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The Holocaust in Ukraine
Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph of SS paramilitaries murdering Jewish civilians, including a mother and child, in 1942, at Ivanhorod, Ukraine.
Location	Ukrainian SSR
Date	22 June 1941 to 1944
Incident type	Imprisonment, mass shootings, concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor, starvation, torture, mass kidnapping
Perpetrators	Erich Koch, Friedrich Jeckeln, Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel and many others. Various local Nazi collaborators, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
Organizations	Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, and others
Victims	More than a million Jews
Memorials	At various points in country

The Holocaust in Ukraine took place in Reichskommissariat Ukraine during the occupation of the Soviet Ukraine by Nazi Germany in World War II. Between 1941 and 1944 more than a million Jews living in Ukrainian SSR were murdered as part of Generalplan Ost and the Final Solution extermination policies.

According to Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder, "the Holocaust is integrally and organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg, to the war in 1941, and is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine."

Generalplan Ost

One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from their native lands so as to make living space for German settlers. This plan of genocide was to be carried into effect gradually over a period of 25–30 years.

According to historian William W. Hagen, "Generalplan Ost . . . forecast the diminution of the targeted east European peoples' populations by the following measures: Poles – 85 percent; Belarusians – 75 percent; Ukrainians – 65 percent; Czechs – 50 percent. ... The Russian people, once subjugated in war, would join the four Slavic-speaking nations whose fate Generalplan Ost foreshadowed."

Death squads (1941–1943)

Total civilian losses during the war and German occupation in Ukraine are estimated at four million, including up to a million Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police battalions, and local Nazi collaborators. Einsatzgruppe C (Otto Rasch) was assigned to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldavia, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus. According to Ohlendorf's testimony at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Romani, Communist functionaries, active Communists, uncooperative slavs, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of Passover:

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.

From September 16–30, 1941 the Nikolaev massacre in and around the city of Mykolaiv resulted in the deaths of 35,782 Soviet citizens, most of whom were Jews, as was reported to Hitler.

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.

The most notorious massacre of Jews in Ukraine was at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29–30, 1941. (An amalgamation of 100,000 to 150,000 Ukrainian and other Soviet citizens were also killed in the following weeks). The mass killing of Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt, 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, assisted by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. On the Monday, 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, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:

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.

Collaboration in Ukraine

The National Geographic reported:

A number of Ukrainians had collaborated: According to German historian Dieter Pohl [de], around 100,000 joined police units that provided key assistance to the Nazis. Many others staffed the local bureaucracies or lent a helping hand during mass shootings of Jews. Ukrainians, such as the infamous Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, were also among the guards who manned the German Nazi death camps.

According to The Simon Wiesenthal Center (in January 2011) "Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator."

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."

According to Timothy Snyder, "Something else to remember: 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 an occupation which is a German historical responsibility.

Death toll

Until the fall of the Soviet Union, it was believed that about 900,000 Jews were murdered as part of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This is the estimate found in such respected works as The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hillberg. In the late 1990s, access to Soviet archives increased the estimates of the prewar population of Jews and as a result, the estimates of the death toll have been increasing. In the 1990s, Dieter Pohl estimated 1.2 million Jews murdered, and more recent estimates have been up to 1.6 million. Some of those Jews added to the death toll attempted to find refuge in the forest, but were killed later on by Home Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or other partisan groups during the German retreat. According to American historian Wendy Lower, "there were many perpetrators, albeit with different political agendas, who killed Jews and suppressed this history".

Executor units

• Einsatzgruppen C & D (Einsatzkommando)
• Abwehr/Brandemburg special saboteur unit Nachtigall Battalion
• Freiwilligen-Stamm-Regiment 3 & 4 (Russians & Ukrainians)
• Ukrainian auxiliary units: Schutzmannschaft as well as Ukrainische Hilfspolizei

Survivors

• Mina Rosner
• Roald Hoffmann
• Shevah Weiss
• Simon Wiesenthal
• Adam Daniel Rotfeld
• Mordechai Rokeach
• Stefan Petelycky

Rescuers

Ukraine rates the 4th in the number of people recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for saving Jews during the Holocaust, with the total of 2,515 individuals recognized as of 1 January 2015.

The Shtundists, an evangelical Protestant denomination which emerged in late 19th century Ukraine, helped hide Jews.

Massacres

• Babyn Yar
• Bila Tserkva
• Dnipropetrovsk
• Feodosiya
• Ivano-Frankivsk
• Klevan
• Lviv pogroms
• Massacre of Lviv professors
• Mezhirichi
• Mizoch
• Nikolaev massacre
• Olyka
• Plyskiv
• Terebovl
• Zhytomyr

See also

• Einsatzgruppen trial
• Gas van
• History of the Jews in Ukraine
• Hegewald, a short-lived German Colony near Zhytomyr
• No Place on Earth, a 2012 documentary film on a group of Ukrainian Jews who survived the height of The Holocaust in the Verteba and Priest's Grotto caves

References

1. Grzegorz,, Rossolinski, (2014). Stepan Bandera : the life and afterlife of a Ukrainian nationalist : Fascism, genocide, and cult. Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem-Verlag. ISBN 9783838206868. OCLC 880566030.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
2. 1926-, Arad, Yitzhak, (2009). Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 89. ISBN 9780803222700. OCLC 466441935. {{cite book}}: |last= has numeric name (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
3. "Nazikollaborateur als neuer Held der Ukraine - Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin". www.jg-berlin.org (in German). Retrieved 2018-01-05.
4. Himka, John-Paul. "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
5. Gregorovich, Andrew (1995). "World War II in Ukraine: Jewish Holocaust in Ukraine". Reprinted from FORUM Ukrainian Review (92).
6. "Timothy Snyder: Germany must own up to past atrocities in Ukraine". Retrieved 5 July 2017.
7. ^ Hagen, William W. (2012). German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 313. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |name-list-format= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help)
8. DIETRICH EICHHOLTZ "»Generalplan Ost« zur Versklavung osteuropäischer Völker"
9. Madajczyk, Czesław. "Die Besatzungssysteme der Achsenmächte. Versuch einer komparatistischen Analyse." Studia Historiae Oeconomicae vol. 14 (1980): pp. 105-122 in Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945: A Critical Assessment by Gerd R. Ueberschär and Rolf-Dieter Müller
10. ^ Berenbaum, Michael (2006). The World Must Know. Contributors: Arnold Kramer, USHMM (2nd ed.). USHMM / Johns Hopkins Univ Press. ISBN 978-0801883583. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) P. 93.
11. Hemme, Amira Lapidot (2012). "Jewish History of Mykolayiv (Nikolayev), Kherson Gubernia". JewishGen. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
12. ^ Berenbaum 2006, pp. 97–8.
13. "President Putin Has Called Ukraine a Hotbed of Anti-Semites. It's Not.". National Geographic. May 30, 2014
14. Nazi-hunters give low grades to 13 countries, including Ukraine, Kyiv Post (January 12, 2011)
15. Arad, Yitzhak (2009). The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. U of Nebraska Press. p. 211. ISBN 0-8032-2270-X.
16. Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake, Eurozine (7 July 2017)
17. Lower, Wendy. "Introduction: the Holocaust in Ukraine". Holocaust and Genocide Studies: 3.
18. "Mobile Killing Squads". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
19. Petelycky, Stefan (1999). Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine (PDF). Kashtan Press. ISBN 978-1-896354-16-3.
20. "Names and Numbers of Righteous Among the Nations - per Country & Ethnic Origin, as of January 1, 2015". Yad Vashem. Retrieved 12 December 2015.
21. Snyder, Timothy (2015). Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Crown/Archetype. p. 328. ISBN 978-1-101-90346-9.

External links

• The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Conference Papers, 2013
• 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.

• The Holocaust by country
• The Holocaust in Ukraine
• Jewish Ukrainian history
• Military history of Ukraine during World War II
• Reichskommissariat Ukraine
• World War II prisoners of war massacres
• Eastern Front (World War II)
• Ukraine in World War II
• 1940s in Ukraine