Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine

Abstract

Though the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime have been the subject of exhaustive historical analysis, Wendy Lower's study of how the conquest, colonisation and ‘racial purification’ of Ukraine was conceptualised and implemented by Nazi leaders and their functionaries is part of a recent wave of research which marks an interesting new approach to this fraught topic. Instead of focusing on those at the highest levels of the regime in order to determine such issues as how and when the final order was given to destroy the Jewish population of Europe, much of this work looks at the actions of those German police and state officials sent to the farthest reaches of this short-lived empire. By examining Nazi attempts to transform the ethnic balance of the Zhytomyr region in central Ukraine, Wendy Lower emphasises the key role played by German officials on the ‘frontline’ of the Nazi imperial project in shaping the genocidal policies of the regime. Unlike previous studies, which have tended to analyse the destruction of Jewish populations, relations with Slavic communities or the resettlement of locally-based ethnic Germans, Lower emphasises the extent to which these three policy strands were interconnected. The complex role played by Ukrainians in the genocidal schemes of various SS leaders and German administrative functionaries is also given its rightful place. Some of the most fascinating sections of this book are those which detail the manner in which many local Ukrainians manipulated Nazi paranoia over possible Jewish ‘threats’ to their own economic or political advantage (p. 94). Equally effective is Lower's examination of the different ways in which the incompetence and ideologically driven brutality of German administrators quickly alienated even those Ukrainians who had hoped for the end of Communist rule (p. 115). Particularly interesting is the competitive dynamic that existed between different parts of the German administration which seems to have both speeded up the genocidal policies in which Ukrainian collaborators played an essential part and at the same time encouraged the use of increasingly brutal measures to extract resources and forcibly recruit labour which undermined the commitment of these local auxiliaries to the German cause (p. 125). Lower convincingly links these genocidal policies with the parallel efforts of local Nazi leaders to ‘re-educate’ ethnic Germans who had lived in Zhytomyr prior to 1939 in order to transform a largely uneducated and impoverished community into the soldier-peasants of Nazi racial fantasies. The fact that the Hegwald colony established by the SS, which marked the culmination of these plans to construct a purely German colony in a central part of the Zhytomyr, was only brought about by the forcible resettlement of ethnic Germans from across Ukraine, indicates the extent to which German policies destroyed the lives of even those who were supposed to benefit from the colonial projects of the Nazi regime (p. 178). Crucially, however, this study also demonstrates the ways in which members of ethnic German communities tried to take advantage of the new political order to improve their own economic and political position, often taking part in pogroms, plundering and mass executions in the process (p. 137).