This 2015 Timothy Snyder article is called Hitler’s world may not be so far away. He is a well-respected historian whose previous books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

He calls the Holocaust “misunderstood” in the article, but he is not disputing facts or events that occurred. He makes a few points. First, we modern people tend to assume that we are morally superior to Germans of that period, and that we would not allow something like that to happen even under similar circumstances. He says there is no reason to believe this is true. Second, he points out that the worst deprivations occurred not within the borders of Germany or other western European states, but in lawless, stateless areas of eastern Europe. Nazi Germany intentionally created those lawless, stateless areas, but this holds lessons for failed states today, such as Syria. Third, he says that fear about the food supply in the 1930s was a significant driver of Hitler’s policy to expand east, creating space and farm land for Germans while exterminating or enslaving the inferior people who lived there. The so-called green revolution, which drastically accelerated agricultural yields, happened mostly after World War II. (We can argue later whether using massive fossil fuel inputs to produce fertilizer, pesticides, groundwater pumping at rates that will only be replenished over geologic time, and dumping the resulting waste in the ocean was a long-term solution, but it has fed a few billion people successfully for a few decades in a row now.)

So lessons for today are that as the climate crisis almost certainly worsens, we will see failed states, hunger and fear of hunger, mass migration, and these are all risk factors for genocide. I’ll pick a paragraph, but this long article really is worth a read.

Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.