The Origins of Mass Killing: the bloodlands hypothesis. - "At no other time in European history were so many human beings deliberately killed as a matter of policy as in Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945. In the lands between Berlin and Moscow, the Soviets killed more than four million by starvation and bullets, the Germans more than twice that number by starvation, bullets, and gas. Most deliberate Soviet killing, and almost all deliberate Nazi killing, took place in this zone. If we can understand the totality of the catastrophe, we will better understand the two regimes, and we may be better prepared to understand its component parts, the most significant of which was the Holocaust of European Jews."