On Nazi Rule In Soviet Ukraine

This year the world commemorates the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Another sad 70th anniversary coming up in the fall is the massacre of the Jewish population in a ravine near Kyiv in Ukraine. The ravine called Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar in Ukrainian, is a site where around 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were executed by the Nazis in the late September of 1941.

I wanted to publish a review of Karel Berkhoff’s 2004 book Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule in which the author details these events. Also, today I happened to attend Mr. Berkhoff’s lecture on Babi Yar at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently visiting all the way from the Netherlands and has one more lecture on Soviet propaganda tomorrow which I am planning to attend. I will post about them in a bit.

Karel C. Berkhoff’s book Harvest of Despair is a narrative history of Reichskommissariat Ukraine – Nazi Germany’s largest colony on the territory of Soviet Ukraine that had been under Soviet rule for over two decades at the time of the German invasion.  The book is a thematic and horrific account of every day life of Ukrainian peasants and urban dwellers, or more accurately the “natives” because this included other groups as well, from 1941 to roughly 1944, the time of the German retreat.

By concentrating specifically on Reichskommissariat Ukraine the author is able to present the reader with a more successful and complete historical study of German occupation as opposed to lumping a diverse patchwork of historically different territories under one umbrella of “German rule.” Above all, Berkhoff’s account brings to light the unimaginable brutality and inhumanity with which the Nazi treated the local population; they exterminated most of the Jewish population, they starved the Red Army POWs and city dwellers, extorted food from the peasantry and forced millions into work for the regime, among others.

Reichskommissariat Ukraine included the Right Bank Ukraine except for the pre-1939 Ukrainian territories, as well as Left Bank covering the area of Poltava as well as Southern Ukraine. One of the most horrendous crimes committed by the invading Nazi forces was almost complete extermination of the local Jewish population. Women, children and the elderly were rounded up in many cities and taken to the ghettoes where they were stripped of their clothes and shot.

The ravine of Babi Yar was one of the largest and most notorious places where the mass killing of the Kyiv Jewish population took place with many locals participating as auxiliary police and assisting the Nazis.  In 1942-43 the Germans murdered over 350,000 Jews in Reichskommissariat.  The Nazi also perpetrated genocide against the Roma or Gypsies.  In the wake of the massacres the outright passivity of local population is disturbing, although it is known that the Germans punished any kind of transgression by shooting people on the spot and this appears to be at least a partial explanation for the seeming indifference to the plight of the Jews.

Ethnic Russians were regarded as inferior and were also targeted for extermination, more so than the local Ukrainians. One of the reasons that the Red Army POWs were brutally treated, arbitrarily murdered and artificially starved was due to the fact that most of them were perceived to be Russian (some Ukrainians were released). The policy of artificial starvation of major cities by cutting off the outside food supply, including to Kyiv is well documented.

Although the expression of Ukrainian culture was permitted and the use of Ukrainian language was allowed for official use, the Germans stopped short of allowing anything that might appeal to Ukrainian nationalism. Religion was repressed, education above the forth grade was abolished and included a ban on the proliferation of Ukrainian literature, sciences and humanities. Germans used forced labor both in the Reich and in Ukraine. In June 1943 the number of those taken out of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine reached one million and together with the southern military zone this number reached 1.5 million people

Berkhoff’s work is very important for our understanding not only of the Holocaust, Red Army POW massacres, and mass murder and other crimes committed against the non-Jewish population in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, but it also paints a more complete picture of the brutality and assault on the local population by the both Nazi and Soviet regimes. The author makes a very clear argument that the Soviets were no better than Hitler in the way they treated, in this case, their own people. With the German invasion and the Red Army retreat, the NKVD shot prisoners en masse in prisons, industrial and farm equipment was ordered to be destroyed. Only the Communist elite was evacuated from Kyiv and the rest of the citizens were abandoned to face the invaders while the city itself was rigged with mines which caused many explosions and fires days later.