher moral level. This was an expression of a certain kind of devotion. (…) It was Gandhi who noted that evil depends upon good, in the sense that those who come together to commit evil deeds must be devoted one to the other and believe in their cause. Devotion and faith did not make the Germans good, but they do make them human. Like everyone else, they had access to ethical thinking, even if their own was dreadfully misguided.
Timothy Snyder
Bloodlands – Europe Between Hitler and Stalin è un libro di Timothy Snyder, uscito per la prima volta nel 2010, tradotto in italiano (2015) con il titolo Terre di sangue – L’Europa nella morsa di Hitler e Stalin. E’ un libro la cui tesi storiografica è molto semplice ma anche intelligente e controintuitiva. Infatti, a quanto pare nessuno prima di Snyder, professore a Yale, si è reso conto che la zona di territorio che va dalla Germania-est sino, sostanzialmente, alla linea che va da San Pietroburgo-Mosca e Volgograd, è stata l’area del mondo in cui quattordici milioni di persone sono morte a causa dell’interazione del regime Nazista con il regime comunista-stalinista.