The Holocaust in Ukraine: a new history

My maternal family came from Ukraine, one half from Berdyansk, Mariupol and Grafskoy, and the other half from Odessa and Simferopol. My parents in law and their siblings came from towns (Chust, Nizhniy Verecki, Mukachevo) that were Czech before WW2 but Ukrainian after the war.

So I was very keen to read The Holocaust and the Germanisation of Ukraine, written by the British historian Eric Steinhart and published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Until the book arrives in Australia, my own comments and questions will have to come after Roger Moorhouse’s review that first appeared in in History Today, July 2015.

Ukraine stood at the very heart of Hitler's perverted vision for Eastern Europe; the centrepiece of the Nazi Lebensraum project and an economic powerhouse, it was also home to nearly three million Jews. Such a subject would be difficult to cover in a smallish book. But since this book is not about Ukraine in its entirety, it is actually a micro-study of German policy in the district of Trans-nistria, a small territory in SW Ukraine (between the River Dniester and the eastern Moldovan border). Trans-nistria is a region that fell under Romanian control following the Nazi invasion in 1941.

This excellent and rigorous study used a wealth of archival sources, many of which have only recently been released. The author showed how Nazi racial policy was recreated in a district that had a significant ethnic German minority. This is important! The existing German minority had promis­ed heaps of sympathetic collaborators to push forward the planned Germanisation programme.

The collaboration called Sonderkommando R was spurred by the arrival of a team of experts and facilitators from Berlin. The programme was not slow to emerge, and soon extended to the mass execution of the Nazis' perceived enemies. In one four-month period, local ethnic German militias murdered 50,000 Jews, just in this small part of Ukraine.

Of course it was not all plain sailing from the Nazi perspective. The Black Sea Germans, though the largest ethnic German community in the Soviet Union, were considered racially rather dubious. Apparently they had long been isolated from mainstream German influence and evidently had intermarried with their Jewish neighbours.

Moreover, while welcoming their new rulers when it suited them, local ethnic Germans were also not above hiding Jews or being creative with their own genealogy. As a result, Steinhart said, normal Nazi criteria had to be jettisoned, leaving Berlin's administrators with the task of making up racial policy as they went along.

Steinhart's 2015 book

Steinhart examined the factors that made those ethnic Germans into such willing and murderous tools of Nazi policy. He concluded that anti-Semitism was rather low on their list of motivators, behind ant­icipatory obedience, venality and especially anti-Soviet sent­iment. As in the example of the Baltic States, recent persecution at Soviet hands meant that the Nazis' local collaborators were often primarily anti-Soviet and only secondarily anti-Semitic. Indeed Steinhart suggested that many of the perpetrators in Trans-nistria only became anti-Semites after participating in the Holocaust.

The book cited other researchers who also found that anti-Soviet sentiment as a central motivator for the Nazis' local collaborators.

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3,000,000 Ukrainian citizens were killed as part of Nazi exterm­in­at­ion policies, 900,000 being Jewish Ukrainians and 2.1 million of them being Christian Ukrainians. Most of these three million were exterminated by German soldiers. In explaining this catastrophe, I am grateful for three factors specified in the book that I would not have thought of myself:

Firstly the author examined Nazi racial policy in a specific prov­ince with a “large ethnic German minority”. 

Secondly that the in­vading German soldiers would not have had enough manpower to ach­ieve their programme alone, and thus needed the warm support of Nazi sympath­isers within the Transnistrian community. 

Thirdly that anti-Soviet sentiment was the central motivator for the Nazis' local collaborators, not anti-Semitism.

map of Transnitstria and its ethnic German settlements, 1942

credit: Steinhart's book

But was this a province with a “large ethnic German minority”? The 1936 census for Transnistria gives the German ethnic minority as 2% while the Russians accounted for 10% and the Jews accounted for 8%. (The vast majority were either Ukrainians or Moldovans). Unless the population changed between the census of 1936 and the Nazi invasion of 1941, the ethnic German population of Transnistria did not seem to be a large minority at all.

I agree that the Germans could not have succeeded with their prog­ramme without the helpful collaboration of local Ukrainians. It has been documented that 100,000 locals voluntarily joined police units that provided key assistance to the Nazis. Even more explic­itly, a company of Tatar volunteers was established in Simferopol under the command of Einsatzgruppe 11. This company participated in anti-Jewish manhunts and murder actions in the rural reg­ions. Many other Ukrainians staffed the local bureaucracies or participated in the mass shootings of Jews.

Was it possible that 900,000 of the executions (30% of all the Trans­nistrian deaths at Nazi hands) were randomly Jewish when Jews accounted for only 8% of Transnistria’s total population? I don’t think so.

Could the modern and independent nation of Ukraine have tried to acknowledge their role during the Holocaust, in some way cleansing an awful part of history? According to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in January 2011 (page 36) "Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator.”

My guess is that anti-Soviet sentiment, so powerful during the Holocaust, was always deeply steeped in anti-Semitism. Right wingers believed in the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy back then and seem to be­lieve in it today. Thus modern governmental acknow­ledge­ment of the massacres that took place during the dark days of Holocaust are not likely to be forthcoming.