The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization

Introduction

Introduction • 1 Introduction Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower Before the Second World War, the Jews of Ukraine constituted one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe.1 They were without a doubt the largest Jewish population within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.2 And between July 1940 and June 1941—after Stalin occupied the interwar Polish territories of eastern Galicia and western Volhynia as well as the interwar Romanian territories of northern Bukovina and southern Bessarabia—the number of Jews in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR) rose to at least 2.45 million persons, thus making it for a brief period home to the largest Jewish population in Europe.3 Despite the size of Ukraine’s Jewish population, academics and laypersons alike have for over two generations tended to talk about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, or Hungary, but not about the Holocaust in Ukraine, which is the subject of this book. The reason for this traditional approach is evident. Unlike any of the aforementioned countries, Ukraine from the mid-thirteenth until the mid-twentieth century was but an ensemble of disparate territories partitioned among several neighboring powers . Ukrainian efforts to establish a state in these lands in the aftermath of the First World War were thwarted by internecine factionalism as well as Polish national aspirations and Soviet revolutionary ambitions. Between the Polish-Soviet peace of 1920 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the lands of modern Ukraine were split among Poland (eastern Galicia and western Volhynia), Czechoslovakia (Transcarpathia), Romania (northern Bukovina and southern Bessarabia), and the Soviet Union. Inside the Soviet Union, the Crimea remained in Russia, while the rest of Ukraine lay within the UkrSSR. The calamities that swept the Soviet Ukrainian lands between the world wars tore apart Ukrainian and Jewish society alike. The Ukrainian lands of Poland were subjected to similar brutality in the 22 months between Soviet occupation in September 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. 2 • Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower Although so many Jews lived throughout the Ukrainian lands, the Jewish inhabitants of Ukraine did not form a cohesive Jewish community. Nor did the Jews of Ukraine form a culturally Ukrainian Jewry. The Jews of Ukraine were greatly influenced by whichever occupying country they found themselves a part of—this applies in particular to the legacies of Austrian and then Polish rule in western Ukraine in the first four decades of the twentieth century. When the Jews of these lands identified with a culture outside their community or assimilated, they most often chose the dominant culture in the towns where they resided, whereas Ukrainians overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. Those urban cultures therefore tended to be Austro-German, Polish, or Russian . Nonetheless, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, almost all the Jews of Ukraine found themselves in the recently aggrandized UkrSSR. Stalin—in a spectacle of revolution played out against a backdrop of Realpolitik—had by July 1940 nearly unified Ukraine for the first time in history. Hitler would dismantle Ukraine again. This re-partitioning of Ukraine was not intended by Alfred Rosenberg , the Nazis’ chief ideologue and later Germany’s minister for the occupied eastern territories. He had hoped to create an enormous unified Ukrainian state under German suzerainty stretching from Lviv to Stalingrad (today Volgograd).4 Hitler equivocated for several months, but ultimately dispensed with Rosenberg’s proposals shortly before a key meeting of Germany’s highest leadership on July 16, 1941.5 Parts of Ukraine fell to the General Government (those parts of the occupied interwar Polish state not incorporated into Germany) and Romania instead of Rosenberg ’s Reich Commissariat Ukraine (Reichskommissariat Ukraine, RKU). (See map 1.2 in chapter 1.) As a consequence of this impromptu partitioning of Ukraine in July 1941, the term Holocaust in Ukraine has come to refer first and foremost to the Wehrmacht-administrated territories and the RKU. The Holocaust in Galicia is technically a part of the Holocaust in Poland, while the Holocaust in Transnistria is a part of the Holocaust in Romania and the Holocaust in Transcarpathia is a part of the Holocaust in Hungary. These distinctions in Holocaust history reflect the role of the various occupying powers and their administrations in shaping and implementing policies of mass murder in their respective parts of Ukraine. However, in all of these various regions, the majority of the population was Ukrainian, and regardless of the nature of the...