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The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine . By Eric C. Steinhart. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and David Lazar.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+264. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690145

1537-5358

Winson Chu,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsThe Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine. By Eric C. Steinhart. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and David Lazar.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+264. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).Winson ChuWinson ChuUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRecent works in Holocaust studies have focused on the role of ethnic Germans in participating in the Holocaust. Eric Steinhart’s examination of Transnistria, which was part of the Soviet Union before falling under Romanian control from 1941 to 1944, reveals the close connection of Nazi plans to strengthen ethnic German communities and the mass murder of Jews. Using Transnistria as a case study, Steinhart provides a thick description of the operations of Sonderkommando R (for Russland), which handled ethnic German affairs among ethnic German communities in Romanian-occupied Transnistria.Steinhart’s analysis offers two perspectives: from Sonderkommando R and from the ethnic Germans. The Sonderkommando R was composed of SS and SA officers and various NSKK (Nationalsozialistische Kraftfahrkorps) members. Nominally under the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), Sonderkommando R functioned outside of both Romanian and German control and thus had even more leeway than the SS elsewhere in the German-occupied east. Steinhart pays close attention to the conflict between the more racially ideological officers and the rank-and-file members, although we hear little about the latter later on in the book.The Transnistrian German communities were established in the nineteenth century and were initially privileged in the Russian Empire, but they were brutalized during the First World War and later during the Soviet period. Steinhart suggests their growing persecution as a reason for why these Germans had an initial propensity to denounce Jews and ethnic Germans who allegedly had worked with the Soviets. Yet further Germanization lagged since the Deutsche Volksliste classification scheme that had been used in occupied Poland did not fit local conditions: there had been almost no opportunities in the Soviet Union for German political and cultural activity that would “prove” prewar Germanness. Sonderkommando R thus relied on local Germans to be experts, but they often included non-German friends and relatives as “Volk Germans.” These were frequently assigned to the ethnic German militias (Selbschutz) in order to give them access to resources designated for the Volksgemeinschaft.The militias were soon deployed to the murder of Jews. The first phase began in December 1941. During the fall, Romanians eager to solve their own Jewish problem had driven Jews east from Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina into camps and ghettos in Transnistria along the Bug River (this solution was seen as temporary before Jews would be sent across the Bug into German-occupied Ukraine). Sonderkommando R’s leaders feared a typhus epidemic and decided to help the Romanians in the liquidation of Jews. Transports of Jews en route to Transnistria were thus diverted to ethnic German communities, where the militias killed several hundred Jews. At the Bogdanovka camp, sixty ethnic German militiamen killed 25,000 Jews over the course of three weeks. The second phase began in January 1942 as Romania once again deported Jews, mainly from the Odessa region, into northern rural Transnistria.Steinhart analyzes how Sonderkommando R leaders came to the decision for mass murder, but the heart of his study remains the motivation of ethnic Germans in their participation. He devotes the last two chapters to profiling the ethnic German killers, in large part using files of the Central Immigration Office (Einwandererzentrale). He argues that the motivations changed from “social psychological pressure” to avarice. Over time, the Sonderkommando R hooked the ethnic Germans on plunder, but as their taste for Jewish property grew, it also forced the Reich to channel goods from Jews murdered in occupied Poland to Transnistria. Steinhart notes the irony that the often haphazard distribution of property from murdered Jews actually ended up spreading typhus among ethnic German recipients.Besides the role of greed, Steinhart’s key insights include how the VoMi succeeded in “making Germans by creating killers” (11). By becoming “genocidaires” (157, 162), ethnic German militia members had become Germans both in their own estimation and in the eyes of Reich German supervisors. Collaboration in murder, however, did not result in a lasting clarification of who was German. Local Germans had initially sheltered some integrated Jews and mixed children. The “conspiracies of silences” that protected Jews began to unravel by early 1942, and Sonderkommando R’s leaders became wary once again of the Germanness of the Transnistrian Germans.Yet this argument of genocide making Germans out of (mostly) ethnic Germans could appear circular at times, and Steinhart seems to reduce the process of Nazification to antisemitism. For example, he asserts that there had been little antisemitism before the war, but Germans had become “committed anti-Semites” (17, 228) through participation in genocide. Elsewhere, he writes that the local Germans “were not National Socialists who participated in the Holocaust, but rather Holocaust participants who became committed National Socialists” (237). Here, the nuances between National Socialists, antisemites, and Germans, in the perception of both Sonderkommando R and among Transnistrian Germans, are never clearly defined.Steinhart rightly emphasizes the agency of ethnic Germans using National Socialism for their own ends, but at times he overstates their motivations and effects. He describes the hiding of Jewish relatives as “sabotage” (77, 105, 110, and 111), yet this interpretation would appear to be incompatible with the “hijacking” of Nazi policy (208). He notes that the ethnic Germans “dismantled the VoMi’s demographic enterprise” (111), but his study actually shows how in the end VoMi’s Germanization and genocidal programs succeeded in creating a stronger identification with Germany.Steinhart’s study is based on archives located in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. British radio intercepts of German transmissions from the region, for example, show that Sonderkommando R’s leader, Horst Hoffmeyer, had considerable difficulty getting an appointment to see Heinrich Himmler. Hoffmeyer’s proven reliability in ethnic German affairs and not his personal connections, Steinhart infers, had led to his meteoric rise. At the same time, an overview and key to the archival collections would have been helpful to the reader. Likewise, geographical entities such as Bessarabia and Bukovina appear repeatedly but are not sufficiently explained and do not appear on the maps provided in the book.Nonetheless, Steinhart has provided a meticulously researched case study that combines new approaches to Germanization and genocide. He explains how Nazi Germany’s murderous racial policy was received, improvised, and implemented in an area not under direct German occupation. Steinhart does not fall back on easy explanations, but he provides a compelling argument that shows how motives for murder changed over time in one major site of the Holocaust. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 89, Number 1March 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690145 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.