Chapter 22 Hitler’s Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler presented his views on the future of the world in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the book he dictated in the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria during his incarceration for his role in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923.

The idea of Lebensraum for the Germans was not Hitler’s creation. First formulated before World War I, it envisioned the acquisition of German territory all over the world. Germany’s defeat in the war made colonial expansion across the British-controlled seaways all but impossible, and Hitler saw room for growth in eastern Europe alone. “It would have been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of possessions abroad,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), which included the recognition of a Ukraine independent of Russia and occupied by German and Austrian troops, provided one model for German eastward expansion. But Hitler had little appetite for nation building in the east. His goal was different: to wipe out the existing population all the way to the Volga and settle the fertile lands of eastern Europe — Ukraine in particular — with German colonists.

Hitler’s rural utopia for the Germans required not only the acquisition of new territory but also its deurbanization and depopulation. His vision for eastern Europe differed greatly from the one introduced by the Bolsheviks and promoted by Joseph Stalin. Both dictators were prepared to use brute force to build their utopias, and both needed Ukrainian territory, soil, and agriculture to achieve their goals, but they had dissimilar attitudes toward the cities and the population at large. Ukraine would learn what that meant in practice and assess the degree of difference between the two regimes during its three-year occupation by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. With its pre-1914 reputation as the breadbasket of Europe and one of the highest concentrations of Jews on the continent, Ukraine would become both a prime object of German expansionism and one of the Nazis’ main victims. Between 1939 and 1945 it would lose almost 7 million citizens (close to 1 million of them Jewish), or more than 16 percent of its prewar population. Only Belarus and Poland — two other countries within the sphere of Hitler’s Lebensraum — sustained higher proportional losses.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler envisioned an alliance with Britain to defeat France and a pact with Russia to annihilate Poland. Ultimately, Russia — or, rather, the Soviet Union — was supposed to provide Hitler with what he wanted: land for settlement and a wealth of natural resources that would turn Germany into a continental empire whose links with its colonies the British navy could not disrupt. The alliance with Britain never materialized, but by the fall of 1939 Hitler had indeed accomplished an accord with the Soviet Union and the annihilation of Poland.

When World War II began with a German attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin had already agreed on a partition of the Polish lands on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed less than ten days earlier. As Stalin delayed Soviet entrance into the war, concerned about the reaction of Britain and France as well as the ongoing Soviet-Japanese conflict in Mongolia, German diplomats used the Ukrainian card to speed up the Soviet attack on Poland. They claimed that if the USSR continued to delay its invasion, Germany would have no choice but to create separate states in the territories assigned to the Soviet Union. The formation of a German-backed Ukrainian state in Galicia and Volhynia was the last thing Stalin wanted to see in that area. When he finally sent his troops across the Polish border, they marched under the pretext of defending the “fraternal” Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.

By early October 1939, the Polish army had ceased to exist, destroyed by the attacks of the two powerful neighbors. The Soviets captured but then released most of its rank-and-file soldiers. The officers, however, met a different fate. The USSR detained close to 15,000 of them in three detention camps, one in Ukraine and two in Russia. In the spring of 1940, most of them would perish in Katyn Forest near Smolensk and other sites of mass murder. Initially, however, few people, especially among the non-Poles, suspected the Soviets of evil intentions. The Red Army, which was no match for the Germans in mechanization, demonstrated its superiority to the Polish troops in the quality of its armaments, which included new tanks, aircraft, and modern guns — all products of Stalin’s industrialization effort. But to the surprise of many, the Soviet officers and soldiers were often badly dressed, poorly fed, and shocked by the relative abundance of food and goods in the Polish shops. The locals found Soviet officers ideologically indoctrinated, uncultured, and unsophisticated.

Once the Red Army had taken Lviv and other major centers in Galicia and Volhynia, the occupiers held Soviet-style elections to the National Assembly of Western Ukraine, which in turn asked Kyiv and Moscow to annex Galicia and Volhynia to Soviet Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev, the newly appointed party boss in Kyiv, insisted that the northern Polisia, including the city of Brest, also be transferred to Ukraine, but Stalin decided to assign that territory to the Belarusian republic. The new authorities made it possible for local Ukrainians and Jews to enter government service and take the positions in educational, medical, and other institutions denied them under Polish rule. They treated local Jews well but often turned those the Germans expelled from Poland back at the border. The authorities launched a comprehensive Ukrainization campaign, turning the Polish-language university, schools, theaters, and publishing houses into Ukrainian ones. They also nationalized large landholdings and distributed the land among the poor peasants. Pro-Soviet sympathies, always strong among members of communist and leftist parties and organizations in the region, grew even stronger.

But the honeymoon in relations between the Soviet authorities and the local Ukrainians did not last long. Never well disposed to organized religion — the institutional basis of Ukrainian identity in the former Polish republic — the Soviets confiscated the landholdings of the Greek Catholic Church and tried to limit the role of the traditional churches, both Orthodox and Greek Catholic, in public life. More surprising was the Soviet treatment of former leaders and rank-and-file members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, who were generally suspected of nationalism and eventually targeted by the Soviet secret police.

In 1940, the occupation authorities began mass arrests and deportations of the local population to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia. Former Polish government and police officials, members of Polish political parties, and military settlers brought to the region during the interwar period headed the list of “enemies of the people.” In February 1940, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, carried out the first mass deportation of close to 140,000 Poles. Nearly 5,000 deportees did not reach their destinations, dying of cold, disease, and malnutrition on the way. Altogether, between the fall of 1939 and June 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR, the Soviet secret police deported close to 1.25 million people from Ukraine. The NKVD also hunted members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose leaders, including Stepan Bandera, fled to the German-controlled part of Poland. Stalin saw them as a clear and present danger to his regime.

The fall of Paris to the advancing German armies in May 1940 caught Stalin by surprise and made him think that Hitler would soon turn eastward to attack the Soviet Union. The regime had to solidify its control over the newly acquired territories and remove potential “fifth columnists.” Stalin also decided to occupy all parts of eastern Europe assigned to his sphere of influence by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of Romania, which comprised Bessarabia and Bukovyna. The Soviet leader annexed southern Bessarabia and northern Bukovyna, settled largely by Ukrainians, to Soviet Ukraine in August 1940. There the Soviet authorities introduced the same policies as they had earlier in Galicia and Volhynia, including the nationalization of land, promotion of local non-Romanian cadres, and Ukrainization of institutions. Arrests and deportations followed.

Stalin was preparing for an attack by his ally, Adolf Hitler. He expected it to take place in 1942, but it came a year earlier, catching the Soviet dictator by surprise. Hitler needed Soviet resources, including Ukrainian wheat and coal, as soon as possible, especially as he was still at war with Britain, and behind the British lion cornered on its islands loomed the much larger United States — the most powerful economy in the world. Hitler attacked the USSR against the objections of the Reich’s leading economists, who argued that the invasion would solve none of Germany’s problems and become a drain on the German economy. But the military brass preferred war with the Soviets to war with the West, and Hitler was happy to oblige.

In December 1940 he signed a directive ordering preparations for war with the Soviet Union. The operation was code-named Barbarossa after the twelfth-century German king and Holy Roman emperor who had led the Third Crusade. He had drowned while trying to cross a river in heavy armor instead of taking the bridge used by his troops. It was certainly a bad omen, but at the time those in the know paid no attention to historical precedent. Like Barbarossa before him, Hitler was prepared to take risks and cut corners. The planners aimed to defeat the Soviets and drive them beyond the Volga in the course of a campaign that would last no longer than three months. Hitler wanted his armies to take Leningrad first, capture the Donbas coal mines second, and then take Moscow. The Wehrmacht sent German soldiers to the front with no provision for winter clothing. This turned out to be a mistake, although it had the short-term benefit of misleading Stalin, who refused to believe that the Germans would attack without preparing for a winter campaign and was thus caught off guard when they invaded.

The invasion began in the early hours of June 22, 1941, along a front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Germany and its allies, including Romania and Hungary, fielded some 3.8 million soldiers. Germany’s Army Group South attacked Ukraine, advancing from positions in Poland and marching along the ancient route between the northern slopes of the Carpathians and the Prypiat marshes. The Romanians attacked in the south, moving into Ukraine between the southern slopes of the Carpathians and the Black Sea. The Huns had used these routes in the fifth century and the Mongols in the thirteenth when they invaded central Europe. Now the troops moved in the opposite direction, but they proceeded along the same unpaved roads, with mechanized divisions, not cavalry, raising dust. On the Soviet front, the Germans concentrated some 4,000 tanks and more than 7,000 artillery pieces. Over 4,000 aircraft covered the advance. The Germans had almost complete control of the air — a surprise Luftwaffe attack destroyed the bulk of Soviet military planes on the airfields before they could become airborne.

The Red Army had approximately the same number of men on the Soviet western border as the Germans and significantly more tanks, guns, and aircraft. The USSR’s materiel, however, was inferior to the latest German models, and inexperienced officers, who had only recently replaced the more experienced commanders purged by Stalin, led its men into battle. Commanders abandoned their units, while the morale of the soldiers, many of them peasants who had survived the famine and collectivization, was low. It fell further with every passing day as the Germans took advantage of their surprise attack, gained territory rapidly, and inflicted devastating casualties on the retreating Soviet troops. What Stalin had considered his success — the acquisition of new territory after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — turned out to be a trap. In the month preceding the invasion, he had moved his troops west of the defense lines built over the previous decade so as to protect the new borders, and now they had to defend a border that they had had no time to fortify. As envisioned by the planners of blitzkrieg warfare, the German panzer divisions cut through the Soviet defenses, encircling entire armies and creating havoc behind Red Army lines.

In western Ukraine, Red Army commanders launched a major counteroffensive in the region of Lutsk, Brody, and Rivne, sending all their tank formations into battle, only to be outmaneuvered and defeated by a much smaller Wehrmacht tank force. It would be all downhill after that. In three weeks, the Wehrmacht managed to advance eastward anywhere from three hundred to six hundred kilometers. Not only Galicia and Volhynia, recently occupied by Soviet forces, but also large parts of Right-Bank Ukraine were lost. More than 2,500 Soviet tanks and close to 2,000 aircraft were destroyed. Casualties were hard to count. In August, German divisions surrounded and imprisoned more than 100,000 Red Army soldiers near the city of Uman in Podolia, but they took the greatest prize near Kyiv the following month. Contrary to the advice of Red Army commanders, including the head of the General Staff, Georgii Zhukov, Stalin refused to withdraw his troops from the Kyiv region, given the city’s symbolic importance, and caused probably the greatest Soviet military disaster of the entire war.

Red Army units led by a native of the Chernihiv region, General Mykhailo Kyrponos, resisted the advance but could do little against German mechanized divisions. Kyiv fell to the Germans on September 19, 1941. General Kyrponos died in battle the next day near the town of Lokhvytsia. The Wehrmacht surrounded and took prisoner more than 660,000 Red Army soldiers in the Kyiv pocket. In October, the same fate befell close to 100,000 men between Melitopol and Berdiansk in southern Ukraine, and another 100,000 surrendered near Kerch in the Crimea in November. By the end of the year, when the Red Army was forced to abandon almost all of Ukraine, more than 3.5 million of its officers and soldiers were in enemy hands. The retreating Soviets followed a scorched-earth policy, removing industrial equipment, livestock, supplies, and people from areas they were about to leave. Altogether, they evacuated approximately 550 large factories and 3.5 million skilled laborers to the east.

Many in Ukraine welcomed the German advance in the summer of 1941, hoping for the end of the terror unleashed by the Soviet occupation authorities in the years leading up to the war. This was true not only for the recently occupied regions of western Ukraine but also for central and eastern Ukraine, where the population never forgave the regime for the horrors of the famine and collectivization. Some expected that “national socialism” would bring true socialism. Others simply hoped for improved living standards. With Soviet salaries insufficient to buy even a pair of shoes, it was not difficult to nourish false hopes and imagine that the “European” Germans would make life better for the population they were “liberating” from Moscow’s control. Many remembered the Austrians of the pre–World War I period and the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, which was benign by the standards of the Stalinist terror. Some saw the return of the Germans as a prelude to the restoration of a Ukrainian state as it had been under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. Those who awaited the Germans with such expectations were soon proved wrong, often dead wrong, irrespective of what had fed their hopes for a better life under German occupation.

The German minister for the occupied eastern territories, Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German educated in Moscow, among other places, originally put together German plans for Ukraine. He wanted to support Ukrainian, Baltic, Belarusian, Georgian, and other Soviet nationalities’ aspirations for independent statehood in order to undermine the Soviet Union. In his vision, a Ukrainian polity independent of Russia would become a client state of the Reich along with a Baltic federation, Belarus, and Finland. Indeed, Rosenberg’s experts advocated the expansion of Ukrainian territory all the way to the Volga. But Rosenberg lost the political contest to head of the German security forces and later minister of the interior Heinrich Himmler, Reichstag president and aviation minister Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders eager to implement their racial ideology and squeeze the newly conquered territories for every economic resource they had. The 1918 Brest-Litovsk vision of eastern European states, Ukraine among them, controlled by Germany gave way in the summer of 1941 to a model, rooted in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, of colonial dismemberment and exploitation.

The Germans divided the Ukrainian territories under their control into three parts: Galicia was lumped together with what had been Western Galicia and the Warsaw region into an entity called the General Government; most of Ukraine from Volhynia in the northwest to Zaporizhia in the southeast, along with southern Belarus around the cities of Pinsk and Homel, became the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; and eastern Ukraine, from Chernihiv in the north to Luhansk and Stalino (Yuzivka, Donetsk) in the south, remained under military command as an area too close to the front lines to be assigned to civilian administration. The division of Galicia and Volhynia and the aggregation of Volhynia with Dnieper Ukraine reflected German thinking about the region in terms of the divide established by the Russo-Austrian border in the late eighteenth century. The partitioning of Ukraine was not the only disappointment that befell those previously terrorized by the Soviets. They would soon discover that the Germans of 1941 were anything but the Germans of 1918.

The first to experience disappointment with the Nazi regime were the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had split in 1940, soon after one of its most radical leaders, Stepan Bandera, walked out of a Polish prison in September 1939. Bandera led a revolt against the old cadres and soon found himself at the helm of the OUN’s largest faction and most radical members. In February 1941, they made a deal with the leaders of German military intelligence (Abwehr) to form two battalions of special operations forces from their supporters. One battalion, Nachtigall, was among the first German troops to enter Lviv on June 29. The next day it took part in the proclamation of Ukrainian independence by members of the Bandera faction of the OUN. This spelled the end of German cooperation with Bandera’s followers. The Germans, who had very different plans for Ukraine, turned on their former allies, arresting scores of members of the Bandera faction, including Bandera himself, whom they told to denounce the declaration of independence. He refused and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he would spend most of the war. Two of his brothers were arrested as well and died in Auschwitz.

The Bandera faction of the OUN went overnight from the Germans’ loyal ally to their enemy. The more moderate OUN faction, headed by Colonel Andrii Melnyk, tried to take advantage of the German conflict with its competitors and moved its expeditionary groups into central and eastern Ukraine to set up its network, influence the selection of Ukrainian cadres for the occupation administration, and conduct educational work and propaganda among the local population. The faction’s operations came to a halt in late 1941, with the German administration taking ever stricter control over the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Nazi police had hundreds of OUN members shot in Kyiv and other cities and towns of Ukraine. By early 1942, both factions of the OUN were at war with the Germans.

Nazi theatment of Soviet prisoners of war sent another signal, this time to the citizens of central and eastern Ukraine, that the Germans of 1941 bore no resemblance to the Germans of 1918. If the former were just occupiers, the latter were colonizers who treated the conquered as subhuman.

Before the war, Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention of 1929 that regulated the treatment of prisoners of war — the USSR was a revolutionary power that did not abide by capitalist rules of conduct. When he tried to do so in the summer of 1941, it was too late: the Germans would not agree to extend to Soviet prisoners the treatment they offered POWs from the West. Whereas they treated the latter with a degree of respect, recognizing rank and providing access to medical attention, as well as to parcels of food and clothing, they denied Soviet prisoners of war all of that. Besides, they did not leave everyone who wanted to surrender alive; many they shot on the spot. On June 6, 1941, more than two weeks before the invasion, the headquarters had issued the order for troops to shoot on capture commissars and Red Army political officers, as well as NKVD men and Jews. Muslims who failed to prove that their circumcision had nothing to do with the Jewish religion also often met their end, as did, occasionally, Red Army commanders who fell into captivity. Those left alive got sent to makeshift concentration camps — old factories, schoolyards, often fields surrounded by barbed wire.

During forced death marches to those concentration camps, guards shot those wounded, ill, and weary prisoners who could no longer walk. The locals tried to feed the exhausted POWs and help them in any way they could, the assumption being that others were feeding and helping their own sons, husbands, and fathers mobilized into the Red Army before the war and probably facing the same ordeals. Once in camp, the prisoners often went without food and water, which caused hunger, starvation, and, ultimately, cannibalism. Disease took care of those who managed to survive on the meager rations. Nazi propaganda portrayed the Soviet POWs as subhuman, and their treatment was inhuman indeed. Ideology was only partly responsible for that. The Germans had not planned on taking hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of prisoners. In the first months of the war, the more people died in captivity, the less trouble there was for the Wehrmacht. Not until November 1941 did the masters of the Reich economy begin to consider the POWs as a workforce, which was in short supply in Germany. In the course of the war, more than 60 percent of those captured on the eastern front died in captivity.

Ukrainians, like members of other Soviet-ruled nationalities of the western USSR, generally fared better in the camps than Russians and Muslims. At first the Germans even allowed them to go free, considering them a lesser threat than the Russians. Thus, in September 1941, the Nazis issued a directive allowing the release of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts. Inmates could leave the camps if a relative claimed them (sometimes women claimed strangers as their husbands) or if they came from a particular region. The policy was reversed in November, but probably tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Ukrainian men drafted into the Red Army and captured by the Germans in the summer and fall of 1941 managed to survive the ordeal and return to their families. Later in the war, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts were more likely than Russians to be recruited into police battalions and trained to secure eastern European territory cleansed of local inhabitants and settled by German colonists. The Nazis sent some to guard concentration and extermination camps in Poland once the leadership of the Third Reich realized that the promised German colonial paradise in eastern Europe was being postponed indefinitely.

In the twisted world of the Nazi occupation, the Holocaust turned former Soviet POWs from victims into perpetrators. In Auschwitz, by far the best-known Nazi concentration camp, the first to die in the gas chambers were Soviet POWs — the Germans tested Zyklon-B gas on them in September 1941. Later, guards recruited from the POW camps — the so-called Trawniki men, named for the place where they were trained — helped conduct Jews arriving at the camp to the gas chambers. Jewish men selected from the previous transports then gathered and sorted the clothes of the victims. In the camps, survival too often meant participating in the destruction of fellow humans. Ukraine under German occupation became a large-scale model of a concentration camp. As in the camps, the line between resistance and collaboration, victimhood and criminal complicity with the regime became blurred but by no means indistinguishable. Everyone made a personal choice, and those who survived had to live with their decisions after the war, many in harmony, some in unending anguish. But almost everyone suffered survivor’s guilt.

The Holocaust was the single most horrific episode of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which had no shortage of horror. Most Ukrainian Jews who became victims never made it either to Auschwitz or to any other extermination camp. Heinrich Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, with the help of local police formed by the German administration, gunned them down on the outskirts of the cities, towns, and villages in which they lived. The shooting began in the summer of 1941 in all territories taken by the Wehrmacht from the retreating Soviets. By January 1942, when high Nazi officials gathered in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate the implementation of the Final Solution — the eradication of European Jewry — Nazi death squads had killed close to 1 million Jewish men, women, and children. They did so in broad daylight, sometimes in plain sight and almost always within earshot of the local non-Jewish population. The Holocaust in Ukraine and the rest of the western Soviet Union not only destroyed the Jewish population and its communal life, as was the case in Europe generally, but also traumatized those who witnessed it.

Every sixth Jew who died in the Holocaust — altogether close to a million people — came from Ukraine. By far the best-known massacre, with the greatest number of victims, took place in Babi Yar (in Ukrainian, Babyn Yar, or Old Woman’s Ravine) on the outskirts of Kyiv. There, in the course of two days, the automatic fire of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by the German and local police, killed 33,761 Jewish citizens of Kyiv. The shootings took place on September 29 and 30, 1941, on the orders of Major General Kurt Eberhard, the military governor of Kyiv, who would commit suicide while in American custody after the end of the war.

Eberhard ordered the mass execution in retaliation for acts of sabotage carried out by Soviet agents. Five days after Kyiv fell to the Germans on September 19, bombs planted before the Soviet retreat blew up a number of landmark buildings in the city’s downtown. As expected, the German military command occupied the structures, and the explosions killed quite a few senior German officers. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Germans were fighting the war in the east against the Jewish Commune, as the propagandists referred to the Soviet regime, linking the Jewish origins and communist beliefs of some of its early leaders. As the German authorities saw it, there was a direct association between Soviet agents and Jews. They had already made that link explicit in Lviv, Kremianets, and other cities and towns of western Ukraine. There the NKVD had shot hundreds of prisoners, many of them local Ukrainians and Poles, before leaving the cities and retreating eastward. Back then, the Germans had encouraged anti-Jewish pogroms “in retaliation” for the Soviet atrocities. Beginning in August, however, they had changed their policy — the Reichsführer of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Heinrich Himmler, had authorized the killing of Jewish women and children and the annihilation of entire Jewish communities. Pogroms no longer sufficed. The Jews had to die.

“Jews of the city of Kiev and vicinity!” read a leaflet distributed in Kyiv in late September. “On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 8:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorohozhytska Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.” The Jewish citizens of Kyiv — largely women, children, and the elderly, as the men had been summoned to military service — thought that they were being assembled for resettlement and would not be harmed. The next day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Those who responded to the call were escorted to the gates of the Jewish cemetery, forced to surrender their documents and valuables, stripped naked, and then shot in groups of ten on the slopes of a ravine. The Babi Yar massacre stands out in history, as it was the first attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish community of a major urban center anywhere in Europe. But numerous other massacres of horrendous proportions preceded and followed it. In late August, a German police battalion gunned down more than 23,000 Jews, largely refugees from Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia. In October, close to 12,000 Jews of Dnipropetrovsk were shot in a ravine on the outskirts of the city — the future site of the Dnipropetrovsk National University. In December, about 10,000 Jews of Kharkiv met the same fate on the premises of the city’s tractor factory — the pride of the Soviet industrialization project.

Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu — who took back northern Bukovyna and Bessarabia, which Stalin had forced him to surrender in 1940, and brought Odesa and parts of Podolia under his control — treated Jews with the same contempt and brutality as his Nazi masters. In October 1941, in an episode replicating the Babi Yar massacre, Antonescu ordered 18,000 Jews executed in retaliation for the Soviet demolition of the building that housed Romanian military headquarters in Odesa and killed a senior Romanian commander. In all, between 115,000 and 180,000 Jews died under Romanian occupation in Odesa and environs. Furthermore, between 100,000 and 150,000 Bukovynian and Bessarabian Jews perished in the Romanian version of Hitler’s Holocaust. Most of the Galician Jews, like Polish Jews residing in the General Government, died in the course of 1942 after spending months isolated from the rest of the population in ghettos created on Nazi orders. Acting on instructions of German police commanders, the Jewish and Ukrainian police rounded them up and shipped them to extermination camps. Motivated more often by greed than anti-Semitism, locals often tried to take advantage of the misfortunes of their Jewish neighbors, either denouncing them to the authorities or seizing their property. But the majority simply looked the other way.

The Holocaust in Ukraine also differed from the Holocaust in central and western Europe in that those who tried to rescue Jews were subject not only to arrest but also to execution. So were the members of their families. Still, many did try to save their Jewish neighbors. To date the State of Israel has recognized more than 2,500 citizens of Ukraine as “Righteous Among the Nations” for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. The list is incomplete and still growing. One person missing from it is Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, who hid hundreds of Galician Jews in his residence and in monasteries. In February 1942 he sent a letter to Himmler protesting the use of Ukrainian police in the rounding up and extermination of Galician Jewry. The letter had no effect. Those who delivered Himmler’s response told the metropolitan that if it were not for his age, he would have been shot. A few months later, Sheptytsky issued his best-known pastoral letter, “Thou Shall Not Kill,” on the sanctity of human life. It was read in all Ukrainian Catholic churches and understood as his condemnation of the Holocaust. Sheptytsky’s name does not appear on the list of the “righteous” because in the summer of 1941 he welcomed the German takeover of Galicia after two years of Soviet occupation. Whatever Sheptytsky’s and his fellow countrymen’s hopes for German rule, they vanished very quickly.

The severity of the occupation regime differed from one part of Hitler’s Ukrainian Lebensraum to another. The Romanians, who never wanted Odesa and its environs but dreamed of exchanging it for Hungarian-held northern Transylvania, simply robbed southern Ukraine of everything they could lay their hands on. German policies were somewhat milder and the treatment of Ukrainians somewhat more humane under military command and in the former Austrian possessions.

The worst was in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The man responsible for some of the most heinous crimes committed by the Nazi occupation regime in Ukraine was the Reichskommissar of Ukraine, Erich Koch. Stocky and loudmouthed, sporting a Hitler-style moustache, the forty-five-year-old Koch was the party administrator for East Prussia. He had a reputation for brutality and for getting things done. In Ukraine he was tasked with exploiting resources and depopulating the conquered territory. He treated the Ukrainian population as European colonizers treated blacks and Asians in their overseas colonies, asserting, “No German soldier will ever die for that nigger people.” Koch did not want Ukrainians progressing beyond the fourth grade of elementary school and shut down universities and schools for students above fifteen years of age. “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot,” he declared on one occasion. His subordinates did a great deal of shooting indeed, some of it in the Babi Yar ravine, the same place where a few months earlier the Germans had killed nearly 34,000 Kyiv Jews. By the time the occupation of Kyiv ended in November 1943, another 60,000 Nazi victims — Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, members of the Soviet underground, and Roma — had found their final resting place in Babi Yar.

Koch established his Ukrainian headquarters in the town of Rivne in Volhynia, which had been part of interwar Poland. It was the third capital of the polity called “Ukraine” in slightly more than twenty years: whereas the Soviets had chosen industrial and highly Russified Kharkiv over “nationalist” Kyiv in the 1920s, the Germans preferred provincial Rivne, with a population of 40,000, over the large and now heavily Sovietized Kyiv. Blockaded and starved, Kyiv was witnessing its first cases of famine since 1933. The Nazis’ vision of Lebensraum included the pastoralization of Ukraine and the elimination of major urban centers, whose population they otherwise had to feed, diverting resources from the Reich and its army. Thus the policy was to starve the cities, whose inhabitants, driven by hunger into the countryside, would become a productive force, feeding themselves and the German Reich. The Germans left collective farms intact, taking advantage of the Soviet invention for extracting resources from the rural population. They also refused to privatize large enterprises, regulating whatever was left of Ukraine’s economy with a new bank, colonial currency, and price controls. They controlled the movement of population with identity cards.

Starting in January 1942, the Nazis exploited Ukraine as a source not only of agricultural products but also of forced labor. That month the first train of so-called Ostarbeiter (eastern workers) left Kyiv for Germany, carrying young Ukrainians attracted by the promise of jobs, good living conditions, and the chance to get acquainted with Europe. “Germany calls you! Go to beautiful Germany!” ran one ad in a Kyiv newspaper. One poster, titled “The Wall Has Come Down,” portrayed Ukrainians looking through an opening in the wall isolating the Soviet Union from Europe. On the horizon were the skylines of German cities. “Stalin placed a high wall around you,” read the caption. “He well knew that anyone who saw the outside world would fully grasp the pitiful state of the Bolshevik regime. Now the wall has been breached, and the way to a new and better future has been opened.” It was an opportunity for the younger generation to leave the villages and see the world. Many responded with interest and even enthusiasm.

The ads turned out to be a trap. Whether they worked in factories or the households of individual Germans, young men and women ended up as slave laborers, forced to wear a badge reading “OST” and regarded as subhuman by the German authorities and a good part of German society. As news of exploitation in Germany began to reach Ukraine, the occupation authorities had more and more difficulty fulfilling monthly quotas of 40,000 Ukrainian laborers: they began rounding up people arbitrarily and packing them off to Germany by force. Altogether, close to 2.2 million Ukrainians were apprehended and sent to Germany in 1942 and 1943. Many died of malnutrition, disease, and Allied bombing of the military and munitions factories where they worked. Those who survived and were liberated by Red Army soldiers in late 1944 and 1945 (only 120,000 individuals registered as displaced persons at the end of the war) were often treated as traitors, and some were shipped directly from German concentration camps to Soviet ones in the Gulag system. Ukraine was not the only part of the Soviet Union where the Germans engaged in slave-hunting expeditions, but it was by far the largest hunting ground. Citizens of Ukraine constituted close to 80 percent of all Ostarbeiter taken from occupied areas of eastern Europe to Germany in the course of the war.

By the summer of 1943, little remained of the original German plan to establish a paradise for German farmers in Ukraine. Hitler had spent a good part of the summer and autumn of 1942 in Ukraine, where German engineers, using the forced labor of Soviet POWs, built his farthest eastern headquarters, code-named Werwolf, in a pine forest near the city of Vinnytsia. He was also there in the spring of 1943, but on September 15 of that year, he left Werwolf forever. That day he ordered his troops in Ukraine to retreat to the Dnieper defensive line. A week later, Soviet troops crossed the Dnieper north of Kyiv, cracking Hitler’s eastern wall for the first time. The Germans would detonate the entire underground structure of Werwolf before retreating from the area in the spring of 1944.

The dream of conquest and Lebensraum had ended, but the horror it unleashed remained. Ukraine became a graveyard for millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Poles, to list only the largest affected ethnic groups. The Holocaust eradicated most of Ukrainian Jewry. Gone, too, were the German and Mennonite settlers of southern Ukraine and Volhynia — if the Soviets had not deported them in 1941, they now fled with the retreating Wehrmacht. The Polish population of Volhynia and Galicia was under attack from Ukranian nationalists. As the Red Army began its advance into Ukraine after the victorious Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the Soviet leaders confronted a very different country from the one they had left in haste in the summer and fall of 1941. The cities were empty and their industrial enterprises completely destroyed.

The survivors greeted Red Army troops as liberators, but Soviet officials had doubts about their sincerity. The people who welcomed them had managed to survive under enemy rule and lived outside Soviet control long enough to have doubts about the Stalinist system. Orthodox believers had become accustomed to the only freedom Hitler brought them — freedom of worship. Those who did not think of themselves primarily in ethnonational terms began to do so after living under the Nazi occupation, when life and death was often decided on the basis of ethnicity. All of that threatened the victorious communist regime. Until the 1980s, Soviet citizens would fill out numerous forms that included questions about whether they or their relatives had lived in German-occupied territory. Those questions were next to the ones about the individual’s criminal record.