Nazi Empire-building And The Holocaust In Ukraine

by LOWER, WENDY

• ISBN13: 9780807829608
• ISBN10: 0807829609
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann G¶ring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine.Midlevel "managers," Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi "race" and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices.

Author Biography

Wendy Lower is assistant professor of history at Towson University. She is a former research fellow and director of Visiting Scholar Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Glossary	xv
Introduction	1	(17)
Nazi Colonialism and Ukraine	18	(12)
Military Conquest and Social Upheaval, July--August 1941	30	(14)
The Wehrmacht Administration of Zhytomyr	44	(25)
Making Genocide Possible: The Onset of the Holocaust, July-December 1941	69	(29)
The Zhytomyr General Commissariat, 1942-1943	98	(31)
The General Commissariat's Machinery of Destruction: The Holocaust in the Countryside and Jewish Forced Labor, 1942-1943	129	(33)
Himmler's Hegewald Colony: Nazi Resettlement Experiments and the Volksdeutsche	162	(18)
The Unraveling of Nazi Rule, 1943-1944	180	(20)
Legacies of Nazi Rule	200	(9)
Appendix: German and Ukrainian Spellings of Place Names	209	(2)
Notes	211	(68)
Bibliography	279	(22)
Index	301

Excerpts

"On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Goring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine." "Midlevel "managers," Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi "race" and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices."--BOOK JACKET.