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Reviewed by:
  • The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
  • Maarten Pereboom
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, by Yitzhak Arad. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 720 pp. $45.00.

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the third volume in the University of Nebraska Press's Comprehensive History of the Holocaust series, following Christopher Browning's Origins of the Final Solution (2004) and Livia Rothkirchen's The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (2006). Impressively documented from German, Soviet, and Jewish sources, Yitzhak Arad's study takes up the formidable task of describing and analyzing the murder of over one million Jews in the Soviet Union, which began almost immediately upon Germany's [End Page 184] launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 and lasted until the final expulsion of German troops from Soviet territory in 1944.

To use Martin Gilbert's terms of analysis, most of the Soviet Union's Jews became victims of Nazi Germany's "Fourth Solution" to the so-called Jewish "problem": specifically, special police units called Einsatzgruppen became killing squads, following the armed forces into the Soviet Union, rounding up populations of Jews and shooting them by open pits, ravines, or trenches. While the overall numbers are both staggering and numbing, individual atrocities numbered in the thousands, perpetrated all throughout the territory that came under German control at one time or another, roughly one-half million square miles, during the war.

The demands of such a study are great: how can one treat "comprehensively" in one volume an event of such magnitude, with so many questions to be answered, and yet address the particular challenges of dealing with the Holocaust, to convey a sense of the hell created by the perpetrators while honoring the humanity and memory of its victims? Yitzhak Arad, who prior to his retirement served as director at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority, for more than twenty years (1972-1993), was more than qualified to take on the challenge. He has succeeded in creating a work of scholarship that will be the authoritative work for the foreseeable future.

Arad carefully lays the groundwork for his study with a careful analysis of the shifts in territorial control that affected the people of the region in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and indeed affected the fate of Jewish populations during the war. The area occupied by Germany included the entire Pale of Settlement, or area in which Jews were allowed to reside within the Russian Empire. Belorussia and Ukraine still had relatively large Jewish populations (375,000 and 1,500,000) compared to Russia itself, where the majority of its Jews (about 850,000) lived in Moscow (250,000) and Leningrad (200,000), but about 200,000 Jews lived in territories that came under occupation. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (Jewish population about 250,000, mostly in the latter two states) had been occupied by the Soviets in 1940, but were quickly overrun by Germany in the summer of 1941. In all of these areas, historic animosities, memory, and issues of identity contributed to behaviors that subtly or not so subtly affected the fate of Jewish populations. In those territories occupied by Germany during the First World War, for example, Arad writes that some older Jews appeared reluctant to believe in the malevolent intentions of returning German armies.

Such attitudes were significant, as the potential to avoid falling under German control was relatively high compared to elsewhere in occupied Europe. Expulsions, evacuations, and individual escape efforts enabled many to [End Page 185] evade the Germans. Deportation to the gulag was of course brutal in its own right, but those who were expelled from the Baltic states in 1940 arguably stood a better chance of surviving the next few years than did those who remained in their homes, particularly in those areas where non-Jewish neighbors had their own history of virulent antisemitism: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Romanians were especially prone to violence with little prompting from the Germans.

Just as expulsions were not intended to do any favors for the deportees, evacuations were not organized to protect the vulnerable but rather to deny the Germans access...

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