the holocaust and colonialism in ukraine - Apple

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