The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  In the twisted world of the Nazi occupation, the Holocaust turned former Soviet POWs from victims into perpetrators. In Auschwitz, by far the best-known Nazi concentration camp, the first to die in the gas chambers were Soviet POWs—the Germans tested Zyklon-B gas on them in September 1941. Later, guards recruited from the POW camps—the so-called Trawniki men, named for the place where they were trained—helped conduct Jews arriving at the camp to the gas chambers. Jewish men selected from the previous transports then gathered and sorted the clothes of the victims. In the camps, survival too often meant participating in the destruction of fellow humans. Ukraine under German occupation became a large-scale model of a concentration camp. As in the camps, the line between resistance and collaboration, victimhood and criminal complicity with the regime became blurred but by no means indistinguishable. Everyone made a personal choice, and those who survived had to live with their decisions after the war, many in harmony, some in unending anguish. But almost everyone suffered survivor’s guilt.

  The Holocaust was the single most horrific episode of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which had no shortage of horror. Most Ukrainian Jews who became victims never made it either to Auschwitz or to any other extermination camp. Heinrich Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, with the help of local police formed by the German administration, gunned them down on the outskirts of the cities, towns, and villages in which they lived. The shooting began in the summer of 1941 in all territories taken by the Wehrmacht from the retreating Soviets. By January 1942, when high Nazi officials gathered in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate the implementation of the Final Solution—the eradication of European Jewry—Nazi death squads had killed close to 1 million Jewish men, women, and children. They did so in broad daylight, sometimes in plain sight and almost always within earshot of the local non-Jewish population. The Holocaust in Ukraine and the rest of the western Soviet Union not only destroyed the Jewish population and its communal life, as was the case in Europe generally, but also traumatized those who witnessed it.

  Every sixth Jew who died in the Holocaust—altogether close to a million people—came from Ukraine. By far the best-known massacre, with the greatest number of victims, took place in Babi Yar (in Ukrainian, Babyn Yar, or Old Woman’s Ravine) on the outskirts of Kyiv. There, in the course of two days, the automatic fire of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by the German and local police, killed 33,761 Jewish citizens of Kyiv. The shootings took place on September 29 and 30, 1941, on the orders of Major General Kurt Eberhard, the military governor of Kyiv, who would commit suicide while in American custody after the end of the war.

  Eberhard ordered the mass execution in retaliation for acts of sabotage carried out by Soviet agents. Five days after Kyiv fell to the Germans on September 19, bombs planted before the Soviet retreat blew up a number of landmark buildings in the city’s downtown. As expected, the German military command occupied the structures, and the explosions killed quite a few senior German officers. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Germans were fighting the war in the east against the Jewish Commune, as the propagandists referred to the Soviet regime, linking the Jewish origins and communist beliefs of some of its early leaders. As the German authorities saw it, there was a direct association between Soviet agents and Jews. They had already made that link explicit in Lviv, Kremianets, and other cities and towns of western Ukraine. There the NKVD had shot hundreds of prisoners, many of them local Ukrainians and Poles, before leaving the cities and retreating eastward. Back then, the Germans had encouraged anti-Jewish pogroms “in retaliation” for the Soviet atrocities. Beginning in August, however, they had changed their policy—the Reichsführer of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Heinrich Himmler, had authorized the killing of Jewish women and children and the annihilation of entire Jewish communities. Pogroms no longer sufficed. The Jews had to die.

  “Jews of the city of Kiev and vicinity!” read a leaflet distributed in Kyiv in late September. “On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 8:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorohozhytska Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.” The Jewish citizens of Kyiv—largely women, children, and the elderly, as the men had been summoned to military service—thought that they were being assembled for resettlement and would not be harmed. The next day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Those who responded to the call were escorted to the gates of the Jewish cemetery, forced to surrender their documents and valuables, stripped naked, and then shot in groups of ten on the slopes of a ravine. The Babi Yar massacre stands out in history, as it was the first attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish community of a major urban center anywhere in Europe. But numerous other massacres of horrendous proportions preceded and followed it. In late August, a German police battalion gunned down more than 23,000 Jews, largely refugees from Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia. In October, close to 12,000 Jews of Dnipropetrovsk were shot in a ravine on the outskirts of the city—the future site of the Dnipropetrovsk National University. In December, about 10,000 Jews of Kharkiv met the same fate on the premises of the city’s tractor factory—the pride of the Soviet industrialization project.

  Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu—who took back northern Bukovyna and Bessarabia, which Stalin had forced him to surrender in 1940, and brought Odesa and parts of Podolia under his control—treated Jews with the same contempt and brutality as his Nazi masters. In October 1941, in an episode replicating the Babi Yar massacre, Antonescu ordered 18,000 Jews executed in retaliation for the Soviet demolition of the building that housed Romanian military headquarters in Odesa and killed a senior Romanian commander. In all, between 115,000 and 180,000 Jews died under Romanian occupation in Odesa and environs. Furthermore, between 100,000 and 150,000 Bukovynian and Bessarabian Jews perished in the Romanian version of Hitler’s Holocaust. Most of the Galician Jews, like Polish Jews residing in the General Government, died in the course of 1942 after spending months isolated from the rest of the population in ghettos created on Nazi orders. Acting on instructions of German police commanders, the Jewish and Ukrainian police rounded them up and shipped them to extermination camps. Motivated more often by greed than anti-Semitism, locals often tried to take advantage of the misfortunes of their Jewish neighbors, either denouncing them to the authorities or seizing their property. But the majority simply looked the other way.

  The Holocaust in Ukraine also differed from the Holocaust in central and western Europe in that those who tried to rescue Jews were subject not only to arrest but also to execution. So were the members of their families. Still, many did try to save their Jewish neighbors. To date the State of Israel has recognized more than 2,500 citizens of Ukraine as “Righteous Among the Nations” for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. The list is incomplete and still growing. One person missing from it is Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, who hid hundreds of Galician Jews in his residence and in monasteries. In February 1942 he sent a letter to Himmler protesting the use of Ukrainian police in the rounding up and extermination of Galician Jewry. The letter had no effect. Those who delivered Himmler’s response told the metropolitan that if it were not for his age, he would have been shot. A few months later, Sheptytsky issued his best-known pastoral letter, “Thou Shall Not Kill,” on the sanctity of human life. It was read in all Ukrainian Catholic churches and understood as his condemnation of the Holocaust. Sheptytsky’s name does not appear on the list of the “righteous” because in the summer of 1941 he welcomed the German takeover of Galicia after two years of Soviet occupation. Whatever Sheptytsky’s and his fellow countrymen’s hopes for German rule, they vanished very quickly.

  The severity of the occupation regime differed from one part of Hitler’s Ukrainian Lebensraum to another. The Romanians, who never wanted Odesa and its environs but dreamed of exchanging it for Hungarian-held northern Transylvania, simply robbed southern Ukraine of everything they could lay their hands on.
German policies were somewhat milder and the treatment of Ukrainians somewhat more humane under military command and in the former Austrian possessions.

  The worst was in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The man responsible for some of the most heinous crimes committed by the Nazi occupation regime in Ukraine was the Reichskommissar of Ukraine, Erich Koch. Stocky and loudmouthed, sporting a Hitler-style moustache, the forty-five-year-old Koch was the party administrator for East Prussia. He had a reputation for brutality and for getting things done. In Ukraine he was tasked with exploiting resources and depopulating the conquered territory. He treated the Ukrainian population as European colonizers treated blacks and Asians in their overseas colonies, asserting, “No German soldier will ever die for that nigger people.” Koch did not want Ukrainians progressing beyond the fourth grade of elementary school and shut down universities and schools for students above fifteen years of age. “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot,” he declared on one occasion. His subordinates did a great deal of shooting indeed, some of it in the Babi Yar ravine, the same place where a few months earlier the Germans had killed nearly 34,000 Kyiv Jews. By the time the occupation of Kyiv ended in November 1943, another 60,000 Nazi victims—Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, members of the Soviet underground, and Roma—had found their final resting place in Babi Yar.

  Koch established his Ukrainian headquarters in the town of Rivne in Volhynia, which had been part of interwar Poland. It was the third capital of the polity called “Ukraine” in slightly more than twenty years: whereas the Soviets had chosen industrial and highly Russified Kharkiv over “nationalist” Kyiv in the 1920s, the Germans preferred provincial Rivne, with a population of 40,000, over the large and now heavily Sovietized Kyiv. Blockaded and starved, Kyiv was witnessing its first cases of famine since 1933. The Nazis’ vision of Lebensraum included the pastoralization of Ukraine and the elimination of major urban centers, whose population they otherwise had to feed, diverting resources from the Reich and its army. Thus the policy was to starve the cities, whose inhabitants, driven by hunger into the countryside, would become a productive force, feeding themselves and the German Reich. The Germans left collective farms intact, taking advantage of the Soviet invention for extracting resources from the rural population. They also refused to privatize large enterprises, regulating whatever was left of Ukraine’s economy with a new bank, colonial currency, and price controls. They controlled the movement of population with identity cards.

  Starting in January 1942, the Nazis exploited Ukraine as a source not only of agricultural products but also of forced labor. That month the first train of so-called Ostarbeiter (eastern workers) left Kyiv for Germany, carrying young Ukrainians attracted by the promise of jobs, good living conditions, and the chance to get acquainted with Europe. “Germany calls you! Go to beautiful Germany!” ran one ad in a Kyiv newspaper. One poster, titled “The Wall Has Come Down,” portrayed Ukrainians looking through an opening in the wall isolating the Soviet Union from Europe. On the horizon were the skylines of German cities. “Stalin placed a high wall around you,” read the caption. “He well knew that anyone who saw the outside world would fully grasp the pitiful state of the Bolshevik regime. Now the wall has been breached, and the way to a new and better future has been opened.” It was an opportunity for the younger generation to leave the villages and see the world. Many responded with interest and even enthusiasm.

  The ads turned out to be a trap. Whether they worked in factories or the households of individual Germans, young men and women ended up as slave laborers, forced to wear a badge reading “OST” and regarded as subhuman by the German authorities and a good part of German society. As news of exploitation in Germany began to reach Ukraine, the occupation authorities had more and more difficulty fulfilling monthly quotas of 40,000 Ukrainian laborers: they began rounding up people arbitrarily and packing them off to Germany by force. Altogether, close to 2.2 million Ukrainians were apprehended and sent to Germany in 1942 and 1943. Many died of malnutrition, disease, and Allied bombing of the military and munitions factories where they worked. Those who survived and were liberated by Red Army soldiers in late 1944 and 1945 (only 120,000 individuals registered as displaced persons at the end of the war) were often treated as traitors, and some were shipped directly from German concentration camps to Soviet ones in the Gulag system. Ukraine was not the only part of the Soviet Union where the Germans engaged in slave-hunting expeditions, but it was by far the largest hunting ground. Citizens of Ukraine constituted close to 80 percent of all Ostarbeiter taken from occupied areas of eastern Europe to Germany in the course of the war.

  By the summer of 1943, little remained of the original German plan to establish a paradise for German farmers in Ukraine. Hitler had spent a good part of the summer and autumn of 1942 in Ukraine, where German engineers, using the forced labor of Soviet POWs, built his farthest eastern headquarters, code-named Werwolf, in a pine forest near the city of Vinnytsia. He was also there in the spring of 1943, but on September 15 of that year, he left Werwolf forever. That day he ordered his troops in Ukraine to retreat to the Dnieper defensive line. A week later, Soviet troops crossed the Dnieper north of Kyiv, cracking Hitler’s eastern wall for the first time. The Germans would detonate the entire underground structure of Werwolf before retreating from the area in the spring of 1944.

  The dream of conquest and Lebensraum had ended, but the horror it unleashed remained. Ukraine became a graveyard for millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Poles, to list only the largest affected ethnic groups. The Holocaust eradicated most of Ukrainian Jewry. Gone, too, were the German and Mennonite settlers of southern Ukraine and Volhynia—if the Soviets had not deported them in 1941, they now fled with the retreating Wehrmacht. The Polish population of Volhynia and Galicia was under attack from Ukranian nationalists. As the Red Army began its advance into Ukraine after the victorious Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the Soviet leaders confronted a very different country from the one they had left in haste in the summer and fall of 1941. The cities were empty and their industrial enterprises completely destroyed.

  The survivors greeted Red Army troops as liberators, but Soviet officials had doubts about their sincerity. The people who welcomed them had managed to survive under enemy rule and lived outside Soviet control long enough to have doubts about the Stalinist system. Orthodox believers had become accustomed to the only freedom Hitler brought them—freedom of worship. Those who did not think of themselves primarily in ethnonational terms began to do so after living under the Nazi occupation, when life and death was often decided on the basis of ethnicity. All of that threatened the victorious communist regime. Until the 1980s, Soviet citizens would fill out numerous forms that included questions about whether they or their relatives had lived in German-occupied territory. Those questions were next to the ones about the individual’s criminal record.

  chapter 23

  The Victors

  Soviet troops recaptured Kyiv from the retreating Germans on November 6, 1943. Forty-nine-year-old Lieutenant General Nikita Khrushchev, political commissar of the First Ukrainian Front—the group of armies that entered the city—was overcome with joy. As party leader of Ukraine before the war, he knew the city and environs well and now entered Kyiv by the road he had used before the war to go to and from his country house. Khrushchev found the buildings in downtown Kyiv intact—the Germans, unlike the retreating Soviets in 1941, had not tried to blow them up—but the city completely deserted, as he had ordered it shelled the previous day in order to speed up the German retreat.

  As Khrushchev, accompanied by Ukrainian party leaders, approached the Opera House in downtown Kyiv, which had miraculously survived the Soviet attempt to blow it up in 1941, he noticed a screaming man running toward him. “I am the only Jew left! I am the only Jew in Kyiv who is still alive!” screamed the man. Khrushchev tried to calm him down and asked how he
had survived. “I have a Ukrainian wife,” came the answer, “and she kept me hidden in the attic. She fed me and took care of me.” People began to emerge from their hiding places, and a few minutes later another citizen of Kyiv, an old man with a huge beard, hugged and kissed Khrushchev, who later remembered being “very touched.” The soldiers of the regime, for whom many in the summer of 1941 had wished nothing but defeat, now returned as saviors. It was not so much what the Soviets did after their return but what the Germans had done during the occupation that changed the attitude of those who survived, leading them to welcome the Red Army soldiers not only as victors but also as liberators. Those who thought otherwise, including a good part of the Ukrainian intellectual elite, had left with the Germans.

  The Red Army would spend the next year liberating the rest of the Ukrainian territories from German occupation, but the Soviets would fully secure control over those lands only after the final Allied victory over Germany in May 1945. In June of that year, the Soviet government would draw a new western Ukrainian border by annexing to the USSR not only the lands claimed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but also the Transcarpathian region of interwar Czechoslovakia. It was victor’s justice in its characteristically ruthless Soviet rendition.