The True Nazi agricultural policy was the creation of an eastern frontier empire. The German agricultural question would be resolved not within Germany but abroad: by taking fertile land from Polish and Soviet peasants — who would be starved, assimilated, deported, or enslaved. Rather than importing grain from the east, Germany would export its farmers to the east. They would colonize the lands of Poland and the western Soviet Union…. During collectivization in the early 1930s, Stalin treated the campaign against his own peasants as a “war” for their grain; Hitler counted on victory in a future war to feed Germany. The Soviet program was made in the name of universal principles; the Nazi plan was for massive conquest in eastern Europe for the benefit of the master race.

Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow, but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. [This is what Snyder calls the Bloodlands.]…. For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image. Their programs and their power all depended upon their control of Ukraine’s fertile soil and its millions of agricultural laborers. In 1933,  Ukrainians would die in the millions, in the greatest artificial famine in the history of the world. This was the beginning of the special history of Ukraine, but not the end. Hitler would seize Ukraine from Stalin, and attempt to realize his own colonial vision beginning with the shooting of Jews and the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered. During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.

Some Details of Mass Death (excerpted from Bloodlands)

• Under Stalin’s Order 447, 378,326 people were executed in the USSR in 18 months (1937-38), as compared to 267 death sentences in Nazi Germany during the same period
• A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938
• While more than one million Soviet citizens toiled in concentration camps and special settlements in late 1938, the number of Germans in the German concentration camps was about 20,000 (25x larger in the USSR as proportion of the population)