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"...All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people. This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, laboring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth.
...I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew.
...Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians?"1
Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR, known as Operation Barbarossa, was both a military plan and an ideological program. Hitler saw the war against the Soviet Union as a “holy war” against “the powers of evil”. This campaign had the following objectives:
a) Conquest of living space for the German people. Soviet territories were perceived by the German national consciousness as the natural ground for continuing expansion of the Aryan race. The natural riches of those lands were destined to supply materials and resources for the purposes of this war in particular and the Third Reich in general. In their plans, Nazi ideologists assigned the conquered peoples of the USSR the role of barely literate slaves who would serve the representatives of the superior Aryan race in the “new world order”. This ideological approach determined an especially cruel character for the occupational regime in all Soviet territories.
b) Eradication of the Soviet “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime.
A combination of a new type of warfare – strategic-ideological – and the place Soviet Jews were allotted in it, became a starting point for the final stage of the Nazi policy of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.
Jews were perceived by the Nazis as the founders and apologists of the Bolshevik system that threatened all mankind. In Hitler’s eyes, the battle with the USSR was an uncompromising struggle of two worldviews. Hitler concluded that the defeat of the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy was only possible as a result of a war of annihilation.
Total war against Bolshevism, which began with the invasion of the Soviet Union, also became the start of mass extermination of the Jews in the occupied territories.
The Holocaust of the Soviet Jewry was different from what had happened in the occupied territories of Europe before the summer of 1941. What is special about the fate of the Jews and the anti-Jewish policy of extermination in the Soviet territories? The famous Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad points out a number of special aspects when talking about the situation in the Soviet lands:
The area where the murder of the Jewish population took place – all the territories of the USSR occupied by the Germans and their allies from 1941 to 1945.
The duration of the occupation and extermination. The period of the German occupation and the period of extermination of the Jews were relatively short. In the west of the country, the occupation lasted about three years, in the eastern territories sometimes only weeks or months. The extermination of the Jews went on throughout the period of the occupation. Most of the Jews were murdered in the first 18 months of the occupation. In many places, Jews were exterminated as early as the first weeks and months of the war.
Definition of the word “Jew”. In the occupied territories of the USSR everyone with even one Jewish grandparent out of four was subject to extermination. Special operations were conducted to detect such people.
Methods of extermination. Most of the Soviet Jews were not deported to death camps. Their places of residence became their places of extermination – as, for instance, in Kiev. The number of the Jews determined the scale of their annihilation. Huge territories and the wide dispersion of the Jewish population required mass participation of the perpetrators, both Germans and their collaborators from the local population. Murder was committed before their eyes, and the fate of the Jews was no secret to anybody.
Different methods of killing were used in the occupied parts of the USSR, depending on the capabilities and preferences of the perpetrators. The main method, however, was mass shootings that took place not only in the first months, but throughout the entire period of the occupation.
Character of the local population. In the occupied Soviet territories, murders were committed openly, before the eyes of the locals. The majority of the population in these territories was not involved in the extermination of the Jews but remained passive. Some were indifferent. Others viewed the persecution and killing of the Jews with satisfaction; moreover, a large number of locals took direct part in the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Yet others felt pain and compassion but did not take any action – out of fear or for other reasons. There were also people who helped the Jews or tried to save them despite the risk to their own lives.
Germany’s war with the USSR, and its treatment of the population in the occupied Soviet territories, bore some special characteristics. Slavic peoples made up the majority of the population there, and the Germans viewed them as representatives of an inferior race and their territories as the “living space” for themselves. Occupational regime in the USSR was very cruel, the smallest offence was punished with execution, and the death toll among the civilian (non-Jewish) population was very high.
The main factors influencing the behavior of the local population and its reaction to the extermination of the Jews were, therefore, the following:
- Antisemitism of part of the population;
- Cruelty of the occupational regime;
- Extreme and unbending character of the German anti-Jewish policy;
- The profit that the local inhabitants stood to gain from the murder of their Jewish neighbors.
In the territories annexed by the USSR in 1939-1940, together with the above mentioned factors, one must also point out the bitterness of the population following their loss of independence or hopes for independence, overall Sovietization and repressive Soviet policies, as well as the faith many had in the Nazi propagandists clichés about the connection between the Jews and the Soviet regime, although in fact the Jews were persecuted by the authorities, as were all the other population groups.
In the Soviet territories, the result of these complex relationships was collaborationism and active participation in anti-Jewish policies from the first days of the war.
The Soviet Jews became the first victims of mass annihilation during the Nazi occupation. The main reason for that was the identification of the Jews with Bolshevism in the eyes of the Nazis against the backdrop of the total war and racial policies in the East. Murders of the Jews by the SS units signal the transition from the period of persecutions, harassment and restrictions in the ghetto to the period of mass destruction. Thus, Operation Barbarossa became the beginning of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.
- 1. Vasilii Grossman, “Ukraine Without Jews”.