The Holocaust in Ukraine
The Holocaust in Ukraine | |
---|---|
Organizations | Einsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, Axis occupation forces (Hungarians, Romanians),[5] and local collaborators |
Victims | 850,000[6] –1,600,000 Ukrainian Jews[7][8] |
Memorials | In various places in the country |
The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of
Between 1941 and 1945, between 850,000[10][11][12]–1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine, which included assistance of local collaborators.[7][8][13]
According to Yale historian
Death squads (1941–1943)
Total civilian losses during the war and the German occupation of Ukraine are estimated to number four million, including up to a million Jews who were murdered by :
I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.[16]
From 16 to 30 September 1941 the
Jews of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.
— Order posted in Kiev in Russian and Ukrainian on or around September 26, 1941.[18]
The most notorious massacre of Jews in Ukraine was at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941; some 100,000–150,000 Ukrainian and other Soviet citizens were also killed in the following weeks. The mass killing was approved by the military governor Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln), and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD, and Security Police. On Monday the 29th, the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten. A truck driver described the scene:
[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzmannschaft and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.[18]
Collaboration in Ukraine
Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi Germany did so in various ways including participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police,
A number of Ukrainians had collaborated: According to German historian
Treblinka, were also among the guards who manned the German Nazi death camps.[19]
Timothy Snyder notes that "the majority, probably the vast majority of people who collaborated with the German occupation were not politically motivated. They were collaborating with an occupation that was there, and which is a German historical responsibility."[20]
Widespread coordination between the Third Reich and Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian militia and rank-and-file pogromists occurred. Prior to the German invasion of Ukraine, the two active OUN factions coordinated directly from their headquarters in
According to political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, the agreement between Ukrainian nationalists and the occupying authorities in the region was not limited to ideology, as 63% of UPA commanders by early 1944 were represented by former commanders of police formations created by Nazi Germany during the initial stage of the occupation of Ukraine.[30] Police units and civil militia established by the Nazi authorities played the role of collaborators of the Nazis, participating not only in the genocide of the Jewish population[31] but also in the killing of Soviet prisoners, as well as in the murder of Ukrainian civilians, such as the killing of 3,000 people in the village of Kortelitsa in September 1942.[32][30]
Ukrainian police auxiliaries "had been involved at least in preparations for the
According to the Israeli Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, "In January 1942 a company of Tatar volunteers was established in Simferopol under the command of Einsatzgruppe 11. This company participated in anti-Jewish manhunts and murder actions in the rural regions."[34]
According to
Victims
According to
Execution units
- Einsatzgruppen C & D (Einsatzkommando)
- Order Police battalions
- Abwehr/Brandemburg special saboteur unit Nachtigall Battalion
- Freiwilligen-Stamm-Regiment3 & 4 (Russians & Ukrainians)
- Ukrainian auxiliary unitsUkrainische Hilfspolizei
Notable survivors
Rescuers
Ukraine rates fourth in the number of people recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for saving Jews during the Holocaust, with 2,515 individuals recognized as of January 2015.[41]
The Shtundists, an evangelical Protestant denomination which emerged in late 19th century Ukraine, helped hide Jews.[42]
Massacres
- 1941 Bila Tserkva massacre
- 1941 Odessa massacre
- Artemivsk massacre
- Babi Yar
- Dnipropetrovsk
- Drobytsky Yar
- Feodosiya
- Ivano-Frankovsk
- Kamenets-Podolskiy massacre
- Klevan
- Lviv pogroms (1941)
- Massacre of Lwów professors
- Mezhirichi
- Mizoch
- Nikolaev massacre
- Olyka
- Pliskov
- Sarny massacre
- Terebovl
- Zhytomyr
See also
- Gas van
- German war crimes
- History of the Jews in the Soviet Union
- History of the Jews in Ukraine
- The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
- World War II casualties of the Soviet Union
- Hegewald, a short-lived German Colony near Zhytomyr
- No Place on Earth, a 2012 documentary film about a group of Ukrainian Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Verteba and Priest's Grotto caves
Notes
- ^ Given the overlapping geographical scopes, see also The Holocaust in Poland (west), The Holocaust in Romania (southwest), The Holocaust in Belarus (north) and The Holocaust in Russia (east).
References
- ^ a b Himka, John-Paul. "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd". Academia.
- OCLC 880566030.
- OCLC 466441935.
- ^ "Nazikollaborateur als neuer Held der Ukraine – Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin". www.jg-berlin.org (in German). Retrieved 5 January 2018.
- OCLC 794328914.
- ^ "Questions and answers about the Holocaust (Hebrew) (#4)". Yad Vashem (in Hebrew): 4.
- ^ a b Kruglov, Alexander Iosifovich. "ХРОНИКА ХОЛОКОСТА В УКРАИНЕ 1941–1944 гг" (PDF). holocaust-ukraine.net. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 August 2014.
To this number of victims should be added Jews who died in captivity, as well as Jews who were exterminated on the territory of Russia (mainly in the North Caucasus), where they evacuated in 1941 and where they were caught by the Germans in 1942. Number of Jews who perished can be estimated at 1.6 million.
- ^ D. Snyder, Timothy; Brandon, Ray. Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953.
Approximately 1.5 million of the approximately 5.7 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust came from within the borders of what is today Ukraine – Dieter Pohl
- ^ Gregorovich, Andrew (1995). "World War II in Ukraine: Jewish Holocaust in Ukraine". Reprinted from Forum Ukrainian Review (92).
- ^ Alfred J. Rieber (2003). "Civil Wars in the Soviet Union" (PDF). pp. 133, 145–147. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 October 2020. Retrieved 8 June 2022. Slavica Publishers.
- ISBN 978-0802078209.
- ISBN 0-553-34302-5.
- ISBN 978-1-138-36944-3.
As a result of Nazi policy, about one and a half million Jews were murdered on the territories that constitute modern Ukraine.
- ^ "Timothy Snyder: Germany must own up to past atrocities in Ukraine". Retrieved 5 July 2017.
- OCLC 794328914.
- ^ ISBN 978-0801883583.
- ^ Hemme, Amira Lapidot (2012). "Jewish History of Mykolayiv (Nikolayev), Kherson Gubernia". JewishGen. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
- ^ a b Berenbaum 2006, pp. 97–98.
- National Geographic. May 30, 2014
- ^ Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake, Eurozine (7 July 2017)
- JSTOR 41036794.
- ^ The Lviv pogrom of 1941 By John Paul Himka. Kyiv Post 23 September 2010. Archived 25 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Yad Vashem (2005). "June 30: Germany occupies Lvov; 4,000 Jews killed by July 3". Archived from the original on 11 March 2005.
- ^ Holocaust Encyclopedia (2006). "Lwów". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ Yad Vashem (2005). "July 25: Pogrom in Lwów". Chronology of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 11 March 2005.
- ^ І.К. Патриляк. Військова діяльність ОУН(Б) у 1940–1942 роках. – Університет імені Шевченко \Ін-т історії України НАН України Київ, 2004 I.K Patrylyak. (2004). Military activities of the OUN (B) in the years 1940–1942. Kyiv, Ukraine: Shevchenko University \ Institute of History of Ukraine National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. p. 324.
- ^ Philip Friedman. "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation." In Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. (1980) New York: Conference of Jewish Social Studies. p. 181
- ^ Philip Friedman. "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation." at Yivo annual of Jewish social science Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1959 p. 268
- ^ Institute of Ukrainian History, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Chapter 2 Archived 25 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine, pp. 62–63
- ^ a b Katchanovski, Ivan. "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine, Conference: Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust" Conference, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum & Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna, 2013". researchgate.net.
- .
- S2CID 161077713.
- ^ Martina Bitunjac, Julius H. Schoeps (2021). Complicated Complicity: European Collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
- ISBN 978-0803222700.
- ^ Nazi-hunters give low grades to 13 countries, including Ukraine, Kyiv Post (12 January 2011)
- S2CID 35070744.
- ^ Timothy Snyder (16 July 2009). "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original (Internet Archive) on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
- ^ Lower, Wendy. "Introduction: the Holocaust in Ukraine". Holocaust and Genocide Studies: 3.
- ^ "Questions and answers about the Holocaust (#4)". Yad Vashem (in Hebrew).
- ^ "Mobile Killing Squads". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
- ^ "Names and Numbers of Righteous Among the Nations - per Country & Ethnic Origin, as of January 1, 2015". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 13 October 2016. Retrieved 12 December 2015.
- ISBN 978-1101903469.
Further reading
- The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Conference Papers, 2013
- Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz (24 April 2016). "Holocaust, Fascism, and Ukrainian History: Does It Make Sense to Rethink the History of Ukrainian Perpetrators in the European Context, published by the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, April 2016". Academia.edu. Retrieved 1 March 2023.
- Dean, Martin Christopher (2022). "Forced Labor Camps for Jews in Reichskommissariat Ukraine: The Exploitation of Jewish Labor within the Holocaust in the East". Eastern European Holocaust Studies. 1: 175–196. ISSN 2749-9030.