The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization

I • The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine

The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews • 23 From the moment the German armed forces entered Ukraine on June 22, 1941, the Jews of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the largest Jewish minority in the Soviet Union, faced near certain death. In the 18 months that followed, the Germans, together with their allies and satraps, killed almost every Ukrainian Jew who failed to flee with the retreating Red Army. Although Soviet Ukraine’s Jews represented the second largest Jewish community in Europe prior to the Second World War, scholars have largely neglected the history of this community’s destruction (and even more so the destruction of the Russian Federation’s Jews). By contrast, the persecution and killing of Jews elsewhere in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories have been subjected to considerable examination by historians, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This chapter aims to provide a basic outline of the National Socialists ’ “Final Solution of the European Jewish question” as it applied to Ukraine’s Jews. This is by no means an exhaustive study. Here, only the Ukrainian territories that were administered by the Wehrmacht and the civilian -run Reich Commissariat Ukraine (RKU) are addressed. For anaI The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine Dieter Pohl 24 • Dieter Pohl lytical reasons, the regions of eastern Galicia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria are left out. Eastern Galicia (today in western Ukraine) was annexed to the General Government (the German-occupied Polish territories not incorporated into the Reich); the fate of its Jewish population was interwoven with that of the Jews of Poland during the Nazi era.1 Similarly, northern Bukovina (today Ukraine’s Chernivtsi province) and Transnistria (a swath of territory between the Southern Buh and Dniestr rivers awarded Romania by Germany) concern primarily Romanian anti-Jewish measures, even though German officials greatly influenced Romanian policy.2 Finally, the area of operations of Einsatzgruppe D, the SS task force behind the lines of the German 11th Army and the Third Reich’s Romanian allies, is also omitted, for this Einsatzgruppe was not subordinated directly to Rear Area Army Group South.3 Galicia and Transnistria aside, the state of research into the murder of Ukraine’s Jews is hardly satisfactory.4 Even German occupation policy in Ukraine still awaits a more thorough investigation.5 At this writing, substantial studies on the Holocaust in Ukraine are available only for a few regions outside Galicia and Transnistria, in particular Volhynia6 and Zhytomyr.7 Related works have also appeared or are expected to appear soon.8 At the start of the Second World War, the Jewish minority in Soviet Ukraine numbered over 1.5 million people. After the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland in the early weeks of the war, the number of Jews in the expanded Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic rose to 2.35 million Jews.9 With that, the percentage of Jews in Ukraine increased from 5 to 6 percent. Just over 85 percent of Ukrainian Jews lived in urban areas. East of Kiev, Ukraine’s Jews tended to concentrate in large cities; west of Kiev, large communities of Jews could be found in almost every midsized town. In the larger population centers of western prewar Soviet Ukraine—Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, and Kamianets-Podilsky—Jews made up between one third and two thirds of the population.10 In those places , assimilation—especially vis-à-vis the non-Jewish population—was low. Nevertheless, in Soviet Ukraine as a whole, according to figures for 1938, 17–18 percent of Jews were married to non-Jews.11 The Bolshevik Revolution initially brought with it an unambiguous break with the systematic discrimination against Jews of the tsarist era. Many Jews—especially those in large cities such as Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkiv—were quick to take advantage of the new opportunities that came with emancipation. The nationalization of the economy in the 1920s may have placed considerable restrictions on craftsmen and retailers, traditional professions for East European Jews, but jobs in education and administration offered new perspectives for Ukraine’s Jews. As time passed, however, these gains were thrown into doubt. In the 1930s, religion and the various official Soviet national cultures The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews • 25 were subject to growing repression—including Judaism and the Yiddish proletarian culture originally sponsored by Moscow. In the final phase of the Great Terror of 1938–1939, many...