In this Holocaust Memorial Day lecture, the renowned historian Professor Timothy Snyder asks, “What was special about Nazi Germany in an age of official antisemitism?”
Both Germany and its neighbour Poland expressed the removal of Jews as a goal of public policy in the late 1930s. And yet the two nations were in the end not allies but enemies, and the German invasion of Poland began the Second World War. The conflict was not accidental, but a matter of fundamental disagreements. One of these concerned the future of the Jews and the possibility of a State of Israel.
Professor Snyder will explore the ways that different sorts of antisemitism can themselves bring about conflicts that are meaningful or even decisive to the history of the European Jews.
Timothy Snyder is Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University; he has also held fellowships and scholarships in Paris, Vienna and Harvard. He is the author of numerous award-winning books including, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010), a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. Bloodlands, which became an international bestseller translated into more than 20 languages, was awarded the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities.