Abstract
Reviewed by: Tetiana Pastushenko, Institute of History of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc gave historians unprecedented access to the archives of the former USSR and states of Eastern Europe, as well as the possibility of visiting these countries in person. In the post-socialist states, there was a real boom in recording the first-hand accounts of witnesses to the war who were still alive, and who for many years had had to keep quiet about what they had experienced. By the first decade of the 2000s several dozen studies had appeared, which underlined ever more strongly the importance of Eastern Europe in the war and in the Holocaust in particular. The researches of Omer Bartov (Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, 2007), Patrick Desbois (The Holocaust by Bullets, 2008), Yitzhak Arad (The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 2009) and Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands, 2010) have greatly influenced interpretations of the Holocaust and have drawn historians’ attention to the importance of what happened on the territory of Poland and the former USSR.
Waitman Wade Beorn’s The Holocaust in Eastern Europe has been written above all to help students find their way through the complex and confused tangle of events and phenomena during the war in Eastern Europe, where 75 per cent of Europe’s Jews lived and where over 90 per cent of them were killed.
Beorn proposes that the Holocaust be viewed in the context of the ‘Nazi genocidal project’, in which the Jews were just part of the victims. Others were Sinti/Roma (gypsies), the disabled, the Reich’s political ‘enemies’, Soviet POWs and other ethnic groups like the Slavs. Beorn rightly states that ‘one cannot understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without placing it in the context of this larger Nazi genocidal project that foresaw murder and demographic engineering on a colossal scale’ (5).
The book has a well-considered chronological structure, and consists of 11 chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. At the outset, the author sets out what he means by ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Eastern Europe’. The latter term, for the purpose of his study, includes the present-day Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, European Russia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. Beorn sketches the history of the Jewish communities from 1492, paying particular attention to manifestations of anti-Semitism in various countries, primarily from the beginning of the twentieth century. Two chapters are devoted to the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, an analysis of Nazi ideology, the Nazi leaders’ conceptions of ‘the East’ and their plans for colonizing Eastern lands. The ‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’ was the prelude to Germany’s attack on Poland and its subsequent division of Eastern Europe jointly with the USSR. Beorn deals with the early phases of World War II in two chapters which look at what happened on either side of the dividing line. Chapter 4, ‘Soviet Interlude’ examines the repressive policies of the Soviet Union in the Polish territories it occupied and in the Baltic states. Beorn remarks that this was ‘a period of instability while destroying state structures that had maintained order’, and ‘provided very real grievances’ and ‘a very real hatred of the Soviets and communism’ (93). In Chapter 5 Beorn dubs the German occupation policy in Poland between 1939 and 1941 ‘The Nazi Laboratory of Genocide’. The next chapter looks at the events of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territory, and examines concepts such as ‘War of Annihilation’ and ‘The Holocaust by Bullets’. It describes the Nazis’ criminal treatment of Red Army POWs, the nature and activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen, and the policy of starvation across an enormous territory from Leningrad to Crimea. The events of the Holocaust in the General Government in 1941–1942 are represented in the book through the prism of ‘death and survival’ of Jews in the ghetto. A separate chapter is devoted to the anti-Jewish policies of Germany’s East European allies – Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The most detailed chapter is Chapter 9, ‘The Final Solution’, which shows how the Nazi leaders gradually came to the decision to annihilate physically all the Jews of Europe, and the methods used to accomplish this. Chapters on ‘The Kaleidoscope of Jewish Resistance’ and ‘Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Rescuers’ conclude the main body of the book. In his ‘Conclusions’ Вeorn considers the problem of punishing war criminals and those who collaborated with the Nazis, and reflects on the treatment of the Jews who survived and post-war anti-Semitism in the countries of Eastern Europe.
The book is written in a lively, aphoristic style, with numerous quotations from the memoirs of eye-witnesses. This allows Beorn not only to show the various facets of history, such as politics and life stories, but also to make the narrative more lively and capture the readers’ interest. All chapters are rounded off with a short bibliography of recommended reading. Additionally, the author provides a great many references which can serve as a further bibliography. The text is accompanied by well-considered illustrative material (maps, photographs and tables).
Despite its many new subjects, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe follows the traditional pattern of ‘Holocaust narrative’. Beorn presents the history of the Jews as a history of persecution and anti-Semitism on the part of the local East European population, leading logically to the Holocaust. Without the support of the local inhabitants, there would not have been slaughter on such a scale: ‘… far more collaborators participated in all aspects of the Nazi genocidal project in the East. Moreover, this collaboration exceeded in severity any in the West, with large numbers of locals acting as killers and co-perpetrators’ (3).
But this ‘genetic’ anti-Semitism and nationalism on the part of the local population cannot on its own explain the chronology or topography of the killing of Jews. To understand the complexity of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ requires us to examine far more than just anti-Semitism and Hitler. Beorn’s study would have benefited considerably from paying more attention to the other incendiary of the war – the Soviet Union. Nazi ideology is analysed in detail in the book, but communist ideology receives much less attention. But anti-Bolshevism was an important component of Nazi propaganda. A million Nazi collaborators from the Soviet Union grew up and were educated in the Soviet value system. Moreover, from 1944 onwards, all of Eastern Europe was again under the control of Soviet ideology and remained behind the ‘iron curtain’ until the 1990s. This important geopolitical factor is absent from the book, even though it is one of the reasons why only now has it been possible to research and write The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution.