Invasion and Annihilation

Yitzhak Arad, The History of the Holocaust:

The Soviet Union and the Annexed Areas

Yad Vashem, 2004, Vol. I – 568 pp., Vol. II – 524 pp.

by Leah Goldstein

The latest volume in the critical series The History of the Holocaust covers, for the first time, the fate of the Jews under Nazi occupation in the Soviet Union and the Annexed Areas (including the Baltic States, Bessarabia and North Bukovina, West Belorussia and West Ukraine). An essential breakthrough in research on this topic occured with the opening of the Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. In addition, many survivor testimonies have been collected from Russian immigrants to Israel over the past decade. The result is a two-volume work by former Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Dr Yitzhak Arad, emphasizing the unique aspects of the implementation of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in these areas.

Jews digging their own graves before being executed by the Einsatzgruppen, USSR, 1941

Soviet Jews were the first in Europe to be annihilated. Unlike in other Nazi-occupied countries, where the Jewish population was subjected to a number of different stages—such as wearing a yellow badge, ghettoization and forced labor—before being taken to extermination camps, here, execution was carried out immediately following the German occupation. In most cases, victims were killed close to their homes. The majority of Jews were shot; in certain places they were gassed in vans or suffocated in abandoned mines. In this way, the Germans exterminated the Jews of Kiev, Kharkov and many other cities. In a few places (such as Vilna, Minsk and Lvov), all the stages were interconnected and implemented simultaneously.

This kind of mass murder required the active and direct participation of thousands of Germans, members of the Einsatzgruppen and German Order police units, along with tens of thousands of local collaborators—particularly in the Baltic States and the Ukraine. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, the German army and the military administration collaborated with the Einsatzgruppen in their murderous actions.

The murders were conducted in the open, with the local people well aware that their Jewish neighbors were not being sent to work “somewhere in the East” but being taken for immediate execution. Influenced by generations’-long antisemitic sentiment as well as Nazi German propaganda claiming their fight was not with the Russian people or the other nations of the Soviet Union, but against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks”, many locals eagerly offered their assistance. In addition, the measures employed by the Germans for any infringements of Nazi edicts—including aiding and abetting the Jews—were extremely cruel. In spite of this terrifying atmosphere, a few gentiles risked their lives to help the Jews. Yet the apathy of the vast majority of the local population, and the cooperation of many of them with the Nazis, significantly contributed to the highest Jewish death rate in German-occupied Europe: about 96% of the local Jewish population was wiped out.

The Jews’ reaction to the extermination policies was characterized by a prominent element of armed resistance. The phenomenon of clandestine organizations—and particularly the scale of escape to the forests and collaboration with other partisan groups—was unparalleled in the rest of Europe.

Alongside the immense number of deaths, the Holocaust in the Soviet Union also resulted in the elimination of the shtetl—that for centuries had embodied the Jews’ unique way of life in Eastern Europe—and of Jewish agricultural settlements (kolkhozes) with tens of thousands of Jewish peasants, particularly in the Ukraine and Crimea.

Despite the relief of victory over Germany in 1944, Holocaust survivors in these lands did not resume a calm and quiet life. In addition to the objective difficulties faced by all Soviet citizens at that time, Jews also faced persistent antisemitism from the local populace and the government establishment, which continued to thwart their attempts at rehabilitation for many decades to come.

The publication, supported by the Claims Conference and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, is currently being translated into English.

Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority