Сторінки воєнної історії України [Pages from the Military History of Ukraine], 2019
The focus of this paper is on a particular manifestation of collaboration that occurred in the hi... more The focus of this paper is on a particular manifestation of collaboration that occurred in the historical framework of Operation 'Reinhard', the Nazi SS plan to kill the Jews of occupied Poland. That collaboration unequivocally constituted armed assistance to the enemy, on top of perpetration of mass crimes. The initial consent to serve and then a tacit, on-going agreement to remain in service – a day to day decision not to flee – arose from different impulses and could extended over a period of years, months, or even simply days. The population on which this study is based was as complex as its Motherland: two waves of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) that filled the SS’s training camp at Trawniki, Poland, men captured in the opening weeks of ‘Barbarossa’ and during spring 1942 operations in the vicinity of Kerch. Under SS leadership, they went on to participate in the murder of one and a quarter million Jews in the course of about nine months. Soviet interrogations of some of these former Soviet POWs in the 1960s and 1970s are the source material. The pathway from prisoner of the Germans to armed collaboration in a major criminal enterprise (Aktion 'Reinhard') was less a "decision to collaborate" than a perpetual dialogue between Soviet man and SS man .
To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss tu... more To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss turned in early 1943 to an untapped, highly experienced and brutal source. Former Soviet prisoners of war recruited in 1941 and 1942 and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Poland, had effectuated the mass murder of over one million Jews in the three Operation “Reinhard” killing centers in about 9 months. By early 1943, however, some of those guards had come to doubt the wisdom of their collaboration with the Nazis, and deserted to the partisans. ss authorities decided to solve manning shortages in concentration camps by transferring 150 Trawniki guards to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in March 1943. By failing to accommodate the foreign auxiliaries’ discontent, Auschwitz’s commandant faced his own mass desertion three months later. Berlin’s response to events at Auschwitz fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between the ss and its eastern guards in the Reich’s entire concentration camp system. About 1,500 Trawniki-trained guards eventually entered the camp system and served loyally until the Reich’s end. In coming to know their Slavic clients, the “new Soviet men,” the Nazis abandoned collaboration and turned to hierarchical discipline and integration with their own German guards.
Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia... more Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941? Records show that they represented diverse political and demographic strata. Those most distant from nationalist roots, however, demonstrated the highest lethality and greatest willingness to serve as disciplined agents of Nazi genocide. The cycles of violence in German-occupied Galicia were far from uniform in character. The victims and German perpetrators alike rarely differentiated among the Ukrainians doing the violence. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “task groups” first entered Galicia to establish Ukrainian nationalist authority and in Lemberg participated in a few days of blood-letting until disbanded by the SS. A new, better controlled Ukrainian militia likewise proved unreliable except in self-actuated violence, and was disbanded. Finally, in late July 1941 a standing Ukrainian Auxiliary Police force – different in structure, membership, subordination, and motivation – came into being. It participated centrally in the rendering of Lemberg as Judenfrei, as security and civil authorities orchestrated the murder of Lemberg’s 150,000 Jews over the following two years.
Hungary's active complicity in the Final Solution of its "Jewish question" caused 330,000 deaths,... more Hungary's active complicity in the Final Solution of its "Jewish question" caused 330,000 deaths, the single largest number of victims of the entire Nazi undertaking. In all, about 5.8 million Jews lost their lives in the Nazi effort to kill all Jews in Europe, of whom ca. 5.3 million resided in the area east of Germany and Austria. The Germans and their collaborators killed about 4 million Jews in hundreds of small scale operations in or near the places those Jews lived, in ghettos, and in extermination facilities scattered across German-occupied East. The single facility that accounted for the greatest number of murders -- about one million Jews killed -- was Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whose victims one-third were Hungarian Jews who were rounded up, concentrated and transported there in mid-1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau is our memory marker of the Jewish Holocaust. Its Hungarian Jewish victims uniquely define that status, universally. How these 330,000 Jews came to be killed (and another 110,000 or more enslaved) at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the subject of status reports by a Hungarian Gendarmerie officer, László Ferenczy. The non-Hungarian historiography on the operation has been based on only one perspective: that of the German primary sources. We believe that these historians have been seeing with but one eye. This project will provide the sources needed to create a stereoscopic understanding of the operation. Without the initiative of Hungarian security forces the operation never would have occurred, and that is captured only through the Hungarian documentation. The proposed volume will present the key Hungarian primary sources, in translation, to a wide audience, most for the first time ever. The reports written by Ferenczy are a centerpiece of those materials. The volume will also offer students a coherent English-language compendium of German documentation of the operation's planning and implementation. The completed volume is thus specifically intended also for use as a source textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses. Close examination of the way Hungary handled its "Jewish question," seen through these primary sources, will constitute a complete, coherent case study of the mature stage of the Final Solution.
"The Tsar's Colonels" weaves together several levels of narrative to show how the increasingly so... more "The Tsar's Colonels" weaves together several levels of narrative to show how the increasingly sophisticated, scientific and positivistic work attitudes and habits of the Russian general staff acculturated younger officers, redefining their relationship with and responsibilities to the state. In time, this new generation of officers projected their characteristic notions onto the state and onto autocracy itself; professional concern for the security of the state eclipsed traditional unquestioning loyalty to the regime.
Investigating, Punishing, Agitating. Nazi Perpetrator Trials in the Eastern Bloc, edited by Katharina Rauschenberger, Joachim von Puttkamer, and Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2023), 2023
Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe: A People’s Justice?, eds. Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin (Rochester, 2022), 2022
Between 1942 and 1991, law enforcement and security authorities in the Soviet Union employed an e... more Between 1942 and 1991, law enforcement and security authorities in the Soviet Union employed an evolving set of edicts to prioritize their investigation and prosecution of citizens for individual activities during the German occupation. Particularly during postwar processes, the breath-taking effectiveness with which security organs identified, located and tried citizens under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code represented the most thorough accountability effort undertaken by any European power. With very few exceptions, the proceedings were closed and secret; after 1960, occasionally the outcome would appear in a short press account. Yet for the government, the pursuit of individual accountability remained of sufficient domestic and international importance to justify commitment of resources, Union-wide, until the demise of the Soviet Union. A representative subset of the many hundreds of thousands of Article 58 prosecutions were the cases brought against Soviet citizens who participated in "Operation Reinhard" (AR), the Nazi's effort to murder all the Jews in Poland. Soviet investigations and trials against men who served in the so-called Trawniki system, named for the training camp where all were inducted, trained, and deployed to AR sites, demonstrate the comprehensiveness of state security's efforts and the potential high value of those records for completing a modern historical reconstruction of the crimes committed during "Reinhard" between 1941 and 1945.
John Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: the Holocaust in the Age of Genocides, vol. 1: 688-701, 2001
By use of Soviet interrogation protocols and captured German "trophy documents" the organization ... more By use of Soviet interrogation protocols and captured German "trophy documents" the organization of manpower in Treblinka II can be described with precision. The rationalized rotation of the guards, organized into three platoons, ensured that security during unloading of transports was sufficient to prevent loss of control over the doomed Jews, and also that every man assigned to Treblinka II eventually rotated through every duty post in the camp.
Conference: Quantifying The Holocaust: Classifying, Counting, Modeling: What Contribution To Hol... more Conference: Quantifying The Holocaust: Classifying, Counting, Modeling: What Contribution To Holocaust History?, Paris, 15-16 May 2024. The presentation will compare and contrast the four statistical data sources and assess the “raw sources” on which each list was based. It will assess the statistical potential offered by the Glaser list to deduce gender proportions of prisoners and the total numbers transported and then killed. I will also consider the motives behind each list’s creation, and its originators’ expectations of subsequent use. Finally, I will return to my first part — comparison of the four lists — to assess the statistical value of the numbers recorded.
Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt + Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena conference, "The Holocaust and the Col... more Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt + Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena conference, "The Holocaust and the Cold War: Culture and Justice"
IPN Warsaw, International conference, "Guilt and Punishment: Societies towards settlement of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes 1939-1956", 2014
An examination of the Soviet approach to domestic accountability for collaboration, 1943-53, as s... more An examination of the Soviet approach to domestic accountability for collaboration, 1943-53, as shaped by evolution of its criminal code and treatment of evidence.
Using Ukrainian Police (UP) individual reports of pistol ammunition use written during the "Great... more Using Ukrainian Police (UP) individual reports of pistol ammunition use written during the "Great Operation" (Grosse Aktion, August 1942), the pattern followed by the two-week operation as it unfolded may be described geographically. The reports also demonstrate the extent to which Jews had successfully survived outside the official ghetto in L'viv/Lemberg as late as August 1942. Finally, the documentation demonstrates the widespread recourse to firearms that the UP employed during anti-Jewish operations.
Сторінки воєнної історії України [Pages from the Military History of Ukraine], 2019
The focus of this paper is on a particular manifestation of collaboration that occurred in the hi... more The focus of this paper is on a particular manifestation of collaboration that occurred in the historical framework of Operation 'Reinhard', the Nazi SS plan to kill the Jews of occupied Poland. That collaboration unequivocally constituted armed assistance to the enemy, on top of perpetration of mass crimes. The initial consent to serve and then a tacit, on-going agreement to remain in service – a day to day decision not to flee – arose from different impulses and could extended over a period of years, months, or even simply days. The population on which this study is based was as complex as its Motherland: two waves of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) that filled the SS’s training camp at Trawniki, Poland, men captured in the opening weeks of ‘Barbarossa’ and during spring 1942 operations in the vicinity of Kerch. Under SS leadership, they went on to participate in the murder of one and a quarter million Jews in the course of about nine months. Soviet interrogations of some of these former Soviet POWs in the 1960s and 1970s are the source material. The pathway from prisoner of the Germans to armed collaboration in a major criminal enterprise (Aktion 'Reinhard') was less a "decision to collaborate" than a perpetual dialogue between Soviet man and SS man .
To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss tu... more To solve insurmountable manpower shortages in its concentration camp guard forces, the Nazi ss turned in early 1943 to an untapped, highly experienced and brutal source. Former Soviet prisoners of war recruited in 1941 and 1942 and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Poland, had effectuated the mass murder of over one million Jews in the three Operation “Reinhard” killing centers in about 9 months. By early 1943, however, some of those guards had come to doubt the wisdom of their collaboration with the Nazis, and deserted to the partisans. ss authorities decided to solve manning shortages in concentration camps by transferring 150 Trawniki guards to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in March 1943. By failing to accommodate the foreign auxiliaries’ discontent, Auschwitz’s commandant faced his own mass desertion three months later. Berlin’s response to events at Auschwitz fundamentally reconfigured the relationship between the ss and its eastern guards in the Reich’s entire concentration camp system. About 1,500 Trawniki-trained guards eventually entered the camp system and served loyally until the Reich’s end. In coming to know their Slavic clients, the “new Soviet men,” the Nazis abandoned collaboration and turned to hierarchical discipline and integration with their own German guards.
Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia... more Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941? Records show that they represented diverse political and demographic strata. Those most distant from nationalist roots, however, demonstrated the highest lethality and greatest willingness to serve as disciplined agents of Nazi genocide. The cycles of violence in German-occupied Galicia were far from uniform in character. The victims and German perpetrators alike rarely differentiated among the Ukrainians doing the violence. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “task groups” first entered Galicia to establish Ukrainian nationalist authority and in Lemberg participated in a few days of blood-letting until disbanded by the SS. A new, better controlled Ukrainian militia likewise proved unreliable except in self-actuated violence, and was disbanded. Finally, in late July 1941 a standing Ukrainian Auxiliary Police force – different in structure, membership, subordination, and motivation – came into being. It participated centrally in the rendering of Lemberg as Judenfrei, as security and civil authorities orchestrated the murder of Lemberg’s 150,000 Jews over the following two years.
Hungary's active complicity in the Final Solution of its "Jewish question" caused 330,000 deaths,... more Hungary's active complicity in the Final Solution of its "Jewish question" caused 330,000 deaths, the single largest number of victims of the entire Nazi undertaking. In all, about 5.8 million Jews lost their lives in the Nazi effort to kill all Jews in Europe, of whom ca. 5.3 million resided in the area east of Germany and Austria. The Germans and their collaborators killed about 4 million Jews in hundreds of small scale operations in or near the places those Jews lived, in ghettos, and in extermination facilities scattered across German-occupied East. The single facility that accounted for the greatest number of murders -- about one million Jews killed -- was Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whose victims one-third were Hungarian Jews who were rounded up, concentrated and transported there in mid-1944. Auschwitz-Birkenau is our memory marker of the Jewish Holocaust. Its Hungarian Jewish victims uniquely define that status, universally. How these 330,000 Jews came to be killed (and another 110,000 or more enslaved) at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the subject of status reports by a Hungarian Gendarmerie officer, László Ferenczy. The non-Hungarian historiography on the operation has been based on only one perspective: that of the German primary sources. We believe that these historians have been seeing with but one eye. This project will provide the sources needed to create a stereoscopic understanding of the operation. Without the initiative of Hungarian security forces the operation never would have occurred, and that is captured only through the Hungarian documentation. The proposed volume will present the key Hungarian primary sources, in translation, to a wide audience, most for the first time ever. The reports written by Ferenczy are a centerpiece of those materials. The volume will also offer students a coherent English-language compendium of German documentation of the operation's planning and implementation. The completed volume is thus specifically intended also for use as a source textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses. Close examination of the way Hungary handled its "Jewish question," seen through these primary sources, will constitute a complete, coherent case study of the mature stage of the Final Solution.
"The Tsar's Colonels" weaves together several levels of narrative to show how the increasingly so... more "The Tsar's Colonels" weaves together several levels of narrative to show how the increasingly sophisticated, scientific and positivistic work attitudes and habits of the Russian general staff acculturated younger officers, redefining their relationship with and responsibilities to the state. In time, this new generation of officers projected their characteristic notions onto the state and onto autocracy itself; professional concern for the security of the state eclipsed traditional unquestioning loyalty to the regime.
Investigating, Punishing, Agitating. Nazi Perpetrator Trials in the Eastern Bloc, edited by Katharina Rauschenberger, Joachim von Puttkamer, and Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2023), 2023
Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe: A People’s Justice?, eds. Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin (Rochester, 2022), 2022
Between 1942 and 1991, law enforcement and security authorities in the Soviet Union employed an e... more Between 1942 and 1991, law enforcement and security authorities in the Soviet Union employed an evolving set of edicts to prioritize their investigation and prosecution of citizens for individual activities during the German occupation. Particularly during postwar processes, the breath-taking effectiveness with which security organs identified, located and tried citizens under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code represented the most thorough accountability effort undertaken by any European power. With very few exceptions, the proceedings were closed and secret; after 1960, occasionally the outcome would appear in a short press account. Yet for the government, the pursuit of individual accountability remained of sufficient domestic and international importance to justify commitment of resources, Union-wide, until the demise of the Soviet Union. A representative subset of the many hundreds of thousands of Article 58 prosecutions were the cases brought against Soviet citizens who participated in "Operation Reinhard" (AR), the Nazi's effort to murder all the Jews in Poland. Soviet investigations and trials against men who served in the so-called Trawniki system, named for the training camp where all were inducted, trained, and deployed to AR sites, demonstrate the comprehensiveness of state security's efforts and the potential high value of those records for completing a modern historical reconstruction of the crimes committed during "Reinhard" between 1941 and 1945.
John Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: the Holocaust in the Age of Genocides, vol. 1: 688-701, 2001
By use of Soviet interrogation protocols and captured German "trophy documents" the organization ... more By use of Soviet interrogation protocols and captured German "trophy documents" the organization of manpower in Treblinka II can be described with precision. The rationalized rotation of the guards, organized into three platoons, ensured that security during unloading of transports was sufficient to prevent loss of control over the doomed Jews, and also that every man assigned to Treblinka II eventually rotated through every duty post in the camp.
Conference: Quantifying The Holocaust: Classifying, Counting, Modeling: What Contribution To Hol... more Conference: Quantifying The Holocaust: Classifying, Counting, Modeling: What Contribution To Holocaust History?, Paris, 15-16 May 2024. The presentation will compare and contrast the four statistical data sources and assess the “raw sources” on which each list was based. It will assess the statistical potential offered by the Glaser list to deduce gender proportions of prisoners and the total numbers transported and then killed. I will also consider the motives behind each list’s creation, and its originators’ expectations of subsequent use. Finally, I will return to my first part — comparison of the four lists — to assess the statistical value of the numbers recorded.
Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt + Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena conference, "The Holocaust and the Col... more Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt + Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena conference, "The Holocaust and the Cold War: Culture and Justice"
IPN Warsaw, International conference, "Guilt and Punishment: Societies towards settlement of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes 1939-1956", 2014
An examination of the Soviet approach to domestic accountability for collaboration, 1943-53, as s... more An examination of the Soviet approach to domestic accountability for collaboration, 1943-53, as shaped by evolution of its criminal code and treatment of evidence.
Using Ukrainian Police (UP) individual reports of pistol ammunition use written during the "Great... more Using Ukrainian Police (UP) individual reports of pistol ammunition use written during the "Great Operation" (Grosse Aktion, August 1942), the pattern followed by the two-week operation as it unfolded may be described geographically. The reports also demonstrate the extent to which Jews had successfully survived outside the official ghetto in L'viv/Lemberg as late as August 1942. Finally, the documentation demonstrates the widespread recourse to firearms that the UP employed during anti-Jewish operations.
For conference presentation, "Operation 1005: Nazi Attempts to Erase the Evidence of Mass Murder ... more For conference presentation, "Operation 1005: Nazi Attempts to Erase the Evidence of Mass Murder in Eastern and Central Europe, 1942–1944" June 15–16, 2009, Paris, France. Aktion Reinhard is infrequently connected with the operation of Sk-1005, either by the methods it used to eradicate the evidence of mass crimes or by a decision making conjunction between the Blobel's Sk-1005 group and the Reinhard staff in Lublin. Instead, the method of disposal of the million or more corpses accumulated at the Reinhard killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka is usually viewed as a derivative of locally devised and executed initiatives, independent of the Sk-1005 process, per se. Postwar Soviet investigations of perpetrators unwittingly showed that the process of corpse disposal at Reinhard camps had earlier systematization and resourcefulness than did concurrent Sk-1005 experiments. The operation of Jewish Sonderkommando in these places followed requirements of the specific site where they worked. These methods allowed, in Hilberg's view, a potentially unlimited capacity for disposal of the evidence of genocide. As early as the beginning of April 1942, rumors of corpse burning at Belzec were publicly circulating among Poles in the Zamosc area of southeastern Poland – months earlier than is usually credited. The Trawniki-trained guard force at Belzec, then Sobibor, and finally Treblinka witnessed these developments first hand. After 1947, Soviet interrogators, more concerned with treason than genocide, recorded the former guards' stories of body burning, without giving it an apparent second thought. This naive testimony is a unique source for describing and evaluating the obliteration of evidence of mass murder.
I describe the ways disposal of corpses in the Reinhard camps can be dated and how they evolved, according to the divergent organization and capacities of the camps. The pit burning operations in Bug River killing centers were carried out, as elsewhere, by Jewish prisoners themselves destined in short order to vanish without trace. How they worked and the size of the prisoner detachments at each site is one basis for comparison among Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Using former camp guard interrogations taken by the KGB, I will date the beginning of disposal and track the evolution of form. I will argue that Sonderkommando 1005 was less a discrete unit or Aktion than a concept – a conscious conspiracy – for obliterating the evidence of mass murder and that it dated from spring 1942 at the latest – independent of any central control or operation.
Imre Kertész Kolleg, University Jena "Monday Seminar", 2021
This seminar presentation was structured around a description of eight 1960s trials of "karateli"... more This seminar presentation was structured around a description of eight 1960s trials of "karateli" (lit. punishers, meaning collaborators who had also spilled Soviet blood) from among the guards -- former Soviet Red Army POWs -- trained at Trawniki SS training camps and who served in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Janowska. The presentation described the Soviet policies, laws, and decrees that governed these investigations and trials, as well as some of the extraordinary types of documentation and evidence that may be found in these case files.
To the Organizers of the Symposium “The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of th... more To the Organizers of the Symposium “The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century,” Paris, March 9-11, 2017: We are concerned about the fact that Volodymyr Viatrovych, Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, will be speaking at the symposium “The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century” on March 9-11, 2017. It is well documented that his publications do not correspond to international academic standards and serve to support a nationalist agenda. He was also instrumental in the drafting of laws which have been widely criticized in the international academic community for their clear potential to stifle open debate about the history of Ukrainian nationalism, especially during World War Two. We understand the need for controversial and free discussion, but we also think that inviting Volodymyr Viatrovych to speak on this topic at your conference in effect risks normalizing and legitimizing politicized attempts to downplay the antisemitic ideas and actions of World War Two Ukrainian nationalists.
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2023
During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its J... more During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of Bulgaria as a European exception has prevailed—but at a cost. For it ignored the roundup of almost all the Jews living in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation between 1941 and 1944, who were in fact deported to Poland, where they were murdered. In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria's past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a "rescue" to the river's south. She traces how individual merits were turned into "national" achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering. This book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND: https://sciencespo.hal.science/CERI/hal-04274176v1
The exchange of populations between Poland and Ukraine, which took place in the context of the mo... more The exchange of populations between Poland and Ukraine, which took place in the context of the modification of territories and the establishment of the new Soviet border in 1944-45, has never been addressed as such. The reconstruction of this migratory crossroads of one and a half million people sheds light on the ways in which the two states were involved, and on the lived experience of displacement, according to the places, destinations and temporalities of this period of upheaval.
This book is based on research into the central archives of the Soviet State, the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland. It approaches the topic on different scales, from the most local to the international context. It allows us to disentangle the different geostrategic and political stakes of the period, to distinguish the role of logistical obstacles and inter-state disputes in the conduct of migrations, and to trace the very asymmetrical trajectories of the two minorities, Polish and Ukrainian, between constraints and expectations. In the light of this violent past that has durably separated the two peoples, the phenomenal presence of Ukrainian refugees in Poland since February 2022 marks a real inversion of history which manifests itself in contemporary issues.
Uploads
The non-Hungarian historiography on the operation has been based on only one perspective: that of the German primary sources. We believe that these historians have been seeing with but one eye. This project will provide the sources needed to create a stereoscopic understanding of the operation. Without the initiative of Hungarian security forces the operation never would have occurred, and that is captured only through the Hungarian documentation. The proposed volume will present the key Hungarian primary sources, in translation, to a wide audience, most for the first time ever. The reports written by Ferenczy are a centerpiece of those materials. The volume will also offer students a coherent English-language compendium of German documentation of the operation's planning and implementation. The completed volume is thus specifically intended also for use as a source textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses. Close examination of the way Hungary handled its "Jewish question," seen through these primary sources, will constitute a complete, coherent case study of the mature stage of the Final Solution.
The presentation will compare and contrast the four statistical data sources and assess the “raw sources” on which each list was based. It will assess the statistical potential offered by the Glaser list to deduce gender proportions of prisoners and the total numbers transported and then killed. I will also consider the motives behind each list’s creation, and its originators’ expectations of subsequent use. Finally, I will return to my first part — comparison of the four lists — to assess the statistical value of the numbers recorded.
The non-Hungarian historiography on the operation has been based on only one perspective: that of the German primary sources. We believe that these historians have been seeing with but one eye. This project will provide the sources needed to create a stereoscopic understanding of the operation. Without the initiative of Hungarian security forces the operation never would have occurred, and that is captured only through the Hungarian documentation. The proposed volume will present the key Hungarian primary sources, in translation, to a wide audience, most for the first time ever. The reports written by Ferenczy are a centerpiece of those materials. The volume will also offer students a coherent English-language compendium of German documentation of the operation's planning and implementation. The completed volume is thus specifically intended also for use as a source textbook in undergraduate and graduate courses. Close examination of the way Hungary handled its "Jewish question," seen through these primary sources, will constitute a complete, coherent case study of the mature stage of the Final Solution.
The presentation will compare and contrast the four statistical data sources and assess the “raw sources” on which each list was based. It will assess the statistical potential offered by the Glaser list to deduce gender proportions of prisoners and the total numbers transported and then killed. I will also consider the motives behind each list’s creation, and its originators’ expectations of subsequent use. Finally, I will return to my first part — comparison of the four lists — to assess the statistical value of the numbers recorded.
Aktion Reinhard is infrequently connected with the operation of Sk-1005, either by the methods it used to eradicate the evidence of mass crimes or by a decision making conjunction between the Blobel's Sk-1005 group and the Reinhard staff in Lublin. Instead, the method of disposal of the million or more corpses accumulated at the Reinhard killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka is usually viewed as a derivative of locally devised and executed initiatives, independent of the Sk-1005 process, per se. Postwar Soviet investigations of perpetrators unwittingly showed that the process of corpse disposal at Reinhard camps had earlier systematization and resourcefulness than did concurrent Sk-1005 experiments. The operation of Jewish Sonderkommando in these places followed requirements of the specific site where they worked. These methods allowed, in Hilberg's view, a potentially unlimited capacity for disposal of the evidence of genocide. As early as the beginning of April 1942, rumors of corpse burning at Belzec were publicly circulating among Poles in the Zamosc area of southeastern Poland – months earlier than is usually credited. The Trawniki-trained guard force at Belzec, then Sobibor, and finally Treblinka witnessed these developments first hand. After 1947, Soviet interrogators, more concerned with treason than genocide, recorded the former guards' stories of body burning, without giving it an apparent second thought. This naive testimony is a unique source for describing and evaluating the obliteration of evidence of mass murder.
I describe the ways disposal of corpses in the Reinhard camps can be dated and how they evolved, according to the divergent organization and capacities of the camps. The pit burning operations in Bug River killing centers were carried out, as elsewhere, by Jewish prisoners themselves destined in short order to vanish without trace. How they worked and the size of the prisoner detachments at each site is one basis for comparison among Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Using former camp guard interrogations taken by the KGB, I will date the beginning of disposal and track the evolution of form. I will argue that Sonderkommando 1005 was less a discrete unit or Aktion than a concept – a conscious conspiracy – for obliterating the evidence of mass murder and that it dated from spring 1942 at the latest – independent of any central control or operation.
We are concerned about the fact that Volodymyr Viatrovych, Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, will be speaking at the symposium “The Holocaust in Ukraine. New Perspectives on the Evils of the 20th Century” on March 9-11, 2017. It is well documented that his publications do not correspond to international academic standards and serve to support a nationalist agenda. He was also instrumental in the drafting of laws which have been widely criticized in the international academic community for their clear potential to stifle open debate about the history of Ukrainian nationalism, especially during World War Two. We understand the need for controversial and free discussion, but we also think that inviting Volodymyr Viatrovych to speak on this topic at your conference in effect risks normalizing and legitimizing politicized attempts to downplay the antisemitic ideas and actions of World War Two Ukrainian nationalists.
In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria's past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a "rescue" to the river's south. She traces how individual merits were turned into "national" achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering.
This book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND: https://sciencespo.hal.science/CERI/hal-04274176v1
This book is based on research into the central archives of the Soviet State, the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland. It approaches the topic on different scales, from the most local to the international context. It allows us to disentangle the different geostrategic and political stakes of the period, to distinguish the role of logistical obstacles and inter-state disputes in the conduct of migrations, and to trace the very asymmetrical trajectories of the two minorities, Polish and Ukrainian, between constraints and expectations. In the light of this violent past that has durably separated the two peoples, the phenomenal presence of Ukrainian refugees in Poland since February 2022 marks a real inversion of history which manifests itself in contemporary issues.