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The University of North Carolina Press
328 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 23 illus., 5 maps, append., notes, bibl., index
Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine
2007 Baker-Burton Award, European History Section, Southern Historical Association
A 2006 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
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 Göring'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.
"Valuable. . . . An assured, meticulous, and accessible presentation. . . . This is a monograph of considerable value which deserves a wide readership among scholars and students of the Holocaust and genocide."
--Journal of Genocide Research
"Focusing on the Zhytomyr region--where Adolf Hitler's headquarters were located in summer 1942--this excellent book reconstructs the regime's attempt to implement its colonial vision by murdering the Jewish population, enslaving the Ukrainians, and transforming the local ethnic Germans into the new Master Race of this rich agricultural region. Lower has uncovered fascinating documentation."
--Times Literary Supplement
"An exemplary local study. . . . Lower integrates the Ukrainian version of the Shoah as one component--albeit a major one--within this fastidiously researched, thorough, insightful, and flowingly readable examination of the Nazi racial vision as implemented in one locale of the occupied East."
--Central European History Review
"[Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine] offers an excellent regional account of the Holocaust, carefully unpacking the interaction between higher orders and lower level initiatives in the unfolding of genocide."
--American Historical Review
"Lower's excellent book confirms many findings of the new regional studies over the past decade. . . . Lower demonstrates a mastery of both German sources and those accessible only in the native language (in this case Ukranian) of the occupied population."
--German Studies Review
"[A] tightly written case study. . . . Unlike most occupational studies, Lower details the close relationship between traditional European imperialist thinking, Nazi racial ideology, and the Holocaust itself. . . . Lower mined German and former Soviet archives in Berlin, Moscow, Kiev, and Washington, as well as local archives in Zhytomyr, to produce this well-researched monograph. . . . Lower's book is a worthy contribution to the history of World War II, the Holocaust, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine."
--Russian Review
Paper: $23.95
© 2007 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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