For millions of Europeans, the official end of the First World War brought no peace. Bloody revolutionary, nationalist, and interventionist wars ravaged the former Russian Empire and demoralized the people who lived there. Hungarian and Romanian troops waged fierce battles over the future borders between their countries even as the Hungarian Republic of Councils was subjugated by counterrevolutionary forces. Yugoslavian soldiers attacked Kärnten, Austria, and Polish troops marched on Kiev. There were territorial conflicts in various spots between Germany and the newly created Polish state. Some 3,000 people died in the fighting in Upper Silesia. Those numbers may have been small compared to the millions of casualties in the national wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions in Eastern Europe, but the internal outbreaks of violence and the wars over borders and against minorities that followed the 1918 armistice and the Paris peace agreements radicalized people and made them impatient for action.
Hundreds of thousands of people who had been declared personae non gratae left the territories Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary had been forced to cede or otherwise lost. All too often they were driven from their homes. Two million people fled Russia for Western Europe, which itself was suffering from hunger, spiritual and material ruin, and a harrowing Spanish flu epidemic. Crises, insecurity, malnutrition, and the disintegration of law and order fueled hatred for Eastern European Jews.
The survivors of the Great War swept aside old social orders in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. They followed the principle of “self-determination of peoples”—an idea that initially sounded benevolently democratic but soon became a shrill call to arms. It had been popularized at the beginning of the First World War by the Russian revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky. In September 1915, together with thirty-eight socialist delegates from eleven countries who met secretly in Switzerland’s Zimmerwald Forest, they endorsed the nationalist cause “unanimously and enthusiastically.” One passage from the “Zimmerwalder Manifesto,” written by Trotsky, read: “The right of nations to self-determination must be the unshakable foundation of national relations.”
No sooner had it taken power in late 1917 than the Bolshevik government in Russia proclaimed the right to national self-determination. In reaction US president Woodrow Wilson also adopted the concept, using it as the guiding political idea for his Fourteen Points, which were intended to lead to a just, lasting post-armistice peace. In January 1918, even as cannon were still firing on all fronts, Wilson presented his plan to Congress. He understood national self-determination in American terms: as a step toward national independence, modern, democratically legitimated constitutions, the rule of law and order, equitable relations between peoples and interests, and the constraint of violence between states and expansionist aggression.
In November 1918, as the war came to an end and the historic powers in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin collapsed, the “springtime of nations” so hotly anticipated by political strategists proceeded less peacefully than hoped. Wilson was not to blame. He put important issues on the agenda, ones that had long concerned Europe and the entire world and continued to excite people’s passions: free trade, free passage for ships, radical, controlled disarmament, the “sincere welcome of Russia into the community of free nations,” the creation of a Polish state, the territorial integrity of the Balkan countries, and the solidarity of the world’s countries in a league of nations that would promote international peace by guaranteeing protection for all member states, particularly small ones pressured by larger neighbors.
Buoyed by such visions, Wilson told Congress on February 11, 1918: “‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of actions which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Yet the US president’s British and French counterparts used the principle tactically to reduce the territories of Bolshevist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, decreasing their influence in favor of Britain and France’s own interests. They thus supported self-determination for populations in Southern and Eastern Europe. In their minds, the principle didn’t apply to colonial peoples at all.
Wilson’s secretary of state Robert Lansing quickly recognized what sort of a genie his boss had released from its bottle. On December 30, 1918, he wrote in his diary: “The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination,’ the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races.… The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered!”
As a lawyer and constitutional expert, Lansing thought the concept, no matter how well meant, would lead to killings and violence and be put to unintended uses. He wondered what the effects of the word “self-determination” would be on “the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers.” What, he asked, if “the Mohammadans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it?” Moreover, how could it be “harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?” All in all, the idea of self-determination seemed to Lansing to be completely incompatible with the political structure of a world built upon the idea of nationality.1
With the military collapse of the Central Powers, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, and other peoples hastened “to draw the consequences from the principles Wilson proclaimed” and “make themselves free.” That was how Joseph Bendow-Tenenbaum characterized the bitter fighting in late 1918 between nationalist Poles and equally nationalist Ukrainians over East Galicia, which had been under Austrian control. The Poles considered Lvov/Lviv as essentially Polish, the Ukrainians saw the city as totally Ukrainian, and the 70,000 Jews who lived there were caught between the fronts. In November 1918, seeing a Polish pogrom brewing, they sent a dispatch to Wilson pleading for help. In vain. A few days later, Jews were being murdered and robbed in the name of national self-determination.
In 1924, after the situation had calmed down somewhat and anti-Jewish discrimination had returned to its usual quiet form, the Jewish-German writer Alfred Döblin traveled to Poland. “Today’s states are the grave of peoples,” he wrote. The more or less arbitrarily formed new nations of Europe were “collective beasts” that taught the masses, “their subjects,” the barbarism of nationalism rather than values. “It is impudent arrogance to blindly prioritize what is called national community ahead of everything else,” Döblin wrote. “The freedom that is preached becomes hostile to other equally important freedoms in the way it is preached. I do not like the nation for its own sake.”2
Zionists welcomed the idea of self-determination, which raised great hopes for a Jewish state. Encouraging them was a briefing prepared by Lansing for Wilson on September 21, 1918, to prepare him for future peace conferences. Its point eighteen read: “Palestine to be an autonomous state under a general international protectorate or under the protectorate of a Power designated to act as the mandatory of the Powers.”3 At the time around 700,000 people lived in Palestine: 568,000 Muslims, 74,000 Arab Christians, and 58,000 Jews. Within this protectorate-state, so conceived, Jews would be able to lead an autonomous existence. During a debate within Jewish circles, Lansing asked Chaim Weizmann, Britain’s leading Zionist then visiting Washington, to sketch out a future Jewish community in Palestine, and Weizmann answered that it was his goal “to gradually form a Jewish nation in the same sense that France was a French and Britain a British one.” Later, Weizmann added, “When Jews make up a large majority, the time will come to form a government, to push the country forward and turn our own ideals into reality.”
Lansing didn’t contradict this vision. On the contrary, he accepted the idea that in the medium term four to five million Eastern European Jews would be resettled in the “empty spaces” of Palestine. Weizmann returned triumphantly to London and announced that the US secretary of state together with political leaders from France and Britain supported him. On March 2, 1919, he assured the delegates of the American Jewish Congress: “In complete agreement with our government and our people, the Allied nations are unanimously of the view that the foundations of a Jewish community should be laid in Palestine.” Representatives of defeated Germany, he went on, also supported the plan.4 With that, the notion of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine was internationally recognized. It was a continuation and elaboration of the terse Balfour Declaration of 1917: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Along with the leaders and members of Zionist groups, anti-Semites were delighted with this vision—although they ignored the part of the declaration that supported Jews’ civil and religious rights in every country of residence. They were simply happy at the prospect that Jews would soon begin to emigrate en masse. In 1917, for example, Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos demanded the formation of a Jewish state for one reason only: “to de-Jewify and Hellenize” Salonika.5 Driven by a far greater hatred of Jews, the early Adolf Hitler brusquely rejected the idea of a Jewish state. In 1926 in Mein Kampf, he accused “Zionism” of trying to fool the rest of the world into thinking that Jews would be satisfied with such a state. In reality, Hitler claimed, all Jews wanted was “an organization headquarters for their international swindling and cheating with its own political power that is beyond the reach and interference from other states.”6
With their decision in 1920 to place Palestine under British mandate and allow a homeland for Jews there, the delegates of the victorious Allies in Paris laid the first cornerstone of what would later become Israel. Germany laid the second one with the murder of six million European Jews. It was only after the Holocaust that, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read out his declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel in a Tel Aviv theater: “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by reestablishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.”
One important precedent for mass resettlement was set by the French administration in Alsace-Lorraine, which between 1918 and 1923 expelled large numbers of Germans and descendants of Germans who had arrived in the two regions after the Franco-Prussian War. Their stories are one example of ethnic cleansing in the first four decades of the twentieth century. As states increasingly pursued the goal of homogenization, they also came to view Jews as foreign elements within the nation. Hannah Arendt, who herself fled Germany in 1933, wrote of ethnically motivated displacements as having “specifically modern features,” including divorcing people from their homeland, uprooting them socially, and stripping them of any political rights. In Arendt’s eyes, this sort of treatment of people reached its apotheosis in the “murderous population policies of [Nazi] Germany.” Nonetheless, while the Holocaust represents the apex of ethnic violence, it remains embedded within twentieth-century European history as a whole.7
With its age-old convolution of German, Alemannic, and French influences, Alsace-Lorraine was a culturally rich area. Residents had always had to deal with competing centers of power, and no matter who ruled over them, they maintained a pragmatic opportunism common to other European border and transitional areas. Cleverly, they stressed local patriotism and maintained distance from their perennially faraway, often bellicose masters. In 1871, Germany annexed most of Alsace and the northern, heavily industrialized half of Lorraine. On November 21, 1918, the two regions, which Paris had previously considered either imperial territory or eastern départements, were ceded back to France. From 1940 to 1944, they were once again made parts of Germany.
In November 1918, the venerable Alsatian rabbi of Strasbourg, Emile Levy, resigned to avoid having to greet French troops marching into the city—he had long since gotten rid of the accents over the “e’s” in his first and last names. Inspired by German patriotism, he had himself transferred across the Rhine River in 1919 and became the rabbi of the Charlottenburg district in Berlin. In 1934, Levy fled Nazi Germany for Tel Aviv, where he died in 1953. By contrast, Harry Bresslau only left Strasbourg against his will when it was returned to France. He had taught medieval history at the university there since 1890. He owed his post to the liberal director of universities in the Prussian Ministry of Education, Friedrich Theodor Althoff. Althoff had been unable to get the respected Jewish scholar approved by the cliques at Berlin’s universities and sent him to distant Strasbourg. Even today, Bresslau’s Handbook on the Study of Documents is considered a classic among medieval historians.
On December 2, 1918, French police and soldiers hounded the seventy-year-old back to Germany, calling him a “pan-Germanist militant.” But Bresslau, who was Albert Schweitzer’s father-in-law, had never sympathized with the Pan-German League or similar nationalist associations. In his autobiographical sketches, composed in Heidelberg, he noted: “On Sunday, December 1, at 11 a.m., a gendarme brought the deportation order. The following day, at 3 p.m., on the orders of the commanding general, I was to appear at the bridge over the Rhine at Kehl. I was only allowed to take what I could carry. The question of furniture was to be settled at a later date. People of the same nationality who lived under one roof were allowed to accompany me, but they had no hope of being permitted to return. My wife immediately decided to go with me. That afternoon news arrived that every traveler could take 40 kilograms with them. The French would bring it to the Rheinbrücke. The next morning, I brought two hastily packed suitcases to the assigned collection point. I was afraid the French would search my luggage, so I left a number of papers behind that I would have liked to take with me.”
That afternoon the first fifty people to be deported from Strasbourg arrived at the bridge. The commanding officer ordered the Germans to carry their own luggage; he forbade his men from offering any help. In the middle of the bridge, some soldiers relented and assisted the elderly Bresslaus in bringing their two suitcases, each weighing forty kilos, to the German side. Bresslau mentioned these details “in order to convey the unnecessary brutality” with which the French proceeded, although he “could be accused of nothing more than of being particularly unwelcome to the inventors of French propaganda because he had a lot of friends among Alsatians.” It would take several years for Bresslau to be reunited with his furniture and his beloved library.8
The fate suffered by the Bresslaus would be shared by at least 100,000 others in the months that followed. Deportees were usually only informed that they would have to leave France twenty-four hours before their departure, and they, too, were only allowed to take forty kilos of luggage, in some places less. Twelve commissions de triage with three members each decided who was to be driven out of the region. The ultimate aim was épuration, or “cleansing.” The commission made their decisions on the basis of informants’ denunciations and police and intelligence service dossiers. Their mission was to weed out all “suspects,” “personae non gratae,” and “pan-Germanists,” in order to “cleanse Alsace-Lorraine from all the effects of the annexation.” On January 24, 1919, French president Georges Clemenceau issued blanket orders to the committee members that “where and however the presence of Germans affected the public order, the threat is to be removed immediately.”9
Clemenceau was not just worried about Francophobe German militarists, but also about leading Social Democrats and trade-union organizers, men who had been active in Strasbourg’s revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ councils before the region had been put under French control. Union and SPD activists were deported or detained, including several who had organized labor activities while Alsace-Lorraine was part of the German Empire. From the outset, Clemenceau used the policy of épuration to pursue social and political ends. He emphasized to committee members that they had a “duty” to get rid of superfluous German workers “so that the people of Alsace and Lorraine are not driven into unemployment.”
To benefit demobilized French soldiers, it was ordered that German workers were to be the first to be fired in and around the city of Colmar. An anonymous informer reported that several Germans were still employed in the electrical plant in Turkheim—the letter writer demanded that “these undesirable people” be deported. On April 12, 1919, the local police commissioner wrote to the regional administrator: “I take the liberty of informing you that a number of boches [a pejorative term for Germans] are still at work on the construction sites of Munstertal, while Alsatians are sitting around on the streets looking for work.”
Germans who were already unemployed were also put on the lists of “undesirables” because they represented a potential burden to the French social-welfare system. “To protect public hygiene,” French officials drove German prostitutes into Germany. The same happened to “antisocial or degenerate elements,” a category that included the unemployed Pole Maurise Feibusch, who was accused of doing black-market labor. The commissions soon ceased, however, to apply the category “undesirable” to specialists and other people whose skills could not be easily replaced.
This process of differentiation between people repeated itself in much harsher form in 1939 in German-annexed areas of Poland, Alsace, Luxembourg, and the Finnish-Russian border region of Karelia—and after 1945 in Carpathian Ukraine, Sudetenland, former eastern and southeastern Poland, Soviet-annexed East Prussia, Siebenbürgen, and Banat. In these places, too, the ruling powers made exceptions for specialists and other essential workers. Wherever “foreigners” were displaced in Europe, the category “undesirable” was expanded and contracted to meet social and economic needs. As a rule, miners were usually allowed to stay in their homes, while members of the intelligentsia, shopkeepers, farmers, and the sick, the aged, and those branded as antisocial were made to disappear.
As was the case elsewhere when people were displaced, the expulsion of Alsatian Germans was justified as an act of punitive payback and accompanied by schadenfreude, vandalism, and larceny carried out by the majority. As Germans were being deported from Colmar, taking with them only what they could carry, a “corridor of hatred” formed along the sidewalks and “a respected woman in the town spit upon one man’s frock coat.” Youths pelted the Germans with small stones and horse dung and sang: “Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele erüs” (Must I, must I, leave this little town). Families of Germans who had moved to Colmar anticipated deportation and began to make preparations. One of them, schoolteacher Wilhelm Schmitz, who was originally from the German Rhineland, took out an ad in the local paper reading: “Due to an impending move, an entire household up for sale cheaply. Everything in good condition. Bedroom, bureaus, make-up tables, armchair, chaise longue, chairs, beds, mirror, tables and pillows.” Neighbors looted the furnishings of apartments deportees had been forced to leave behind. Even when there was no looting, French officials arranged “orderly” auctions to sell off the contents of people’s homes at bargain prices, with the proceeds going to state coffers.10
Who was considered German and who was deemed French? The majority of the classifications according to the friend-or-foe schema in Alsace-Lorraine were not made by the commissions de triage. They were far too slow and were disbanded in late 1919. Officials at the residents’ registry offices were far more efficient because they differentiated less between individual cases. On the basis of the residents’ registry, they classified the 1.9 million people in the region using four groups: (A) full French, (B) partly French, (C) necessary or tolerated foreigners, and (D) Germans.
Class A identity cards were reserved for people of “pure heritage,” whose parents or grandparents had all been born in the region or in France. In cases of doubt, people had to prove their lineage. A Class A identity card, bearing the tricolor, gave holders the right to travel, vote, and work; 1,082,650 people enjoyed these liberties.
Those who were the product of French-German “mixed marriages” fell into category B. The corresponding identity card bore two red stripes on the side. People in this group, of whom there were 183,500, were allowed to attain full citizenship if they proved their loyalty over the years. Until then, they lived as second-class citizens, always under threat of deportation.
Only 55,050 people, whose grandparents came from neutral or French allied countries, fell into category C. Almost all of them were workers who had come under German rule to Alsace-Lorraine to work in the mines or in industry. Their labor was still very much in demand, so they were given preferential treatment.
Group D encompassed 513,800 people of German heritage, or roughly one-fourth of the region’s population. They had been born in Alsace-Lorraine, but their parents had moved to the area after 1870. The files drawn up for these people by French bureaucrats bore the heading “purgatoire.”
These criteria meant that a man with German parents who was born in Alsace would be given the classification D while his French wife would be put in category A. The children would end up in group B when they reached adulthood—minors were automatically given their fathers’ classification. Along with difficulties in finding work and the constant threat of deportation, people in group D were economically disadvantaged in a number of other respects and were systematically robbed by the state insofar as they were forced to exchange money and other liquid assets in reichsmarks at the poor rate of 1.25 to 1 franc while the rate for everyone else was .74 to 1. (The Bulgarian government would do something similar with Jews in 1941, when they introduced the lev into annexed parts of Macedonia and Thrace.)11 The French government also fired many Germans who worked in the public sector and the postal and rail services. They forced “halfbreeds” to move to other parts of France, restricted their freedom of movement and voting rights, and subjected them to police surveillance. But hardest hit were the people deported to Germany. By late 1919 they numbered around 100,000. Fifty thousand more were forced to return to Germany in the four years that followed. By 1926 there were also at least 575,000 people forced out of the territories Germany was required to relinquish after the First World War: Posen, Upper Silesia, and West Prussia. Among them were many Jewish-German families, who were put under enormous pressure to emigrate. Subjectively, of course they too felt like refugees.12
In France, those summoned before the committees as foreigners weren’t allowed to view their files, which often contained denunciations by informants, nor were they permitted to introduce witnesses and evidence on their behalf. They had no legal counsel or any possibility of appeal. The witnesses for committees remained anonymous and didn’t have to testify under oath.13 Past quarrels, business competition, envy among colleagues, ambition, and plain treachery produced so many accusations that as early as December 1918 the police director of Strasbourg complained of being unable to deal with all the denunciations he was receiving in the mail.
At that juncture, France had suspended the principle of equality for all before the law of which it was otherwise so deservedly proud. Of the 1.9 million inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, 85 percent indicated that German was their native language. Under German rule, between 1871 and 1914, French had remained the official language in local government offices and schools wherever French native speakers were in the majority. It was only with the start of the First World War that French became the mistrusted language of the enemy. After the fighting stopped, victorious France was quick to try to Romanize the region. Strict centralizing rules were intended to eradicate the linguistic and cultural particularities of the inhabitants of the Franco-German border region and inculcate them with French nationalism once and for all. With the ethnic cleansing programs affecting many schoolteachers, the prefectures offered higher wages to attract teachers and superintendents from the French heartland. As a rule, these people spoke not a word of German. Yet they were charged with teaching classes in which less than 10 percent of the pupils spoke French.14
Systematically and bureaucratically classifying masses of people within a larger populace on the basis of where their parents and grandparents had been born was something that had never before been done in Western Europe. France did not pursue this process of national sorting and expulsion to its ultimate conclusion. With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, a milder pragmatism gradually won the upper hand. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the Third Republic naturalized people of German descent still living in the country, although they often had to pass a variety of individual tests. People with names like Karl Georg Görke became Charles Georges Goerké. School administrations were particularly strict in insisting upon the Romanization of names.
The twin ideas of selecting out certain groups for deportation and rigidly insisting upon a national language spread through Europe between the world wars. With the motherland of European republicanism having legitimized such methods, the newly founded and formed nation-states of the continent quickly stripped and denied people of citizenship because their parents and grandparents weren’t Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Latvian, or Polish. Conversely, many older people lost their right to reside in the places their children or grandchildren did.
In the fall of 1935, Nazi Germany defined who was Jewish in what became known as the Nuremberg Laws. After considerable debate, the authors of the legislation decided that the crucial criterion was the religion of a person’s grandparents—something that was relatively easy to determine. On October 3, 1940, when the Vichy government in France voluntarily proclaimed the statut des juifs, which brought its policies in line with the activities of the German occupiers, it was initially unclear who would be considered Jewish. But in a few weeks, leading civil servants agreed that individuals were members of the “Jewish race” if three of their four grandparents had been members of the Jewish religious community. That criterion was enshrined in law in the second statut des juifs, proclaimed on June 2, 1941. The commissioner-general for Jewish questions in Vichy France, Xavier Vallat, stressed that France was only following the example of “modern legislators” in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Croatia, who had observed the same rule. Nonetheless, the procedure proved to be more difficult than in Germany since neither civil registrars’ offices nor residential registries kept records of people’s religion. On one score, the 1940 statut des juifs went even further than the Nuremberg Laws. It treated two “half-Jews” married to one another as “full Jews”—as Adolf Eichmann’s representative in France, Heinz Röthke, noted with satisfaction.15
In May 1942, Hitler cited France as an example of how he wanted to impose ethnic categories, if necessary with brute force. A record of his monologues at mealtimes has him saying: “We can even learn a lesson from the way the French behaved in Alsace. Without the slightest regard for the generations of men who would have to suffer in consequence, they set to work to eradicate from Alsace every vestige and trace of German influence, thrusting brutally the customs and the culture of France down the throats of the inhabitants. Acting in the same way we will mercilessly wipe out bilingualism in these territories, and the radical methods to which we shall have recourse will themselves prove their efficiency, even among the population hostile to Germanization. We shall rapidly achieve a clear-cut situation, so that by the second generation, or at the latest by the third, these regions will have been completely pacified.”
Hitler praised the “application of the most severe measures” begun in the summer of 1940 to expel natives of Alsace-Lorraine to France, scoffing, “we shall still have to get rid of a further quarter of a million of ‘Frenchified’ [sic] Alsatians.” In contrast to the relatively orderly methods of the French, he cited a far more radical model of the brute force he wanted to apply to ethnic selection. Especially in eastern areas, Hitler proposed, his goals could only be achieved with Stalinesque procedures.16
The Germans retook Alsace-Lorraine in summer 1940 and deported 105,000 people between July and December. As a report put it, these were “mainly Jews, gypsies and other members of foreign races, criminals, antisocial people and incurable lunatics, in addition to French and Francophiles.” These deportations were just the beginning. On September 12, 1940, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the German police, decided upon “the future composition of the populace” in the “incorporated eastern regions,” that is, the areas of Poland that Germany had annexed.
According to Himmler’s decree, people living in these areas were to be divided into four groups: “A: members of the German people,” that is, full Germans; and “B: people of German descent who needed to be educated to become full Germans and therefore only enjoyed German citizenship but not all the rights of members of the German Reich.” They were generally to be resettled in traditionally German areas, if necessary, re-Germanifying them. Group C, in Himmler’s definition, consisted of “valuable foreigners and renegade Germans whose German citizenship is conditional.” Group D, the largest category, was made up of “members of foreign peoples who do not possess German citizenship.” These close to eight million Polish men and women were to be “combed through” to separate out those who “represent a worthwhile addition for the German people.” Himmler limited their number in advance to “one million people at the most.”
On the basis of these categories, in the same edict, Himmler introduced a second, subsidiary classification system called the “German people’s list.” It divided up Germans and people worthy of being Germanified—more or less groups A, B, and C—into subgroups one through four and gave them various civic and social rights. Anyone who was “actively engaged” in the battle between German and Polish ethnicity or could at least show that he had “preserved his Germanity” was to go into subgroups one and two. “People of German descent who had formed connections over the years to Polishness … but on account of their behavior had the prerequisite conditions for becoming full members in the German ethnic community” were assigned to subgroup three. This subgroup also included “ethnically foreign” people who had married Germans—although only if in the opinion of German ethnicity experts the German part of the “mixed marriage” prevailed. That was the case if, for instance, a household conformed to German ideals of orderliness or had displayed a better-than-average desire to contribute to the collective. The fourth and final subgroup was reserved for ethnic renegades, “people of German descent who have completely gone over politically to Polishness.”
The irreproachably German members of subgroups one and two were “to be deployed for the development of the East,” while those in subgroups three and four “were to be educated through years of intensive training to become full-fledged Germans and made German citizens again.” Members of subgroup four were given provisional German citizenship, as were “racially valuable foreigners (Ukrainians, Greater Russian, Belarussians, Czechs and Lithuanians),” and both were subject to police surveillance.
In line with Himmler’s upper limit of one million, the people responsible for determining individuals’ Germanity in the annexed Polish provinces added 977,000 people to subgroups one and two on the German people’s list, giving them the status of reliable citizens; 1,928,000 were put in subgroups three and four. They were considered less reliable citizens, with too many Slavic influences, who needed to be subjected to a robust procedure of adaptation.
Werner Hasselblatt, an ethnic German from Latvia, described how the same criteria were used to distinguish between residents of the Baltic countries in 1942. As a delegate representing Latvia’s German community, Hasselblatt had long functioned as a voice for reconciliation in European congresses on national minorities. But he went over to the other side, becoming the director of the special department of German Eastern Policy in Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941. There he examined which Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians could be successfully Germanified. To that end, Hasselblatt developed a special Latin terminology, which he presented to Rosenberg’s expert on racial issues, Erhard Wetzel. This vocabulary gave Himmler’s criteria the sheen of classical-sounding respectability.
Hasselblatt distinguished between “Homo genere et ingenio praestans” (people of full value racially and personally), “Homo germanisando dignus” (those worthy of being Germanified), “Homo germanisabilis atque germanisandus” (those who could be Germanified and thus should be Germanified), and “Homo germanisatus” (those who had been Germanified). The recipient of this list, Wetzel, had made contact with Viktor Brack, the managing director of Hitler’s Party Chancellery, and Eichmann after the “public” (and therefore “not to be approved of”) mass shootings of Jews in Vilnius. On October 18, 1941, a satisfied Hasselblatt was able to inform his boss that both men approved of using gassing machinery in the future to get rid of “those Jews unable to work.”17
In 1946, Sefton Delmer, the Berlin-born British journalist and Germany expert and critic, traveled to Mariánske Lázně, the city known in German as Marienbad, which had just been returned to Czech control. There he witnessed the deportations of Sudeten Germans—men, women, and children who all wore a large N pinned to their clothing. The N stood for Němec—Czech for “German.” Delmer wrote that they were forced to wear this designation on their lapels exactly as Jews under the National Socialists had been made to wear yellow Stars of David. The deportees, he noted, were only allowed to take a maximum of fifty kilos of personal belongings with them.
Czech militiamen deported German-speaking Bohemians to Bavaria, not to gas chambers. Nonetheless, the sight of weeping women and children who begged him as an Englishman for help left Delmer teary-eyed himself, even as he reminded himself that these were the same people who had served Hitler as a fifth column as he tried to “wipe Czechoslovakia off the map,” to enslave the Czechs, to Germanify their children, and colonize the country with the help of Germanic supermen from the SS. Delmer was witness to a human tragedy unjustly visited upon certain people. Nonetheless, as a political thinker, he welcomed the decision of Czech president Edvard Beneš and his government to expel the Sudeten Germans.18
Nazi Germany radicalized the methods of classifying human beings to an unprecedented and previously unimaginable extent. German bureaucrats and population experts decided on the welfare and misery, life and death, of millions of people. That limits the validity of historical comparisons. Nonetheless, the comparatively harmless French beginnings, to which the French themselves soon put a stop, and other comparable processes should not be forgotten. They legitimized distinctions of this sort being drawn between human beings. They provided a model for far harsher and infinitely more violent repopulation projects and continued to exert influence long past 1945. The principle of sorting people according to ethnic, religious, bureaucratic, social, and economic perspectives, with the aim of deporting some of them, established itself in many parts of Europe after 1918. Leading politicians and commentators praised it as an ultimately useful if brutal tool for ensuring peace. They believed in all seriousness that the members of a national state were happiest when they lived together with people who were socially and historically as much like themselves as possible.
While millions of Poles celebrated their freedom and a Polish republic was proclaimed on November 11, 1918, in Warsaw, pogroms, some of them major, erupted in villages and smaller and larger cities. In the six weeks following Polish national independence, there were at least 150 outbreaks of violence. Well over a hundred people were killed, the majority in Lviv. Israel Cohen, who traveled to Poland in January 1919 and composed a report for the Central Office of the Zionist Organization in London, wrote that “in the euphoria of its long coveted independence, Poland ignited a wildfire of anti-Jewish extremism.”
In their elation over the creation of a free, democratic Poland, three hundred representatives of the Jewish community in Kielce also held celebrations that day. In their minds, anything was better than the Russian rule the city had been under until 1914, and the word “republic” raised hopes of being freed from the tsarist special laws. But these Jews were badly mistaken. Led by provisional commandants, local militiamen stormed the Jewish events being held in the city theater. They herded the celebrants out of the theater and down the stairs through a gauntlet of people armed with sticks and bayonets. After that, they were pummeled by a mob. The violence lasted several hours, during which three members of the Jewish community were killed and more than one hundred injured. The following morning, farmers from nearby villages and residents of Kielce plundered the city’s Jewish quarter. Police didn’t intervene for six hours.
In the small Beskid Mountain city of Maszana-Doolna and the surrounding villages, Poles stole everything local Jews owned during the festive days of independence celebrations. On November 12, armed farmers stormed and looted the small West Galician city of Brzesko. To be able to take all they could they came in horse-drawn carts. Polish paramilitaries set several houses on fire and murdered eight Jews, throwing one of them in front of a moving train. Then, drunk and heavy with their spoils, they headed home.
In the neighboring city of Novy Wiśicz, anti-Jewish rioting was less wild. There crowds contented themselves with staging a barbaric spectacle, popular at the time, that was intended to show Jews who was boss. On November 27, under the command of a Polish officer, troops forced 132 Jewish men to strip bare in the city market place and whipped them. In the nearby Silesian city of Jaworzno on the German border, Christians terrorized their Jewish neighbors on November 5, 6, and 18. The ringleaders wanted to drive all Jews from the city within fourteen days, though they failed.
West of Krakow, in Chrzanów, the Polish population, freed from its oppressors, murdered two Jews on November 6 and went on a looting spree. The newly constituted city council demanded protection money in return for guaranteeing Jews’ safety. The local authorities in the small West Galician city of Tuczempil near the southeastern border of today’s Poland took a different tack. After four women, a child, and a young Jewish man on track to become an officer were murdered on November 15 and 16, Jews were allowed to raise a militia for self-defense.
The village of Grochów had only a single Jewish family, that of Aron Brochower, his wife, and their three sons. They were murdered by their neighbors on November 17. Similar crimes were committed in Lasi. There the only Jewish family—a shopkeeper, his wife, their daughter, and their grandchildren—died in a fire in their house, which local farmers had set. In Przemyśl on the San River, Poland’s day of independence coincided with a victory over Ukrainian troops. The celebrations went on from November 11 to 13—at the cost of fifteen Jewish lives.19
Galicia and its capital, Lviv, were handed over to the Austrian monarchy as part of the first partition of Poland in 1772. In the fall of 1918, at the end of a world war that had been particularly hard on Galicia, the Hapsburg regime’s troops withdrew, defeated. With no fanfare they retreated to Vienna, whereupon Poles and Ukrainians immediately sought to gain the upper hand and seize disputed territory. After a few weeks, the Polish side emerged victorious in Lviv and the surrounding area.
In 1918, Lviv had a population of 220,000, including 75,000 Jews. Tens of thousands of inhabitants had fled west when the Russian army took the city in 1914. They had lost everything they once possessed, so many of them didn’t return home, staying on in Vienna or Moravia even after the city was retaken by the Austro-Hungarian army. In their stead, Jewish refugees from the eastern Galician cities razed by the Russians moved into the looted apartments. Lviv’s historic Jewish community had been badly weakened by war, flight, and deprivation.20
A week after Polish troops captured Lviv, a well-organized pogrom was staged. It proceeded according to the “Russian model” but with “greater brutality,” as observers from the Jewish Defense League attested. In contrast to several other Jewish organizations and the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, the League was not known for exaggeration and checked its reports carefully. In their annual report for 1918, the authors tersely noted: “On November 22 and 23, and as a kind of aftershock on December 29, there were horrible outbreaks of violence in Lviv.” Seventy-two Jews were murdered, 443 injured, “28 homes razed to the ground, 9 damaged by fire and between 4,000 and 5,000 families looted.” The Polish soldiers, militiamen, and civilians who had taken part in the violence stole 11 million Austrian crowns in cash, 6 million worth of jewelry, clothing valued at 15 million, and 50 million in salable goods. (By comparison, the average weekly wage of an Austrian worker at the time was around 100 crowns.) The murder victims seem to have been partly targeted by profession. Thirty-six were merchants while ten were artisans.21
The most precise account was the one published in 1919 by the military doctor Joseph Tenenbaum, writing under the pseudonym Josef Bendow. He was a Jewish militiaman in Lviv, both a victim and a witness. In writing his report he called upon 800 pieces of testimony, which were recorded in the weeks after the pogrom. Recent historical studies based on police files and other sources that have become available support his fundamental points.22 In 1920 Tenenbaum emigrated to the US. In 1936, he helped found the Joint Boycott Council, at the urging of the American Jewish Congress, which aimed to exert economic pressure on Nazi Germany.
Preceding the pogrom in the late autumn of 1918 were three weeks of constant fighting between Ukrainian and Polish nationalists. Knowing that they had much to fear from both sides, Jews proclaimed their strict neutrality. Nevertheless, in their hour of victory, the Polish “freedom fighters” turned reality on its head, claiming that Jews had covertly supported the Ukrainians and given them large sums of money. With such statements, leading Polish military officers, politicians, and journalists essentially declared open season on Jews.23 Lviv’s “liberators” spread rumors and laid the groundwork for the horror to come. A high-ranking municipal administrator declared: “We will take everything from the Jews, and poor Christian children will have an abundance of everything.” The organization and initiative for the pogrom was the task of the military and the republican paramilitaries. Military and political leaders determined how long it would last (forty-eight hours) and when it would start (at 4 a.m. on November 22). They saw the orgy of violence as a reward for troops who had achieved the “heroic deoccupation” of Lviv. The military also had a vested interest in filling their warehouses with food, shoes, cloth, and the like. For their part, nationalist politicians welcomed the chance to find an internal enemy and to consolidate identification with a newly autonomous and free Poland by staging a bloody mass spectacle.
Tenenbaum wrote, “In the early morning hours, the terrified populace of the Jewish quarter heard the jeering and whistling of marching Polish soldiers accompanied by gunshots, harmonica playing, and anti-Jewish curses and insults.” The men of the Jewish self-defense organization were disarmed, and machine guns and armored cars were brought into position on the margins of the district. “This barrier was intended to keep the people to be slaughtered from running in all directions and to show the pillagers the limits of where they could loot,” so that Christian businesses and homes were spared any damage.
Polish soldiers and paramilitaries ransacked the other buildings. If doors were open, the troops used hand grenades. “Jew, hand over your wallet!” they bellowed into rooms, seizing anything they could get their hands on. “Lust for money was what gave the patriotic incitement its individual stamp and greatest appeal,” wrote Tenenbaum. “The Polish heroes rewarded themselves handsomely for their efforts and paid themselves a splendid wage for their work as executioners.” Whatever the troops couldn’t take away was destroyed or handed out to the Polish mob. Following plans drawn up by the military leadership, the marauders forced their way into Jewish businesses and warehouses. Officers drove up in automobiles and helped themselves “in particular to leather goods, cloth and food.” Paramilitaries and Christian residents of Lviv had the run of smaller shops and workshops—even Red Cross nurses joined in, claiming they were “requisitioning items for the hospital.” The well-organized soldiers brought canisters of petroleum in cars to start fires. They set individual buildings ablaze under the watchful eyes of officers, not neglecting to open all the doors and windows “so that air could better fan the flames.” Having been informed in advance of what was to occur, officials at the city water company had cut off the water supply to the Jewish quarter.
Jews were burned to death in their houses after Polish troops nailed their doors shut from the outside. “The hordes of soldiers had stock answers to all pleas and entreaties: ‘The Jews needed a good roasting. Today, there’ll be Jewish bacon.’ These and other inhumane taunts were the only consolation the poor victims received. Sometimes, promises of enhanced protection money moved hearts that remained stone deaf to pleading, and soldiers filled their wallets in return for allowing a Jewish family to slip through alleyways past the machine guns and armored cars. But others weren’t susceptible to pecuniary arguments and went about their work as executioners immune to bribes—so that all that was left of unfortunate people was charred remains.”
On the following morning, it was the synagogues’ turn. At 10 a.m., incited and often intoxicated nationalist marauders stormed the synagogue on the edge of the city, stealing sacred items and destroying whatever they could. “You could see paramilitaries and women wrapped in the curtains of Holy Ark, horsing around and treading on the Holy Scripture.” Then the burning of the city’s oldest house of Jewish worship began. “Paramilitaries heaped the mutilated Torah scrolls in the middle of the synagogue, poured petroleum on the pyre and set it ablaze.… Two boys, David Rubinfeld and Israel Feigenbaum, who tried to save two Torah scrolls from the burning synagogue, were shot to death at the entrance. Several students were found dead, with Torah scrolls clutched to their chests.” Following that, soldiers also burned down the city’s Hasidic synagogue.
Amid such a reign of rage and terror, the Polish masters of the city organized a follow-up pogrom on December 29. Soldiers who had been recently transferred from Warsaw to Lviv claimed that they had been shot at. Led by a captain, they used explosives to blow open the doors of buildings near their barracks where Jews lived, ransacking and looting apartments. “The events of November 22, 1918, repeated themselves. Women and girls were abused, while men were beaten, taken away and interrogated in the Czacki School, before being beaten again and sent up before a court as suspects.” No one was killed that night, but a number of people, “victims of a barbaric system of bad conscience,” were left homeless.
“How did Polish society behave in the Jews’ days of greatest need?” Tenenbaum asked in a separate chapter of his documentary report. As was the case with Russian pogroms, all of society, “nearly without regard to party affiliation, rank, or sex” in the new Poland took part in the violence. “The proud aristocrat,” he wrote, “was of one mind with the common man, and the blackest reactionary with the reddest Marxist. Where the pogroms were concerned, there was a rare harmony of emotion and opinion on the otherwise so fissured political ground of Galicia.”
The leader of the Polish social democratic movement, Ignacy Daszyńsky, had the audacity to try to rescue the new nation’s honor by spreading the lie that the pogroms were “an act organized by Austrian Germans.” Nonetheless, he couldn’t bring himself to utter a single word of condemnation concerning the violence. The town’s Women’s Committee called for a return to calm and law and order, while claiming that “the Jews have taken a provocative stance.” Equally devoid of human sympathy, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Lviv, Józef Bilczewski, who was sanctified in 2005, refused to clearly condemn the larceny and murder: “If the Jewish people have incurred guilt in some way, the court of divinity and humanity will render a just verdict.”
On the second day of the main pogrom, the Kuryer Lwowski newspaper ran the following fictional report: “The scum of society, many of whom were disguised in military uniforms, broke into businesses and plundered them. Paramilitary patrols intervened but prevention proved impossible.” Why? According to the article, the flames from the rioting spread so quickly because of a lack of firemen. In fact, not a single fire fighter had tried to extinguish the blazes lit on Krakow Square. On November 28, the Polish news agency turned the facts upside down and reported that the damage had been done by a mixture of criminals freed from prison by Ukrainians and “Jewish plunderers.” The report went on to claim that “the Polish military authorities moved immediately against the bandits and were soon able to quell the uproar.” Other newspapers such as Słowo Polskie, Trybuna Polska, and Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny tried to obfuscate the Lviv murder and looting spree in similar fashion.24 When news of the horrors became known outside Poland, foreign papers ran reports based on interviews with eyewitnesses, but Polish media immediately went on the counterattack. On December 5, the newspaper Pobudka (Call to Awaken), the central organ of the Polish military command, threatened: “The Jews should not forget that they rely on hospitality in Lviv and elsewhere and every provocation on their part will necessarily bring unforeseeable consequences.”
Reports in Austrian newspapers were in the main accurate about what had happened, but one editorial represented a notable exception. It ran on November 29 in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung, the main outlet of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party of German Austria, and is a prime example of the sort of left-wing anti-Semitism that masqueraded as anticapitalist theory. The newspaper blamed the violence in Lviv on the “savage hatred” of the poor for “Jewish dealers and [war] profiteers.” It added: “Once again, as is so often the case, Jewish proletarians have had to pay the price for what Jewish capitalists have done.… Jewish capitalist greed understood how to extract a healthy profit out of the misery of struggle, and poor, ignorant Polish proletarians had no other way of avenging the crimes committed against them than by attacking Jewish proletarians who were equally poor, innocent and as victimized by the great and rich as they themselves.” But the historical facts contradict such pseudo-explanations. The Jews murdered in Lviv were largely merchants and self-employed people, and the large numbers of injured included 271 women and children, 124 merchants, and 5 workers.25
On December 12, 1918, the quartermaster of Polish troops stationed in Lviv published an official announcement in newspapers. It read: “Recently it has been documented that, contrary to the oath they solemnly swore to the military command, the Zionists have established very lively contact with the enemy and have prepared a common plan of attack.” The previous day, to lend credence to what was an obvious lie, the army had arrested five Jews: Dr. Michael Ringel, Dr. Alexander Hausmann, Dr. Leon Reich, the editor M. A. Tennenblatt, and the staff physician Wilhelm Gabel. The Polish civil administration of Galicia sought to convince the English and French governments, both allies of Poland, that statements by the Jewish National Council in Poland and articles in the Jewish press about “allegedly planned anti-Jewish pogroms” were fabrications designed to provoke the Polish public “to an extreme extent.” The real entities behind such propagandistic horror stories, Polish officials argued, were their former enemies in Berlin and Vienna. They wrote: “The relationship of the majority of Jews to the Prussians and the former Austrian government is too well known for us to overlook in whose interest this is happening.”
In this atmosphere of suspicion, Jews, and in particular Jewish representatives, were subjected to constant verbal and written threats. A letter sent to the Jewish Relief Committee and cleared by Polish military censors read: “You should pack your things and move to Palestine by New Year’s Day. Your entire wealth belongs to the Poles, but consider leaving as soon as possible because there are new pogroms on your doorstep, much bloodier and more serious ones.” Reporting from Lviv, journalist Max Reiner described the general mood among Catholic and Polish residents: “No matter how many Poles I have talked to, they all found it natural to severely discipline Jews for their neutral stance in the battle against the Ukrainians.”26
On November 28, 1918, the community buried its dead, bringing the remains of those killed directly to the city’s Jewish Cemetery because “under the prevailing political conditions” a funeral procession was out of the question. “The entire multitude of mourners—40,000 souls—wept, wailed and almost perished in pain.” Their despair was the expression of “the immense misery of a people who can be butchered without punishment or recompense.”
The seventy-two people who were murdered and buried together in a common grave were: Josef Goldberg, Julius Goldberg, Michael Chewander, Toni Rad, Markus Kontes, Mendel Mandel, Moses Smoczak, Scheindlinger, Chaim Donner, Dawid Rubinfeld, Abraham Broder, Zygmunt Gorne, Genia Gorne, Jakób Hermann Schäfer, Salomon Spiegler, Leib Einschenk, Zygmunt Langnas, Izydor Mesuse, Salomon Langnas, Meschulem Frauenglas, Samuel Acker, Heinrich Dawid, Moses Agid, N. Silberstein, Moses Posner, Chaim Abend, Hania Necheles, Zalel Wildner, Majer G. Pordes, Hermann Bardach, Hermann Herbst, Adolf Grab, Mendel Hochberg, Rubin Hiss, Eliasz Sebel, Leon Einschlag, Jakob Neuer, Juda Leib Schnips, Nachmann Altmann, Leib Windmann, Klara Sonntag, Małka Riess, Izrael Feigenbaum, N. Tauber, Reize Berger, N. Herz Zuckermann, Marjem Ester Windmann, N. Wilner, Freide Jelles, Małka Kupferstein, Genia Turszynska, N. Brumer, Ignacy Rothberg, Mordche Zwickel recte Stern, Izrael Lipsker, Chane Menkes, Henryk Lewin, Moses Goldscheider, Meier Selig Peries, Schulem Mayer, Dawid Ennoch, Salomon Katz Sr., Salomon Katz Jr., Oskar Schwarzenberg, Rosa Finkelstein, Mechel Achtentuch, Berl Terten, Laura Krapp, Meilech Weiss, Johann Reiter, Benjamin Toth, and one man who was never identified.
Having no way of knowing what sorts of crimes against humanity lay ahead, Tenenbaum ended his chronicle with words of encouragement: “In its time of flourishing, Jewishness cannot be choked to death or be defeated no matter how great the brutality! No pogrom, no matter how terrible, can destroy Jewishness. It will survive all pogroms and those who incite them.” Tenenbaum’s words notwithstanding, the era of reunited, independent Poland began with months of violence against Jews, which recalled, in the words of Zionist Leon Chasanowitsch in 1919, “the most terrible and darkest times of the Middle Ages.” He added: “Chauvinism poisoned the mind of Polish society and caused its conscience to ossify. Larceny and murder became tools in the political and economic struggle.”27
Even as his account of the violence was going to press, Israel Cohen had to add a final section titled “The Latest Pogroms.” In it he wrote of a “new cyclone” that had swept up Polish Jews and Jews subject to Polish authority in March 1919 in places like Szydłów, Paxanow, Stobnica, Dąbrowo Górnicza, Chmielnik, Busk, Wieluń, Częstochowa, Kalisz, Pinsk, and Lida.
In early March, Polish troops captured the Belarussian city of Pinsk, which had been held by units of the Bolshevik Red Army. Several weeks later, on the evening of April 5, 1919, Polish soldiers stormed a meeting of the Jewish Welfare Committee, which had been registered with city commanders, and arrested those in attendance on suspicions of Bolshevik activity. The soldiers then searched the Zionist People’s Home for weapons, found none, and then arrested more Jews on the street. After robbing their prisoners of anything of value they had on them, the soldiers released the women, children, and elderly, herded the remaining thirty-four men into the Russian Orthodox church, stood them up against the wall, and mowed them down with machine guns. Three managed to survive, injured, and were shot to death the following morning immediately after they had shown signs of life. This mob of soldiers also locked twenty-six Jews in prison cells and demanded that Pinsk’s Jews pay a collective fine of 100,000 rubles for fomenting “unrest.” The major who commanded the troops, Jerzy Narbut-Łuczyński, later admitted making a “mistake.” That error didn’t damage his military career, however; he was made a brigadier general in 1924. No one was ever punished for the massacre.28
All the while, Poles, Lithuanians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians were all trying to gain the upper hand in the important city of Vilnius. In the end, on April 19, 1919, Polish troops succeeded in seizing control, after fighting street by street and suffering thirty-three casualties. None of the city’s Polish civilians died in all the shooting but sixty-five Jews, including four women, were believed killed. During and after the fighting, Polish soldiers and city residents also plundered more than two thousand Jewish homes and businesses.29
In Ukraine, the end of the First World War in November 1918 brought not peace but two years of terror. More than fifteen hundred pogroms took place in this interval, and the number of victims reached the tens of thousands. Throughout Ukraine, Jews were burned alive in their homes, stabbed on the street in broad daylight, beaten and kicked to death, or gunned down. Entire families were murdered. No one was left behind to report what had happened to them. In comparison to earlier pogroms, writes historian Oleg Budnitskii, the violence was completely new in scope. The chapter of his book about the situation of Jews during the Russian and Ukrainian civil wars bears the title “In the Shadow of the Holocaust—The Pogroms of 1918–1920.”30
As long as German and Austrian troops controlled large parts of Ukraine, they prevented random violence as far as they were able. But starting in late 1917 the German occupiers incited Ukrainian nationalism as a way of weakening the influence of Bolshevik Russia and gaining access to raw materials and grain. In April 1918, they established a puppet government in Kyiv. To give the regime the appearance of legitimacy, they dug up “from the depths of history the seventeenth-century Hetman Constitution.” Hailed as a remnant of a heroic past, it recalled the bloody uprising led by Ukrainian national hero Hetman (Head of State) Bohdan Chmielnicki against Poles and Jews in 1648 and 1649. The head of the new Ukrainian state propped up by the Germans, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, even went by the title of “hetman.” His men ran around in “Cossack hats with fur tails” and replaced the Russian “o” with a Ukrainian “i” in place names like Kharkov/Kharkiv and Lvov/Lviv. But while pushing the politics of national identity, they otherwise remained subservient to the Germans.31
With the withdrawal of the defeated Central Powers following the armistice agreement in Compiègne on November 11, 1918, various civil and interventionist wars broke out. Led by Symon Petliura, Ukrainian “social nationalists” deposed Skoropadskyi in December 1918. Petliura, who became the president of Ukraine, and his deputy and prime minister, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, seized power in Kyiv. They proclaimed a “people’s republic of Ukraine,” calling their regime a “directorate” and pursuing a strict anti-Russian course.
Back in 1905, taking their inspiration from the social democratic movements in Germany and Austria, the two leaders of the new Ukrainian nation had founded the “Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party,” which from its inception tried to merge nationalist and social-welfare aims. Vynnychenko even translated major works by socialists Karl Kautsky and Ferdinand Lassalle into Russian. In December 1918, Petliura and his comrades emphasized the social-welfare goals of the revolution they had led. “The rebellion was not motivated as much by nationalism as by socialism and in part by Bolshevism,” wrote Elias Heifetz, the first chronicler of the massacres of Jews that were about to commence. In the following months, during the fighting against Russians and Poles, the nationalist aspect of the movement came to the forefront, although socialism remained the main tool for mobilizing the masses. Both elements were used to justify robbing and murdering people who were not envisioned as being part of the Ukrainian state—first and foremost Jews.32
After some frenzied commando missions, military defeats, and loss of territory, Petliura’s troops were driven from the country in late 1919. For several months, they tried to team up with Polish interventionists to retake parts of Ukraine, but such attempts were only temporarily successful. In March 1921, the Peace of Riga between Poland, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Ukraine ended the fighting and—for the time being—the dreams of many Ukrainians for an independent nation. Poles and Russians had joined together against them. Most of western Ukraine was given to Poland, and some smaller stretches of land to Romania and Czechoslovakia; the considerable rest, which had been conquered by the Red Army, was annexed by Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union.
From late 1918 to the spring of 1921, Ukraine—one of the main European regions in which Jews had settled—became the central terrain for battling and marauding militias, bands of rootless men including deserters and former civilian home-front defenders. Whenever one or the other group would win a battle, there were hasty retreats and fresh attacks. Ukrainian nationalists, Polish invaders, Red and White Russians, and Black (anarchist) groups fought against and with one another. Meanwhile armed mobs spread destruction sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. Without political goals, they were driven solely by avarice and bloodlust.
Between the unclear frontlines, which often changed on a weekly basis, were Jews who were only protected in rare cases by Red commissars or Polish officers. All the participants in the fighting treated them as fair game. The results were the worst pogroms in modern European history, carried out by tens of thousands of nationalist and socialist “freedom fighters.”
We will never know how many Jews were murdered and how many of them, in particular women and children, starved or froze to death because their homes were burned down, all their belongings, provisions, and tools were stolen, their husbands and fathers were slaughtered, and external assistance couldn’t reach them as the numerous battles were being waged under a multitude of flags. Estimates of the number of people directly murdered or injured so badly that they died soon thereafter range from 50,000 to 200,000. In any case, in 1923, chronicler Elias Tcherikover wrote of “a massive and lasting calamity for our people.”33
In 1921, Heifetz published a preliminary, incomplete account, based on individual reports, of what had happened in Eastern Europe in 1919. According to his report, at least 372 Jewish neighborhoods had been destroyed in the preceding twelve months. In some places four, five, or even ten pogroms had taken place in quick succession. In scattered small cities, pogroms went on continuously for as long as it took to get rid of the Jewish population entirely and to completely plunder or destroy their assets. In Ukraine alone in 1919, Heifetz confirmed on the basis of verified eyewitness reports that at least 30,500 Jews had been murdered. But “this figure,” he added, “does not by any means give an accurate idea of the actual number of persons who perished.” Neutral observers had been unable to reach many places and regions, including Western Volhynia, Volhynia, and the southern part of the Cherson governorate. Heifetz assumed that at least 70,000 civilians had lost their lives in anti-Jewish violence within a year in Ukraine.
It wasn’t until Nahum Gergel’s 1928 essay “The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–1921” that the first systematic statistics were published. They, too, were incomplete, but drawing upon more precise reports about 887 pogroms and 349 “excesses,” the historian was able to present a sociological picture of the mass murder and larceny. Gergel distinguished between “excesses” (acts of anti-Semitic violence carried out by a single person, even if they had led to deaths of many people) and “pogroms” (acts of group violence). For the sake of simplicity, we will abandon that distinction and fold the relatively rare “excesses” into the general category of pogroms.
For half of the reliably verified 31,071 murder victims in 531 places, Gergel had access to a list that contained the sex and sometimes the age of those killed. These sources indicate that 76 percent of the victims were male, 3.5 percent under the age of eight, 19 percent between eight and twenty, 46.5 percent between twenty-one and forty, 15 percent were between forty-one and fifty, and 26 percent were older.
Gergel was familiar with the Jews’ situation in Ukraine from his work as an observer for the Refugee Committee of the Soviet Red Cross during the pogroms. From his experience, he estimated the number killed at a very conservative 50,000 to 60,000. But he based his accounts of the perpetrators and chronology of the pogroms on the empirically reliable part of his data, and not suppositions.
According to Gergel, the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic under Petliura and the paramilitaries allied with the Ukrainian cause committed 40.1 percent of all pogroms and killed 53.7 percent of all victims. Monarchist and bourgeois White Russian forces were responsible for 17.2 percent of pogroms and 17 percent of those murdered. Fighters allied with the warlord Nikifor Grigoriev, who constantly switched sides, committed merely 4.2 percent of the pogroms but killed 11.2 percent of the casualties. Red Army troops killed only 2.3 percent of the victims but carried out 8.6 percent of the pogroms. The First Red Cavalry Army commanded by Semyon Budyonny was primarily responsible. The Polish army under the command of General Piłsudski was relatively disciplined, carrying out only 2.6 percent of the pogroms and causing 0.4 percent of the fatalities. The few troops under the command of Belarussian general Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz were only peripherally involved, carrying out 0.5 percent of pogroms and killing 0.7 percent of the victims. Free-ranging armed bands of rebels or deserters, whom we will refer to as “independents,” were deemed responsible for 24.8 percent of pogroms and 14.8 percent of the Jewish murder victims. The average Jewish community suffered through 2.3 pogroms. The general governorate of Kyiv endured 2.9, and Chernihiv, Poltawa, and Cherson went through 5. The Jews of Chaschevat in Podolia endured 12 pogroms and those of Stavyshche (governorate of Kyiv) 14.
Gergel used his data to create an index by comparing the absolute number of the pogroms committed by each group with the average number of people murdered in each one. Ukrainian nationalists: 439 pogroms/average of 38 dead. Independents: 307/15. White Russian troops: 213/25. Red Army troops: 106/7. Paramilitaries: 52/67. Pogroms whose instigators were unknown: 33/1. Polish troops: 32/4.
Eighty percent of the anti-Jewish violence took place in areas where most Jews lived: the governorate of Kyiv (41.7 percent) and the Western Ukrainian-Polish border regions of Podolia (23.7) and Volhynia (16.3). In 12 percent of cases, the attackers murdered more than one hundred people in one pogrom location. More than a thousand were killed in the cities of Tetiev, Fastov, Chmelnyzkyj, and Kropywnyzkyj. There is no data on the number of rapes. Victims usually kept silent about what had happened to them, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands of Jewish women were subjected to sexual assault. The high point of terror visited upon Jewish communities came between May and September 1919. Half of all the violence between 1919 and 1921 happened during that period. As the Red Army and Polish troops began to advance, the anti-Jewish violence quickly receded.34
Gergel originally published his essay in Yiddish in Berlin, but it was also put out in English in 1951 in New York, twenty years after the author’s death. The editorial notes pointed out that while the Ukrainian pogroms may have seemed limited compared with the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, they remained “a most important chapter in the story of the dissolution of East-European Jewry.” More recent investigations have concluded that more than 100,000 Jews died in around 2,000 pogroms and individual acts of violence. The groundbreaking 2006 work by Lidia Miliakova, originally published in Moscow but cited here in the French edition, holds that most likely 150,000 Jews were killed and 200,000 injured, often crippled, and tens of thousands of Jewish women were raped. Some 300,000 Jewish children were left orphaned. In the 1920s the demographer Jakob Lestschinsky arrived at a similar number. He calculated that 125,000 Jews had been killed in Ukraine and 25,000 in Belarus.
On occasion, Heifetz identified an apparent connection between revolution and the pogroms. He wrote: “The Russian pogroms of the early 1880s corresponded to the revolutionary movement of the intelligentsia organized as ‘Narodniki’ (People’s Friends), ‘Zemlya i Volya’ (Land and Freedom), and ‘Narodnaya Volya’ (Popular Will). Those in the beginning of our century, during the period of prerevolutionary unrest (1903–1905), corresponded to the great mass strikes in the south of Russia. Finally, the third pogrom wave corresponded to the outbreak of the first revolution itself at the end of 1905.”35 In late 1918, under the influence of gigantic, often successful national and social revolution, the fourth and by far and away most homicidal wave of anti-Jewish terror began.36 As early as 1881, Narodnaya Volya activists greeted the pogroms as “the beginning of a social revolution” and accused Jews of invariably reproducing the “vices” and “tumors” of the ruling social order. Russian revolutionaries euphemistically characterized the pogroms as “flying sparks” that would unleash the revolutionary wildfire and for that reason were entirely welcome.37
We will ignore here the “documents” published in 1920 and 1927 by the nationalist Ukrainian government purporting to prove its pro-Jewish policies: there is considerable evidence that these were attempts to whitewash history.38 The question of whether the Petliura regime in Kyiv willfully supported or merely tolerated the pogroms, hotly debated among some historians, is irrelevant here.39 The important thing is that it offered no effective opposition—and it had good reason not to. Homicidal stealing from Jews and mass rape propped up Ukrainian troops’ morale, reduced desertions, and alleviated the problem of recruitment, and they meant that soldiers didn’t have to be paid as much. All this was greatly in the interest of the nationalist government in Kyiv. President Petliura and his commanders “knew only too well that there was no more reliable way of motivating the multitudes under their orders than permission to massacre Jews.”40
Those were the general circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of violence. But what about the pogroms themselves: How did they proceed practically? What sort of internal logic did they follow?
Measured by what was to follow shortly, the first pogroms were relatively small. A good example is the violence in Ovruch in Volhynia, a city of 10,000 people, two-thirds of them Jews, in the governorate of Zhytomyr. No one there was particularly interested in politics. Amid all the pogroms Russian Jews had been forced to endure since 1881, Ovruch had remained peaceful. The first violence took place in December 1917. Angry at wartime inflation, Christian residents looted and destroyed some of the city’s Jewish businesses. There were no attacks on Jewish homes, and no one was murdered.
That changed when Petliura’s “freedom fighters” entered the city on December 25. Their commander, Ataman (Warlord) Kozyr-Zyrka, arrested the town’s rabbi the next day, telling him: “I know that you are a Bolshevik, that all your relatives and all Jews are Bolsheviks. Know that I am going to destroy all the Jews in the city.” Luckily for Jews, the Petliura militias were driven out of the city. But three days later, they returned and began a pogrom, in which seventeen people were killed. As his underlings were going about their bloodthirsty work, Kozyr-Zyrka ordered Jewish men to assemble in the public square and announced that he had “the right to destroy all the Jews and would do so if any one of them as much as touched the hair of a single Cossack.” He demanded that Jews pay a hefty fine, and only after receiving it did he call off the orgy of terror.
The pogrom carried out by these Ukrainian People’s Republic paramilitaries proved contagious. By the end of the civil war, Christian residents and militias had looted twelve hundred Jewish homes and killed more than one hundred people. (Pogrom initiators often invited Christian neighbors and farmers from surrounding areas to enjoy, take part in, and profit from the mass murder.) The official rationale may have been that the city’s Jews were all Bolsheviks, but according to the 1921 report on the violence, the masses of Ukrainians involved would have accepted any reason. The pogrom eradicated differences in material wealth between Jews. Almost all ended up destitute.41
As part of the revolutionary pogroms of May 7 and 8, 1905, the Christian residents of Zhytomyr had already committed serious crimes of violence, in which twenty-nine Jews and one Christian, the university student Nikolay Blinov, were killed. (Blinov was murdered because he tried to help Jews.) Then on March 21, 1919, during the civil war, the Red Army left the city. The next morning, Petliura’s men moved in and began five days of killing and pillaging. In the center of town, 317 Jews were murdered, as were many more on the outskirts—mostly elderly people, women, and children, since most of the young Jewish men had fled together with the Bolshevik troops. While the Ukrainian nationalist soldiers were mainly out to steal money and kill people, youths, building superintendents, and domestic servants plundered Jewish homes and businesses. The majority of Jews killed were poor. Jews with money were often able to save their lives by paying ransom. Given the massive lust for murder in the air, the number of dead remained relatively small. A disproportionate number of Christian families in Zhytomyr hid Jews, and a Red Army counteroffensive stopped the massacre on March 25.
Two days before, with the pogrom raging, Petliura visited the city together with a troop of farmers and had statements printed up saying: “We will defend all who don’t want to become servants of Jews.” Petliura was reported to have dismissed the mayor of Zhytomyr when he wanted to inform him about the homicides being carried out against Jews.42
Another one of Petliura’s bands carried out a massacre in the small city of Pohrebyshche, a hundred kilometers southwest of Kyiv, on August 22, 1919. Eighteen hundred Jews lived there. Led by Ataman Zeleny, soldiers killed 375 of them. Afterward the chairman of the town’s Jewish community there reported: “They carried out a pogrom in every sense of the word. They looted, raped and killed. They didn’t want just what we owned. They wanted our souls. They dragged people up from their cellars and down from their attics in order to kill them. They spared neither young nor old. Among those killed were the ninety-year-old butcher Mazisuk and the one-hundred-year-old Binjomin Frenkel. They were beaten to death for ‘Communist crimes.’”
Zeleny’s troops carried out at least fourteen further pogroms in the region, killing at least 2,000 people. The Jews of the district capital, Trypillya, didn’t escape the violence. In 2009, a pompous statue of Zeleny as a “fighter for the freedom of Ukraine” was erected there. Nearby there had long been a memorial site that in Soviet fashion remembered the joint Jewish and Communist victims of the civil war. It was turned into a museum for Ukrainian folklore.
On February 15, 1919, nationalist Ukrainian units committed a massacre on a new scale, one of the bloodiest in this period as a whole, in Proskuriv (Proskurov), about 240 kilometers east of Lviv. The city had 50,000 inhabitants, split evenly between Christians and Jews. Like in Ovruch, residents originally seem to have gotten along. Among the fifty members of the city council, twenty-four were Jews and twenty-six Christians. The mayor was Polish, as was the chairman of the city council.
Around ten days before the pogrom, Cossacks from the Ukrainian Republican Army occupied the city. Their leader was Ataman Ivan Semosenko, and they quickly overcame a rebellion by Bolshevist-leaning soldiers from the local garrison. Together with the Third Haidamak Regiment, a paramilitary band of irregulars, Petliura’s Cossacks then turned their attention to the city’s Jews. Within a few hours they had butchered 1,650 people, orphaning 960 children. Polish and Ukrainian residents were spared their wrath.
Heifetz wrote a twenty-page summary of the testimony of eyewitnesses. It began: “The mass of the Jews had hardly heard of the Bolshevik revolt which had occurred in the barracks. Accustomed in recent times to all kinds of firing, they paid no particular attention to the shots which were heard that morning. It was Saturday and the orthodox Jews had gone early to the synagogue, where they prayed, and then, returning home, sat down to the Sabbath dinner. Many, according to established custom, after the Sabbath dinner, had lain down to sleep.”
In the early afternoon, several hundred Cossacks rode in military formation to the Jewish quarter. They were led by a musical unit playing the song that was then and still is the Ukrainian national anthem, “Szcze ne wmerla Ukrainy ni slava, ni volya” (Glory and freedom are not yet dead in Ukraine). At exactly 2 p.m., they spread out in groups of five to fifteen. One eyewitness, Schenkmann, recalled: “With perfectly calm faces they entered the houses, took their sabers, and began to cut down all the Jews in the houses, without distinction of age or sex. They killed old men, women, and even nursing babies. They not only cut them down with the sword, but also thrust them through with bayonets. They resorted to firing only in case individuals succeeded in breaking out into the street. Then bullets were sent after them. When news of the beginning of the massacre spread among the Jews, they began to hide in attics and cellars, but the Cossacks dragged them down from the attics and killed them. Into the cellars they threw hand grenades.”
The eyewitness report, cited by Heifetz, continued: “According to the testimony the Cossacks killed [Schenkmann’s] younger brother on the street near the house, and then ran into the house and split the skull of his mother. The other members of the family hid under beds, but when his little brother saw his mother die he crept out from under the bed to kiss her body. The Cossacks started to cut down the boy. Then the old father could endure it no longer and also came out from under the bed, and one of the Cossacks killed him with two shots.” Schenkmann himself somehow escaped unharmed.
A survivor named Marantz described how fifteen people were killed and four seriously wounded in a friend’s home. When Marantz asked his Christian neighbors to help him dress the wounds of those injured, one woman lent him a hand while the others refused.
A Mrs. Grünfeld reported observing from her window as roughly twenty Haidamaka Cossacks stopped in front of the house across the street, which belonged to the Kashelev family. Four of them forced their way into the neighboring home of the Schiffmanns but emerged before long and cleaned off their bloody sabers in the snow. A short time later, it became known that they had massacred eight people.
An eyewitness named Spiegel told of having been on a visit with his brother to a family named Potekha, when he heard about the violence. Worried about his mother, he returned home and accompanied the elderly lady via back roads to some Polish acquaintances. But they turned her away, fearing for their lives if they took her in. When Spiegel returned to the Potekhas’ house, Christian onlookers warned him against entering the building, because a massacre was going on. Concerned about his brother, he ignored their advice.
He found the entire family and his own brother dead in pools of blood. The family matriarch had been so badly mutilated that he could only identify her by her physical shape. “Near her lay the body of her son, hacked with saber-cuts and thrust through with bayonets. In the same manner her oldest daughter had been killed. The youngest daughter was also killed, and the middle one was lying severely wounded. A woman relative visiting them was also severely wounded. In the yard were two brothers Bressler and their aged mother. His brother was severely wounded, but still breathing, and died in his arms.” Spiegel added, “Out of curiosity Christian neighbors came into the house, and I asked them to help me lay the wounded on beds, but they refused. Only one neighbor named Sikora rendered me some help. Two of the wounded died; the rest recovered, but remained cripples.”
Such is the tenor of Heifetz’s depiction of how 1,640 people were slaughtered in the space of less than four hours. The Cossacks’ mission was murder. Their orders were not to rob or rape their victims. That was why they were so quick to carry out their butchery—and why civilians from Proskuriv had the chance to profit by stealing from those who had been killed. They were aided in their larceny by the macabre fact that the city’s Jews, the vast majority of whom were Orthodox, had lit their lamps that Friday because they were forbidden to light fires or turn on electricity on the Sabbath. After the killing there was no one left to extinguish those lights, which guided Christian plunderers to Jewish homes, where they stole the effects of the deceased and desecrated their corpses. Ukrainian farmers had been hired to dig a mass grave, 64 meters long by 21 meters wide, at the cemetery. But here, too, locals stole clothing, pried gold fillings from the mouths of the dead, and cut off murdered women’s fingers to get their rings. The dead weren’t laid to rest until Monday.
The day of the massacre the Haidamak troops moved on to Felshtyn, twenty-five kilometers to the west of Proskuriv. Three days later, on February 18, 1919, they committed their next major atrocity. As had not been the case in the previous days, they raped a large number of women and looted and attacked 665 Jews, of whom 600 died immediately or soon thereafter. The dead represented a third of Felshtyn’s Jewish population.43
Today there are almost no Jews living in this part of the world, although even as late as 1941, the terribly tortured Jewish community of Proskuriv, then part of the Soviet Union, had still numbered 14,518. But on July 7 of that year, German soldiers took the city. Before long, the occupiers had set up a forced labor camp for Jews from the towns and environs. Inmates were put to work building roads, a backbreaking task. The first mass shootings took place between August and November. Over the course of the following two years, Germans had 17,200 Jews from Proskuriv and the surrounding area murdered.44
In the days after the Proskuriv massacre, lone Jews, many of whom were on the move in fields, the forest, nearby villages and hamlets, continued to be killed.45 Such murders, carried out spontaneously whenever soldiers happened upon Jews, were largely committed by the Third Haidamak Regiment.
The novelist Mikhail Bulgakov describes what this sort of roadside killing must have been like in his novel The White Guard, written in the early twenties. Bulgakov wrote:
On the night of February 2nd to the 3rd [1919], at the snow-covered approach to the Chain Bridge across the Dnieper two men were dragging a man in a torn black overcoat, his face bruised and bloodstained. A cossack sergeant was running alongside them and hitting the man over the head with a ramrod. His head jerked at each blow, but the bloodstained man was past crying out and only groaned. The ramrod cut hard and viciously into the tattered coat and each time the man responded with a hoarse cry.
“Ah, you dirty Yid!” the sergeant roared in fury. “We’re going to see you shot! I’ll teach you to skulk in the dark corners. I’ll show you! What were you doing behind those piles of timber? Spy!”
But the bloodstained man did not reply to the cossack sergeant. Then the sergeant ran ahead, and the two men jumped aside to escape the flailing rod with its heavy, glittering brass tip. Without calculating the force of his blow the sergeant brought down the ramrod like a thunderbolt on to the man’s head. Something cracked inside it and the man in black did not even groan. Thrusting up his arm, head lolling, he slumped from his knees to one side and with a wide sweep of his other arm he flung it out as though he wanted to scoop up more of the trampled and dung-stained snow. His fingers curled hook-wise and clawed at the dirty snow. Then the figure lying in the dark puddle twitched convulsively a few times and lay still.
An electric lamp hissed above the prone body, the anxious shadows of the two pig-tailed haidamaks fluttered around him, and above the lamp was a black sky and blinking stars.
As the man slumped to the ground, the star that was the planet Mars suddenly exploded in the frozen firmament above the City, scattered fire and gave a deafening burst.
After the star the distant spaces across the Dnieper, the distance leading to Moscow, echoed to a long, low boom. And immediately a second star plopped in the sky, though lower, just above the snow-covered roofs.
At that moment the Blue Division of the haidamaks marched over the bridge, into the City, through the City and out of it for ever.
Behind the Blue Division, the frost-bitten horses of Kozyr-Leshko’s cavalry regiment crossed the bridge at a wolfish lope followed by a rumbling, bouncing field-kitchen … then it all disappeared as if it had never been. All that remained was the stiffening corpse of a Jew on the approach to the bridge, some trampled hay and horse-dung.
And the corpse was the only evidence that Petliura was not a myth but had really existed.46
The regiments took the name Haidamak from the depths—or perhaps abysses—of Ukrainian history. Haidamaks (also transliterated as gaidamaks) were fighters who, more than a century after the Proskuriv Revolt of 1648, launched a further bloody rebellion of peasants and Cossacks against the mainly Polish large landowners in the region in 1768. They murdered thousands of Jews along with aristocrats, Jesuits, and Catholic clergymen. Later these massacres of Poles and Jews were glorified as acts of heroism by the writer Taras Ševčenko, who is held in high esteem in Russia and Ukraine even today, in his ballad “Haydamaky” of 1841. Ševčenko wrote of a rich Jew, also called a Jew-swine, squatting and counting ducats, when a soldier pounds on his door and commands him to open it or be beaten. The troops break down the door anyway and whip the man viciously. His daughters are fetched, and they, too, are beaten and abused despite their entreaties and prayers. The blood of “Jews and Poles” is described as running under the door. The narrator says that if he had a thousand hands, he would strangle all the “vermin,” and not a soul would remain alive in the town of Lysianka.47 With next to no authorial distance, Ševčenko celebrates rape, robbery, and murder in the name of Ukraine—something most contemporary secondary literature prefers to ignore. He is still considered Ukraine’s most important national poet. The same was true in the Stalinist era. “Haydamaky” was also published to great acclaim three times in Communist East Germany. In the Third Reich and afterward, Ukraine specialist Hans Koch, a self-declared historian and the man who organized Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, was among the leading Ševčenko admirers and imitators.48
The model for the 1768 murder of Jews Ševčenko found so worthy of praise was provided a hundred years earlier by Hetman Khmelnytsky, whom the German occupiers in spring 1918 promoted as a Ukrainian national hero. Ševčenko revered him as a spiritual and practical predecessor of the haidamaks he celebrated. In the Polish-Russian War of 1648–1653, Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks had also carried out large-scale pogroms, killing tens of thousands of Jews. A full century later, the haidamaks emulated the murders carried out by the rebels under Khmelnytsky’s command. For this reason, Simon Dubnow characterized the mass killings of 1918–21 as the “third haidamak eruption.”49
In 1954, the Soviet government was very keen on consolidating Ukraine, which had been subject to such abuse by German troops during the Second World War, and encouraging a controlled, regional nationalism there. For instance, Khrushchev “gave” the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Crimea. This “gift” coincided with the three-hundredth anniversary of the 1654 Treaty that, at Khmelnytsky’s request, rescued the Ukrainian Cossack state from Polish threat by making it a Russian protectorate. To mark the ceremonial occasion, celebrated in half Ukrainian-nationalist and half Russian-imperialist fashion, a special stamp commemorating Khmelnytsky was issued, new monuments were erected to Ukrainian national poets, thinkers, and heroes, and several cities were renamed, including Proskurov as Khmelnytsky. Ever since 1954, the city in which Ukrainian Cossacks murdered more than 16,000 Jewish civilians in 1918 is known by a name honoring the slaughterer Khmelnytsky as a Ukrainian liberation hero.
To various extents, all the combatants in the war butchered and robbed Jews. The crimes of some groups may not seem especially grave because those groups controlled only a small amount of territory for short stretches of time, but the intensity of the violence was serious indeed. Taking part in it were everyone from White Russians loyal to the tsar to Ukrainians eager to escape Russian rule to anarchists aiming to destroy the state and dreaming of free associations of those who had been kept down and stripped of their rights. Many of the armed bands and mobs “were permanently changing sides,” as Lidia Miliakova writes, and it was common for individual soldiers and whole divisions to go over to the enemy. Their leaders “were constantly concluding new, mostly fluid alliances, whose only common element was anti-Jewish pogroms.”50
Anarchists, who fought for peasant self-rule and communist council freedom, were no less active in carrying out pogroms than Ukrainian nationalists. Under the pretext of class warfare, they stole whatever they could from Jews. Their leader, Nestor Machno, who fancied himself a cosmopolitan internationalist and lent his name to the Machnovshchina Partisan movement, gave his men free rein. His political ideas followed those of the virulent Russian anti-Semite and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.51 In 1908, Machno had aligned himself with the terrorist wing of the Russian populist narodniki.
For three years, Machno’s men carried out pogroms in various places in the Mariupol and Donetsk districts. For example, on September 8, 1919, they entered Sofyevka in Yekaterinoslav province “under the black flag of the anarchists.” There they robbed Jews, rich and poor, often down to the shirts off their backs, and raped and murdered the most unfortunate victims. Similar scenes were reported in the small cities of Khlebodarovka, Satichiye, and Nadioynaya.52
The troops of the warlord Nikifor Grigoriev were relatively few in number but particularly homicidal. In the First World War, Grigoriev had been a Russian army officer. In December 1918, he and his men joined up with Petliura’s troops, but by February 1919 he was made a general in the Red Army. Then in May, he refused to follow orders and declared his independence, taking with him 15,000 heavily armed men, mostly peasants’ sons from Southern Ukraine. He declared that he was pursuing a social revolutionary but also anti-Bolshevist, anti-Jewish agenda. He called upon Ukrainians to throw off the yoke of the “Jewish servant” Lenin, to cleanse the country of Bolshevik commissars and “foreign elements,” and to create a nationalist Ukrainian socialism. Within the space of weeks, Grigoriev’s paramilitaries had carried out 148 pogroms. In the district capital Yelizavetgrad (later Kirovograd in the Cherson governorate), they killed more than a thousand Jews from May 15 to 17, 1919, alone. All in all, they butchered well over 5,000 Jewish people.53
Having temporarily gained ground, White Russian troops carried out a particularly large number of acts of violence against Jews when they were forced to retreat in late 1919. In the first phase of their advance in June and July, White Cossacks had only attacked isolated Jews, sometimes pillaging in cities or raping women. In the second phase, from August to October, looting Jewish quarters became routine, and many Jews were murdered. Still, the soldiers were more interested in larceny than anything else, so Jews were often able to deflect any homicidal intention with offers of money. But in the third phase, when the Red Army forced the White Russians to retreat in November and December, they began mass atrocities, taking out their frustration on the most defenseless people they encountered. White Russians may have only been responsible for a fifth of the pogrom murders in Ukraine, but they committed them within a very short span. Citing I. M. Cherikover, Oleg Budnitskii writes: “In this period, the Volunteer Army broke all records. Their pogroms were more intensive than those of the others, the number of victims was higher, and the violence was more widespread.” In the small city of Fastov alone, paramilitaries under the command of General Anton Denikin killed more than one thousand Jews, most of them elderly people, women, and children, in August 1919.54
As mentioned above, soldiers from the First Red Cavalry Army under the command of General Budyonny also carried out murders and pogroms. Red Army war correspondent Isaak Babel recorded a number of cases. His accounts were first published in Moscow in 1926, earning the author the immediate enmity of Budyonny. From the Volhynian shtetl Berestchko, he reported how the Red Cossack troops he was accompanying rode into town. Shortly after arriving, they hung up posters on telegraph masts announcing that the Divisional War Commissioner Vinogradov would be holding a lecture that evening about the Second Congress of the Communist International. But before the talk came to pass, Babel witnessed the following scene: “Directly in front of my windows, several Cossacks were about to execute a gray-bearded old Jew for spying. The old man whimpered and kept squirming free. Then Kudrya from the machine gun unit grabbed the man by the head and put it under his armpit. The Jew fell silent and splayed his legs. Kudrya took out a dagger with his right hand and carefully stabbed the man to death, making sure he didn’t get any blood on himself. Then he knocked on the boarded-up window. ‘If anyone’s interested, you can take him away,’ he said. ‘The path is free.’”55
Soldiers from the Sixth Division of the First Red Cavalry Army committed similar murders in September 1919 in Polonnoye in the district of Proskurov. An investigation into these crimes found cavalry soldiers turning not only against Jews, but some Communists: “In the days of the Sixth Division’s retreat before Polish troops, the view took hold in several units: ‘Let’s cleanse the backward regions of Yids’; ‘Let’s do as our good old father Machno did’; ‘Put down the Yids, the Commissars and the Communists!’ The military and political leadership of the division didn’t do anything at all to intervene against these slogans.” The resulting pogrom was simply allowed to take its course. The report of the Extraordinary Investigative Committee of Revolutionary Military Soviets on the war crimes committed by its own Red Army troops continued: “The next day, Comrade Chepelev crossed through Polonnoye, where Red Army soldiers were still plundering. After dispersing them, he saw an orderly and the nurse Maria Chumakova of the Thirty-Third Regiment stripping the last items of value from a dead Jew. When the orderly fled, Chepelev shot him and arrested the nurse. But Chumakova succeeded in informing other soldiers that Chepelev had killed the orderly. They in turn shot Chepelev dead and acted as though nothing unusual had happened. No one informed on the murderer, although presumably the soldiers all knew him.”56
In 1914, Jews owned 95 percent of all businesses and companies in Polonnoye. In 1917, soldiers from the regular army of the tsar killed 98 Jews in the city. After the Russians retreated, 25 Jews were conscripted to serve in the Ukrainian People’s Republic army and were murdered by their fellow soldiers in their barracks. In the spring of 1919, Red Army troops carried out an initial pogrom, killing 8 Jews. In 1910, 15,257 Jews lived in Polonnoye. By 1923, there were only 5,080. During the First World War and the Russian civil war, the majority of Jews had fled the hotly contested city.
In 1939 there were still 4,171 Jews living in Polonnoye, accounting for 30 percent of the city’s residents. In August 1941, German invaders shot 19 Jews as “Communist agents.” On August 23, 113 more Jewish men were killed. On September 2, SS men, assisted by Ukrainian police, murdered 2,000 men, women, and children. A ghetto was established. The Germans forced 1,300 Jews, including some from surrounding areas, to do slave labor in a granite quarry. Meanwhile, “murder, robbery and destruction became everyday occurrences.” June 25, 1942, saw the next mass executions, in which 1,270 Jews were killed. On January 9, 1944, Red Army soldiers liberated Polonnoye. Only eleven Jews had survived. Ukrainian families had hidden them, sometimes for money, but in all cases endangering their own lives.57
Hungarian historian and Holocaust survivor Peter Kenez describes the motivations of the pogrom initiators as follows: “It was … much easier to destroy the ‘enemy’ in a Jewish settlement than on a battlefield. Loot was the driving force and antisemitism, fanned by official propaganda, only justified the looting.” The British journalist John Hodgson reported from White Russian headquarters: “The officers and the men of the army laid practically all the blame for their country’s trouble on the Hebrew.” And Heifetz concluded: “On the basis of exaggerated reports of ‘the wealth of the Jews,’ there developed among the peasants a feeling of envy and a desire for city products (manufactured goods, shoes), of which there was nothing in the Ukrainian village, rumor having it that the Jews in the larger centers enjoyed a superfluity of such things.”
Just like the Ukrainian and Russian nationalists, Russian liberals, who had joined the umbrella Constitutional Democratic Party, kept close tabs on public opinion. At their party conference on November 3–6, 1919, in Kharkiv, they passed a resolution that can only be read in context as an incitement to carry out pogroms. It read: “The anti-Bolshevism of Jews is fraudulent. They’re trying to save their own skins. Nothing else.” A number of Russian Orthodox patriarchs also blamed Jews for causing Bolshevism. In so doing, they justified Christians’ violating the sixth and tenth commandments. Other groups accused Jews of being members or servants of the bourgeoisie, financial speculators, and exploiters, and held them chiefly responsible for the suffering caused by five years of world and civil war.58