HARVEST OF DESPAIR: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule by Karel C. Berkhoff (2004)
Ukraine was the scene of two of the most murderous episodes of 20th century history.
The first was the Holodomor, which was the systematic starvation of Ukrainian and other peasants by Joseph Stalin in 1929-1933 as part of the drive to collectivize agriculture, combined with the suppression of Ukrainian culture. Nobody knows for sure how many people died as a result, but the consensus is that they numbered more than 3 million. Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow documents this event in its full horror.
The second was the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941-1944. The Nazis' immediate objective in Ukraine was to use it as a breadbasket to feed the German army and people. Its long-range objective was to depopulate Ukraine, by means of starvation and killing, so as to open it up for German pioneer settlers, with only a remnant of the Ukrainian people left to serve as slaves of the occupiers.
That story is told in Karel C. Berkhoff's Harvest of Despair, a history of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the short-lived colony the Nazis set up on Ukrainian soil.
Berkhoff's best estimate is that one million civilians and prisoners of war were deliberately killed or starved to death by the Nazi occupiers of Ukraine.
The dead mainly included (1) Jews and Roma (gypsies), (2) prisoners of war, (3) urban populations the Nazis deemed useless and (4) people killed during the German retreat in 1944 as part of a scorched earth policy.
Of course these killings are a small part of what would have happened if Nazi rule had become permanent.
I had a notion that this book would provide an explanation of present-day Ukrainians' admiration for the Nazi-like Stepan Bandera. My idea was that Ukrainians' hatred for Russians arose during the Holodomor and was the reason for their admiration for Bandera, a nationalist who thought he could use the Nazis to create an independent Ukrainian state.
Berkhoff's book provides no support whatsoever for my notion. He said the basic attitudes of Ukrainians, despite their great suffering, were unchanged during the period he wrote about.
Ukrainians were so demoralized by Soviet rule that most of them were incapable of organized resistance. Stalin's rule had created a culture of mistrust and denunciation. Anybody could denounce anybody else for what they allegedly said or did. You could not trust anyone outside your immediate family or your closest friends. This universal suspicion continued under Nazi rule.
Ukrainians during this period did not hate Russians, but regarded them as fellow victims of Soviets and Nazis, Berkhoff wrote. When they spoke of "our people," they meant both Ukrainians and Russians.
Read more of this post
No comments:
Post a Comment