Between 1941 and 1945, between 850,000[10][11][12] and 1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine, which included assistance of local collaborators.[7][8][13]
According to Yale historianTimothy D. Snyder, "the Holocaust is integrally and organically connected to theVernichtungskrieg, the war in 1941, and it is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine … Had Hitler not had the colonial idea to fight a war in Eastern Europe to control Ukraine, had there not been that idea, there could not have been a Holocaust."[14] According toWendy Lower, thegenocide of theUkrainian Jews was closely linked to German plans to exploit and colonize Ukraine.[15]
Total civilian losses during the war and the German occupation of Ukraine are estimated to number four million, including up to a million Jews who were murdered byEinsatzgruppen units,Order Police battalions,Wehrmacht troops and local Nazi collaborators.Einsatzgruppe C (Otto Rasch) was assigned to north and central Ukraine, andEinsatzgruppe D (Otto Ohlendorf) toMoldavia, south Ukraine, theCrimea, and, during 1942, the northCaucasus. According to Ohlendorf's testimony at theEinsatzgruppen Trial, "theEinsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Romani, Communist functionaries, active Communists, uncooperative Slavs, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all Jewish civilians (noEinsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations).[citation needed] TheUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen inPiryatin,Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on 6 April 1942, the second day ofPassover,
I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits". Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.[16]
From 16 to 30 September 1941 theNikolaev massacre in and around the city ofMykolaiv resulted in the deaths of 35,782 Soviet citizens, most of whom were Jews, as was reported toHitler.[17]
Jews of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.
—Order posted in Kiev in Russian and Ukrainian on or around September 26, 1941.[18]
The most notorious massacre of Jews in Ukraine was at theBabi Yar ravine outsideKiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in an operation on 29–30 September 1941; some 100,000–150,000 Ukrainian and other Soviet citizens were also killed in the following weeks. The mass killing was approved by the military governor Major-GeneralKurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-ObergruppenführerFriedrich Jeckeln), and theEinsatzgruppe C CommanderOtto Rasch. It was carried out by SS, SD and Security Police. On Monday, 29 September, the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten. A truck driver described the scene,
[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of theSchutzmannschaft and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.[18]
Jews digging their own graves. Storow, 4 July 1941.
Ukrainians who collaborated with Nazi Germany did so in various ways, including participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police,Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, and serving asconcentration camp guards. TheNational Geographic reported:
A number of Ukrainians had collaborated: According to German historianDieter Pohl, around 100,000 joined police units that provided key assistance to the Nazis. Many others staffed the local bureaucracies or lent a helping hand during mass shootings of Jews. Ukrainians, such as the infamousIvan the Terrible ofTreblinka, were also among the guards who manned the Nazi death camps.[19]
Timothy Snyder notes that, "the majority, probably the vast majority of people who collaborated with the German occupation were not politically motivated. They were collaborating with an occupation that was there, and which is a German historical responsibility."[20]
Widespread coordination between the Third Reich and Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian militia and rank-and-file pogromists occurred. Prior to the German invasion of Ukraine, the two activeOrganization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) factions coordinated directly from their headquarters inBerlin andKrakow. The headquarters decided to create marching companies ("pohidni groopi") to accompany the German invasion of Ukraine, recruiting new members into their ranks.[21] The OUN supported Nazi antisemitic policies. In 1941, when German officialReinhard Heydrich requested "self-cleansing actions" in June of that year the OUN organized militias who killed several thousand Jews in western Ukraine soon afterward that year.[22] TheUkrainian People's Militia under the OUN's command led pogroms that resulted in the massacre of 6,000 Jews in Lviv soon after that city's fall to German forces.[23][24][25]
OUN members spread propaganda urging people to engage in pogroms.[26] A slogan put forth by theBandera group andrecorded in the 16 July 1941Einsatzgruppen report stated: "Long live Ukraine without Jews, Poles and Germans; Poles behind the river San, Germans to Berlin, and Jews to the gallows".[27][28][verification needed] In instructions to its members concerning how the OUN should behave during the war, it declared that "in times of chaos... one can allow oneself to liquidate Polish, Russian and Jewish figures, particularly the servants of Bolshevik-Muscovite imperialism" and further, when speaking of Russians, Poles, and Jews, to "destroy in struggle, particularly those opposing the regime, by means of: deporting them to their own lands, eradicating their intelligentsia, which is not to be admitted to any governmental positions, and overall preventing any creation of this intelligentsia (e.g. access to education etc.)... Jews are to be isolated, removed from governmental positions in order to prevent sabotage... Those who are deemed necessary may only work under strict supervision and removed from their positions for slightest misconduct... Jewish assimilation is not possible."[29]
According to political scientistIvan Katchanovski, the agreement between Ukrainian nationalists and the occupying authorities in the region was not limited to ideology, as 63% ofUkrainian Insurgeny Army (OUN) commanders by early 1944 were represented by former commanders of police formations created by Nazi Germany during the initial stage of the occupation of Ukraine.[30] Police units and civil militia established by the Nazi authorities played the role of collaborators of the Nazis, participating not only in the genocide of the Jewish population[31] but also in the killing of Soviet prisoners, as well as in the murder of Ukrainian civilians, such as the killing of 3,000 people in the village of Kortelitsa in September 1942.[32][30]
Ukrainian police auxiliaries "had been involved at least in preparations for theBabi Yar massacre."[33]
According to the Israeli Holocaust historianYitzhak Arad, "In January 1942 a company of Tatar volunteers was established in Simferopol under the command ofEinsatzgruppe 11. This company participated in anti-Jewish manhunts and murder actions in the rural regions."[34]
According toThe Simon Wiesenthal Center (in January 2011), "Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator." There had been many prosecutions in the past, but all of these trials were conducted by Soviet military andUkrainian SSR courts, and never by Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.[35][36]
According toTimothy D. Snyder, at least 1.7 million Soviet Jews were killed by Germans and their collaborators by the end of 1942, "and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist."[37] Until thefall of the Soviet Union, it was believed that about 900,000 Jews were murdered as part of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This estimate is found in renowned and respected works such asThe Destruction of the European Jews byRaul Hilberg. In the late 1990s, access to Soviet archives increased the estimates of the prewar population of Jews and as a result, the estimates of the death toll have been increasing.[38]
In the 1990s,Dieter Pohl estimated that 1.2 million Jews were murdered, and more recent estimates of the death toll have been as high as 1.6 million. Some of those Jews whose names have been added to the death toll attempted to find refuge in the forest, but later on, during the German retreat, they were killed by members of theUkrainian Insurgent Army, members of some nationalist units of the Home Army, or members of other partisan groups. According to American historianWendy Lower, "there were many perpetrators, albeit with different political agendas, who killed Jews and suppressed this history".[39]Yad Vashem research maintains that between 1 and 1.1 million Soviet Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, of them around 225,000 were fromBelarus.[40]
Ukraine rates fourth in the number of people recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for saving Jews during the Holocaust, with 2,673 individuals recognized as of December 2024.[42]
TheShtundists, anevangelical Protestant denomination which emerged in late 19th century Ukraine, helped hide Jews.[43]
^Grzegorz, Rossolinski (2014).Stepan Bandera : the life and afterlife of a Ukrainian nationalist : Fascism, genocide, and cult. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag.ISBN978-3838206868.OCLC880566030.
^Arad, Yitzhak (2009).Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 89.ISBN978-0803222700.OCLC466441935.
^Kay, Alex J.; Rutherford, Jeff; Stahel, David (2012).Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941 : total war, genocide, and radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 203.ISBN978-1580467698.OCLC794328914.
^abKruglov, Alexander Iosifovich."ХРОНИКА ХОЛОКОСТА В УКРАИНЕ 1941–1944 гг"(PDF).holocaust-ukraine.net. Archived from the original on 9 August 2014.To this number of victims should be added Jews who died in captivity, as well as Jews who were exterminated on the territory of Russia (mainly in the North Caucasus), where they evacuated in 1941 and where they were caught by the Germans in 1942. Number of Jews who perished can be estimated at 1.6 million.
^Kay, Alex J.; Rutherford, Jeff; Stahel, David (2012).Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941 : total war, genocide, and radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 232.ISBN978-1580467698.OCLC794328914.
^Philip Friedman. "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation." InRoads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. (1980) New York: Conference of Jewish Social Studies. p. 181
^Philip Friedman. "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation." at Yivo annual of Jewish social science Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1959 p. 268
^Martina Bitunjac, Julius H. Schoeps (2021).Complicated Complicity: European Collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
^Kaganovich, Albert; Seegel, Steven (2012)."Gritsev". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3147.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kaganovich, Albert (2012)."Kalinovka". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3271.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Kazatin".The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3272.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^abDolganov, Petro (2023).Ковель: життя та загибель єврейської громади [Kovel: life and death of the Jewish community](PDF) (in Ukrainian and English). Kyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
^Kaganovich, Albert (2012)."Litin". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3279.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Liubar". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3280.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Novaia Odessa". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3350.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kaganovich, Albert; Martin, Dean (2012)."Ruzhin". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3299.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Martin, Dean (2012)."Samgorodok". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3300.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Sokolovka". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3331.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kaganovich, Albert; Martin, Dean (2012)."Tal'noe". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3332.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Tarashcha". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3333.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Kruglov, Alexander (2012)."Vinnitsa". In Martin, Dean (ed.).The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe). Vol. 2.doi:10.1353/document.3308.ISBN978-0-253-00202-0.
^Dolganov., Petro (2023).Кисилин: життя та загибель єврейської громади [Kysylin: life and death of the Jewish community](PDF) (in Ukrainian and English). Kyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
^Dolganov, Petro (2023).Острожець: життя та загибель єврейської громади / Петро Долганов [Ostrozhets: the life and death of the Jewish community] (in Ukrainian and English). Kyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
^Derevyanko, Natalia (2023).Райгород і Соболівка: життя та загибель єврейських громад [Raihorod and Sobolivka: the life and death of Jewish communities / Natalia Derevyanko](PDF). Kyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
^Dolganov, Petro (2023).Ратне: життя та загибель єврейської громади [Ratne: life and death of the Jewish community](PDF). Kyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
^Dolganov, Petro (2023).Рава-Руська: життя та загибель єврейської громади [Rava-Ruska: the life and death of the Jewish community](PDF) (in Ukrainian and English). Lyiv: Ukrainian Center for the Study of the History of the Holocaust.
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Debois, Patrick;Shapiro, Paul (2009).The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.ISBN978-0230617575.
Himka, John-Paul (2021).Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944. ibidem.ISBN978-3-8382-1548-8.
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