The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine

This book probes the local dynamics of the German occupation and the collaboration in the Holocaust in southern Ukraine.

Eric C. Steinhart (Author)

9781107061231, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 February 2015

276 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.52 kg

'Steinhart has written an engaging, highly illuminating study of the relationship between the ideologues of the Third Reich and the complex reality they encountered on the ground as they attempted to remake eastern Europe into a racially ordered imperium founded on genocide.' Paul Moore, H-Nationalism

The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as the vanguard of German expansion. This study recovers the intersection of these two projects in Transnistria, a portion of southern Ukraine that, because of its numerous Volksdeutsche communities, became an epicenter of both Nazi Volksdeutsche policy and the Holocaust in conquered Soviet territory, ultimately asking why local residents, whom German authorities identified as Volksdeutsche, participated in the Holocaust with apparent enthusiasm.

Introduction
1. From privileged to persecuted: the Black Sea Germans, 1800–1941
2. Sonderkommando R: the men and women who made Germans and created killers
3. Establishing Nazi rule in Transnistria
4. The mass murder of Transnistria's Jews, December 1941–April 1942
5. The Volksgemeinschaft in Transnistria, 1942–4
6. The Black Sea Germans and the Holocaust
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Jewish studies [JFSR1], Military history [HBW], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]