The Holocaust in Ukraine

The Holocaust in Ukraine
SS paramilitaries murder Jewish civilians, including a mother and her child, in 1942, in Ivanhorod, Ukraine.
LocationUkrainian SSR
Date22 June 1941 to 1944
Incident typeImprisonment, mass shootings, concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor, starvation, torture, mass kidnapping
PerpetratorsErich Koch, Friedrich Jeckeln, Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel and many others.
Various local Nazi collaborators, including Ukrainian Auxiliary Police,[1] and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists[2][3][4][1]
OrganizationsEinsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, Axis occupation forces (Hungarians, Romanians),[5] and local collaborators
Victims850,000[6] – 1,600,000 Ukrainian Jews[7][8]
MemorialsIn various places in the country
A map of the Holocaust in Ukraine

The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine (all of those areas were under the military control of Nazi Germany), in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region (all of those areas were then part of Romania, with the latter three areas being re-annexed) and Carpathian Ruthenia (then part of Hungary) during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine (except modern-day Transnistria).[9][a]

Between 1941 and 1945, between 850,000[10][11][12]–1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine, which included assistance of local collaborators.[7][8][13]

According to Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder, "the Holocaust is integrally and organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg, the war in 1941, and it is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine. … Had Hitler not had the colonial idea to fight a war in Eastern Europe to control Ukraine, had there not been that idea, there could not have been a Holocaust.”[14] According to Wendy Lower, the genocide of the Ukrainian Jews was closely linked to German plans to exploit and colonize Ukraine.[15]

  1. ^ a b Himka, John-Paul. "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd". Academia.
  2. ^ Grzegorz, Rossolinski (2014). Stepan Bandera : the life and afterlife of a Ukrainian nationalist : Fascism, genocide, and cult. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. ISBN 978-3838206868. OCLC 880566030.
  3. ^ Arad, Yitzhak (2009). Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-0803222700. OCLC 466441935.
  4. ^ "Nazikollaborateur als neuer Held der Ukraine – Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin". www.jg-berlin.org (in German). Retrieved 5 January 2018.
  5. ^ Kay, Alex J.; Rutherford, Jeff; Stahel, David (2012). Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941 : total war, genocide, and radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 203. ISBN 978-1580467698. OCLC 794328914.
  6. ^ "Questions and answers about the Holocaust (Hebrew) (#4)". Yad Vashem (in Hebrew): 4.
  7. ^ a b Kruglov, Alexander Iosifovich. "ХРОНИКА ХОЛОКОСТА В УКРАИНЕ 1941–1944 гг" (PDF). holocaust-ukraine.net. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 August 2014. To this number of victims should be added Jews who died in captivity, as well as Jews who were exterminated on the territory of Russia (mainly in the North Caucasus), where they evacuated in 1941 and where they were caught by the Germans in 1942. Number of Jews who perished can be estimated at 1.6 million.
  8. ^ a b D. Snyder, Timothy; Brandon, Ray. Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953. Approximately 1.5 million of the approximately 5.7 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust came from within the borders of what is today Ukraine – Dieter Pohl
  9. ^ Gregorovich, Andrew (1995). "World War II in Ukraine: Jewish Holocaust in Ukraine". Reprinted from Forum Ukrainian Review (92).
  10. ^ Alfred J. Rieber (2003). "Civil Wars in the Soviet Union" (PDF). pp. 133, 145–147. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 October 2020. Retrieved 8 June 2022. Slavica Publishers.
  11. ^ Magocsi, Paul Robert (1996). A History of Ukraine. University of Toronto Press. p. 679. ISBN 978-0802078209.
  12. ^ Dawidowicz, Lucy S. (1986). The war against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Bantam Books. p. 403. ISBN 0-553-34302-5.
  13. ^ Himka, John-Paul (2024). "Antisemitism in Ukraine". In Weitzman, Mark; Williams, Robert J.; Wald, James (eds.). The Routledge History of Antisemitism (1st ed.). Abingdon and New York: Routledge. p. 241. doi:10.4324/9780429428616. ISBN 978-1-138-36944-3. As a result of Nazi policy, about one and a half million Jews were murdered on the territories that constitute modern Ukraine.
  14. ^ "Timothy Snyder: Germany must own up to past atrocities in Ukraine". Retrieved 5 July 2017.
  15. ^ Kay, Alex J.; Rutherford, Jeff; Stahel, David (2012). Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941 : total war, genocide, and radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 232. ISBN 978-1580467698. OCLC 794328914.


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