German Frustrations

Despite their initial triumph, the Nazi leadership, German military com­manders, and their front-line troops experienced enormous frustration with the eastern front.⁷⁰ Hitler and his inner circle predicted that the entire Soviet political system would collapse by the winter of 1941.⁷¹ The “shock and awe” tactics of the blitzbrieg, those that inflicted the final deathblows to Poland in 1939 and Norway and France in 1940, failed in the Soviet territories.

Stalin did not surrender. Instead, the Soviet authorities resisted as best they could, withdrawing, and initiating a “scorched earth” policy, destroying factories, railways, buildings, dams, and even unharvested fields. They also evacuated over one thousand factories and 3.5 million people (mostly party and state officials, skilled industrial workers, members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and their families) to the RSFSR and Central Asia.⁷² Although the majority of the Red Army troops did not seriously challenge the German forces, small groups fought stubbornly, inflicting far more casualties than the Germans suffered heretofore on the western front.⁷³ The German high command and the front-line troops did not an­ticipate these high losses.

Although the Germans quickly conquered the vast, flat expanses of the European USSR, they could not secure or live off the land. Constantly ex­periencing exhaustion, malnourishment, disease, high casualties, and a high level of personal insecurity, the troops internalized the Nazi racial ideology and turned the conflict into a war of total hatred and annihilation.⁷⁴ The Nazis considered the peoples of East Central Europe Untermenschen (sub­humans) and trained their troops to think this way:

The subhuman, this apparently fully equal creation of nature, when seen from the biological viewpoint, with hands, feet, and a sort of a brain, with eyes and a mouth.

The invaders first targeted the Jews, the Gypsies (the Romani), and com­munists. By mid-summer 1941 Hitler ordered his troops to immediately execute all communist members of the Soviet state apparatus, as well as the entire Jewish population.

Four operational SS groups, known as Einsatzgruppen, followed German troops into the Soviet Union and sought to fulfil this mission. Einsatzgruppe C operated in Ukraine near Kiev and Kharkiv. Einsatzgruppe D worked in Bessarabia and southern Ukraine. In addition to the three thousand members of these Einsatzgruppen, a number of Waffen SS bri­gades and dozens of German Order Police battalions helped hunt down and annihilate the Jewish population in the German- and Romanian- occupied territories of the USSR. Most importantly, the German military gave the SS Einsatzgruppen a free hand to operate in areas under its ad­ministration and assisted in liquidating the Jews.⁷⁶

After July 1941, auxiliary police units (Schutzmannschaften), recruited from local inhabitants and subordinated to the SS, reinforced these German forces. At the end of July 1941 SS Chief Heinrich Himmler issued an order establishing these indigenous police formations. In the course of 1942, the number of Schutzmannschaften (Schuma for short) on the entire eastern front increased from 33,000 to 300,000.⁷⁷ One scholar asserts that most of the Schuma in RK Ukraine were Ukrainians, but its ranks also included Russians and members of other nationalities.⁷⁸ According to an­other estimate, approximately 100,000 Ukrainians served in the auxiliary police or the fire brigades during the war.⁷⁹

Several days after the German occupation of Kiev on 19 September 1941, a series of explosions set by the NKVD rocked Khreshchatyk (the city’s major avenue), destroyed buildings headquartering the new authorities, and shattered a number of churches and monasteries.

From 22 June 1941 to the end of the winter of 1941-2, these German units, local Ukrainian nationalist militias, and Schutzmänner executed the majority of the Jewish population in Eastern Ukraine, Bessarabia, Bukovina, the Crimea, and Transnistria. From the spring of 1942 until the end of the winter of 1942-3, they massacred the majority of Jews in Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia-Podillia. With the German retreat from Ukraine in the spring of 1943 to the summer of 1944, they murdered all of the Jews still remaining in the ghettos or labour camps or sent them to

Table 8.1 Estimated Number of Jewish Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust in Ukraine, 1941-1944

Source: Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 518-25.

concentration camps in Germany.⁸⁴ According to one estimate, between thirty and forty thousand Ukrainians took part in the Nazi-organized ex­termination of the Jews.⁸⁵

Of the approximately 2.6 million Jews killed on the territory of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority died in the Ukrainian SSR.⁸⁶ By mid-1941, according to reliable estimates, nearly 1.7 to 1.8 million Jews lived in the Ukrainian SSR under German occupation, which included the territories which constituted the original Ukrainian SSR and those an­nexed in 1939-40.⁸⁷ Of these nearly 1.8 million Jews, only approximately eighty-five thousand survived the Holocaust (see table 8.1).⁸⁸

In comparison with the survivors of other Jewish communities in Nazi- subjugated Europe, the number and percentage of Soviet Jews who sur­vived the German occupation was the lowest.⁸⁹ Of all the conquered territories of the Soviet Union, only in the region of Transnistria and the city of Chernivtsi did the Jews who still lived in ghettos and labour camps outlast the war. The Soviet army’s swift advance into this area in March and April 1944 and the Romanian administration’s rapid overturn of its annihilatory policies made this possible.⁹⁰

Although the Jews and Romani occupied the centre stage in Nazi plans for extermination, Hitler and his associates also considered Russians and Ukrainians racially inferior.

Members of the Nazi elite did not consistently differentiate between the Ukrainians and the Russians. They applied the term “Russian” to anyone who resided in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war, “along with residents of the districts of Galicia and Bialystock, and thus included Ukrainians.”⁹² When they distinguished between the two groups, some as­serted that the former occupied a higher racial status than the latter.⁹³ Others claimed that the Ukrainians, especially those living in the country­side, possessed more immunities against the disease of “Judeo-Bolshevism” than the Russians. Following this line of thought, Hitler allowed the re­lease of several hundred thousand Soviet Ukrainian prisoners of war be­tween September and November 1941. Ukrainians comprised 270,095 of the 280,108 Soviet POWs the German military discharged in this period.⁹⁴ Although Hitler hated the Slavs, especially the eastern Slavs, he imag­ined that the blond, blue-eyed Ukrainians he encountered during his 1942 trip to Reichskommissariat Ukraine “might be the peasant descendants of Germanic tribes which had never migrated.” He suggested that Ukrainian women with these physical features conscripted for work in the Reich should be “Germanized after a period of probation.”⁹⁵

Ukrainians, in effect, retained a position at the top of the East Slavic hierarchy, at least in the views of certain Nazi leaders. But as subhumans (Untermenschen), they occupied a different, inferior, and almost unbridge­able universe from the German one. Although the Nazis targeted Jews, intellectuals, nationalists, and anyone suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies, they did not consider Ukrainians deserving of group destruction.⁹⁶ Nazi ideology considered these Slavs expendable, only worthy of exploitation, starvation, and cruelty.

In light of its racist mindset and acquisition of vast and populous terri­tories, the German high command introduced a brutal set of policies to prevent any resistance, highlighted by the vicious abuse of five million Soviet prisoners of war their military forces captured. In the first six months of the German-Soviet war, the German army took many more POWs than their generals anticipated.

Inasmuch as the German army did not consider their Soviet prisoners of war fellow human beings, its operational plans did not take into account the need to feed, shelter, or provide medical care for the millions they cap­tured. The Germans marched their captives over long distances or trans­ported them by train without protection from the elements. Along the way, they shot stragglers, the wounded, and the exhausted. In the POW camps, they did not register their prisoners by name or provide them with humane treatment. The overcrowded camps did not possess adequate housing or proper sanitary conditions, including toilets. The camps more often than not consisted of open fields, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. Oftentimes the prisoners did not receive any meals on a regular basis (if so, they received less than they needed to survive) and ate whatever (grass, bark, and pine needles) they could find. As prisoners starved, cannibalism spread in the camps.⁹⁷

Not only did the Germans refuse to spend valuable resources to provide for their detainees, but they did not allow the local populations to give them food and water. Camp guards, moreover, shot civilians who tried to help them. Millions died of starvation and disease, the highest number and the highest percentage of the Allied prisoners of war.⁹⁸ Germany captured a total of 3.9 million POWs (including an estimated 1.3 million Ukrainians) during the first eight months after its invasion of the USSR. By February 1942 only 1.1 million remained alive.⁹⁹

The German-Soviet war destroyed the communist political order throughout the new and old Soviet Ukrainian territories. By September 1941, Nazi Germany divided the Ukrainian territories in East Central Europe into five areas. The first, the Romanian region (called Transnistria) in Southern Ukraine, included southern Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and parts of the Odessa, Vinnytsia, and Mykolaiv oblasts. The second, the General Government (with Cracow as its capital), now gained Eastern Galicia (renamed District Galicia) and the territories that once belonged to Poland not incorporated into Germany. The third, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, included Volhynia and Polissia, most of Righ-Bank Ukraine, and part of Poltava Oblast, but excluded the former oblasts of Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv, and the Donbass, which remained under German mil­itary administration (the fourth region). The city of Rivne in Western Volhynia served as Reichskommissariat Ukraine’s capital.¹⁰⁰ With Hitler’s blessings, Hungary retained its control over Transcarpathia (the fifth area) from April 1939 to October 1944. The division of the Ukrainian SSR into these five domains privileged and unprivileged different sets of people in each administrative region.