One Day in Israylovka: A Case Study of the Holocaust in Southeastern Ukraine

This article uses sources gathered in the course of Australian war-crimes proceedings to examine a massacre carried out in mid-1942 in the Ukrainian village of Israylovka. A distinctive feature of the events of that day was that the killing of more than a hundred members of the local Jewish population was followed immediately by the murder of Mischling ("mixed-race") children. Focusing on the role played by the alleged war criminal Heinrich Wagner, the authors analyze the role of ethnic Germans in facilitating genocidal actions in southeastern Ukraine. In doing so, they relate the inter-ethnic dynamics of the Holocaust in Ukraine to the larger temporal context of the history of Israylovka, which reaches back to the early nineteenth century.