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248 • Martin Dean VII Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, 1941–1944 Martin Dean In late spring 1942, after only a few months of service with the po­ lice in Ustynivka Precinct (Rayon) in Nazi-occupied southern Ukraine, Ernst Hering, a 19-year-old ethnic German native of the area, was asked to participate in the shooting of Jews from his home region.1 The Bobrynets County commissar had ordered the police to gather the roughly 25 surviving Jews from the nearby villages at the police station in Ustynivka. Another 35 to 40 Jews were brought in from the nearby town of Bobrynets, where they had been collected from elsewhere in the county.2 Around 60 Jews were still living in Hering’s home village of Izra- ïlivka. On the eve of the action, the precinct police chief, Alexander Hübner, also an ethnic German, issued orders for the Jews to be gathered in the village center. After arriving in Izraïlivka, at around 2 am, the policemen forced the Jews into the school building.3 Meanwhile, a mass grave was prepared near Kovalivka, a few kilometers outside Izra ïlivka on the road to Ustynivka.4 The next morning, the Gendarmerie, as the rural police from the Reich were known, and the local police (Schutzmannschaft) escorted the Jews to the freshly dug pit. The Jews—men, women, and children—were Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine • 249 made to undress. Then members of the Security Police (which included the Gestapo), the Gendarmerie, and the local police murdered them by shooting. Other members of these police forces stood guard around the perimeter of the execution site. The commissar for Bobrynets County , a National Socialist official from Germany named Holzmann, and Ustynivka Precinct’s top civil administrator, a local ethnic German by the name of Friedrich Strohmeier, stood by and observed the massacre.5 Having taken away the “racially pure” Jews that morning, some of the local policemen, including Ernst Hering, were sent back to Izraïlivka to collect about 20 half-Jewish children from mixed marriages. The children were then killed as well. In June 1991, a team of forensic experts employed by the Australian Special Investigations Unit carried out an exhumation of the mass grave near Izraïlivka. The skeletal remains of 19 children aged under 11 years were uncovered lying at the top of the grave. Seven of the children had bullet wounds to the head, while the remainder had fractured skulls caused by a blunt instrument, such as a rifle butt. Under these bodies was a layer of soil and beneath that the remains of adult humans. The Australians estimated that about 100 more bodies were buried there.6 Six years later, 55 years after the shooting, Ernst Hering, by then 75, was convicted of abetting the murder of the children at Izraïlivka and given a suspended sentence of 20 months by a German juvenile court in Cologne.7 According to the court, Hering had joined the German administration’s local auxiliary police force in March or April 1942, roughly seven months after the Germans arrived in Kirovohrad Oblast, his home region. The court also found that Hering decided to join the police of his own free will.8 What would make a 19-year-old man decide to join what was at the time known to be a murderous agency of foreign occupation? From the available evidence, it does not appear that Hering joined the police out of antisemitism. Between the world wars, ethnic relations in Izraïlivka (also known as Steinthal or Berezovatka) had not been openly hostile. Approximately half of the small town’s inhabitants were Jews; the remainder, apart from seven ethnic German families, were Ukrainians. Ernst Hering had even attended the town’s Jewish school for a short period prior to its closure by the Soviet authorities.9 Hering’s parents, devout Christians, disapproved of their son’s decision to join the police, but this did not change his mind. He relocated a few kilometers from Izraïlivka to the precinct center of Ustynivka, returning only occasionally to visit his family. Not long after joining the police, Hering learned from his new comrades that their Ukrainian boss, deputy police chief Mefody Marchyk, frequently tortured and shot Jews when he was drunk. This information, however, also failed to move Hering to reconsider. He stayed on, as did his cousin Gustav.10 It appears...

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