328 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 23 illus., 5 maps, append., notes, bibl., index

During World War II, the most powerful military forces ever amassed clashed over Ukrainian territory while Nazi occupiers initiated their criminal schemes against the population. Nearly 4.1 million civilians in Ukraine died under Nazi rule. The Germans and their collaborators murdered at least 1.2 million Jews. Of the 2.8 million laborers forcibly deported from the former Soviet territories to Hitler's Germany, an estimated 2.3 million were from Ukraine. More than 700 cities and towns and about 28,000 villages were completely or partially destroyed.[1] The figures alone, however, do not describe, let alone explain, the significance of this horrendous history. Ukraine suffered destruction to an extent that other regions of Nazi-occupied Europe did not, and all of this devastation came in the wake of the worst years of Stalinism. In Ukraine's history of man-made disasters, mostly imposed from the outside, the Nazi occupation stands out as the worst episode.

Until recently, Ukraine (which gained its independence in 1991) was a territory inhabited by generations of Russian rulers, Polish landlords, ethnic German settlers, Jewish traders, and Ukrainian peasants, who comprised the overwhelming majority within its porous borders. For centuries the Great Powers of Europe viewed Ukraine as the continent's "breadbasket," valued for its natural resources more than its diverse population of Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Poles, Belorussians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Crimean Tatars, Roma, and ethnic Germans. The perception that this "space" and its people could be exploited and radically transformed was most extreme in the 1930s and 1940s when Soviet and then Nazi empire-builders unleashed their utopian schemes in Ukraine. In about two decades, the area was transformed, as historian Kathryn Brown aptly described it, from an "ethnic borderland to a Soviet heartland."[2]

This study sheds light on how the Nazis conceptualized, conquered, and governed Ukraine in a manner that was historically familiar, as well as distinctive and even unprecedented. It explores new questions about the ideological roots and manifestations of Nazi colonialist thinking toward Ukraine, the interaction of the center and periphery in Hitler's Europe, the implementation and interrelation of Nazi policies toward Jews, ethnic Germans and Ukrainians, and the impact of Nazi rule on Zhytomyr, a central region in Ukraine. It elucidates how Nazi-style militarism, colonialism, and genocidal population policies came together in one particular place and how the indigenous population there coped and, in inconceivably large numbers, tragically died under German rule.

With its fertile plains and northern valleys safely nestled west of the Dnepr, the Zhytomyr region was envisioned by Nazi leaders as a future Aryan stronghold consisting of German agricultural colonies, SS-estates, and defense fortifications.[3] In mapping this space, Nazi empire-builders pieced together the former Soviet administrative districts (oblasts) of Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr, western sections of Kiev Oblast, and a northern patch of marshland from Belorussia to create the Zhytomyr General District. The district (Bezirk) was 25,000 square miles (roughly the area of the combined U.S. states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts) with close to 3 million inhabitants, therefore sparsely populated in most parts. On German administrative maps it looked indistinguishable from the other five regional districts that comprised the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU). Yet during the war it became the hub of elite activity in Ukraine and a laboratory for Reichsführer of the SS and Police Heinrich Himmler's resettlement activists. Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Himmler all placed their elaborate headquarters and retreats around Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr. Here both pillars of Hitler's racist, revolutionary ideology—the elimination of the Jews and German colonization of the East—transformed the landscape and devastated the population to an extent that was not experienced in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe besides Poland.

Often scholars have quoted Hitler's musings about Ukraine's being a German "India" as evidence of his delusions of grandeur. However, little has been written about how Europe's history of imperialism, and Germany's history of migration to Eastern Europe and völkisch utopian fantasies shaped the policies and behavior of Nazi leaders and their functionaries who tried to colonize Ukraine during World War II.[4] The Third Reich's population planners, technocrats, Nazi Party "missionaries," and other white-collar professionals who furthered Reichsführer Himmler's resettlement schemes placed themselves within a longer tradition of a Germanic "drive to the East."[5] As Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf: "We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze to the east. At long last we break off the colonial, commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future."[6] Hitler's "soil policy of the future" derived from various strands of thought that had become especially popular as of the late nineteenth century and gained wider currency among the frustrated, right-wing German nationalists who felt cheated by their World War I defeat and the "humiliating" Versailles Treaty. Determined to give Germany its "natural" place on the world stage as an empire, German geopolitical theorists, Nazi ideologues, and Hitler's officials governing Ukraine promoted their expansionist aims relative to other European models of imperialism, often comparing themselves to the pioneers of North America or to the high-brow British overseers in India. They likened the indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe to the "inferior" and "disappearing races" of Indians, "Negroes," and Africans. In addition to distributing colonial literature to regional functionaries in Ukraine and Poland, Nazi leaders encouraged subordinates to fashion themselves literally as imperial rulers. They were obsessed with enforcing the proper Nazi salute and militaristic dress codes, down to every insignia and medal. Like the Nazi flag that was dutifully raised each day by functionaries in the most remote outposts, the salute and uniform were assertions of German power and "Aryan" solidarity.[7] The caste of Nazi adventurers who ran Ukraine from 1941 to 1944—most of them were SA "old fighters" who had grown up with the Party in the 1920s—perceived their actions as legitimately linked to Europe's history of conquest and rule; they also prided themselves on being revolutionaries with a new, utopian vision of an Aryan-dominated Europe.

Ultimately, the exigencies of the war effort and mounting partisan warfare behind the lines prevented Nazi leaders from fully developing and realizing their colonial aims in Ukraine. The experiments that the Nazis were able to test out around their Zhytomyr headquarters failed. Aside from demonstrating the sad fact that it is easier to destroy than create, especially in the context of a major war, the inability of German leaders to realize their colonial aspirations sheds light on the history of Nazi policy-making and implementation as it occurred at the periphery of Hitler's empire, which is another theme of this study.

The essence of Reich policies in Ukraine originated with Hitler's prophecies and offhand remarks that were then realized by his subordinates, an ensemble of ignoble characters who vied for ever-increasing power. Often Martin Bormann (chief of the Nazi Party bureaucracy), Heinrich Himmler (chief of the SS-police), Alfred Rosenberg (head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), and Erich Koch (Reich commissar for Ukraine) would, fresh from a visit with the Führer in his Ukrainian headquarters at Vinnytsia, formulate a policy based on Hitler's casual, sinister observations of the local people.[8] This style of "on the spot" decision-making characterized the political culture of Nazism; it was secretive, corrupt, and valued action.

Speaking from his Hegewald compound near Zhytomyr, Himmler urged his subordinates to "make decisions in the field!" Then he described his own "model" approach to the attentive SS-policemen at the conference: "I do not make decisions in Berlin, rather I drive to Lublin, Lemberg, Reval, etc., and at these places in the evening, then, eight, ten, twelve major decisions are made on the spot."[9] In fact, only two months earlier when he arrived at his Hegewald field headquarters, Himmler rushed to Hitler's Werwolf compound nearby. They lunched there on 25 July 1942, and discussed among other things plans for ethnic Germans, the Waffen-SS, and antipartisan warfare. Later that evening and during the day that followed, Himmler held a series of meetings with Ukraine's SS-police commanders at his Zhytomyr headquarters. He told his men that the earlier order to kill all the Jews must be carried out immediately and entirely. According to the postwar testimony of one SS-policeman who was present, Himmler demanded that they "clean the territory of Ukraine for the future settlement of Germans." In addition to the immediate destruction of all Jewish communities, Himmler insisted that the Ukrainian civilian population be brought to a "minimum." Four months later all of Ukraine's shtetls and ghettos lay in ruins; tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were brutally murdered by stationary and mobile SS-police units and indigenous auxiliaries. Meanwhile, Ukrainians in Kiev were reliving the nightmare of an artificial famine—this time at the hands of the Nazis, who blocked food shipments to the city in an effort to deurbanize Ukraine by depopulating the cities of non-Germans.[10]

In the Nazi system, major policy decisions were often made "on the spot" or in the field, as Himmler revealed to his men. This style of policy-making and decision-making has puzzled historians of the Third Reich, who have tried to piece together the inner workings of the state and party system with sparse documentation about the origins of new policies or shifts in policies, but ample source material about the bureaucratic machinery of the Reich. Nazi rule in Ukraine was a combination of this rather arbitrary form of Hitler-centered goal setting and the dynamic, frequently contradictory actions of his subordinates who "worked toward the Führer," pursued their own self-interests, and held mixed views about the future of the Reich.[11] Regional leaders adapted the most radical policies to local conditions, demonstrating an uneven, albeit powerful combination of zealous initiative, sycophantic obedience, and uneasy compliance. Yet there was order in this chaos. In the case of policies with clear aims and strong support, the Nazi system functioned very systematically and thoroughly. The history of the Holocaust offers the most glaring example of how a National Socialist consensus developed on certain issues that overrode personal, professional, and political rivalries.

Nazi leaders relished their mobility because it allowed them to participate in the historic events that they set in motion. Hitler, Göring, and Himmler commissioned planes and elaborate trains so that they could see firsthand how their goals and visions were taking shape in the field. The chief of the Reich's Secret Police and Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, who wanted to show off his toughness, patriotism, and prowess, flew with the Luftwaffe during the first six weeks of Operation Barbarossa. After his plane was shot down near Zhytomyr, he was rescued by some of his men who were active in a mobile killing unit, an Einsatzgruppe. According to the postwar testimony of an Einsatzgruppe member, Heydrich met with his mobile killing units at this time, and thereafter in early August 1941 the units began killing Jewish women and children in massive numbers.[12] The elite's trains, airstrips, and secret headquarters marked the landscape of Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. The direct influence of these leaders on the periphery of the Third Reich has not been fully explored by historians, and the Zhytomyr region's wartime history offers a powerful demonstration of the center's impact on local events.

This regional case study, however, is not strictly about the dynamics of German policy implementation in Zhytomyr. The region's population suffered tremendously at the hands of the Nazis, and the fate of some groups and the actions of others illuminate significant aspects of Ukraine's history. When the Germans arrived in the region in 1941, they confronted a population that was much more politically demoralized and economically destitute than they had expected. Ukrainians who were still haunted by the terror of 1930s Stalinism did not uniformly embrace the Nazis as "liberators." While all Ukrainians viewed Germans as outsiders or foreigners, as individuals they experienced the occupation differently depending on where they lived, the character of the local German rulers, the type of work they obtained, whether they were male or female, old or young, and whether they could speak or read German. Historian Karel Berkhoff's exceptional study of daily life in Ukraine, Harvest of Despair, has deepened understanding of these varied responses and experiences. By defining the colonial setting of Nazi rule, my study of Zhytomyr builds on Berkhoff's social history because it provides an ideological framework for understanding German aims and behavior in Ukraine. It also focuses on the history of the Shoah, which was in its scope and methods the most extreme genocidal policy of the Reich and indeed the defining feature of Nazi empire-building.

I chose to organize the book chronologically and thematically into nine chapters. The first chapter explores the ideological roots of Nazi colonialist thinking in Ukraine. Besides the historical German fascination with the East, in what ways did Europe's history of imperialism and colonialism influence Hitler's projections of Ukraine and Nazi policy aims there? The second chapter examines the military invasion and occupation of the Zhytomyr region. It introduces the first of two governing systems that ravaged the region—the German army's occupation administration of Kommandanturen and mobile SS-police units; and the subsequent civilian administration of Kommissare and stationary gendarme and SS units. The third chapter investigates how the Wehrmacht ruled over Zhytomyr between mid-July 1941 and November 1941. In this initial stage of the occupation, Ukrainians and ethnic Germans willingly served the Germans as mayors, district leaders, village elders, and auxiliary policemen. Did these collaborators wield any power, or were they simply German puppets? What were their relations with German officials and, moreover, with their neighbors? What were the Wehrmacht's main policies for governing the newly conquered areas as compared to the subsequent policies of the civilian government?

The fourth chapter is the first of two on the Holocaust. In Zhytomyr, Germans and non-Germans from all walks of life participated in the murder of the entire population of Jewish men, women, and children, as many as 180,000 persons. Most regional leaders fully exploited anti-Jewish measures to meet local needs, their superiors' expectations, and their own self-interests. While many left their individual mark on the persecutory apparatus, the killing campaigns down to the most remote villages were not totally disconnected from a central chain of command.

The fifth chapter—on the Zhytomyr Commissariat—explores how the Germans tried to establish their colonial-style occupation system and pursued conflicting, ad hoc Ukrainian policies. Regional Nazi administrators in Ukraine, known as general and district commissars, functioned within the hierarchy of Alfred Rosenberg's Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. On paper they were the leading civil authority; however, in reality they had to share power with Himmler's SS and police forces. To what extent did the commissars control Nazi policies at the local level? What were the interrelations among the different German and non-German agencies present in the region?

In chapter seven, the study moves chronologically into a more focused look at the fall of 1942, when Hitler and Himmler created the Volksdeutsche settlement called Hegewald. This first experimental colony contained roughly 10,000 of the region's Volhynian Germans who were concentrated into protected farming communities. Although German leaders celebrated the inaugural colony, local German leaders doubted the success of such initiatives. What do conflicts over the Volksdeutsche programs reveal about the lower-level commitment to Hitler's utopian vision of a German Lebensraum in Ukraine?

The last chapter analyzes the unraveling of Nazi rule from late fall 1942 until early 1944. It traces the impact of the partisan movement on the local population and German administration. In Zhytomyr there were at least four underground movements with varying political agendas. Although seemingly at odds with one another, Ukrainian resistance and Ukrainian collaboration actually overlapped. Many resistance fighters worked undercover in the administration. Moreover, Ukrainian police collaborators and administrators who were central agents of the Nazi terror and Holocaust in 1941-42 later deserted their posts and joined the partisans in 1943-44. In other words, many Ukrainians and ethnic Germans changed sides during the war, often blurring the categorical distinctions of victim, perpetrator, and bystander.

Ukraine on the Eve of the Nazi Occupation, 1939-1941

In the interwar era and especially in the years leading up to the Nazi conquest of Ukraine, the territory's borders were redrawn at least three times, and Ukrainians found themselves divided among Soviet, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and German rulers. By 1939, the vast majority (over 20 million or 80 percent) resided within the borders of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, while 7 million more lived in Polish-held Galicia and Volhynia. Ukrainians also fell under Romanian rule in Bukovina and Bessarabia, and after March 1939 Hungary governed the Ukrainian majority in the newly annexed Subcarpathian Rus'. Then Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, sparking the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. Over 3 million Ukrainians who had been living in interwar Poland were suddenly swept up in Stalin's sovietization of eastern Galicia, western Volhynia, and western Polissia, the hallmark of which was the rapid collectivization of agriculture. In addition, Stalin's secret police (NKVD) initiated mass arrests and deportations of the leading noncommunist Ukrainians and nearly the entire Polish upper classes and intelligentsia. They were crammed into freight cars and shipped to central Asia and Siberia. According to historian Timothy Snyder's work on Volhynia, Soviet occupiers and their local collaborators deported as many as 70,000 or 20 percent of the entire Polish population between 1939 and 1941.[13]

Meanwhile, over 3,000 Ukrainians (including the émigré nationalists who fled the Soviets) remained in Cracow and other formerly Polish territory seized by the Germans in 1939. Consistent with the Nazi divide-and-rule strategy, the Germans granted this Ukrainian minority leading positions in the occupation administration of Poland. Ukrainian nationalist leaders and the Nazis had a few things in common. They both wished to see the demise of Poland and Soviet Russia. They both assumed that the Jewish minority in Eastern Europe would be rendered powerless in the New Order. Anti-Semitism was a significant force in both movements, but it was more central to the Nazi Weltanschauung. In this era when ethnic cleansing did not have a bad name, Ukrainian leaders sought an independent Ukraine for Ukrainians only, not a multiethnic society with its perceived political instability, "racial" impurity, and vulnerable borders. They mistakenly assumed that Ukrainian autonomy would be acceptable to Hitler who had much larger ambitions of European (and later global) domination, and certainly little sympathy for the plight of Ukrainians, who were in his mind inferior Slavs.

Within two years of Poland's defeat, France and the other continental powers of Europe were at Hitler's knees, and he turned his attention to his main enemy, the Soviet Union. On 22 June 1941 Hitler and his allies launched Operation Barbarossa and quickly conquered most of Ukraine west of the Dnepr. Ukrainian nationalist leaders and their supporters ended up in concentration camps or in the mass graves that were fast becoming a major feature of Ukraine's landscape. As Hitler described it to his coterie on 16 July 1941, the ultimate aim of this Vernichtungskrieg (war of destruction) against the Soviet Union was to make a "Garden of Eden" out of the newly won eastern territories in the East. One of the areas being eyed by Nazi leaders as a future Aryan paradise was Right Bank Ukraine around Zhytomyr.

The Zhytomyr Region and Its People

"Zhytomyr," a compound word meaning "rye-peace" or "wheat-universe," is a little-known place on the map of Eastern Europe. For centuries the population of this region, situated about ninety miles west of Kiev, subsisted on crops grown on the fertile black soil of Ukraine's southern forest steppe that begins below the Teterev River (a tributary of the Dnepr) and extends southward to the Podolian town of Vinnytsia. In the 1930s it was the sugar beet capital and major agricultural center of the Soviet Union, with 500,000 acres of sugar beet crops and over 5 million acres of wheat. Other than some local crafts and trade, the region's industries were tied to local farming and animal husbandry: for example, textile mills, sugar refineries, distilleries, slaughterhouses, and tanneries.[14]

While most of the Zhytomyr region, as it was defined by German occupiers, lay in the Volyn-Podolia upland, the northern border with Belorussia was historically part of the Polish kresy also known as Polissia. This borderland territory, which was heavily populated by Poles in districts such as Markhlevsk (Dovbysh) as well as by Belorussians, was one of the poorest "backwaters" of Europe. Its swamps, the Pripiat' marshes, and dense forests were not appealing to farmers and traders but inviting to outlaws and persecuted groups, who sought refuge there.[15]

Before and after World War II, Ukrainians made up the majority of the population of the Zhytomyr region. They dominated the countryside and formed most of the peasantry. In the 1930s, however, many Ukrainians moved to the region's centers at Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Berdychiv, and Ovruch. Zhytomyr was the largest of these with 95,000 inhabitants in 1939. Vinnytsia, also an oblast capital, contained 92,000 inhabitants, and Berdychiv had 70,000 dwellers, nearly half of whom were Jewish. Initially the younger male peasants migrated to these centers to work in new positions and learn new trades within the Soviet system. Entire villages disappeared. By 1941 Ukrainians constituted 60 percent of the urban population in Zhytomyr and this growth represented a threefold increase in the number of Ukrainians in cities since 1926. They entered the professions of teaching, bookkeeping, carpentry, printing, and mechanics, and they took up half of the positions in the state and Communist Party offices. Stalin's attempt to rapidly industrialize Ukraine's agricultural economy forced more peasants out of the countryside; thousands were deported and many more died during Stalin's collectivization drive. During the Great Famine of 1932-33, the Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia oblasts lost about 15 to 20 percent of their peasant population to starvation-related illnesses. Despite the seemingly urban features of the New Soviet Men (and women), Ukrainians in Zhytomyr's larger towns were only one generation away from the farm and rural traditions.[16] And despite intense Soviet repression of religious institutions, many Ukrainians, especially those in the countryside, secretly observed their Christian Orthodox beliefs.

Among the region's population of minorities, the Russians composed the political elite for two centuries, a status that was challenged briefly during the collapse of the tsarist empire and Bolshevik revolution.[17] In 1918-19 the embattled Ukrainian movement for independence under Simon Petliura was forced to move the seat of its government (the Directory) to various towns in Right Bank Ukraine including Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia. While the fledgling Directory tried to establish Jewish national autonomy within Ukraine, the political and economic upheaval of the time let loose armed militias, government troops, and anti-Semitic hooligans who attacked and killed thousands of Jews, and many acted in the name of Ukrainian nationhood. Some of the worst pogroms occurred in Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, and Berdychiv. Jewish businesses, farms, and homes were ransacked. Hundreds of Jews were beaten and harassed; women and girls were raped. In Zhytomyr proper, Petliura gangs killed 317 Jews on 22-26 March 1919. Twenty-three died in Berdychiv. Jewish self-defense units prevented more fatalities in Vinnytsia and in Berdychiv.[18]

According to the 1939 Soviet census of the Jewish populations in Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, and parts of Polissia, there were about 266,000 Jews residing in the region; an average of 30 percent lived in the cities or larger towns. Indeed, the Zhytomyr region contained some of the highest concentrations of Jewish communities in all of Ukraine.[19] For centuries the Jewish shtetls in these parts were hit by waves of anti-Jewish violence. Yet this area was also a haven for Jews of the Russian empire, officially designated the Pale of Settlement. Berdychiv, a center of Hasidism, was known as the little Jerusalem of Volhynia. Here and in Zhytomyr, Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious life abounded at eighty synagogues and battei midrash (houses of prayer and study), seminaries, printing shops, and theater houses. In the early twentieth century, thousands of Jews moved from the shtetl communities into the larger towns; many continued on to America. The migration was sometimes forced under tsarist laws of Russification. Others left the countryside to seek refuge from the pogroms of October 1905 and January 1919, or to find new livelihoods in the expanding state bureaucracies and industries. In general the Jewish population of the Zhytomyr region decreased dramatically between World War I and World War II; on the eve of World War I, there were 55,876 Jews in Berdychiv, and in 1939 there were 23,266.[20]

The Polish (largely Roman Catholic) minority enjoyed power in the region between the fourteenth century and the eighteenth century as owners of some of the largest estates in Europe. After the partitions of Poland and failed Polish insurrections of the mid-nineteenth century, the tsars pursued intense Russification of the region, exiling Poles to Russia's interior, confiscating their land and peasants (serfs), and banning the Polish language. The former Polish aristocracy became a landless minority. In Right Bank Ukraine, many migrated to Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, and Kam'ianets'-Podil's'kyi, but most settled west of the region in Podolia and Volhynia. A few Polish communities remained intact in Soviet Ukraine until the mid-1930s, most notably the community at Markhlevsk in the Polissia section of the Zhytomyr region. But with the start of World War II and the Red Army advance into Poland, most Poles in the Soviet territories of Ukraine were deported to northern Kazakhstan, Siberia, and other desolate parts of inner Russia.[21]

The ethnic German minority in Zhytomyr consisted of over 70,000 East Volhynian Germans, mostly Mennonites who began arriving in the early nineteenth century from Prussian-occupied Poland.[22] They worked as foresters and tenant farmers and formed settlements near Zhytomyr, such as Neudorf and Alter Hütte, which the Soviets later destroyed and the Nazis tried to revive. As a minority they had enjoyed some privileges under the tsar but were later persecuted by Ukrainian anarchists and nationalists in the wake of World War I. They died in disproportionally high numbers during the Great Famine of 1932-33 and suffered waves of deportations in 1935, 1937-38, and 1941.[23]

Even before the German Army and its allies conquered Zhytomyr in July 1941, Nazi officials expected the region's population of ethnic Germans to serve as the empire's peripheral leaders and frontier defenders. German irredentist claims on behalf of ethnic Germans living outside the Reich's borders had been the cornerstone of Weimar and Nazi foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed Hitler's strongest pretext for initiating the war in 1939.[24] Already in 1934 ethnic Germans in the Zhytomyr region received food aid from the Reich in the form of "Hitler certificates" as part of the Nazis' "Brothers in Need" welfare program for ethnic Germans abroad.[25] These recipients then found themselves the target of Stalin's deportation raids in 1935-36. In January 1935 Stalin initiated the mass deportation of ethnic Germans across the Soviet Union, beginning with the Volhynian Germans from Zhytomyr (Novohrad-Volyns'kyi); at least half of the population was transported to the frigid gulags of Murmansk and desolate camps in Kazakhstan.[26] In the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, Stalin agreed not to deport ethnic Germans, but allowed them to cross the Nazi-Soviet line into German-occupied Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from the former Polish-held region of Volhynia, which fell under Soviet rule, were allowed to cross into German-occupied Poland; but very few of these Volksdeutsche came from the Zhytomyr region and even fewer from regions east of the Dnepr.[27]

A Note on Sources and Languages

The bulk of primary research material collected for this book stems from the captured German records held in former Soviet archives. The Zhytomyr State Archives collection forms the core of the study's source material. The most top-secret German administrative documentation that survived the war, especially concerning Hitler's and Himmler's presence in the region, was transferred to restricted repositories outside the region and eventually reached the Special Archive in Moscow, the former October Revolution Archive in Kiev, and KGB archives. Additional high-level orders from the commander of the Order Police, the Higher SS and Police leaders, the Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and other senior officials are scattered in archival collections, primarily in Minsk and Prague. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has microfilmed a good portion of this captured German material from the major archives of the former Soviet Union; the museum's collection serves as an outstanding complement to the extensive collection of wartime material held at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.

The massive quantity of captured German records presents scholars with research challenges. As is typically the case, quantity is no measure of quality. The cold, bureaucratic style of the Nazi documents failed to provide a human dimension to the story. To compensate for this lack of material about the individual victims of Nazi policies, I turned to additional sources such as postwar testimonies from war crimes investigations, memoirs, letters, photographs, and oral histories. Today in Zhytomyr, Ukrainian and Jewish survivors have welcomed the chance to finally provide a candid account of the occupation, free from the constraints of the official Soviet wartime history that played down the Holocaust, lionized Soviet partisans, and vilified Ukrainian nationalists. These postwar recollections can be problematic because of memory lapses and other historical inaccuracies, but the survivors have provided valuable insight and information about individuals, families, and particular villages. Often their stories can be corroborated with secondary sources or the Nazi documents.