Timothy Snyder treats Slavs, Balts, and Jews as victims together. Illustration by Yarek Waszul

A college student working on a seminar paper about the mechanics of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 sees his father reading “Black Earth” (Tim Duggan/Crown), the Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s new book on the Holocaust, and asks the unaskable question: Do we really need one more book on the Holocaust? The facts are in and clear, he says, while so many other human horrors demand our historical understanding and get so much less: how many new books have been published this year on the Belgian genocide in the Congo? Doesn’t endlessly retelling the story of the murder of the Jews of Europe let us give ourselves the appearance of moral seriousness while immunizing us to the urgencies of actual moral seriousness? Piety is the opposite of compassion, which is better directed toward those who need it now than toward those who were denied it then.

The student turns away in exasperation before his father can reply that Snyder has framed this book in order to respond to that question. It’s why he has given it the subtitle “The Holocaust as History and Warning.” Snyder’s point is that if we really understood what happened in Ukraine in 1941 we would begin to understand what happened in Rwanda in 1994—and might prevent something like it from happening elsewhere next year. He even argues, against the grain of the usual historian’s practice, that there are recurrent patterns in history and that the bad ones can be identified and perhaps undone.

Though Snyder’s goal is to clarify history, he is certain (and here he is like most academic historians) that one can clarify history only by complicating it. As one might expect, an extremely complicated story, formed in the field of Holocaust studies, trails his new effort. His previous book, “Bloodlands,” was an effort to historicize the Holocaust—to remove it from the stock black-and-white imagery, accompanied by minor-key cello music, in which it had come to reside, at least within the popular imagination. In particular, he sought to re-center our attention on the “forgotten” Holocaust, on the reality that at least as many Jews were killed in mass actions in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic states as were dispatched in the death factories of Birkenau and Treblinka. Soldiers machine-gunning people on the edge of a pit that they’d dug themselves and that already held the bodies of their families—that was the true image of the Holocaust, more so than trains running on time to industrialized gassings and burnings. Auschwitz, in this view, is, to put it brutally, almost a tourist trap for historians. What distinguished the horror from other horrors was not lists on graph paper and bureaucratic requisitions for Zyklon B gas. It was a soldier writing home to his wife about killing Jewish babies in Belarus: “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. . . . Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight.”

Historicizing anything risks diminishing it—history, after all, is what used to happen—and critics complained that Snyder, by robbing the horror of its industrial modernity, had made it a folkloric and merely regional tragedy. Worse, they complained, by blending the crimes of the war with Soviet crimes that began in the thirties—the Ukrainian famine, for instance—he was explaining away the enthusiastic participation in the mass killing of Jews by the locals, Ukrainians and Poles in particular. Instead of seeing crazed German fanatics who communicated their pathogen to hardened Jew-haters, he asked us to see what happened in the forties as a blind scything through a harsh landscape, ignorant armies clashing by night and killing millions in the darkness, a scene from Bosch more than from Kafka. “Mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region,” he wrote in “Bloodlands.” “The victims were chiefly Jews, Belarusans, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Balts, the peoples native to these lands.” By making the massacres part of a geographic tragedy of invasion and counterinvasion, and of victimized native populations who suffered in various ways along with the Jews, Snyder could be accused of playing down the role of ideological and indigenous anti-Semitism. “The gesture of a finger across the throat, remembered with loathing by a few Jewish survivors,” Snyder wrote with great delicacy, “was meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die—though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them.” It is certainly not the way that Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” represents the gesture. Elsewhere, Snyder wrote that the “victims of Auschwitz were more likely to be bourgeois and thus suitable targets of comfortable identification,” although “comfortable” is surely the last feeling anyone reading about their suffering would ever have. By treating Slavs, Balts, and Jews all as victims together, his critics claim, he was obscuring a tragic core truth. Slavs and Balts died along with Jews, but Slavs and Balts killed Jews as well, in a way that Jews did not kill Slavs and Balts.

Snyder maintains that too much emphasis has been placed on the ferocity of indigenous anti-Semitism; that it was instead the destruction of Eastern European states by the Nazis, and then the skillful “political” exploitation of their wretched recent history, which made their lands into killing grounds and a small number of their people into executioners. Without the state apparatus that had long accepted, however grudgingly, ethnic coexistence, and with the murder of Jews made into a sign of renunciation of “Judeobolshevism,” intolerable pressure was placed on the native population. He points out that, while the Jews of Estonia died almost to a man, the Jews of Denmark largely survived, and that this was not because Estonians hated Jews and Danes did not but because the Estonian state—though it had had only the briefest of existences before—was destroyed, and the Danish one left mostly intact.

Snyder’s new book is meant, in part, to respond to the criticisms of “Bloodlands,” and a reader familiar with the controversies will note in the text more sublimated anger than might at first appear. Angry authors, even when their books are not explicit replies, end up incorporating unsent responses into the web of the text, where the angry red threads stand out. If the complaint about “Bloodlands” was that Snyder made the Holocaust a local event, this book is meant to universalize it again, with the understanding that what is universal in human experience is what is local and political.

Why do we need any new books on the extermination of the Jews? The Shoah, it seems, has come to be read for portents and interpretation as much as for history itself. Yet one reason that the small scholarly details matter is that they provide an arsenal for whatever argument you want to make about the present. If you believe that the mass extermination of the Jews was already implicit in the orders given for the June, 1941 invasion of Russia, then you are likely to see it as proceeding according to a long-standing fixed plan of Hitler’s; if you believe that the Final Solution, properly so called, was a panicky, confused improvisation arrived at in December, 1941, after the German failure at Moscow and the Russian counterattack, then you will probably see it as a response made by a mostly disordered and dysfunctional evil. If June, you are likely to believe that bad people do what they say they will; if December, you believe that the worst things happen when bad people get cornered by their own bad behavior. How you feel about things as seemingly remote as Iranian deals and Putin’s aggressions is shaped by—or shapes—your judgment of the historical micro-details.