Book Review

Radiation Therapy Physics, by William R. Hendee, Geoffrey S. Ibbott, and Eric G. Hendee, 3rd ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005; ISBN 0‐471‐39493‐9; list price $125

and resources. Economic interests and ideological postulates correspondingly synergized. Economic reconstruction required the kinds of sacrifice that could make mass killing seem like a lesser evil, a means to higher ends.
Stalin knew what would happen when he seized food from the Ukraine; Hitler knew what would happen when he stripped food from the conquered regions of Russia. So did the people who interpreted and implemented those policies. Snyder insists that at seventh and last, Stalinism and Nazism were moral as well as political systems. Both had devoted followers, committed to the cause. To dismiss Nazis and Soviets as beyond understanding, Snyder argues, is to fall into their moral trap. The motives for murder made sense to the perpetrators.
Bloodlands has a bottom line: dead is dead. It mattered little to the victims whether their fate was based on their alleged racial identity, or their alleged class status, or their alleged threat to one or the other projected new world orders. Nor were the mass killings usually on the industrial model often associated with the Final Solution. Over half the 14 million died because of deliberate starvation: the withholding of food when food might have been available. Stalin's collectivization policies in the 1930s were understood to have famine as a consequence. Hitler's: 'Hunger Plan' projected up to 30 million Polish and Russian deaths in the winter of 1941-42 because of the diversion of food to Germany and Nazi-controlled Europe.
Starvation was only one means of murder. A million and a half gentiles, and about half the Jews were shot, most in what might be called, gruesomely but accurately, retail killings. Bolt-action rifles were the principal weapon, with handguns next on the list. Between typical demands for haste and generally poor marksmanship, the number of victims buried while still alive can be reasonably assumed high. Nor was gassing especially modern or high-tech. The gases were familiar, the means often improvised.
What all this amounted to was that the killing was essentially personal. People who starved were observed by Nazi guards and by Soviet officials. Shooting was at close range, the sights and the stenches inescapable. In the gassing facilities the Germans distanced themselves whenever possible by using local auxiliaries and Jewish Sonderkommandos for the hands-on processes. Their success was limited.
Snyder's analysis is based on three approaches: fitting mass murders into a context of historical understanding and inquiry; considering the possibilities and realities of choice, and following an orderly, analytical method of presentation and analysis. What keeps the book from becoming an abstract, anodyne recital of decisions and numbers is Snyder's refusals to let the dead become anonymous. 'Each of the living bore a name,' he insists. They must not be subsumed in exaggerated martyrologies, any more than they can be allowed to disappear into the mass graves or death-camp ashes. 'Victims left behind mourners. Killers left behind numbers,' and each record of death is part of a unique life. As scholars, Snyder states, we must seek to number the dead of the Bloodlands. As humanists, and as human beings, we must turn the numbers back into people. Bloodlands takes a major step along that very long road.

Dennis Showalter
Colorado College