the holocaust and colonialism in ukraine - Apple

18 • THE HOLOCAUST AND COLONIALISM IN UKRAINE
Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1993); and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche
Siedlungspolitik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991). See also Robert Koehl, RKFDV:
German Resettlement and Population Policy, 1939–1945: A History of the Reich
Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1957); Valdis O. Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle
and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993); and Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”:
Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).
31. Müller, Hitlers Ostkrieg, p. 8.
32. Doris Bergen argues that the “tenuousness of the notion of ‘Volksdeutsche’ actually
contributed to the intensification of anti-Semitism.” Even Himmler told his men at
Hegewald to remember that the current sacrifices and hardships they endured in the East
were heroic contributions toward Germany’s future Lebensraum. But the more common
rationale “on paper” for killing Jews was “to secure the Reich”; this Nazi approach
provided an immediate, convincing motivation for actions against the Jews, whom the
Nazis deemed the most threatening. See Doris L. Bergen, “The Nazi Concept of
‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–1945,”
Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994), p. 578. The intersection of Volksdeutsche
resettlement programs and the persecution of Jews is more apparent in Poland, especially
in the Warthegau region. See Sybille Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz:
Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: Saur, 2000);
Valdis Lumans, “A Reassessment of Volksdeutsche and Jews in the Volhynia-Galicia-
Narew Resettlement,” in The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich
and Its Legacy, ed. Daniel Rogers and Alan Steinweis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2003), pp. 81–100.
33. In the summer of 1942, when Zhytomyr’s SD Chief, Franz Razesberger, issued a
verbal order to kill the remaining Jews in Berdychiv (many of whom had labored at
Hegewald), he explained the murder as a “security precaution.” On the Razesberger
order, see Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung Deutscher Strafurteile wegen
Nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 1945–1966, band 16, Case against Knop et
al. (Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1976), pp. 345–49.
34. Situation report of General Commissar Ernst Leyser, 30 June 1943, NARA, RG 238
(Nuremberg Trials) reel A213/088693.
35. Koch had asked Oelhafen to make Rivne “Judenfrei” before his arrival; when asked
about this aktion after the war, Oelhafen told Nuremberg interrogators that “Rowno das
war ein kleines Nest, 500–600” (“Rivne, that was a small nest”; “nest” in this context
could mean “dump” or “hole in the ground”). Actually, the number of Jews killed was