The extensive attention that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin has attracted since its publication in 2010 has raised our overall awareness of the structural might that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany displayed as they reshaped the territories that had separated the two states during the interwar period.Footnote ¹ In addition to earning widespread acclaim, the volume has been widely criticised by scholars who have exposed the extent to which non-German populations in Eastern Europe participated in the violent persecution of unwanted minority communities during the Second World War.Footnote ² Jan Gross, whose Neighbors unearthed that the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours without significant prompting from the German occupiers, has argued that Snyder deprives the inhabitants of his ‘bloodlands’ of agency by blaming wartime violence in the region almost exclusively on Hitler, Stalin and their overlapping policies of state destruction.Footnote ³ The evident tensions between micro-historical approaches that stress the importance of local agency and macro-level analyses of larger geographical spaces have obscured how profoundly the interplay of broader structural factors and local variables shaped the course of the Second World War in different locations. Four recent micro-historical works help to partially reconcile the two seemingly oppositional approaches by providing new frameworks for thinking about the complex interactions that occurred between smaller groups of people and the broader forces that shaped their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The four volumes show that global, national, regional and local agendas overlapped to make ordinary people reconfigure how they saw themselves and how they interpreted the world around them. The identities and perceptions that emerged from these interactions enhance our understanding of the multiple factors that determined people’s actions during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Tarik Cyril Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv chronicles how Ukrainian nationalists interacted with Nazi and Soviet occupiers to transform Lviv into a homogeneously Ukrainian city. Ludivine Broch’s Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust, a study of French railwaymen, the cheminots, exposes the limits of scholarly attempts to classify them as either ‘collaborators’ or ‘resisters’. Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz’s micro-history of the Bosnian town of Kulen Vakuf, examines how Hitler’s decision to install Ante Pavelić’s nationalist Ustasha Movement to rule a newly created Croat state led to a violent conflict that quickly produced a sense of antagonistic national difference among the region’s Muslim, Catholic and Serbian Orthodox inhabitants. Raz Segal’s study of the Subcarpathian Rus, Genocide in the Carpathians, chronicles how several state building agendas from the interwar period and the Second World War created the conditions that ultimately rendered the region’s Jewish and Carpatho-Ruthenian inhabitants incapable of preserving the relatively tolerant society they had shared before the First World War.

By showing that local concerns meaningfully influenced how ordinary people engaged with the broader ideological factors that are often implicit in categories like ‘anti-Semitism’, ‘collaboration’, ‘resistance’, ‘bystanderism’ and ‘nationalism’, all four authors probe concepts that have for decades dominated scholarly discussions of non-elite behaviour during the Second World War. The volumes pay close attention to survivors’ testimonies, memoirs, reports by the regional officials of different polities and other sources that help them uncover the voices of people who did not leave extensive records of their experiences and views. The privileging of such sources does not preclude the four historians from recognising how deeply the decisions of politicians who redrew state borders and unleashed ideologically driven campaigns of national homogenisation affected their volumes’ non-elite protagonists. The authors recognise the diversity that existed even within the small and easily definable groups on which their works focus, allowing them to avoid the widely criticised tendency of micro-historians to present ‘ordinary people’ and ‘non-elites’ as a members of coherent entities that could act independently of the broader structural forces shaping their world.Footnote ⁴ A recognition of the fundamentally incoherent and fluctuating nature of group identities also helps them to avoid retroactively judging their protagonists according to present-day moral standards; they instead give us a better understanding of the many complex, overlapping factors that structured the identities and perceptions which determined how people acted during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Raz Segal begins his study of the Subcarpathian Rus by rethinking conventional understandings of ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘bystanders’, an approach that allows Genocide in the Carpathians to suggest new frameworks for thinking about social mobilisation and identity formation. A tendency to treat ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘bystanders’ as static categories, Segal writes, has led scholars to overlook how extensively local contexts and short-term contingencies shaped the intergroup dynamics of particular locales. His subsequent exposition of the cohesive society that existed in the Subcarpathian Rus before the First World War complicates teleological accounts in which the pervasiveness of what Saul Friedlander has called ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ inevitably led to the Holocaust.Footnote ⁵ The remoteness of the mountainous region fostered tolerance among Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians before the First World War: witness testimonies and dispatches from Austro-Hungarian authorities suggest that both groups were poor, shared similar mystical beliefs and feared outside influences more than each other. One official in the 1890s even concluded that Carpatho-Ruthenian peasants would demand the return of local Jews if the state banished them from the region.Footnote ⁶ By showing that Jews could constitute an integral part of the Eastern European societies in which they lived, Segal calls for new approaches that can explain why Jews also perished in such large numbers during the Holocaust even in places like the Subcarpathian Rus, where their neighbours eschewed the sort of ‘atavistic anti-Semitism’ that contributed to persecution in other parts of Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷ Segal produces a compelling explanation by applying Rogers Brubaker’s theoretical conclusions about the fluctuating nature of group identities to his analysis of Czech and Hungarian state building agendas in the region during the interwar period and the Second World War.Footnote ⁸ Rather than treating Jews just as passive victims of their neighbours’ unjustified hatreds, Segal shows that Jews actively interacted with state building agendas that also affected their Carpatho-Ruthenian neighbours. As a result, they also helped to shape the intergroup dynamics of the Subcarpathian Rus. Both Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians thus contributed to the social breakdown that made it easier for Nazi-allied Hungarian occupiers to obliterate the region’s diversity as they attempted to integrate the Subcarpathian Rus in to a territorially expanded and nationally homogenised Greater Hungary during the Second World War.

Segal’s refutation of explanations that prioritise pre-existing anti-Semitism may at first suggest that the volume has more in common with Bloodlands than with the approaches of Omer Bartov and Jan Gross, who have criticised Snyder for obscuring the importance of local animosities in the ‘bloodlands’.Footnote ⁹ Like Segal, Snyder emphasises that Jewish communities in the region had lived peacefully among non-Jews for half a millennium before the Second World War. Segal, nevertheless, frames his study according to a theoretical interpretation of modern states and local agency that is entirely inconsistent with Snyder’s claims about the fundamentally anti-modern nature of the ideological impulses that purportedly led Hitler and Stalin to destroy newly created states across Eastern Europe. Snyder treats local agency as largely inconsequential in fuelling the unprecedented atrocities that transpired across Eastern Europe during the Second World War, arguing that the brutality of Nazi and Soviet policies had transformed all of the ‘bloodlands” inhabitants into victims. Honest ideological cooperation between them and the Nazis was, according to Bloodlands, impossible because of the extremely subordinate position all Eastern Europeans occupied in the Nazi racial hierarchy. The people who collaborated or persecuted their neighbours, Snyder claims, did so not for any ideological reasons but from a sense of ‘negative opportunism’, a basic desire to avoid an even more harrowing fate.Footnote ¹⁰ Whereas Snyder argues that the destructiveness of Nazi and Soviet ideological agendas rendered the ideological dispositions and agency of ordinary people inconsequential, Segal emphasises the importance of smaller, ideologically motivated state building agendas – particularly those of interwar Czechoslovakia and Hungary – and argues that even seemingly neutral bystanders possessed a considerable degree of agency. Echoing Zygmunt Bauman’s conclusions about the destructive capacity of all modernising states, Segal rejects the idea that the Holocaust constituted a violent interruption in the progressive development of modern Europe.Footnote ¹¹ Unlike Snyder, who argues that Hitler and Stalin attempted to destroy the ‘fruits of the European Enlightenment’ with their neo-colonial assault on the Eastern Europe, Segal treats the atrocities of the Second World War as a foreseeable outcome of interwar state building agendas that started pursuing policies of national homogenisation and territorial expansion before the Nazi seizure of power.Footnote ¹²

The Czechoslovak state that scholars once lauded as the only successful democracy in interwar Eastern Europe appears far less exemplary when one considers Prague’s rule from the perspective of the Subcarpathian Rus. Segal shows that Czech leaders viewed the region through a colonial lens, defining the area as backwards in order to justify Prague’s suppression of the Carpatho-Ruthenian population’s emerging national sentiments and abrogate the region’s autonomous status. At the same time, Prague’s Ukrainian, Hungarian, Zionist and communist opponents endeavoured to recruit the region’s people for their own ideological projects. The incentives that the state and its rivals offered to a politically inexperienced population made it easy for one group to suspect that the other sought to benefit at their expense. The Jews who sent their children to Czech schools, for example, might not have recognised that a decision guided by a pragmatic desire to enhance their prospects in a Czech dominated state implicated them with Prague’s overall ideological agenda in the region and therefore induced Carpatho-Ruthenians to perceive Jews as disloyal. Their Jewish neighbours’ embrace of a policy designed to undermine local autonomy bred resentment among Carpatho-Ruthenians, making some receptive to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Ukrainian nationalists. These resentments turned into ‘affective dispositions’ which led Carpatho-Ruthenians to do nothing when Ukrainians attacked Jews during the short existence of Carpatho-Ukraine, an entity that briefly emerged as Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia. Carpatho-Ruthenian indifference towards their persecution by Ukrainians led some Jews to hope the region’s next occupier, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary, would protect them, indicating that they were oblivious to the fact that Jews constituted as much of an obstacle to the creation of a Greater Hungary as the Carpatho-Ruthenians whom Hungarian forces attacked first. The perception that Jews had welcomed their Hungarian tormentors left Carpatho-Ruthenians with the impression that Jewish neighbours had again betrayed them, compelling Carpatho-Ruthenians to do nothing once Hungarian forces set their sights on the Jews.

While Segal is careful to emphasise that these resentments did not compel Carpatho-Ruthenians and Jews to violently persecute each other, he convincingly argues that they ultimately played a role in making genocidal violence possible. The passivity that scholars often associate with ‘bystanderism’, Segal argues, obscures that doing nothing also constituted an active choice that could determine whether people lived or died. His framing stands in stark contrast to Snyder’s concept of ‘negative opportunism’, which emphasises the purportedly involuntary nature of collaboration in the ‘bloodlands’. Segal argues that Budapest’s assault on Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians did not fully deprive these victimised populations of agency. He effectively uses survivors’ testimonies to show that local resentments led Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians to approve of the violence that outsiders enacted on their neighbours. Such an observation may appear irrelevant if we take into consideration the fact that Nazi and Soviet forces were directly responsible for most of the killing. Yet, Segal’s elucidation of a situation in which the ideological agenda of a collaborationist Hungarian state and the inaction of the local population made a difference raises important questions about the extent to which interwar developments created the conditions that were necessary for Nazi and Soviet violence to occur. While Snyder, and others, have emphasised that atrocities which occurred without direct Nazi or Soviet involvement would have been impossible outside of a context in which Hitler and Stalin had caused so much destruction, Segal inverts such a proposition. Genocide in the Carpathians argues the Nazi-led obliteration of diverse societies across Eastern Europe could not have succeeded without the help of nationalist collaborators who pursued ideological projects that converged with Nazi plans and would have been more difficult to accomplish if local resentments had not obstructed the ability of once cohesive societies to resist external state building agendas.

Segal’s volume complements Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force, which also stresses the centrality of contingency and local context in shaping group identities. While Bergholz downplays the importance of German involvement and longstanding ideological hatreds to an even greater degree than Segal, he depicts interwar state building efforts in a more favourable light. Bergholz presents interwar Yugoslavia as a place in which relations between Kulen Vakuf’s Muslim majority, large Orthodox minority and small Catholic community remained largely free of the resentments that Segal finds in interwar Czechoslovakia. Bergholz thus departs from Segal’s claim that animosities not rooted in well established public discourses have a very limited potential of becoming violent. Bergholz instead argues that violence was not only possible in cohesive societies but also actually necessary to foment divisions in places where discourses of antagonistic nationalism were completely marginal. In Kulen Vakuf, Bergholz claims, violence functioned as a generative force that that produced the very intergroup animosities that scholars generally deem responsible for causing the violent conflicts that occurred in Second World War Yugoslavia.

Violence as a Generative Force strays from established histories that attribute Yugoslavia’s interwar instability to the abortive attempt of a Serb ruling elite to impose an ‘integral’ Yugoslav national identity upon fully integrated non-Serb national groups.Footnote ¹³ Bergholz thus challenges even more erudite recent iterations of this narrative, like Christian Nielsen’s Making Yugoslavs, which concludes that Belgrade’s assimilationist policies made ‘honest dialogue’ between ‘the nations of Yugoslavia almost impossible to achieve’ because they drove non-Serbs ‘into a struggle against this new identity’ while also radicalising ‘them within their own previously held identities’. Like Segal, Bergholz relies on Brubaker’s critique of ‘substantialist’ approaches to nationalism which assume that nations are coherent entities that are capable of unified action and thought. Bergholz does not attempt to rehabilitate interwar Yugoslavia by questioning whether its constituent nations could ‘dialogue’ with each other or ‘struggle’ against state policies; he merely highlights the need to more thoroughly investigate whether ordinary people actually shared the beliefs of the nationalist leaders who claimed to speak on their behalf.

Bergholz finds that most of Kulen Vakuf’s residents did not see their community as divided between mutually antagonistic national groups. A photograph of the local soccer team Mladost features players from different backgrounds smiling before a match; public records show that Muslims and Christians formalised friendships by serving as kumovi (best men) at each other’s weddings. These sources help the volume revise conventional understandings of nationalism in Yugoslavia by showing that the country was no different from other interwar states in which scholars of Eastern Europe have recently discovered nationally indifferent populations.Footnote ¹⁴ Violence as a Generative Force, however, makes a more broadly relevant contribution to the scholarship on identity formation by explaining in great detail how the town’s nationally disinterested residents very suddenly began to conceive of themselves as members of newly formed, mutually antagonistic groups during the Second World War.

Bergholz’s narration of the German destruction of Yugoslavia affirms Snyder’s belief that even illiberal states may be preferable to statelessness.Footnote ¹⁵ Bergholz nevertheless explicitly states that his aim is to shift attention away from the ideological machinations of the faraway leaders who receive so much attention in Bloodlands and instead focus on the local dynamics of a region in which Yugoslavia’s Italo-German occupiers did not kill a single person during the Second World War. He chronicles how the Ustasha leadership set into motion a series of events that quickly led Kulen Vakuf’s residents to accept a key tenet of Ustasha ideology: that Catholics and Muslims belonged to a Croat national community that was existentially threatened by a Serb nation comprised of their Orthodox neighbours. The initial correspondence between Ustasha leaders in Zagreb and regional officials shows that some leading Croat nationalists were themselves ‘constructivists’.Footnote ¹⁶ They acknowledged how poorly their ideas resonated among the public and immediately offered Muslims and Catholics concrete incentives to begin persecuting their Orthodox neighbours. Testimonies, Ustasha memoranda and dispatches from operatives of Josip Broz Tito’s anti-Axis, communist Partisan resistance show that only a small number of socio-economically marginal Muslims embraced the opportunity to enhance their socio-economic standing by stealing from Orthodox neighbours. Smaller transgressions that went unpunished, like the beating that an Orthodox youth received while collecting a debt from a Muslim, set the stage for the first mass killing of the Orthodox population, which prompted some of the town’s Orthodox residents to fight back. That some insurgents survived long enough to resist only because Muslim neighbours had rescued them was lost upon more violently predisposed insurgents. These men refused to distinguish between the handful of perpetrators and the majority of innocent Muslims during retaliatory attacks that, ultimately, claimed more victims than the Ustasha atrocities that sparked the insurgency.

Like Segal, Bergholz emphasises the importance of emotions, which helps him explain why nationally indifferent people adopted new group identities so quickly. The surges of emotion that occurred when people found the decapitated bodies of their relatives, for example, produced rapid reorientations in the way people perceived themselves and their neighbours. Acquaintances stopped addressing each other with the endearing term ‘neighbour’ and instead directed insulting, nationalist slurs at each other. The deaths of innocent people on both sides produced mutually reinforcing fears, leading more people to participate in or approve of violence against neighbours they had suddenly started to perceive as threatening. The volume details several cases in which ‘advocates of restraint’, prevailed over the ‘advocates of escalation’ and thus prevented more bloodshed. The solidarities that such instances fostered among those who refused to kill ultimately contributed to the victory of the inclusive, multi-ethnic Partisan Movement that re-established a Yugoslav state after the Second World War. The Ustashas’ demise could not, however, erase the new group identifications their violent rule had generated. Even though post-war communist authorities punished xenophobic expressions of nationalism, the government granted official recognition to the idea of national difference in its institutions. The state provided incentives for people to practice nationalism in the tolerant spirit of the ruling ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’ among all of Yugoslavia’s peoples. While such policies restored peace in the area, the state’s approach could not prevent antagonistic expressions of nationalism from intermittently resurfacing. Certain interactions – an encounter between a survivor and perpetrator, for example – triggered people to experience a surge of what Bergholz calls ‘sudden nationhood’ that could, depending on context, quickly dissipate or escalate enough to warrant police intervention.

Parts of Bergholz’s analysis correspond to the work of Alex Korb, who has argued that the emergence of a violent Orthodox resistance helped to legitimise Ustasha rule in the eyes of a fearful Croat population. Both historians revise narratives which argue that the Ustashas failed to attract popular support because their violent treatment of Serbs repelled most ordinary Croats.Footnote ¹⁷ Violence, Korb and Bergholz argue, actually fostered intra-group cohesion, leading more people to see the persecution of their neighbours as necessary for their own survival. Bergholz takes the argument a step further by arguing that nationally indifferent people adopted modern national self-understandings for the first time because of Ustasha violence, a claim that diverges from conventional portrayals of the Ustasha regime as an extremist aberration of Croat nationalism. Bergholz agrees that the Ustashas had few supporters before 1941. Yet his volume implies that a popular indifference to nationalism might account for people’s lack of interest in the Ustashas better than assumptions about the existence of a fully integrated, tolerant Croat nation whose members collectively rejected Ustasha fanaticism. By moving beyond narratives that attribute wartime atrocities to a handful of extremists, Korb and Berhgholz are among the first scholars to apply to the history of wartime Yugoslavia the frameworks that have helped historians of Nazi Germany better understand the factors that led seemingly ordinary people to engage in mass violence during the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁸

Bergholz’s decision to focus on one of the few areas in which Orthodox insurgents killed more people than Ustasha militants raises broader questions about the extent to which micro-historical approaches distort broader macro-historical trends. The volume may, as Bob Hayden notes, leave less informed readers unaware that Orthodox civilians died in far greater numbers than Muslims and Catholics during The Second World War.Footnote ¹⁹ Violence as a Generative force is therefore better suited to readers more familiar with Yugoslav history, as they will appreciate Bergholz’s more sophisticated insights about the wartime experiences of people who were largely ignorant about the broader ideological conflict at the core of the war between the Axis and the Allies. Bergholz’s elucidation of the local factors that drove violence in Kulen Vakuf helps us to reflect more broadly on the possible limits of applying certain analytical categories – like ‘collaborators’, ‘resistors’, ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ – to people whose wartime decisions were determined by a complex set of overlapping factors that cannot reveal whether these people understood the ideological goals of the side they had joined. Even though Bergholz divulges that Jan Gross’s Neighbors inspired him to apply an analogous micro-historical approach to a Yugoslav context, he appears to share some of Snyder’s scepticism about the ideological motivations of people who had coexisted peacefully before the Second World War. Virtually no Muslims in Bergholz’s volume attacked their neighbours because they dreamed of a Europe reshaped according to the ideological visions of Nazi and Ustasha leaders. Orthodox insurgent excesses suggest that many had little regard for the anti-fascist ideals guiding the broader anti-Axis coalition they had joined. A crucial difference between the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia and their rule in the ‘bloodlands’, however, forces Bergholz to give issues of local agency and ideology more consideration than Snyder. Hitler had no interest in bringing to the Balkans the violence he deliberately unleashed in the ‘bloodlands’. Nazi officials admonished their Croat subordinates for sparking a conflict that neither the Nazis nor the Ustashas could later contain. The marginality of pre-existing ideological animosities in a setting where Ustasha and Nazi leaders later tried unsuccessfully to stop the violence leads Bergholz to consider the interaction of opportunism, local agency, ideology and violence in a way that corresponds to neither of the mutually irreconcilable frameworks of Gross and Snyder.

Although Bergholz highlights the initial absence of ideological motivations by showing that concrete, material incentives led Muslims to begin persecuting their Orthodox neighbours, he, like Segal, shows how difficult it is for nationally indifferent people to avoid becoming entangled with ideologically motivated state building agendas. The opportunistic calculations of individuals who wanted to profit or simply survive during the Second World War, Bergholz shows, assumed deep ideological contours once violence started to erode the spaces in which people could remain indifferent to ideology. Even those who opposed the reclassification of their community according to Ustasha precepts found it difficult to resist the intrusion of ideology into their daily lives once Ustasha national criteria began to dictate whether one lived or died. The boundaries that violence generated in Kulen Vakuf were not just an artificial product of Nazi or Ustasha coercion that ordinary people embraced as a survival strategy that they would abandon once the threat of violence subsided. Attempts by Ustasha and Nazi leaders to stop the violence failed because people had embraced recently created group identifications so intensely, clinging to them even after the demise of the Ustasha and Nazi regimes. While Snyder argues that Nazi and Soviet violence invalidated people’s ideological dispositions because a non-ideological ‘negative opportunism’ dictated their actions, Bergholz treats violence as a generative force that required people to adopt ideological self-understandings. The case of Kulen Vakuf thus suggests that people internalise ideologically prescribed self-understandings more sincerely during times of violence than during times of peace, when being ideologically indifferent carries fewer risks.

Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust, the only volume that considers a Western European context, fits neatly alongside the other three books about Eastern Europe. Broch also considers the contingent nature of group identities, which helps her analyse the everyday lives of cheminots during the Second World War with a great degree of nuance. The volume’s title feels slightly ironic because Broch immediately shows that the cheminots were far from ordinary. The community of French railwaymen was not monolithic but rather comprised diverse individuals occupying different roles in a hierarchical profession. While a unique set of socio-professional values gave the community some coherence, these values also distinguished cheminots from other workers and ‘ordinary’ French people. By considering the history of Second World War France from the perspective of these railwaymen, Broch moves beyond existing debates regarding collaboration and resistance in Second World War France.Footnote ²⁰ The volume shows that cheminot values meaningfully influenced the railwaymen to behave in a range of inconsistent ways, making it difficult to classify the community according to the conventional analytical categories of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ or ‘collaborators’ and ‘resisters’. Ordinary Workers also reveals that wartime developments eventually led the group to prioritise different values, ones that allowed them to engage in activities they would have avoided before the Second World War.

Broch begins by tracing how the cheminots overturned stereotypes of themselves as unreliable, disobedient drunkards that dated from the 1890s when they internalised the hierarchical professional culture of their bosses and started to espouse paternalistic, militaristic values. These values separated cheminots from other workers, who had developed an appreciation for communism and engaged in strikes during the interwar period. Cheminots believed their role in French society was comparable to that of soldiers because they saw their work on France’s railway network as essential to the preservation of national unity. While few harboured overtly fascist sympathies, many were cautiously optimistic about Vichy’s establishment; new leaders, they hoped, might revolutionise industry and reconcile workers with employers. Broch’s analysis of letters by cheminots who volunteered to work in Germany illustrates how easily some adjusted to life in a German-dominated Europe. The cheminots encounters with ‘bahnhoffs’, as they referred to German railwaymen, were characterised by a spirit of professional cordiality. Many cheminots were more burdened by stiff beds and small food rations than by the broader political-military situation at the time, leading Broch to conclude that most did not display the sort of defiance to the Nazis that, they would later claim, characterised their wartime dispositions from the outset.

Broch goes on to show that the German occupation eventually unified cheminots around a patriotically inspired anti-German message. Yet, in-person interviews, dispatches from the railway company, memoranda from the Vichy officials and reports by German occupation authorities indicate that material and socio-professional anxieties played a crucial role in turning the cheminots against Nazi rule. Concerns about salaries, newly passed labour laws, the availability of clothing, incompetent management and other less overtly ideological issues, Broch argues, nurtured cheminot frustration with Nazi rule. Considering the socio-professional dimensions of cheminot actions helps Broch contextualise why they never sabotaged trains carrying Jews to their deaths in the East. She argues that most initially failed to recognise that Nazi anti-Jewish measures differed from the persecution that the cheminot community experienced. Railwaymen who later helped Jewish colleagues were, she suggests, inspired more by their desire to help fellow cheminots than by an increased awareness of Nazi anti-Semitism. Broch shows that the cheminots did little beyond helping Jewish colleagues and devotes much of the volume to discrediting the post-war narrative about heroic cheminot resistance. She nevertheless rejects the claims of a US lawsuit that alleged a degree of cheminot complicity in Nazi crimes; they were, for her, a cog in the wheel of a process that forces beyond their control had unleashed. Overall, Ordinary Works suggests that the complexity of non-elite behaviour during the Second World War should prevent us from idealising all acts of anti-Nazi subversion as illustrative of a genuine commitment to anti-fascism, while also leading us to refrain from stigmatising all cases of accommodation as evidence of ideologically motivated collaboration. While Broch does not propose that we abandon the categories of collaboration and resistance altogether, she argues that scholars can revisit and expand these categories in a way that allows for more textured accounts of individual and group experiences during the Second World War.

Ordinary Workers recognises that the Nazi treatment of France was mild in comparison to their rule in the East. Broch, however, highlights that the Nazi drainage of French economic resources made the population focus on issues related to their immediate survival. On the one hand, the idea that French people were more preoccupied with survival than with upholding their ideological beliefs affirms Snyder’s views, as it implies that ideologically honest forms of collaboration were entirely impossible in the infinitely more violent ‘bloodlands’. Like Bergholz and Segal, however, Ordinary Workers shows that certain material and socio-professional concerns were inextricably linked to issues of ideology. Broch explains this most clearly when she details how a community that previously viewed their dependable transportation of goods as a patriotic virtue started to perceive workplace theft as morally justifiable. While Ordinary Workers recognises the materialistic motivations for stealing food and basic necessities during the Second World War, Broch shows that theft also served an ideological purpose. It helped cheminots reaffirm their status as manly providers at a time when they felt emasculated by the aggressive self presentations of the German occupiers. The desire to subvert an ideological discourse about effeminate Frenchmen by providing for their families with stolen goods, Broch shows, did not always advance anti-German goals. The cheminots also stole from trains carrying goods to French prisoners of war and thus deprived captive fighters of goods they needed. Ordinary Workers is particularly compelling because it reveals the overlap of material concerns, socio-professional values and cheminot agency while also exposing how these issues factored into cheminot interactions with broader ideological and structural forces.

Like the other volumes, Tarik Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv seeks to integrate the local experiences of a smaller area into a more widely recognised narrative about the devastation that the ideologically driven policies of Hitler and Stalin unleashed in Eastern Europe. Instead of presenting the Ukrainian people of Lviv only as victims of Soviet and Nazi terror, Amar argues that Soviet and Nazi rule benefited Ukrainian nationalists because it transformed Lviv into the homogenously Ukrainian city it remains today. Amar not only exposes flaws in contemporary accounts of pro-European Ukrainian nationalists who often exaggerate the town’s Habsburg past and downplay instances of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis. In The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv also convincingly argues that Lviv was able to acquire its purely Ukrainian character mainly because the Nazis oversaw the near complete extermination of the town’s Jews and because the Soviets subsequently expelled the Polish population from Eastern Galicia. While Amar acknowledges that this process was not predetermined and evolved paradoxically, he recognises the agency of Ukrainian nationalists by paying close attention to their interactions with the Nazi and Soviet forces that helped Ukrainianise Western Ukraine.

Even though Amar acknowledges the brutality of Nazi and Soviet rule, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv diverges from Snyder’s portrayal of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians as united by their shared suffering at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. By presenting the pre-war tensions between the three groups as far deeper than the intergroup divisions that existed in the Subcarpathian Rus and Kulen Vakuf, Amar suggests that local ideological animosities played a more direct role in the developments that occurred in Western Ukraine during the Second World War. He nevertheless agrees with Snyder about the fact that pre-existing tensions had not caused major shifts in the Lviv’s demographic composition until Hitler and Stalin extended their rule to the area. Both historians show that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union played a greater role in shaping local developments in Western Ukraine than they did in the places explored by Bergholz and Segal. While Amar refrains from casting the Soviets in a positive light, he challenges Snyder’s depiction of the two regimes as analogous by portraying Soviet ideology as inherently less destructive than the inflexible racial-biological determinism that led the Nazis to kill people who had done nothing to threaten their rule. Amar’s narrow focus on Eastern Galicia, which belonged to Poland during the interwar period and was thus spared the famine that killed millions in Eastern Ukraine, slightly obscures the fact that the Soviets killed as indiscriminately as the Nazis in other parts of the ‘bloodlands’. It may therefore be more productive to avoid treating Amar’s local study as a complete repudiation of Snyder’s macro-historical conclusions and to instead interpret the inconsistencies as illustrative of the extent to which local dynamics allowed for a greater degree of variation in wartime experiences across the ‘bloodlands’.

Amar’s emphasis on Ukrainian agency in Lviv, nevertheless, constitutes a radical departure from Bloodlands because it suggests that Ukrainian nationalists were the primary beneficiaries of the first Soviet seizure of Lviv, the subsequent Nazi occupation of the town and the final Soviet reconquest of Western Ukraine. While Snyder’s macro-level approach suggests that both states had imposed unprecedented terror on the entire population of that ‘bloodlands’, no group in the volumes by Broch, Segal and Bergholz collaborated with the Nazis as enthusiastically as the Ukrainian nationalists that appear in The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. While Amar concedes that the 1941 pogrom against Lviv’s Jews would have been impossible without Nazi involvement, he emphasises that all segments of Lviv’s society participated.Footnote ²¹ Petitions in which Ukrainians requested the homes of deported Jews from Nazi authorities indicate to Amar that Lviv’s Ukrainians had learned to ‘speak Judeo-Bolshevik to power’, as many explained that they simply wanted restitution for what the Jews had previously stolen from them. While Amar does not deny that material incentives and fears bred by Nazi and Soviet violence drove people to do things they would have avoided before 1939, Nazi and Soviet rule amplified pre-existing animosities in Lviv instead of producing new ones. The overall hostility of the Nazi and Soviet authorities towards the Ukrainians’ Jewish and Polish rivals placed Lviv’s Ukrainians in a position from which they could concurrently benefit from both a material and an ideological standpoint: Ukrainians expropriated the property of persecuted Jews and Poles while they observed and participated in the Nazi eradication and Soviet expulsion of the two communities.

Snyder’s claim that the extremely subordinate position of Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy had rendered ideologically honest forms of collaboration impossible does not fully apply to Lviv. Amar shows that the interests of Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis intersected converged around their shared aversions to ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and Poles. The imbalance of power did not require Ukrainians to fully subordinate their ideological-national goals to the needs of their purportedly unappreciative German masters, nor did it make all Ukrainian nationalists inflexibly committed to pursuing their national aims only within the context of a Nazi reordering of Europe. Nazi lack of interest in Ukrainian nationalists’ enthusiastic proposals for higher level political cooperation, Amar shows, revealed to Ukrainians how little the Nazis cared for them. This led some to emphasise that the Nazi persecution of Poles and Jews would work to their advantage even if Hitler lost the war and others to justify continued cooperation by highlighting that fighting alongside the Germans would allow them to create the core of a Ukrainian army that could seize power once the Germans and Soviets destroyed each other. Nazi and Soviet repression scarcely nurtured among Ukrainian nationalists a sense of negative opportunism that required them to suspend their pursuit of national homogeneity. One might assume that such an outlook was more prevalent among directly persecuted Poles and Jews. Amar, nevertheless, indicates that the victimisation of Poles hardly made them empathise with Jews; they too, dispatches from the Polish Home Army illustrate, perceived the destruction of Jews as beneficial to their overall goals.

While Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Ukrainianisation of Lviv under Nazi rule, Amar depicts them as playing a more passive role after the Soviet reconquest of the city, creating the impression that Ukrainians watched as a state they viewed as their most menacing oppressor Ukrainianised Lviv on their behalf. Nationalist fears of an impending Russification never materialised even though Soviet forces eradicated Ukrainians who refused to come to terms with Soviet rule. The city became more Ukrainian than it had ever been once state authorities facilitated the replacement of murdered Jews and expelled Poles with a new population comprised of ‘locals’, peasants from the villages surrounding Lviv, and ‘easterners’, migrants who arrived from other parts of the Soviet Union. Although tensions persisted between these two groups throughout the Soviet period, the party-state made them into Ukrainians and tasked them with industrialising the city and thus defining a Soviet modernity that could challenge the West’s presumptions about Soviet backwardness.

Although The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv complicates aspects of Snyder’s Bloodlands, Amar seeks mainly to discredit problematic, present-day nationalist discourses that might benefit from a selective reading of Snyder’s volume. Rather than presenting Ukraine as a nation of perpetrators, Amar’s portrayal of Ukrainian nationalists as the paradoxical beneficiaries of Soviet and Nazi policies challenges accounts that exploit Lviv’s Habsburg past to assert Ukraine’s purportedly rightful place in a Europe governed by enlightened, democratic, inclusive ‘Western’ values that we often perceive as anathema to Nazism, Soviet communism and exclusive nationalism. If scholars and policy makers want to take for granted the idea that Lviv is Ukraine’s window to the West, Amar argues, then they also must acknowledge that Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists interacted to shape Lviv’s Ukrainian and Western identity primarily by destroying the heterogenous society that existed there through mass murder and ethnic cleansing.Footnote ²² Like Segal, Amar challenges Snyder’s portrayal of Soviet and Nazi rule as an anti-modern assault on Enlightenment values. The Enlightenment-era dichotomy of Western civilisation and Eastern barbarism, he shows, informed the views of the Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainians in Lviv, as all three deployed violence in an abortive effort to overcome the perceived backwardness of Lviv and Western Ukraine.

The discrepancies between Snyder’s macro-level observations and the four micro-historical approaches partially disguise that the conclusions of Amar, Broch, Bergholz and Segal sometimes diverge more profoundly from Gross’s Neighbors than they do from Bloodlands. The volumes actually fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of mass violence that Snyder has raised in a response to critical reviews of Bloodlands by Gross and others.Footnote ²³ While Snyder has criticised older accounts of local agency for unfairly stigmatising the Eastern European societies they explore, the four books consider local agency without passing retroactive moral judgement. Broch does not write about Eastern Europe, yet the complex set of motivations she discovers among the cheminots leads her to reveal the limits of scholarly attempts to distribute people into the oversimplified binary categories of ‘collaborators’, ‘resisters’, ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’. She instead suggests that scholars should expand these categories and consider issues of local agency without anachronistically applying today’s ethical standards to people who operated in drastically different contexts. Snyder highlights that scholars of Nazi Germany have devoted far more time to understanding the motivations that led Germans to participate in the Holocaust. He believes that historians have displayed less of an interest in the reasons why Eastern Europeans participated in mass violence because many assume that ‘Germans are on some civilisational level where they deserve careful consideration’ while Eastern Europeans are not. Such attitudes, he argues, have led to a widespread acceptance of totalising and ahistorical national frameworks that ignore the causes of mass killing and instead distribute Eastern Europeans into ‘nations of perpetrators’ and ‘nations of victims’. Although the volumes by Amar, Segal and Bergholz radically depart from Snyder’s overall conclusions, they share his commitment to overturning outdated stereotypes that present Eastern Europe as a backward region rife with intergroup animosities that inevitably erupted during the Second World War. Even Amar, who comes closest to portraying the Ukrainians as a nation of perpetrators by depicting them as beneficiaries of Nazi and Soviet policies, emphasises that the homogenisation of Western Ukraine was not a foregone conclusion of unsurmountable local enmities. Bergholz’s account fully discredits narratives about national guilt by demonstrating that wartime violence was necessary for nationally indifferent people to even begin conceiving of their largely tolerant, heterogenous society in national terms. While Segal’s depiction of social breakdown and genocide as firmly rooted in modern state building agendas clashes with Snyder’s portrayal of Soviet-Nazi policies as anti-modern attacks on the values of the Enlightenment, Segal focuses on a cohesive society in which resentments between Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians only emerged after the First World War. Segal explicitly states that the intercommunal violence Gross uncovers in Jedwabne occurred far less frequently than most people imagine, indicating he does not endorse Gross’s approach to wartime destruction simply because he diverges from Snyder’s understandings of modernity and local agency. In many ways, therefore, these new micro-historical studies have done precisely what Snyder has asked scholars to do: explain why Eastern Europeans participated in mass violence without reproducing problematic assumptions about how such behaviours were somehow more natural to them. Yet, Snyder may disagree with many of their conclusions. The three volumes indicate that Eastern European non-elites participated in and approved of violence against their neighbours for reasons that cannot be reduced simply to the destructive impact of Nazi and Soviet violence. They instead suggest that such extensive violence occurred because local nationalists successfully mobilised ordinary Eastern Europeans on behalf of modern state building agendas which, these nationalists hoped, would allow them to obliterate diversity and mould their post-imperial polities to resemble the more homogenous Western European states they idealised.