Karel C. Berkhoff - Harvest of Despair

Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule

KAREL C. BERKHOFF

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1 The Reichskonunissariat Ukraine at its largest.

z Local residents greet a German soldier on a tank. Kremenchuk, eastern Ukraine, September 1941.

3 One result of Stalin's scorched-earth policy-the burned-out center of Kiev, probably on October 5, 1941.

4 Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi party chancellery, Adolf Hitler, and one of the Fiihrer's aides listen to Erich Koch, Reichskomrnissar for Ukraine, at the Werewolf headquarters north of Vinnytsia. Central Ukraine, summer 1942.

5 Office of a district commissar. Oleksandriia, southern Ukraine, 1942.

6 Open mass grave with thousands of Jews. Podolian town of Proskuriv (today Khmelnvtsky), 1941 or 1942.

7 Jews from Lubnv, a town in the Left Bank, and surroundings, who have obeyed an order to assemble. Lubnv region, October 16, 1941.

8 Imprisoned Red Army men unload ammunition at a storage site. Some of their non-German supervisors carry batons. Berdychiv, central Ukraine, August z8, 1941.

9 "The Collective Farm System Has Come to an End!" Nazi propaganda poster, February 1942.

1o A faun leader and his secretary doing bookkeeping in their office. Pereiaslav, central Ukraine, August 1943.

u Public hanging, witnessed by local adults, children, and German soldiers. Kiev, probably late 1941 or early 1942.

12 The Galician Market (formerly the Jewish Market) in Kiev, September 1942.

13 At the height of the Nazi campaign to starve Kiev, an auxiliary policeman armed with a rifle stops women who wish to go there. Summer 1942.

14 Public meeting to mark the second anniversary of the "liberation" of the town of Vasylkiv, west of Kiev. August 20, 1943.

15 "The Wall Has Come Down." Nazi propaganda poster. Probably printed in 1941.

16 Boys of pacifist Mennonite origin, now "ethnic Germans," have donned swastika brassards and parade past SS leader Heinrich Himmler and other high-ranking visitors. Halbstadt district near Zaporizhzhia, Sunday morning, November 1, 1942.

17 A festive procession with church items that people had hidden for years from the Soviet authorities. Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, October 1941.

18 Young men and women who have been forced to leave their villages to work in Germany carry heavy luggage as they walk toward an assembly point. Nekrasov Street, Kiev, 1942.

19 Tymofii Strokach, deputy chief of the Soviet Ukrainian NKVD, and Demian Korotchenko, a Communist party secretary, inspect some of Sydir Kovpak's partisans on the eve of their daring raid toward the Carpathian Mountains. Partisan zone in the Zhytomyr region in northern Ukraine, June 1943.

20 The effects of the Nazi scorched-earth policy. North of Kremenchuk, in central Ukraine, August or September 1943.

21 Women and a child give a warm and spontaneous welcome to the Red Army. Melitopol, southern Ukraine, October 1943.

22 A woman looks for her husband's body among exhumed corpses in the former Nazi concentration camp Syrets. Kiev, 1944.

his book is a narrative history of everyday life in Nazi Germany's largest colony and an assessment of the effect of Nazi rule on a territory that had known Soviet rule for over two decades: the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, founded in 1941 and ultimately dissolved in 1944. As such it is the first detailed description of what life there was like for the native population.

My goal has been to write a territorial history, not a national one. Instead of a study of Ukraine as a whole, this is a study of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which comprised much, but not all Ukrainian territory; and rather than a study of Ukrainians, it is a study of all its natives. This approach requires some explanation. In researching and writing the book, my premise has been that the best framework for studying Europe during World War II is to consider the territories that existed during that war. The vast majority of studies of German-ruled eastern Europe and Russia do not follow this principle. Ukrainian authors often assume that one can study collectively events during World War II in any territory where Ukrainians lived (among several, ruled by various states). Western and Russian authors often suppose that one can study collectively the wartime events in all territories that had been part of the Soviet Union in the middle of 1939, or even in early 1941. Polish authors, for their part, often decide that one can study collectively events between 1939 and 1945 "in the Second Republic" or "on the territory of the Second Republic," even though there was no such republic after 1939 or 1945. This book deals only with events in the territory that ultimately became part of the Reichskorn nissariat Ukraine.

My focus here is what I call "natives" or "the native population." Although it is customary to consider as native only those people who have the titular nationality of the state in question, this is not the case here. (And I use the word without any derogatory intent.) Instead, natives here are all those who lived in Ukraine before the Germans arrived. I have included the experience and perceptions not only of the Ukrainians but also, as much as possible, of Jews, Roma, Russians, and ethnic Germans. In short, the goal has been a multiethnic history. Yet the Ukrainians, who constituted the vast majority of the population of the Reichskonunissariat, still get the most attention.

The Poles of the Reichskommissariat do not take center stage. This is purely for practical reasons: this book focuses on events in the core of the Reichskommissariat, because doing so reveals best not only the nature of the Nazi regime, but also the long-time influence of the Soviet regime, which had ruled that central Ukrainian region for two decades. The Poles of the Reichskommissariat mostly inhabited western Volhynia, which had known Soviet rule for only a brief period between 1939 and 1941. To maintain the book's conceptual focus on Ukraine's central region, I also devote very little attention to the adjacent entity with a large Ukrainian population that was called the General Government, which included the Polish and Ukrainian cities of Krakow and Lviv as well as four of the infamous Nazi death camps.

This book is primarily, although not exclusively, a history "from the bottom up." Only in this way, I believe, will it be possible to provide the reader with a sense of the everyday experiences of the natives under the Nazi system. Even the Reich commissar in charge of the area, Erich Koch, gets relatively little attention. Because in everyday life the population hardly ever saw the leading Nazis-Koch spent most of his time outside the Reichskommissariat, in East Prussia---cmnitting most details about them provides a more realistic portrait of the people's predicament.