the holocaust and colonialism in ukraine - Apple

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10 • THE HOLOCAUST AND COLONIALISM IN UKRAINE 1942 the commissars learned at a large convention in Rivne that the Jewish Question was to be solved 100 percent over the weeks that followed. 40 Two months later, Himmler sanctioned the destruction of the Ukraine’s last remaining ghetto in Pinsk. 41 Meanwhile, Himmler also pushed through the first phase in resettlement operations and experimental colonization of Volksdeutsche in the Ukraine (centered at Dnjepropetrovsk, Nikolaev, and Zhytomyr) as well as in Poland (centered in Lublin). Himmler’s agents in the SS and police, Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office), and the Race and Settlement Office, along with Nazi Party officials and the commissars, resettled close to 100,000 Volksdeutsche in the designated colonial spaces of the Ukraine. Together they constructed agricultural communities and established a plethora of occupational training and educational programs. Although Nazi leaders proclaimed the resettlement effort a success, most regional leaders complained that the campaign was a mess. At Hegewald, a Volksdeutsche colony adjacent to Himmler’s headquarters near Zhytomyr, district SS-Police officials and NS Party officials (many of them female teachers and midwives who served as “pioneer” welfare workers in the East) found that they could not feed and care for the ethnic Germans, especially for the hundreds of kidnapped children who had been placed in makeshift orphanages. Soviet partisans attacked the Volksdeutsche settlers and raided their food supplies. 42 Lacking the personnel and resources, German regional administrators doubted the success of Nazi colonization, especially on the grandiose scale projected by Himmler and Hitler. The defeat of Hitler’s forces by the Red Army and mounting partisan warfare behind the lines cut short Nazi colonization plans. Yet overall, regional leaders realized early in the campaign that developing productive colonies was a far more difficult task than destroying “non-Aryan” populations and cultures. For the final killing sweeps against the remaining Jewish population carried out in late 1942–43, the SS-Police relied heavily on the German commissars to coordinate the use of local units, trucks, and ammunition and on the Ukrainian police auxiliaries to search the forests, fields, and ghettos for every last Jew in hiding. In December 1942 the Gebietskommissar of Berdychiv warned that any locals who did not give up Jews in hiding or reveal their whereabouts would also be killed. 43 Once those in hiding were discovered, the lowest-level German gendarmes and their Ukrainian auxiliaries shot the Jewish men, women, and children. 44 Over 20,000 Jews who worked on the construction of the autobahn in southern Ukraine were also killed during the Wehrmacht’s hasty
Wendy Lower • 11 retreat from the territory in fall 1943. German engineers and labor foremen from the Organisation Todt participated in the selection of the Jewish labor force; they allowed the “unfit” ones to be killed and worked the able-bodied men and women to death. 45 In total, the Germans and their accomplices murdered more than 650,000 Jews in the territory of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine between the summer of 1941 and spring 1944. In the Zhytomyr District alone, they killed at least 175,000 Jews. Fewer than two percent of Zhytomyr’s Jewish population survived. Nazi dreams of an Aryan paradise in the East may have inspired Hitler and Himmler to push through a genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question. However, there is little evidence of lower-level leaders in the regional outposts of the Ukraine justifying, rationalizing, or referring to the killing of Jews as the first step in German colonization, or “germanization,” of the area. The local implementers of the mass murder do not seem to have been motivated by a coherent ideological vision of the future Lebensraum. The antisemitic ideas and slogans that drove the Holocaust in the Ukraine centered almost exclusively on the alleged political and security threat of Soviet Jews who were branded the bearers of Bolshevism. The murder was presented first (whether in Poland, the Ukraine, France, Serbia, or Germany itself) as a security issue on which the survival of the Reich and Germany’s dominance depended. For the many non-German perpetrators whose future under the Nazi regime was uncertain, killing Jews was motivated by other aims, some short term in nature such as material gain, or long term such as the creation of their own ethnically homogeneous nation. Some perpetrators killed Jews simply because they could and chose to do so. While a general distrust, fear, or even hatred of Jews could be found across European society, antisemitism took on different forms across Europe. Thus in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, colonialist thinking was only one of an amalgam of destructive ideas that brought about the Holocaust. Resettlement programs influenced the timing of the mass murder in certain regions of the East, whereas the Holocaust engulfed all of Germandominated Europe including territories not subject to settlement by German colonizers. Conclusion The ground-level approach of recent research has created a more differentiated picture of the Holocaust, one that has led to a reexamination of the decision-making process and of the context of the Holocaust as it figures in European history. Decision-making must be understood within a dynamic center-periphery context. To be sure, the
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