<DIV>Americans call the Second World War &#147;The Good War.&#8221; But before it even began, America&#8217;s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens&#151;and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war&#8217;s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.<p><i>Bloodlands</i> is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, <i>Bloodlands</i> will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.</DIV>