The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (review)

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, unleashed the most horrific war of terror and genocide in modern history. Between 25 and 27 million Soviet citizens died, two thirds of them civilians. But the Germans reserved their particular fury for the Soviet Union's five million Jews. Of this number, almost two million had ended up in Soviet territory as part of the German-Soviet division of parts of Eastern Europe in 1939 and 1940. One to 1.5 million Soviet Jews would be murdered by the Germans and their allies during the war, while another 200,000 died fighting in the Red Army.

To some degree, it could be argued that German successes in Soviet territory during the early months of the invasion led Nazi leaders to plan a more calculated, "scientific" approach to dealing with the USSR's and Europe's Jews. The Germans' early military and ethnic-cleansing operations in the western territories of the Soviet Union provided the opportunity to reach a "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," using occupied Polish territory as the principal German killing ground. Ideologically speaking, the mass murders of Jews and communists by special SS killing squads, the Wehrmacht, and their allies and henchmen demonstrated the importance of eliminating the "Judeo-Bolshevik threat" so central to Nazi propaganda. If occupied Poland was the racial laboratory of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union was the seedbed of its racial-ideological mythology. The Nazi leadership considered it essential to destroy all threats to the future Thousand-Year Reich: the war in the Soviet Union was for them nothing less than a war of survival.

Joseph Stalin and his successors refused to acknowledge the uniqueness of Jewish suffering between 1941 and 1945. Influenced by traditional Russian antisemitism and driven by the need continually to underscore the role of the Communist Party in saving the country from the "fascist beasts," the country's vast war-memory industry recognized only the overall suffering of "the Soviet people," not particular groups such as the Jews, the Roma, or others. During a dozen trips to the Soviet Union between 1975 and 1990, I personally heard little mention of the wartime experience of Soviet Jews. What we knew about the German mass murder of Jews in the western USSR derived primarily from a modest number of published first-hand accounts, the Einsatzgruppen reports, and the 1981 publication of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman's postwar compilation of witness accounts The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by the German-Fascist Invaders throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War of 1941–1945.

Originally Ehrenberg and Grossman sought to publish only accounts of the bestialities of the Germans and their allies, leaving out those that stressed the alacrity with which local collaborators approved and/or contributed to them. An early version of their volume appeared in the United States not long after the war, but Stalin's decision to pursue his own antisemitic course and the leadership's unwillingness to acknowledge in print just how many Soviet citizens supported the occupiers precluded publication in the USSR. Slightly differing versions appeared outside the Soviet Union from the 1980s, including a Russian-language edition printed in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1993. But the materials originally held back—The Unknown Black Book—were published for the first time only in Moscow in 1993. The present volume marks the first appearance in English of these materials that restore the role of the indigenous collaborators. It makes a welcome addition to the growing body of material on Nazi Germany's genocidal campaigns in "the East."

Ilya Altman's introductory essay on "The History and Fate of The Black Book and The Unknown Black Book," and Joshua Rubenstein's introduction "The War and the...