The Holocaust in Ukraine
The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine (all of those areas were under the military control of Nazi Germany), in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region (all of those areas were then part of Romania, with the latter three areas being re-annexed) and Carpathian Ruthenia (then part of Hungary) during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine (except modern-day Transnistria).
| The Holocaust in Ukraine | |
|---|---|
SS paramilitaries murder Jewish civilians, including a mother and her child, in 1942, in Ivanhorod, Ukraine. | |
| Location | Ukrainian SSR |
| Date | 22 June 1941 to 1944 |
| Incident type | Imprisonment, mass shootings, concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor, starvation, torture, mass kidnapping |
| Perpetrators | Erich Koch, Friedrich Jeckeln, Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel and many others. Various local Nazi collaborators, including Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists |
| Organizations | Einsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, Axis occupation forces (Hungarians, Romanians), and local collaborators |
| Victims | 850,000 –1,600,000 Ukrainian Jews |
| Memorials | In various places in the country |
Between 1941 and 1945, between 850,000–1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine, which included assistance of local collaborators. Around 3,000,000 non-Jews were also killed as a result of Nazi occupation policies. Original plans of genocide called for the extermination of 65% of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the remainder of inhabitants to be treated as slaves. Over 2,300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Germany for slave labor. In ten years' time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all Ukrainians.
According to Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder, "the Holocaust is integrally and organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg, the war in 1941, and it is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine. … Had Hitler not had the colonial idea to fight a war in Eastern Europe to control Ukraine, had there not been that idea, there could not have been a Holocaust.” According to Wendy Lower, the genocide of the Ukrainian Jews was closely linked to German plans to exploit and colonize Ukraine.