Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

A prize-winning historian fundamentally revises the history of modern Europe and its central catastrophe: the thirteen million people killed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin in the lands between Berlin and Moscow. Americans think of World War II as ''The Good War,'' a moment when the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was not decided by D-Day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and Joseph Stalin. While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of WWII in the six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality is even grimmer. In thirteen years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed thirteen million people in the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.