Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin: Comparison and Entanglements

Content

This thematic axis examines Ukraine as the territory of the rule and mass crimes of the two major criminal regimes in 20th-century European history, National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. The research should not only make a contribution to the history of Ukraine, but also to the discussion of the significance of these two regimes for the history of Europe in the 20th century. The research projects in this thematic axis use Ukrainian examples to examine the local rule of these two regimes and ask about the contexts of violence, who exercised it and who suffered it. They ask about actions and motives and thus address experiences, traumas and their consequences “from below”. Times of change of rule are of particular interest.

Yaroslav Hrytsak: History of Ukraine, 1914-2022

This project aims to write an English-language synthesis of the history of Ukraine in the XX century. This book is to complete the multi-volume English language edition of “History of Ukraine-Rus” by Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, supplementing it with volumes on the most recent periods of Ukrainian history. The synthesis should be based on the latest research on Ukrainian history of the 20th century – including those that will be carried out within the framework of our German-Ukrainian project. It will also differ from other similar publications in that it will offer a new chronological framework of the “Ukrainian 20th century”: instead of the astronomical (1900-1999) or the “short historical” (1914-1991) it suggests the “long 20th century” (1914-2022). The narration will focus on factor of violence, in particular its influence on the formation of the Ukrainian nation and its geopolitical role.

Gerhard Gnauck: The Holodomor in Ukraine: A Case Study

The Holodomor, the great famine in the Soviet Republic Ukraine in 1932-33 with some 4 million victims, was a man-made catastrophe, created from above through political measures: the ordered confiscation of grain and eventually of every kind of food in the possession of the peasants. Nevertheless, this tragedy from the times of Stalin’s rule has been until recently nearly absent in Germany’s academia as well as the broad public, even though its witnesses were present as displaced persons in Germany, especially in Bavaria, after 1945. The only monographs in German so far were published by authors from “the outside”, Lev Kopelev and Anne Applebaum, in 1979 and 2019, respectively. Meanwhile, Ukrainian and international research has made progress. It discussed, e.g., whether this largest (by numbers) crime of the Soviet regime can be described as a genocide. Following other parliaments, the German Bundestag, in a resolution adopted in 2022, gave a positive answer, calling it also a “Menschheitsverbrechen”, which could be translated as a “crime of mankind”.

At the same time, there is an almost complete lack of scientific works on the “micro” level, the regional and local dimension, the events and acting figures – perpetrators and victims, opponents and witnesses on the spot. As Liudmyla Hrynevych at the “HREC in Ukraine” centre points out, only a handful of dissertations on this topic have been written, although not always published, in the country so far. Since the 1930s, the contents of archives had been falsified or destroyed (“archivocide”); witnesses have become victims either of the Great Terror, starting with 1937, or of the Second World War and German occupation.

On the other hand, many official documents, ego-documents and witness accounts including sources from oral history have been published, among them the “Knyhy pam’iati” (Memorial books) for all the oblasti (regions). This work shall try to approach the events on the level of an oblast’ or parts of it, a raion (district) or a few villages. Visits to archives in Ukraine shall enable a deeper approach to the topic. Finally, the perpetrators, victims, witnesses and participants of the numerous acts of (even armed) opposition against the authorities’ measures should be examined, if possible, as they interact and show the motives for their behaviour. This could encompass, depending on the available sources, the pre- and post-history of the years 1932-33 as well, covering a longer range of the biographies.

Gelinada Grinchenko: Ukrainian 1940s: (De)occupation Legitimizations, Social Transformations, and Everyday Challenges

This project explores three types of transformations in Ukraine—social, everyday, and legitimative—during the late 1930s through the 1940s. The key idea is to examine how social changes and everyday life evolved alongside, or diverged from, legitimization efforts by both Nazis and Soviets. Chronologically, the research spans three interconnected periods: the final phase of pre-war Ukrainian social and political development, the period of WW II (including Nazi occupation and early Soviet reoccupation), and the post-war reconstruction.

The first focus of the project is on the discursive processes of legitimization by Nazis, Soviets, and Ukrainian nationalists, particularly how these actors provided the (de)occupied society with political, social, and cultural frameworks for legal existence. A central part of this study examines propaganda through communication theories, asking: "Who says what, in which channel, to whom, and with what effect?"

The second focus examines the (de)occupation’s political practices and their impact on Ukrainian society. It addresses how Nazi occupation reshaped society by introducing new roles and networks, how Soviet reoccupation altered these structures during the transition from occupation to war’s end, and how social structures were rebuilt post-war.

Finally, the project investigates how the Nazi occupation and its aftermath affected daily life for Ukrainians. The core question is: "What ways and resources does a person use to (re)adapt to the imposed reality?" Ways refer to practical activities analyzed through categories like efficiency and (un)expectedness, while resources involve new social ties and networks shaped by the regulations imposed by occupying powers, such as laws and directives that redefined everyday life. (Re)adaptation in this context involves adjusting to the immediate realities of occupation and readapting to post-war conditions, encompassing survival strategies under occupation and transitions to post-liberation life.

Albert Venher: Collaboration: Historical Event and Figure of “Trial Dramaturgy”

Based on materials from the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Kharkiv, Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions, primarily from the trials of individuals accused of collaboration with the Nazis, two questions are planned to be investigated. The first is purely historical and concerns the involvement of the population of these two regions in collaboration with the occupiers during World War II. Special attention will be paid to determining the motives that drove the local population to collaborate, the duration of the collaboration, and the new social roles that were formed as a result of the collaboration. The study will also trace the fate of those collaborators who were involved in the killing of civilians and prisoners of war. Finally, within the framework of this part of the study, the dynamics of attitudes towards collaboration at the everyday level after the war will be studied, changes in the official position of the state and the party on this issue, as well as the influence of collaboration on subsequent generations and society as a whole.

The second part will be devoted to the study of the court proceedings themselves from the point of view of their dramaturgy. We propose looking at these trials from the viewpoint of their dramaturgy, using the broad definition of “dramaturgy” as “the organization of elements in time and space.” This organization can be discussed from a number of different viewpoints, including as a certain communication that unites coexistence and the mutual impacts of five elements:

• 1) various actors who co-produced the legal action;
• 2) scenes where these actors negotiated, including not only courtrooms (or theater halls in case of open trials), but also the media, which conditioned their interpretative (visual and narrative) frameworks and receptions;
• 3) contexts, meaning the politics of history, public discourses, and transnationalization of certain legal actions;
• 4) messages, or the contents and forms of (re)created narratives or memories of WW II, in other words, interpretation and telling histories beyond the individual cases and elaboration of discourses of broader level;
• 5) reactions and reception by the public.

Namely from this viewpoint, which concentrates on examining the interaction between actors, scenes, texts, and contexts in achieving certain goals, we will try to look at the dramaturgy of war and post-war trials held on the territory of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the 1940s-1980s.

Yurii Shapoval: Soviet Political Police in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s

The study will focus on the little-known aspects of the formation and functioning of the communist political police in Ukraine, which in the early 1920s was called the State Political Administration, or GPU (Derzhavnoye politicheskoye upravleniye, or GPU). The umbrella organisation of such regional structures was the United State Political Administration, or ODPU, which operated at the then all-Union level. These structures became the main source of information for all levels of the Soviet leadership and one of the most powerful levers of state administration. In 1934, these bodies received a new abbreviation – NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, in Russian NKVD, which would later become a symbol of the ‘great terror’.

The author will focus on the perpetrators of Soviet mass crimes from the political police of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. The study focuses on the biographies of the Chekists, political, ideological and other motives for their actions. This will help to compare the criminals and the role of the political police in the Stalinist-era Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany.

Recent research has shown that the issues raised in the study of Nazi criminals, especially in the SS and police, are rarely compared to Soviet crimes. At the same time, the opening of the archives of the former Soviet political police in Ukraine since 2015 has allowed for a broader understanding of the practices of Soviet security agencies that remains impossible in Russia.

The study will rely on the sources of the Sectoral State Archive of the SSU and its regional branches, the Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine (formerly the Party Archives), and on existing historiographical achievements in various aspects of the problem.

Oleksandr Kruglov: Executioners of Babyn Yar

There are hundreds of publications about the Babyn Yar tragedy, but they focus on the victims and say almost nothing about the executioners. Hundreds of people from SD Sonderkommando, police battalions, SS, and Wehrmacht units were involved in the destruction of Kyiv’s Jews in one way or another, and the available publications on the Babyn Yar tragedy usually mention only a few names.

In particular, these publications mainly focus on such key figures as Friedrich Jaeckeln and Paul Blobel. The first was the organiser of the extermination of Kyiv Jews, and the second directly supervised the executions. In addition to them, 22 other individuals are known to have participated in or been involved in the killings: five Wehrmacht generals (von Reichenau, von Puttkamer, von Obstfelder, Zickwolf, and Eberhard), six officers of Sonderkommando 4a (Kalsen, von Radetzky, Gefner, Hans, Janssen, and Funk) four police officers of the ‘South’ regiment (Rosenbauer, Besser, Hannibal, Kreutzer), one Waffen-SS officer (Grafhorst), six officers of the Einsatzgruppe C staff (Rasch, Hofmann, Meyer, Krumme, Schulte, Wojton). The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police also took part in the Kyiv rally. But only a few of its members are known by name. Thus, hundreds of people who directly or indirectly participated in the extermination of Kyiv Jews in autumn 1941 remain behind the scenes.They account for approximately 99 per cent of all those who were involved in the Babyn Yar tragedy in one way or another.

In this regard, the aim of the study is to identify by name, if possible, all those involved in the tragedy – organisers, perpetrators, and accomplices. The full identification of the executioners is important for creating an objective and holistic picture of what happened in Kyiv in the autumn of 1941; for turning the executioners from ‘invisible men’ into real people, so that neither former executioners nor their future ‘colleagues’ can hide in the ‘historical bushes’. Clear identification of perpetrators, even at lower levels, can be an important means of deterring future mass murder. This seems to be important, not least in relation to the atrocities committed by Russian units during the ongoing war in Ukraine.

It is also important that the executioners do not turn into ordinary citizens and cease to be executioners, and that the victims do not cease to be victims, since there are no victims without executioners and executioners without victims.

In addition, without personification of Nazi crimes, that is, if we speak in general about the Nazis or Nazis, the individual and personal component of these crimes is levelled, each of which had organisers and specific perpetrators – those who gave the order, those who pulled the trigger, and those who facilitated it.Ignoring the individual and personal component leads to crimes that seem to hang in the air, becoming something ephemeral. Finally, looking at the biographies of individual perpetrators is also important to clarify the causes and motivations of these acts.

Petro Dolhanov: Property Hunters: Local Responses to the Holocaust in Western Volhynia

This study is devoted to an analysis of the economic motives guiding the behavior of the local non-Jewish population in Volhynia during the Holocaust. Economic factors have long been considered a byproduct of the Holocaust, which did not significantly affect the fate of its victims. The author of the study recognizes the fact that the key causes of the Holocaust lie in a different dimension. This crime constituted state-sponsored genocide. However, this approach is valid when we analyze genocidal politics at the macro level. Looking at the micro level, we become aware of the fact that the Holocaust had a social character. As Mary Fulbrook points out, “…many more people now became actively involved in behaviors that, under other circumstances, they would never have conceived. It was not so much perpetrators who produced the system of violence as the system of violence that produced perpetrators”.

In this project, the author assumes that economic motives and factors sometimes played a vital role in the formation and development of the social dynamics of the genocide. His attention is focused on how material gain influenced various forms of behavior of ethnic Ukrainians and Poles in Western Volhynia (these two population groups being the largest non-Jewish majority in rural areas of the region).

The author researches what were the reasons and motives which prompted various actors to choose different economic behaviors during the Holocaust (poverty, ideology, traditional anti-Semitic prejudices, snowball effect, brutalization effect, etc.); what were the forms of economic interaction between the non-Jewish population of Western Volyn and Holocaust victims, how did they affect the Jews’ chances of survival; what were the economic and social consequences of the Holocaust for the non-Jewish population (often constituted not only by enrichment or obtaining new social and professional status, but also by the irreparable loss of craftsmen, lawyers, doctors, etc. inflicted on the region’s economy); how did the acquisition of Jewish property influence the attitude of the non-Jewish population to the surviving victims of the Holocaust in the postwar period; did at least a partial restitution of the looted property take place? Which forms did it take and what discussions did it generate.

The source base of the study project is constituted by materials from collaborationist newspapers (Volyn, Kostopilski Visti, Haidamaka, etc.) stored in the State Archive of Rivne Region and the State Archive of Volyn Region, materials from the funds on auxiliary police and local auxiliary administration bodies, criminal investigation files on auxiliary police employees and employees of local administration auxiliary bodies (State Security Service (SBU) archives).

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors and Ukrainian neighbors are an equally important part of the research. I will focus on processing the following testimonies archives: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection of Testimonies, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Working with the personal stories and memories collected by the Holosy (Voices) Project (Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center) and the VHA USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem Studies.

Andrii Usach: Local Collaboration in Bar District during German Occupation

The study will examine the problem of local collaboration in the Bar district, one of 26 such administrative units within the Volyn-Podillya General District of the Reich Commissariat Ukraine in 1941-1944. This topic is closely related to the history of the Holocaust in the region. Of the approximately nine thousand Jews who remained under Nazi occupation, more than 80% were victims of two series of mass murders in August and October 1942. The rest were deported to forced labour or killed in the so-called Jew-hunt. Approximately 200 people managed to survive.

The research focuses on local collaborators in the police and administrative spheres. The first group includes local police officers and gendarmerie interpreters, and the second group includes employees of district, city, volost, and village administrations, as well as executives of various levels, the so-called desyatnyks or sotskyis. The main research questions coincide with those that are generally raised in contemporary studies of perpetrators (those who participated in the Holocaust – ed.): how did the process of transformation of local collaborators from ordinary people to perpetrators of extreme violence take place, what were their social portraits, previous experiences, networks of interaction, possible motivations, roles, and levels of complicity in the Holocaust and/or vice versa, assistance to Jewish victims, and their fate.

The study reconstructs their personal biographies, primarily on the basis of more than 200 criminal cases from the archives of the SBU offices in Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi, Chernivtsi, and Chernihiv regions and the State Archives of Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi regions, as well as alternative sources, including Jewish and non-Jewish eyewitnesses. The problem of local collaboration will be examined in a microhistorical perspective and in the context of the dynamics of not only the Holocaust but also other national socialist crimes in the Bar district (genocide of Roma, forced labour, struggle against resistance, etc.) It is also important to identify various local actors – functionaries of the occupation administration, Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet underground fighters, and partisans – and determine their level of influence on the actions of local collaborators in a given period of time.

Yurii Radchenko: The Karaites of Ukraine under the Soviet and Nazi Regimes in the 1920s and 1940s

The historiography of the fate of the Karaites of Eastern Europe during the Nazi occupation is quite extensive. However, many questions about what happened to the Karaite population in many regions of Nazi-occupied Ukraine at the local level have not been reflected in scholarly, popular science, and journalistic texts. Even comprehensive studies on the occupation of certain regions of Ukraine in 1941-1944 do not mention the fate of the Karaites.

The study will answer the following questions: what was the specificity of German policy towards the Karaites in different regions of Ukraine (Galicia, Volhynia, Crimea, the centre and east of the republic); whether they were persecuted by the Germans and their allies; what was the ‘legal’ framework for the implementation of the ‘Karaite policy’ in Ukraine during the German occupation; what was the specificity of Nazi policy towards the Karaites in Ukraine and in different regions of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania.

The issue of the attitude of the OUN (b) and OUN (m) to Ashkenazi Jews in Ukraine is actively studied in the academic literature. At the same time, the attitude of various groups of Ukrainian right-wing radicals to the Karaites remains unexplored. What was the attitude of the Bandera and Melnykite groups to the Karaites in 1941-1942, since they controlled the self-government bodies and police in various regions for a long time? What was the attitude of Ukrainian partisans towards the Karaite population in 1943-1944? How was the ‘Karaite question’ reflected in the propaganda of the Bandera and Melnykites?

The question of whether the local Karaites tried to create the illusion of a community that could make attempts (successful or not) to save them from extermination after the arrival of the Germans, as was the case in many other places, remains poorly understood at the level of microhistory. During the occupation, the Tatar-Muslim population lived in Kharkiv, Donbas, and Volyn. It is still not known what the relations between the Tatar (Muslim) and Karaite communities were in these regions in 1941-1943.

One important aspect of the history of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation in Ukraine is the relationship between Jews and Karaites. It is known that in some regions of Europe controlled by the Germans and their allies, relations between rabbis and Karaites were fundamentally different. What were they like in different regions of Ukraine? The author will try to answer these and other questions in his study.

The Reseracher plans to turn to a huge and rich collection of post-war trials from the archives of the former KGB, as well as to use oral history collected by the Shoah Foundation.

Yehor Vradii: Survival Strategies of Jews in the District “Galicia” during the Holocaust

The research is focused on the process of Jewish survival on the territory of the Nazi occupation zone – the so-called District of Galicia, which, in turn, was a part of the General Government for the Occupied Polish Lands (Generalgouvernement) from August 1941. The author tries to trace how the dynamics of the Holocaust, as well as the changing situation of the non-Jewish population living in the District of Galicia, influenced the evolution of the Jews’ choice of escape routes.

The researcher plans to determine what role the experiences of the past played in the process of interaction between Jews and the non-Jewish population of Galicia:

• cohabitation in interwar Poland, socio-political and social transformations during the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941;
• information about anti-Jewish measures during this period in the territory occupied by Germany, etc.
• what was the significance of the events of anti-Jewish pogroms in the early period of the German occupation in the summer of 1941 for the formation of behavioral attitudes of Jews and non-Jews?
• what were the leading strategies of Jewish survival in different periods of the German occupation and at different stages of the implementation of anti-Jewish policy?
• what was the area of rescue of Jews from the District “Galicia”? Was it actually limited to the territorial boundaries of the occupation zone?
• how did the pre-war experience, social status, place of origin and residence before the outbreak of World War II, etc. influence the choice of ways of escape?
• what was the range of motivations for non-Jews to participate in the rescue of Jews and how could these motivations change depending on changes in the policy of the occupying authorities, the personal experiences of the rescuers, etc.
• how important were the survival practices and social ties established during the occupation after the expulsion of the Nazis in 1944 for the survivors and those who rescued them?

The materials of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and its structural units, particularly the Jewish Historical Commission (now the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute), play a key role in the research, namely the testimonies of Jews who managed to survive the Nazi occupation, which were given during the Second World War or in the first decade after its end. It is also planned to process relevant materials from the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation, the Yad Vashem Archive (files of the Righteous Among the Nations), the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland (court cases of former members of the criminal police who operated in the District of Galicia), the State Regional Archives of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions, and others.

Georgiy Konovaltsev: The French Intervention and the Ukrainian Revolution 1918-1919

As many other European regions, the Ukrainian territories were ravaged by the end of the First World War as well as revolutionary movements, too. Though previously often just subsumed under the sequence of events of the overall Russian Revolution, one can argue that these lands lived through their own, Ukrainian, revolution. Not only were regions outside of the former Tsarist empire (as, e.g., Galicia and Bukovina) affected. Besides the social there was also a national revolutionary component – two new Ukrainian states were proclaimed on the ruins of the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires.

In these turmoil other states soon intervened – like the Central Powers in 1918. But the Entente powers played a role, too, and sent troops to the territories of their former ally. What started as an attempt to reopen the Eastern Front, changed with time to an attempt to halt the Bolsheviks. The Allies split up their troops between different regions: Archangelsk and the Russian North (mainly Great Britain and USA), the Caucasus (Great Britain) and the Russian Far East (USA, Canada and Japan among others), while “Southern Russia” (La russie méridionale) was to be the operational zone of France. From December 1918 until April 1919 French troops were stationed predominantly in Odesa, but also in Kherson, Mykolaiv and Sevastopol. In Southern Ukraine they met and had to deal with several, mutually opposed groups: The Directorate of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Volunteer Army of the Russian Whites, the Bolshevik underground and warlords who sometimes cooperated with them. Many of these political groups where present in Odesa itself, which in that time became a haven for refugees of all kinds. Overall, while the Allied Intervention in itself was a failure, the French withdraw after four months was especially tumultuous and humiliating.

The doctoral project will examine the question of how the French intervention shaped the region of Southern Ukraine - predominantly during the four months of actual French troop presence, but also through the preparations beforehand and the aftermath of the intervention.