If something happens, I would want there to be somebody who would remember that someone named D. Berger had once lived. This will make things easier in the difficult moments.
DAVID BERGER to his girlfriend, Elsa, Vilnius, Lithuania, March 2, 19411
Six months after David wrote this letter, German killing squads and Lithuanian auxiliaries murdered him and thousands of other Vilnius Jews in an unfinished Soviet fuel storage site in the Ponary Forest. He was 19 years old. A German soldier who witnessed shootings there recalled that “an elderly man stopped in front of the entrance [to the pit] for a moment and said in good German ‘What do you want from me? I’m only a poor composer.’ The two [Lithuanian] civilians standing at the entrance started pummeling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit . . . . 400 Jews were shot . . . over a period of about an hour.”2 By July 1944, 75,000 Lithuanian Jews were shot in the Ponary Forest.
MAP 1Pre-World War II Europe, 1919–29.
Source: United States Military Academy Department of History Military Atlas.
Contrary to the image often portrayed to students and the public, Eastern Europe was the epicenter of the Holocaust and the overwhelming majority of Jews killed were Eastern European. The first large-scale killing of Jews began with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and escalated into full-fledged mass murder first in the occupied Soviet Union. The Nazis built industrialized extermination centers in the East because the majority of Jews to be murdered lived there. The Holocaust in the East obliterated a vibrant and diverse Jewish community that had existed for over a thousand years. In addition, Eastern Europe was the focus of the larger Nazi genocidal project (including the Holocaust) that envisioned German colonization of this territory and explicitly planned for the mass deaths of thirty to forty million people, most of them non-Jews. Placing this massive killing in context, the 165,000 German Jews murdered by the Nazis represent less than three percent of those killed in the Holocaust.3
We must shift our gaze from West to East in order to fully understand the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s poignant and tragic experience, for example, was not typical of the Holocaust (insofar as any experience is “typical.”) More Jews lived in the Polish city of Lwów than in all of the Netherlands where Anne hid and wrote her famous diary. Yet, her important story has achieved a level of visibility and awareness that obscures this fact. More Jews lived in the Warsaw ghetto than in all of France. More Jews were murdered on November 14, 1941 in the small Polish town of Slonim than were saved by Denmark’s unmatched, massive rescue attempt of its Jewish population. Pointing out the primacy of the East in the Holocaust does not minimize the deaths of those in other places; engaging in any form of competitive suffering is a losing endeavor for all involved. However, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is critically different from the Holocaust elsewhere, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Several important characteristics distinguish the Holocaust in the East from that in the West, apart from the sheer scale of victims. First, it was conducted largely in public and was no secret to local populations. Second, far more collaborators participated in all aspects of the Nazi genocidal project in the East. Moreover, this collaboration exceeded in severity any in the West, with large numbers of locals acting as killers and co-perpetrators. Third, the Holocaust in the East was a profoundly local affair. Most victims were not deported hundreds of miles to a gas chamber, but were shot near their homes and villages. Finally, unlike Western Europe, which has confronted its Holocaust experience with varying degrees of success, the East remains reluctant to come to terms with the murder of its Jews—at either the public or private level. For all these reasons, we must never neglect Eastern Europe in our study of the Holocaust.
This book, then, tells the story of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe through the voices and documents of those who survived (and died), those who killed, those who watched, and those who helped. It does not seek to be the definitive work on the subject, but to be an open door into a history often overlooked. At its most basic level, this is a story of humanity and inhumanity between individuals. There is no Holocaust; there are six million plus different Holocausts. The murder of an individual was committed six million times. This book, then, seeks to explore the epicenter of the Holocaust in the East—the locations of the majority of victims, of the killing centers, of the majority of collaborators, and of the majority of rescuers. All participants walked the paths that we are challenged to understand here.
Defining the “Holocaust”
Holocaust.
1. A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering.
Oxford English Dictionary4
The murder of Jews in Eastern Europe lay at the heart of the Holocaust, but before we address this issue (and the justification for this book) we must define the term “Holocaust” itself, for it often means different things to different people. The word itself originates from the Greek holos + kaustos meaning “completely consumed by fire.” It was often used to mean “the complete destruction of a large group of people,” and probably first by the poet Milton in 1671.5 It was not used to describe the murder of the Jews of Europe until much later, when we came to differentiate between a holocaust and the Holocaust. Even different institutions and scholars have differing definitions for the term, however. For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as “the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”6 The Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, uses the definition: “the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.”7
Already, we can see subtle differences in definition. In popular usage, the term has often come to be interpreted more broadly, including non-Jewish victims as well. Indeed, when US president Jimmy Carter established the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he referred to “eleven million innocent victims exterminated,” including some five million non-Jewish victims.8 More expansive definitions led some to turn to the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”: Shoah. This term clearly limits its coverage of Nazi crimes to those committed against Jews. Steven T. Katz represents the most extreme version of this, contending “that the Jews alone were targeted for genocide, or total physical annihilation.”9 I will, however, avoid such a narrow use of the term. Not only is it historically imprecise, but it also implies a sense of “competitive suffering” that is simply unhelpful.
I will use the term “Holocaust” to refer mainly to the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe; however, I will also use the more inclusive term “Nazi genocidal project” to capture the larger murderous vision of which the Jews were such a large part. This includes Sinti/Roma (gypsies), the handicapped, political “enemies,” Soviet prisoners of war, and—particularly in the East—entire ethnic groups such as the Slavs. One cannot understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without placing it in the context of this larger Nazi genocidal project that foresaw murder and demographic engineering on a colossal scale.
This book also contains a lengthy but important discussion of preexisting German histories and fantasies regarding Eastern Europe and their mobilization by the Nazis into an unswerving focus on the conquest of that territory. These intellectual, historical, and popular conceptions of the lands in the East help explain the severity of the Nazi occupation there (as compared to that in the West) as well as the importance of the genocidal project there.
A short chapter provides the important context of the experience of Eastern European populations under Soviet rule. This period between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of the Soviet Union had important repercussions for the course of the Holocaust in the East. The Soviets’ own repressive measures and attempts to redesign society affected Jews and non-Jews in similar, yet distinct ways. Perhaps most significantly, the Soviet occupation provided the Nazis with propaganda that enhanced the power of Judeo-Bolshevik antisemitic fervor among non-Jews.
Defining Eastern Europe: Boundaries, Borders, Pasts, and Presents
It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the Age of the Enlightenment. It was also the Enlightenment, with its intellectual centers in Western Europe, that cultivated and appropriated to itself the new notion of “civilization” . . . Such was the invention of Eastern Europe. It has flourished as an idea of extraordinary potency since the eighteenth century.
Historian LARRY WOLFF, Inventing Eastern Europe10
Before we can even begin to discuss the nature of the Holocaust in the East, we must contend with the very fraught definition of that space that we call “Eastern Europe.” The notion of civilization or lack thereof mentioned above further complicates matters, as the definition is itself loaded and very much in the eye of the beholder. So, what is Eastern Europe? Which areas are included? How do we define those areas? Do we use the nation state as the basis for our definition? If so, when? What borders do we choose? How do we decide upon the shape of a space containing incredible ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity and whose boundaries have undergone seismic changes in just the past 150 years while holding multiple cultural and historic affinities for centuries? One way of viewing Eastern European history is through the dominance and collapse of four transnational empires: Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and to a lesser extent, Prussian. Poland provides an illustrative example. A series of partitions in the eighteenth century by Prussia, Austria, and Russia tore it apart, only for it to reappear in the nineteenth century, be dismembered by the Nazis and the Soviets in 1939, and then have its boundaries shifted hundreds of miles west at the end of World War II. Thus, those who may claim a Polish background exist in Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Germany . . . and conversely, inhabitants of those regions may feel a territorial and historical claim to parts of modern-day Poland. Indeed, strong arguments can be made that the division of Eastern and Western Europe is more a relic of the Cold War than a reality in earlier periods of history.
Even the division of Europe into East and West implies an exoticization of the East that in many ways evokes European visions (and divisions) of Africa. It is no coincidence that historian Mark Mazower’s book on Europe in the twentieth century is tellingly titled Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. For many at the time and even today, Eastern Europe conjures visions of backwardness, decay, authoritarianism, and stunted growth. While many of these stereotypes stem from the post-Soviet era, others predate it. Thus, much of the richness of the history of Eastern Europe is lost when viewed through these lenses or in comparison to Western Europe where that region is some idealized model of “civilization.” Contrary to some popular belief, the sun does shine and the birds do sing in Poland.
Unlike some definitions of Eastern Europe that are primarily political, we will rely on a more spatial approach, for we are more interested in a transnational and territorial approach than a comparative political study.11 For the purposes of this book, we will consider Eastern Europe to be the territory east of Germany (not including the Czech Republic/Slovakia) stretching to the end of “European Russia” at the Ural Mountains. From north to south, we will begin with the Baltic States and end with Bulgaria.
Here, the Balkans and Greece are notable exceptions that will not be covered in this book.12 While in some ways this could be seen as an arbitrary distinction, other scholars have placed the Balkans and Greece in their own geographic category of “Southeastern Europe.” Indeed, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum does not include these areas in Eastern Europe either. The region’s common Ottoman past creates deeply important fault lines between this area and an “Eastern Europe,” defined mostly as Baltic, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian territories with the addition of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria—as they were the only independent allies of Nazi Germany in the East. Moreover, the death toll in the Balkans of roughly 200,000 pales in comparison to Eastern Europe. This is of importance for the same reason that the study of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is important compared to that of Western Europe. Even so, our definition of Eastern Europe leaves us with eleven modern-day nations, each with their own histories and experiences in the Holocaust.
The Nazi genocidal project rested on a fluid yet ancient mosaic of cultural conflict, assimilation, and aspirations. Our story is further complicated by the often-intense collaboration of local non-Jews, particularly in killing. Collaboration occurred in the West but never to the same degree or with the same intimacy as in Eastern Europe. This book tells the story of the Holocaust in this region—a region so vital to Nazi expansion and colonial ambitions. In so doing, it brings the Holocaust in Eastern Europe back into our vision and highlights the best new scholarship on the topic.
Constraints of space and accessibility preclude a fully detailed discussion of all aspects of the Holocaust in all of Eastern Europe. However, this book will attempt to touch on as many areas as possible and provide in-depth discussions of themes and experiences common throughout the region, while noting exceptions to those experiences. Chapter 1 focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, giving a brief history of Jews there as well as the different forms of antisemitism they experienced. Chapter 2 summarizes the rise of the Nazi state. Chapter 3 critically discusses the mythical position of Eastern Europe in both the German and Nazi mindsets. It helps us understand why the East was so important to the Nazis and how the larger Nazi genocidal project played on an altered view of a German “Manifest Destiny”. Chapter 4 discusses the important period of Soviet occupation from 1939–40. This often-overlooked moment was critical in setting the stage for the experience of both Jews and non-Jews under the Nazis. Chapter 5 covers the invasion of Poland, initial mass killings there, and Nazi attempts to answer the “Jewish Question” in the region. Chapter 6 discusses the “War of Annihilation” against the Soviet Union and its relationship to the Holocaust. It includes the Einsatzgruppen shootings, local pogroms against Jews, and initial Nazi occupation policy. Chapter 7 addresses both Nazi ghettoization policy and the Jewish struggle to survive in the ghettos, both at the individual and organizational level. Chapter 8 surveys Hitler’s independent allies: Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. It analyzes how and why these nations sided with Hitler and how their specific approaches to Jews fit (or did not fit) into Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Chapter 9 introduces the incremental steps toward the Final Solution. It explains how the Nazis arrived at the decision to murder Jews and then how that policy was carried out. Chapter 10 highlights the very important topic of Jewish resistance. It helps us define what Jewish resistance looked like, giving examples from camps, ghettos, and the forest. Chapter 11 is more thematic, looking more closely at Holocaust perpetrators, collaborators, and rescuers in Eastern Europe. It discusses the variety of behaviors that took place and offers some explanations as to why individuals made the choices they did. Finally, the book ends with a discussion of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust in the East as well as a brief overview of attempts at postwar justice, and a discussion of the current state of memory and memorialization there.
For too long, the life and death of Jews and other victims of the Nazis in Eastern Europe have remained in the shadows. It is time to view the East in its own right as the epicenter of both the Holocaust and the Nazi genocidal project.
Selected Readings
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. van Pelt. Holocaust: A History. New York: Norton, 2002.
Hochstadt, Steve, ed. Sources of the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Rabinbach, Anson, and Sander L Gilman, eds. The Third Reich Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Sachar, Howard Morley. A History of the Jews in the Modern World. New York: Knopf, 2005.