At the Annual Pierre du Bois Lecture on Monday 21 October organised by the Graduate Institute and the Pierre du Bois Foundation for Current History, Yale Professor Timothy Snyder gave a riveting lecture entitled “The Holocaust as a Global History”.
Professor Snyder’s lecture connected German dictator Adolph Hitler’s understanding of the world to the mass murder of millions of people, particularly Jews and Slavic peoples, in the countries which the Third Reich conquered during the Second World War. While Hitler’s worldview may appear disjointed to people today, Professor Snyder contended that it in fact has an internal coherence which made it effective and dangerous during its time.
Professor Snyder maintained that Hitler’s worldview, which presented the state of nature as the way the world actually is, erased centuries of Western political thought that had taken the state of nature as a hypothetical condition from which humanity begins to think and progress. Instead, for Hitler there was only the competition between the races for survival, a kind of “law of the jungle”. Hitler saw political thought, which among other things allowed humans to recognise other humans as part of an abstract community, as a falsehood perpetrated by the Jewish people which prevented the natural competition between races. According to Professor Snyder, this belief was a key motivating factor for Hitler behind the Holocaust.
Professor Snyder also took the time to better define and historically locate widely-known but poorly understood concepts in Hitler’s worldview, such as lebensraum. After discussing the influence the history of European colonialism in Africa and the United States’ settlement of the American continent had on Hitler, Professor Snyder concluded that Hitler’s lebensraum essentially brought the logic of colonialism to Europe.
From Hitler’s perspective, the United States’ displacement of the native peoples of the American continent had created the living space which underpinned America’s prosperity and high living standard. If Germany was to escape the population and living standard limitations imposed on it by its meager land resources, Hitler believed it would have to follow the example of the United States, but in Eurasia. This enabled Hitler to transform the Slavic peoples of Eurasia from Europeans to ‘natives’ who could be dispensed with as Germans saw fit, becoming another motivating factor for Hitler for the policy of racial cleansing in the occupied territories of the Third Reich.
All in all, Professor Snyder gave a rich and nuanced account of Hitler’s worldview, which arguably had a profound impact on human history in the 20th century. The lecture elicited great interest from the audience of nearly 300 people and resulted in a lively discussion afterward. One audience member remarked: “I was very moved and quite disturbed by the speaker last night. He was excellent but Hitler in the present tense made it all so real, close and alive you felt the Fuhrer would come through one of the stage doors any minute. In some ways it seems as though the present World is running on the same thinking and theories with some different names.”
Professor Snyder is a world renowned historian and author of “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”, a best seller in four countries and winner of numerous awards.
The Pierre Du Bois Foundation was created in 2007 after the death of Graduate Institute Professor of Current History Pierre du Bois.
Watch the video of the event: