Harvest of despair: life and death in Ukraine under Nazi rule

Abstract

Karel C. Berkhoff. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 463pp.This is a fascinating and much-needed study of people's life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, an administrative unit that at its largest included the larger part of German-occupied Ukraine-Volhynia, all of Right-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv and Poltava oblasts on the Left Bank, and Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovs'k oblasts in southern Ukraine. Over one hundred pages of notes referring to numerous secondary sources and archival documents from various depositories in Ukraine, Russia, Germany and the United States emphasize how well researched this study is.Earlier classic works, like Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia, examined the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union from a history from above perspective, focusing on the power struggle between Erich Koch and Alfred Rosenberg and the continuous infighting between other German officials and institutions. Harvest of Despair, by contrast, looks at the events through the eyes of those on the receiving end, the civilian population of Ukraine. This Alltagsgeschichte approach is the main merit of the book.The study is structured thematically, covering different aspects of people's life, death and survival in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Chapter I describes the German advance into Ukraine and the Soviet retreat. Having committed mass atrocities and employed a scorched-earth policy, the retreating Soviet authorities behaved as a native government, but as a conqueror that had to leave. One of the most important reasons explaining the rapid German advance into Ukraine was the massive desertion and unwillingness to fight for the collective farm regime. Initially, the majority of Ukrainians, especially peasants, welcomed the Germans. People thought that it was not possible to live worse than under the Soviets. The next chapter portrays the establishment of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the radically racist ethos of the reichskommissar Erich Koch and his entourage, which permeated all levels of Nazi civil administration and set the ground for further brutalization of German policy.Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the genocide of the Jews and the mass murder of Soviet POWs. The vast majority of the local population did interfere to help the Jews. While traditional anti-Semitism partially accounts for such a response, the fear of denunciation and the death penalty played a major role. Those who denounced hiding Jews very often did so to obtain property or reward or to prove their reliability to the authorities rather than because of anti-Jewish sentiments.The starvation of the Soviet POWs was a result of Nazi racist beliefs. The German military command obstructed aid from the local population that could have spared the lives hundreds of thousands of POWs. The mass starvation happened despite the excellent Ukrainian harvest of 1941.Chapter 5 analyzes life in the countryside. Hoping to get their land back, initially the overwhelming majority of peasants were pleased with the arrival of the Germans. Peasants' living standards generally improved during the occupation. But, with the collective system largely left intact and increasing abuse and violence, they began to consider their situation at least as bad as under the Soviet system.The next two chapters deal with the situation in the cities. Conditions of life significantly deteriorated for all city dwellers except the small group of entrepreneurs. Scholars, who were considered useless by the Nazis, were left to starve. …