Today's installment is on one of the first mass killings addressed by Snyder, at Babi Yar in Kiev, Ukraine in September 1941 (so months before the Wannsee conference resulting in the Final Solution).
In this I try to address the nature of the killing fields, the development of the story over time, and the sources for the official story.
What we see from Synder is taking the established like simply as fact and then embellishing it with two of his book's themes, the role of essentially all non-Jews as heartless perpetrators and the motivation coming from the Judeo-Bolshevik myth.
He also weaves in another theme of his book (and of Bloodlands I believe), that of the consequences of German-created stateless areas, which I will address later.