The Soviet Union was the largest single arena of the Holocaust. Around 2.5 to 2.7 million Jews living on Soviet territory in 1939 (counting only the pre-1939 borders) were murdered by the German invaders, the Einsatzgruppen, the local auxiliaries, and the Romanian and Hungarian forces operating alongside the Wehrmacht. Including the territories the Soviet Union had annexed in 1939 to 1940 (Eastern Poland, the Baltic states, parts of Romania, and a small piece of Finland), the figure rises to around 4 million Soviet-territory Jews murdered. The killing on Soviet territory was the bulk of the Holocaust by Bullets, conducted in the open air at the edge of every town the German army took. The Soviet Union also lost around 27 million citizens of all categories in the war, the highest national death toll of any country in the Second World War.
The community before the war
Soviet Jewry was the largest Jewish population in any country in 1939, around 3 million people in the pre-1939 borders, around 5.4 million including the annexed territories. The community was concentrated in the western Soviet republics: Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic, Moldova, and the Polish-speaking areas of what had been eastern Poland. There were smaller but significant communities in Russia proper, particularly Moscow and Leningrad. Most Soviet Jews were Yiddish-speaking and traditionally observant by background, though decades of Soviet anti-religious policy had reduced the public practice of Judaism. Jewish cultural life under the Soviet state had been substantial in the 1920s and 1930s but had been progressively curtailed by the Stalin purges of the late 1930s.
Soviet Jews held senior positions in the Soviet state, the Red Army, the academy, the arts and the sciences. Around 6 per cent of Soviet senior officials in the late 1930s were Jewish. The figure had been falling under Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges of the late 1930s but was still substantial in 1941.
The German invasion, 22 June 1941
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941. Within six months the German forces had occupied territory containing around 90 per cent of the Soviet Jewish population. Around 1.5 million Soviet Jews managed to evacuate east in time, into the Russian and Central Asian interior. The remainder were trapped under occupation and most of them were killed.
The killing began within days of the invasion. The Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory and began systematic shootings of Jewish men, then women and children, by mid-July. The killing pattern is described in detail on the Einsatzgruppen page and the Specific Atrocities pages. By the end of 1941, around 500,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered. By the end of 1942, around 1.5 million. By 1944, when most of the occupied territory had been recovered, around 2.5 million Soviet Jews from the pre-1939 borders were dead, plus around 1.5 million from the annexed territories.
The local auxiliaries
The Einsatzgruppen could not have killed at the scale they did without local help. Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian and Belarusian volunteer units provided most of the personnel for the round-ups, the marches to the killing sites, and increasingly the shooting itself. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, recruited from the local population in occupied Ukraine, was around 35,000 men strong by 1942. Local pogroms in the immediate aftermath of the German arrival killed thousands of Jews in towns where the German forces themselves had not yet established control. The Lvov pogrom of late June 1941, the Kovno pogrom of similar date, the various killings in the Galician towns, all preceded the systematic operations of the Einsatzgruppen and were carried out by local Lithuanian, Ukrainian or Polish-Ukrainian populations.
The role of the Wehrmacht
The German army on the eastern front was not simply standing aside while the SS killed Jews. Wehrmacht units took part in killings, provided logistical support, and in some sectors carried out their own anti-Jewish operations. The criminal orders issued by the German army in spring 1941, including the Commissar Order requiring the shooting of Soviet political officers, normalised the killing of unarmed civilians in Wehrmacht doctrine. The German army post-war myth of a clean Wehrmacht uninvolved in the Holocaust was finally laid to rest by the work of German military historians in the 1990s, particularly the Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s Wehrmacht Crimes exhibition of 1995, which produced a substantial public reckoning in Germany.
Soviet Jews in the Red Army
The Red Army included around 500,000 Jewish soldiers over the course of the war, around 200,000 of whom were killed in action. Around 153 Soviet Jewish soldiers received the Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest Soviet decoration, a per-capita figure substantially above the Soviet average. The Red Army included Jewish soldiers in every theatre and unit. Jewish military doctors and engineers were prominent in the Red Army medical and technical services. Several senior Red Army generals were Jewish, although this was downplayed in Soviet press accounts during the war and erased from accounts after 1948.
The Soviet Jewish refugees
The 1.5 million Soviet Jews who evacuated east into the Soviet interior in 1941 are an important part of the survival story. They reached Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and the Russian Far East under extraordinary conditions, in trains that travelled for weeks across a country at war. Most of them survived the war and returned, after 1945, to find their pre-war homes occupied by others and their relatives mostly dead. Some emigrated to Israel and the United States in the post-war waves of Soviet Jewish departure.
The Soviet response and the Soviet silence
The Soviet authorities knew about the mass killing of Soviet Jews from late 1941 onwards. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, established in Moscow in April 1942 under the actor Solomon Mikhoels, gathered material on the killings and published it abroad in propaganda pieces aimed at international Jewish opinion. The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, edited by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, compiled survivor accounts and documentary evidence of the killings, but the Soviet authorities suppressed publication of the Russian-language edition and the book was only published in full after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Soviet post-war policy treated the killing of Soviet Jews as part of the wider killing of Soviet citizens, refusing to acknowledge a specifically Jewish dimension. Memorials at killing sites named the victims as Soviet citizens rather than as Jews. The Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded by Stalin in 1948 and Mikhoels was murdered. Soviet Jewish writers including Grossman were progressively silenced. The Doctors’ Plot of 1953, in which a group of largely Jewish Soviet physicians were accused of plotting to kill Soviet leaders, was the public manifestation of the late-Stalinist Soviet anti-Jewish campaign. Stalin’s death in March 1953 ended the active campaign, but Soviet anti-Jewish policy continued under his successors.
Soviet Jewish acknowledgement of the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish event came only after 1989. Post-Soviet Russia and the post-Soviet states have engaged with the killings of 1941 to 1944 unevenly. Some sites have been formally acknowledged as Jewish killing sites and given proper memorials. Others remain unmarked or marked only with the original Soviet vague references to anti-fascist victims.
What it adds up to
The Holocaust on Soviet territory killed around four million Jews, more than half of the total Holocaust dead. It happened in the open air, in front of local witnesses, often with local participation. It is the part of the Holocaust most often left out of Western accounts, partly because the bulk of the survivor literature comes from the camps in Poland rather than from the killing fields in the east, partly because Soviet authorities suppressed the specifically Jewish dimension of the killings for forty years, and partly because the post-Soviet states have only recently begun to acknowledge what happened on their soil. The full record is still being recovered, particularly through the work of Father Patrick Desbois’s Yahad-In Unum project, which has been locating, mapping and excavating killing sites across the former Soviet territories since 2004.
See also
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg (eds), The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, Holocaust Library, 1981
- Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule, Belknap, 2004
- USHMM: The Soviet Union