The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (review)

General surveys and other works cover particular aspects of the Holocaust's perpetration and memory in Ukraine. But as Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower note in the editors' introduction to the book under review, research and publication exclusively on the Holocaust in Ukraine remain woefully undeveloped. This is surprising for three interrelated reasons: First, the Ukraine in its boundaries as a Soviet republic in the fall of 1939 had one of the largest Jewish populations in all territories occupied by the Germans. Second, the Germans here generally acted even more brutally than in other areas, and killed approximately 1.4 million Jews, most of them by shooting. Finally, as Christopher Browning and Dieter Pohl, among others, have recognized, local measures and initiatives in Ukraine significantly influenced the central decision-making process in the Final Solution.¹ For such reasons the editors have selected ten essential essays as starting points for future inquiry.

Written by experts in their fields and accompanied by excellent maps and illustrations, all chapters and the editors' introduction are of very high quality. For this reason emphasizing certain chapters does an injustice to others, but for the sake of brevity this review will focus on chapters V, VI, IX, and X. Most general studies of the Holocaust suggest that the Nazis often insisted on complete elimination of the Jews even though the latter could have been used as forced laborers. These works usually associate the Nazi extermination policy with the determination of an all-powerful Reinhard Heydrich, his Reich Security Main Office, and his Einsatzgruppen. As Andrej Angrick finds in his essay on Jewish labor along Thoroughfare IV in central Ukraine, however, constructing reliable communications and supply lines became important to Himmler, who allegedly had to help push his car out of the mud during an inspection tour, when the German advance into the Soviet Union and the accompanying sweep of the Einsatzgruppen stalled in December 1941. Himmler now strengthened the authority of his direct representatives in the field, the Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPFs). To be sure, the HSSPFs and their regular German and auxiliary police units killed even more Jews in Ukraine than did the Einsatzgruppen, but labor was at such a premium during the construction of Thoroughfare IV that the HSSPF and the SS and Police Leaders (SSPFs) subordinate to him and tasked with the project looked to the few remaining Jewish communities to fill their labor needs. As Angrick demonstrates, the treatment of the Jews drafted by the SS remained no less brutal than that under the usual German occupation policy, but at this particular project "forced labor" was more than a euphemism for death through work. Angrick's research additionally contributes to our understanding of the complicated Nazi system of rule more generally: he argues that Himmler designated SSPFs to take positions as construction supervisors in territories yet to be conquered by the German army, hoping that they could learn important lessons in coordinating the contributions of various military, civilian, and SS organizations to Thoroughfare IV.

To shed even more light on the functioning of the chaotic system of Nazi rule in Ukraine, Wendy Lower looks at the activities of mid-level civilian administrators in Zhytomyr district. Trained at Nazi "castles of the order" (elite leadership schools), most of these county commissars were middle-aged, old-Nazi faithful who previously had been bypassed for office and promotion, but now were made responsible for the day-to-day governance of their respective sub-districts. Motivated by private interest, pressure from their superiors, ideological conviction, and illusions of grandeur, they set themselves up like administrators from the Age of Imperialism. Like those, they became masters over the lives of the native population, and especially the Jews. Although fellow Germans often derided them as "Eastern losers" for their corruption, disorganization, and inefficiency, Lower proves that they were important...