Abstract
Lev Rozhetsky was a schoolboy when the Romanian army, the Wehrmacht’s largest ally, occupied south-western Ukraine. His memoir, recently published in English translation in the important collection The Unknown Black Book, is full of terrible stories: girls being tossed into latrines; Jews being tormented, tortured and shot; dogs growing ‘fat as rams’ on the bodies. The perpetrators in this region, usually led by a thin layer of German commanders, included Romanian gendarmerie and local Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). What Rozhetsky also observed was the involvement of locals, not always in the murder process itself, but in the looting that accompanied it: ‘Having caught the scent of booty, all sorts of dirty scoundrels came running from every direction’, as he put it.1 Another survivor, the student Sara Gleykh from Mariupol in Ukraine, wrote that ‘The neighbours waited like vultures for us to leave the apartment.’ The same neighbours then ‘quarrelled over things before my eyes, snatching things out of each others’ hands and dragging off pillows, pots and pans, quilts’.2 As historian Joshua Rubenstein notes, in the Baltic region and western Ukraine especially, but generally throughout Eastern Europe, ‘it was as if the population understood, without much prodding by the Germans, that there were no limits on what they could do to their Jewish neighbours’.3 From Horyngrad-Krypa in Volhynia, where Ukrainians armed with axes, knives and boards spiked with nails murdered 30 local Jews, to Kaunas where the famous ‘death dealer’ of the city was photographed clubbing Jews to death with an iron bar, there is no shortage of evidence to back up Rubenstein’s claim.
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Notes
Lev Rozhetsky, ‘My Life in a Fascist Prison’, in Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (eds.), The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 128.
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Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
As noted by Alon Confino, ‘A World without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust’, German History, 27, 4 (2009), 540–41.
And see the essays in Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas and Richard Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds.), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–63;
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Peter Hayes, ‘Auschwitz: Capital of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17, 2 (2003), 330–50.
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Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jan Erik Schulte, ‘Zwangsarbeit für die SS: Juden in der Ostindustrie GmbH’,
and Bernd C. Wagner, ‘Gerüchte, Wissen, Verdrängung: Die IG Auschwitz und das Vernichtungslager Birkenau’, both in Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher and Bernd C. Wagner (eds.), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000), 43–74 and 231–48.
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See for example, the descriptions in Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Oxford: Berg, 2007);
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On which the historiography is sparse. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996),
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As is explained by, for example, Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 450;
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Stone, D. (2013). Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_2
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