Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered

Explores how young Soviet Jews survived the German occupation of Soviet territories, specifically ghettoization and mass murder

Last resort or key resource? Women workers from the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories, the Reich labour administration and the German war effort

Foreign labour was an essential resource for the Nazi war economy: by September 1944, around six million civilian labourers from across Europe were working in the Reich. Any initial readiness on the part of the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe to volunteer for work in the Reich had quickly dissipated as the harsh and often vicious treatment of foreign workers became known. The abuse and exploitation of foreign forced labourers by the Nazi regime is well documented. Less well understood is why women formed such a substantial proportion of the labour recruited or forcibly deported from occupied eastern Europe: in September 1944, a third of Polish forced labourers and just over over half of Soviet civilian forced labourers were women. This article explores the factors influencing the demand for and the supply of female labour from the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, particularly after the appointment of Fritz Sauckel as Plenipotentiary for Labour in March 1942. It explores the attitudes of labour officials towards these women workers and shows how Nazi gender politics and the Nazi hierarchy of race intersected in the way they were treated

Defining “war crimes against humanity” in the Soviet Union

AbstractThe mass arson of villages on occupied Soviet territory and the terrible plight of their inhabitants – who were executed, burnt alive or deported – has left a lasting impression on the minds of East Europeans, whereas the genocide of Jews in these same regions has been disregarded for decades. The contrast between the remembrance of Soviet Jewish and non-Jewish victims became particularly striking in the 1960s when the new Khatyn memorial monument near Minsk devoted to the memory of Bielorussian torched villages became a real pilgrimage site for most of the Soviet population, while the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev, which had seen the greatest massacre of Soviet Jews, was selected amid stormy controversy for the tardy construction of a monument broadly commemorating victims of Nazi massacres in Kiev. This article aims to show how the theme of burnt down villages pervaded official discourse from very early on in the war and competed with the narrative of the mass killing of Soviet Jews, even though the end of the war and the Soviets’ judicial cooperation with their Western allies in the prosecution of war criminals prompted, both at home and abroad and over the course of several months, a more explicit discourse about the specific plight of Soviet Jews. The accounts of Nazi atrocities, published during the first weeks following the invasion, develop at length the theme of war violence committed against civilians, a theme both ancestral and unheard of by its magnitude. That was before the occupant moved on to the massive “dead zone” policy reported by Soviet commissions of enquiry through survivors’ accounts and lists with the names of victims. The trials that immediately followed the war, in Nuremberg as well as the Soviet Union, gave the Stalinist leadership the opportunity to apply the new judicial concept of crime against humanity to the various categories of Soviet victims of the occupation.RésuméLa destruction par le feu de milliers de villages en territoire soviétique occupé, ainsi que le sort atroce de leurs habitants, exécutés, voire brûlés vifs, ou déportés a durablement marqué les consciences à l’Est, alors que le génocide des juifs dans ces mêmes régions reste dans l’ombre depuis des décennies. Ce contraste entre la mémoire des victimes juives et non-juives en Union soviétique apparaît particulièrement frappant à partir des années 1960, lorsque le nouveau mémorial de Khatyn près de Minsk, consacré à la mémoire des villages brûlés biélorusses, devient un véritable lieu de pèlerinage pour l’ensemble des Soviétiques, tandis que le site du plus grand massacre de juifs soviétiques, le ravin de Babi Yar à Kiev, malgré de houleuses controverses, voit la construction, tardive, d’un mémorial qui universalise les victimes des massacres. L’objectif de cet article est de montrer comment, dès le début de la guerre, le thème des villages brûlés est omniprésent dans le récit officiel et entre en compétition avec le compte rendu du massacre généralisé des juifs soviétiques, alors même que la fin de la guerre et la coopération judiciaire des Soviétiques avec leurs alliés occidentaux pour juger les criminels de guerre donnent lieu, pendant plusieurs mois, à un discours beaucoup plus explicite, sur la scène internationale comme en territoire soviétique, concernant le sort spécifique des juifs soviétiques. Les récits d’atrocités nazies, publiés dès les premières semaines après l’invasion, développent abondamment ce motif, à la fois ancestral et inédit par son ampleur, de violence de guerre commise contre les civils, avant même que l’occupant ne passe effectivement à une politique massive de création de « zones mortes », ce dont les commissions d’enquête soviétiques rendent compte à travers les témoignages de rescapés et les listes nominatives de victimes. Les procès de l’immédiat après-guerre, à Nuremberg comme en Union soviétique, sont l’occasion pour la direction stalinienne d’appliquer le nouveau concept judiciaire de crime contre l’humanité aux différentes catégories de victimes soviétiques de l’occupation

Die heeresgruppe mitte. Ihre rolle bei der deportation Weißrussischer kinder nach Deutschland im frühjahr 1944

Based on German and Belorussian archives as well as on testimonies, this paper examines the deportation of Belorussian children as forced labourers to Germany by units of Army Group Centre in 1944. It analyses the decision-making process, the imprisonment of thousands of children, their deportation, employment in Germany, the role of Belorussian collaborators, and finally the liberation of the children by the Red Army. By focussing on the participation of German military units in deporting child forced labourers, the article sheds light on the contemporary and post-war web of lies to create and maintain the myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht

« Au chien, une mort de chien »

RésuméL’article est consacré aux formes de lutte menée par les partisans soviétiques en territoire occupé contre les collaborateurs et autres personnes désignées par eux comme « traîtres à la Patrie ». Après avoir analysé la compréhension de la « justice » soviétique qu’avaient les partisans et la manière dont ils l’exerçaient en territoire occupé, l’article montre comment cette lutte contre les « traîtres » échappa au contrôle du pouvoir central soviétique et devint rapidement un aspect fondamental de l’activité des partisans. Alors que se dessinaient progressivement les frontières des territoires partisans et « ennemis », ces conflits se radicalisèrent. L’ensemble de la population, même civile, fut alors prise dans cette spirale de violence aux dynamiques profondément locales. L’article illustre comment cette violence s’inscrivait dans une logique de guerre civile. Celle-ci était nourrie tant par la violence de l’occupation allemande que par l’exacerbation de tensions remontant à l’entre-deux-guerres et particulièrement à la collectivisation. L’épuration dont se chargèrent les partisans s’inscrit ainsi dans la continuité des conflits ayant secoué l’URSS depuis la révolution tout en préparant l’épuration légale menée à la libération par les autorités soviétiques.AbstractTo a swine, a swine’s death : Partisans against “traitors to the Motherland”The article is devoted to describing the struggle of Soviet partisans against collaborators in occupied territory and all those they deemed “traitors to the Motherland.” It first analyzes how the partisans understood and applied Soviet “justice” under occupation. Their action quickly spun out of the control of Soviet central authorities, and their struggle against “traitors” became a major feature of partisan activity in occupied territory. As the borders of partisan and “enemy” territory were progressively defined, those conflicts radicalized. The whole population, including civilians, was drawn into a spiral of violence with local dynamics. The article shows how this violence obeyed the logic of civil war. Those local civil wars were aggravated by the violence of German occupation and the exacerbation of local interwar tensions, especially those born out of collectivization. The purge of “traitors” by the partisans thus appears as part of the succession of the internal conflicts that the Soviet Union had experienced since the revolution while foreboding the “legal purges” by Soviet authorities after liberation

Memories of an Unfulfilled Promise: Internationalism and Patriotism in Post-Soviet Oral Histories of Jewish Survivors of the Nazi Genocide

Memories of Soviet Jews who were born during the first two decades of the existence of the USSR show that the destruction of the Soviet society and its ideological tenets is central to their experience of the Nazi genocide. Elderly survivors of the Nazi genocide remember their lives based on comparative evalu- ations of their lives in the Soviet Union and under the Nazi regime, making a strong case for understanding memory as a relational construct. Interrogating the significance of growing up secular and Soviet for experiencing and remembering the Nazi genocide reveals that in order to understand Soviet Jews’ responses to German occupation and genocide and how they remember them, we must turn to their prewar socialization as Soviet internationalists and patriots

Occupying Ukraine: Great Expectations, Failed Opportunities, and the Spoils of War, 1941–1943

The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.Dass der Angriff des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands auf die UdSSR im Sommer 1941 den „Weltanschauungskrieg“ eröffnete, ist bekannt. In seinem Schatten haben lange die engeren militärischen und vor allem ökonomischen Erwägungen gestanden, die „Operation Barbarossa“ motivierten, insbesondere die Erwartung, einen autarken Großwirtschaftsraum zu schaffen. Im Zentrum dieser Erwartungen stand die Ukraine, die einerseits deindustrialisiert werden, andererseits Nahrungsmittel und Rohstoffe im Überfluss liefern sollte. Als diese Hoffnungen unerfüllt blieben, setzte ein verspäteter Kurswechsel zum industriellen Wiederaufbau ein. Dieser implizierte jedoch keineswegs einen Sieg ökonomischer Rationalität über ideologische Prärogativen. Vielmehr verhielten sich industrielle Ausbeutung und rassistische Gewalt komplementär und sicherten der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft bis 1945 zentrale Ressourcen, ohne welche die Rüstungsproduktion zusammengebrochen wäre. Den Preis zahlte die lokale Bevölkerung, die unter brutalen Bedingungen vor Ort wie auch im Reich für die deutschen Besatzer schuftete.Peer Reviewe