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Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine
Wendy Lower (2005)

The University of North Carolina Press
(Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
ISBN 0-8078-2960-9 (alk. paper)

Summary:
Few people realize that, for Hitler and his inner circle, the purpose of World War Two (WWII) was to colonize Ukraine as "living space"(lebensraum) for the expanding German population. Hitler's intention to "drive to the East" (drang nach Osten) is clearly stated in his book Mein Kampf. The following five quotations excerpted from Wendy Lower's book Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine demonstrate the validity of this view:

"In twenty years the Ukraine will already be a home for twenty million inhabitants besides the natives. In three hundred years, the country will be one of the loveliest gardens in the world. As for the natives,we’ll have to screen them carefully. The Jew, that destroyer, we shall drive out. . . . Our colonizing penetration must be constantly progressive, until it reaches the stage where our own colonists far outnumber the local inhabitants.
-- Adolf Hitler, October 1941"

- Hitler at Berdychiv on 6 August 1941 stated: "The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms.The German services will be lodged in marvelous buildings, the governors in palaces. . . . What India was for England the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity; it’s a racial entity."

- "The struggle for the hegemony of the world will be decided in favor of Europe by the possession of the Russian space. . . . The essential thing, for the moment, is to conquer. After that everything will be simply a question of organization.
-- Adolf Hitler, 17-18 September 1941"

- "As regards the Eastern Territories . . . I wish only broad instructions to be issued from Berlin; the settlement of day-to-day issues can safely be left in the hands of the respective regional commissars.
-- Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1942"

- "Who would have dreamed ten years ago that we would be holding an SS meeting in a village named Hegewald, situated near the Jewish-Russian city of Shitomir. . . . This Germanic East extending as far as the Urals must be cultivated like a hothouse of Germanic blood. . . . The next generations of Germans and history will not remember how it was done, but rather the goal.
-- Heinrich Himmler, 16 September 1942"

Ms. Lower originally interviewed survivors in Zhytomyr, Ukraine in 1992 and the spring of 1993 and has done extensive research on the German occupation in the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia area during 1941 to 1944. As a charter member of the Holocaust Industry, she is obliged to highlight the suffering of the Jewish people during this time -- which she does in spades. Nevertheless, the book does document the demographic makeup of the region, the administrative structure set up by the Germans and the ill-fated attempt to establish the Hegewald colony for ethnic Germans. It does describe the cruel ruthless policies imposed on the civilian population. And it does recognize the dilemma faced by Ukrainians trying to survive the genocidal conditions created by the occupiers -- be they Germans or Russians. Finally, Ms. Lower describes in some detail the anti-partisan actions of the Germans against both the Ukrainian nationalist OUN/UPA and the Red partisans sent into the area by Stalin.

Below, particularly relevant material from each of the 9 chapters has either been summarized or excerpted  (in quotation marks) from the original text. Personal comments (in square brackets) have been highlighted in the color fuchsia.

Chapter 8 is of particular interest to us, since it deals with partisan movements as follows:
- "In the Zhytomyr region the partisan movement was mainly divided among the Ukrainian nationalist factions, roving bands of resistance fighters, and Stalin’s larger partisan brigades deployed from Moscow (for example, the Lenin Mounted Brigade). Actually the largest of these movements, the Soviet one, contained few communists and even fewer Party members."
- "in Vinnytsia, in August 1943 there were 25,850 partisans operating in the city and its surrounding districts, of whom only 4,913 (or 19.1 percent) were Communist Party members or candidates for membership. Though the region was between 80 and 90 percent Ukrainian, the Stalin Brigades were only half Ukrainian, whereas the nationalist forces led by Andrii Mel’nyk and Stepan Bandera were, as one might guess, mainly Ukrainian (at least 70 percent)."
- "the Germans turned on the Ukrainian nationalist movement and crushed its local networks in the fall of 1941 and early 1942."

Obviously, in this region, which had been incorporated within the Soviet Union since 1922, Stalin's Soviet forces dominated the partisan movement. This is in contrast to Western Ukraine, which had been part of Poland before WWII and was occupied by the Red Army on 17Sep1939, where the nationalist OUN/UPA dominated the partisan movement. In addition, we have excerpted several whole paragraphs from this chapter, which deal with the Ukrainian nationalist partisan movement.

A word search reveals that Ms. Lower does not use the term Holodomor, although she does refer to the Great Famine of 1932-1933 on four occasions. Also, the term Operation Reinhard (or Operation Reinhardt) does not appear in the text of the book but only in the reference to Peter Black's book "Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard". Peter Black was the chief historian for the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which persecuted John Demjanjuk for so many years.

Will Zuzak; 2013.08.18

Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Glossary xv
Introduction 1
1 Nazi Colonialism and Ukraine 18
2 Military Conquest and Social Upheaval, July-August 1941 30
3 TheWehrmacht Administration of Zhytomyr 44
4 Making Genocide Possible: The Onset of the Holocaust, July-December 1941 69
5 The Zhytomyr General Commissariat, 1942-1943 98
6 The General Commissariat’s Machinery of Destruction: The Holocaust in the Countryside and Jewish Forced Labor, 1942-1943 129
7 Himmler’s Hegewald Colony: Nazi Resettlement Experiments and the Volksdeutsche 162
8 The Unraveling of Nazi Rule, 1943-1944 180
9 Legacies of Nazi Rule 200
Appendix:
German and Ukrainian Spellings of Place Names 209
Notes 211
Bibliography 279
Index 301

Portions of the text have been previously published:
Wendy Lower, "A New Ordering of Space and Race: Nazi Colonial Dreams in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 1941-1944," German Studies Review 25, no. 2 (2002): 228-54; used by permission of German Studies Review.
Wendy Lower, " ‘Anticipatory Obedience’ and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941-1944," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 1-22; used by permission of Oxford University Press.

Acknowlegements
The extensive acknowledgements provided by Ms. Lower reads like a Who's Who in the Holocaust Industry. Particularly relevant people mentioned are:
- Klavdia (Malik) Starovoitov was host "mother" in Zhytomyr, Ukraine during research trips in 1992 and spring of 1993.
- Grateful to Dr. Dieter Pohl (Germany) and Dr. Karel Berkhoff (Netherlands) for providing useful material and commenting on the manuscript.
- "Just as I was preparing to return to the Zhytomyr archives for a second time in the spring of 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened."
- "Alexander Rossino and Peter Black reviewed all or parts of the book manuscript."
- "I am especially grateful to Doris Bergen at the University of Notre Dame and Tim Snyder at Yale University, who devoted many hours to critiquing the manuscript."
- "The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute also contributed funding toward my Ukrainian language studies."

Introduction
- Soviet wartime correspondent Vasilii Grossman (Red Star, October 1943) -- [W.Z. Grossman also witnessed the Holodomor]
- Nearly 4.1 million civilians in Ukraine died under Nazi rule of which 1.2 million Jews.
- Of 2.8 million slave laborers [Ostarbeiter], 2.3 million were from Ukraine.
- 700 cities/towns and 28,000 villages completely/partially destroyed.
- Hitler's "living space" [lebensraum] and "drive to the East" [drang nach Osten]
- Indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe [Ukrainians, Poles] equated to North American Indians, Negroes, Africans
- "Adolf Hitler,Hermann Göring, and Himmler all placed their elaborate headquarters and retreats around Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr."
- "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."
- Himmler demanded that they "clean the territory of Ukraine for the future settlement of Germans."
- Hitler (16Jul1941) wanted to create a "Garden of Eden" in Ukraine. He liked Zhytomyr region.
- "In Zhytomyr proper, Petliura gangs killed 317 Jews on 22-26 March 1919. Twenty-three died in Berdychiv."
- "Berdychiv, a center of Hasidism, was known as the little Jerusalem of Volhynia."
- "on the eve of World War I, there were 55,876 Jews in Berdychiv, and in 1939 there were 23,266."
- "most Poles in the Soviet territories of Ukraine were deported to northern Kazakhstan, Siberia, and other desolate parts of inner Russia."
- "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." "They died in disproportionally high numbers during the Great Famine [Holodomor] of 1932-33 and suffered waves of deportations in 1935, 1937-38, and 1941."
- "Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from the former Polish-held region of Volhynia, which fell under Soviet rule, streamed into German-occupied Poland."

Chapter 1 Nazi Colonialism and Ukraine
"In twenty years the Ukraine will already be a home for twenty million inhabitants besides the natives. In three hundred years, the country will be one of the loveliest gardens in the world. As for the natives,we’ll have to screen them carefully. The Jew, that destroyer, we shall drive out. . . . Our colonizing penetration must be constantly progressive, until it reaches the stage where our own colonists far outnumber the local inhabitants.
-- Adolf Hitler, October 1941"

- "Hitler believed Germany was destined to rule a considerable portion of the Eurasian land mass." -- modeled after the Norh American family farm.
- "historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust have been reluctant to view Nazi rule in the East as a colonial endeavor,"
- "In Heinrich Himmler’s SS propaganda publication, Der Untermensch, one reads about the life-and-death struggle between Germans and Jews alongside Nazi claims to Eastern European territory depicted as ‘‘black earth that could be a paradise, a California of Europe.""
- "In 1918, the Central Powers established a puppet regime in Ukraine (led by Ukrainian nationalist Hetman Skoropodskyi) and negotiated control over the largest concentration of ethnic Germans (more than 700,000) in the tsarist empire in southern Ukraine."
- Hitler at Berdychiv on 6 August 1941 stated: "The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious farms.The German services will be lodged in marvelous buildings, the governors in palaces. . . . What India was for England the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours. Europe is not a geographic entity; it’s a racial entity."
- Hitler "argued against educating Ukrainians, providing them inoculations, and improving any life conditions that might foster non-German population growth."
- "Red Army prisoners and matériel were to be annihilated."

Chapter 2 Military Conquest and Social Upheaval, July-August 1941
- "The struggle for the hegemony of the world will be decided in favor of Europe by the possession of the Russian space. . . . The essential thing, for the moment, is to conquer. After that everything will be simply a question of organization.
-- Adolf Hitler, 17–18 September 1941"

- "In the Zhytomyr region, however, the German army and Himmler’s SS and police established an administration that remained the leading authority from early July until the arrival of the civil leadership in November 1941. It was during this critical period that the Nazis introduced their genocidal campaign against Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and other socalled racial and political undesirables."
- In early 1941, if not earlier, Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Göring briefed leaders of the Armed Forces (OKW), SS-police, and Foreign Office about the impending mass murder that would accompany the anti-Soviet campaign in the East." "On 13 May 1941, Hitler decreed that the army should use all measures to destroy civilian threats or attacks. [W.Z. before the 22Ju1941 invasion???]"  "If individual perpetrators could not be identified, then collective measures against entire villages were to be carried out."
- "Even in the smaller towns around the region Stalin’s henchmen managed to destroy hundreds of homes and brutally murdered prisoners deemed potential Nazi collaborators." [W.Z. Ukrainian nationalists fighting for an independent Ukraine.]
- "In addition to bombs, Germans propaganda leaflets fell from the sky and littered the fields and roadways. One popular appeal stated that the holder of the leaflet was guaranteed a friendly reception by the German army and that the real enemy of the Germans was the Jews, the so-called bearers of Bolshevism." "Trusting that the leaflet was a ticket to safety, local women and children collected and distributed them to Red Army deserters." "In the German battles for Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, and Berdychiv, more than 72,000 Red Army soldiers surrendered."
- "Ukrainians in Zhytomyr believed that the defeat of Stalin’s forces would bring their suffering to an end. To a Ukrainian who had survived a decade of famine and terror under Stalin and just witnessed the devastation caused by Stalin’s "scorched earth" retreat, it seemed that things could not possibly get worse."
- "The time of atheism is gone. The German authorities give you the opportunity to pray in freedom again." "In and around the town of Zhytomyr, 106 clergymen refurbished the churches and opened six in the city itself and fifty-four in the surrounding districts."

pp38-40: Ukrainian Nationalist Activists, Pokhidni Grupy and theWehrmacht
[W.Z. This section provides a good overview of OUN activists attempts to organize Ukrainians in the Zhytomyr region]
- "Many secured German army identifications at first officially and later illegally from a secret printing shop they established in the city of Zhytomyr."
- "another nationalist reported that during August 1941 he and twenty-two other activists set out to organize a number of villages around Zhytomyr, covering a total population of 21,222 Ukrainians, 2,649 ethnic Germans, 132 Russians, 7 Jews, and 9 others."

pp40-43: Initial Nazi Support of the Volksdeutsche
[W.Z. This section relates how the Germans promoted the Volksdeutsche to important administrative positions.]
- "Although 40 percent of the ethnic Germans in the region were day laborers who lacked skills, regional German commanders began to place them in leading administrative positions, much to the ire of the rest of the population of non-Germans."
- "Ukrainian nationalist activists, civil servants, and collective farm leaders perceived the ethnic Germans to be a nuisance and a threat. Yet they vehemently believed that the other ethnic minority in the region, the Poles, posed an even greater danger because historically they had dominated the region and in more recent times had persecuted Ukrainians and Ukrainian nationalists in the interwar Polish republic." "In fact, in the summer of 1941, Ukrainians in Zhytomyr openly expressed more anti-Polish and anti-Russian sentiment than anti-Jewish or anti-German feelings."
- "In Berdychiv, the Wehrmacht plastered posters on buildings in Ukrainian, Russian, and German stating that anyone found on the street between 8:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M. would be shot without warning, and that "for every assaulted German soldier, 20 male civilians will be shot." "
- "Between July and October 1941, the period of military occupation of the region, tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians (mainly Jews) were executed by army and SS-police forces." "The speed and scope of the action paralyzed the victims, who suddenly realized the sinister intent of the self-proclaimed Nazi "liberators." "

Chapter 3 TheWehrmacht Administration of Zhytomyr
- "The army and SS-police exploited the émigré leaders from western Ukraine to help in the purging of the old administration and the securing of a new one. They had no intention of fulfilling the émigrés’ dream of an independent Ukrainian state. Consequently, during the transfer from military to civilian administration most Ukrainian nationalists were arrested, interrogated, and incarcerated. Very few were able to conceal their nationalist sympathies and remain in the German administration beyond the spring of 1942."
- "Thus in these first weeks and months of military rule over the region, the army commanders constructed an administrative hierarchy of Ukrainian and ethnic German raion leaders, village elders, and militiamen."
- "Markull appointed twenty-five district chiefs around the city of Vinnytsia. Across the entire Zhytomyr region, the Germans posted about seventy-five Ukrainian (and some ethnic German) district leaders."

pp49-50: Indigenous Collaborators in theWehrmacht Administration Auxiliary Police
- "The elders and mayors submitted lists of Ukrainian police candidates to the Germans for approval. The size of the militia groups usually did not exceed fifteen men; militia members were on average twenty-five years old." "They carried clubs; in 1941 very few if any were trusted with guns."

[Ref. 19: Black, Peter "Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard." I am grateful to Dr. Black for material on Trawniki guards from Zhytomyr.]

pp50-52: Mayors, District (Raion) Leaders, and Villages Elders
- "Leading Ukrainian administrators in Zhytomyr, many with a nationalist orientation, tried to establish Ukrainian self-help committees and cooperative organizations, including a regional Ukrainian Red Cross."
- "Ukrainians and ethnic Germans in the higher-level positions such as raion leader received between 1,000 and 3,000 rubles per month, which was considerably more than the Soviets had paid."
- "Any elder or raion leader who did not comply with German orders was, according to Nazi policy, treated as an enemy of the Reich and therefore executed."
- "Markull complained about the lack of available manpower while he simultaneously approved the executions of civilians -- at least 1,550 persons who by and large were not guilty of a crime but considered racially worthless or politically threatening to the Germans."

pp52-59: Wehrmacht Security Measures; Roques, Stülpnagel, and Reichenau
- "While conducting a murderous policy against the Jews, Russians, and other so-called Asiatic elements, the army tried to promote "peaceful" German-Ukrainian relations. Stülpnagel asked that his subordinates give Ukrainians the impression that German rule was fair. Nazi persecution and reprisal measures were not to be directed against the "helpful" Ukrainians."
- "Often their searches were incited by Ukrainians who lodged an overwhelming number of complaints about "armed Russian gangs" roaming the villages and forests." "In 1941, however, while there were large numbers of Red Army deserters and civilian refugees, there were very few organized partisan groups operating in the region, and so-called antipartisan warfare became a German cover for carrying out atrocities against civilians and Red Army stragglers."

pp59-66: TheWehrmacht’s Camp System and the Fate of the Prisoners of War
- By end of August 1941 prison population saturated the former Soviet prisons and NKVD buildings to overflowing. "Around Vinnytsia, all unmarried males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five were deemed suspect and arrested."
- "While the number of civilian internees was growing, the more pressing issue at hand was the enormous number of POWs."
- Nazi leadership view: "The more prisoners that die, the better off we are." "Their subordinates adopted a similar attitude and implemented the policy of starvation, inhumane neglect, and mass murder of POWs."
- "In mid-December Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg reported to Hitler that about 2,500 POWs were dying each day in Ukraine’s camps."
- "High Command orders identified Ukrainian POWs as a ‘‘privileged’’ group to be treated less severely than Russians." "Of the 280,108 Soviet POWs released by the German military in 1941, Ukrainians constituted 270,095 (235,466 from camps under Army Group South in Ukraine.)" "Like Hitler, Reich Commissar for Ukraine Erich Koch protested that the freed POWs would avenge the Germans by joining the partisans."

pp66-68: Summing Up Colonial-StyleWarfare and Hitler’sWar in Ukraine
- "Armed with modern tools and the ideology of Nazi-style warfare, ordinary German soldiers and SS-policemen aggressively implemented a policy (which had been defined by the High Command and senior Nazi leaders) to eradicate anyone who stood in the way of a German victory, specifically "suspicious elements" among the Red Army prisoners, civilians, and above all within the Jewish population, the Communist Party, and the Soviet state apparatus."

Chapter 4 Making Genocide Possible; The Onset of the Holocaust, July-December 1941
- "Of the more than 2 million Jews who died in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belorussia, the vast majority died at gunpoint."
- "There was no place for the Jews in the Nazi utopian vision of a Lebensraum; thus the Jews were denied even the lowest status of a colonial subject."
- "The most prominent regional leaders in the 1941 phase of the Holocaust in Zhytomyr were General Reichenau, Higher SS and Police Leader Jeckeln, Einsatzgruppe C Commander Rasch, and SS-Colonel Paul Blobel."

pp73-78: From the Center to the Periphery; Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a and Jeckeln’s SS-Policemen
- "as Vasilii Grossman described it, ..." "According to Vasilii Grossman’s account,..."  [W.Z. Was Mr. Grossman in the Zhytomyr region in summer 1941?]

pp78-83: The Division of Labor; SS-Police and Wehrmacht Collaboration in the Holocaust

pp83-86: Rationalizing, Legitimizing, or Resisting the Mass Murder

pp86-90: Facilitating Genocide; Ghettos in Zhytomyr
- "Indeed, one of the few pre-Barbarossa references to ghettos appeared in a May 1941 memorandum by the Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, who advised his Ukrainian deputy that "after the customary removal of Jews from all public offices, the ‘Jewish Question’ must undergo a decisive solution through the establishment of ghettos or labor battalions."" [W.Z. May 1941 ??? Ukrainian deputy???]

pp90-97: Interethnic Relations and the Holocaust; Ukrainians, Ethnic Germans, and Jews
- "As historian John Paul Himka has recently argued in his work on Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust, ‘‘In normal historical situations, active sadists would be marginalized as criminal elements and latent ones would not become active. . . . But during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, criminality moved from the margins of society to its center, and individuals with an inclination to rob, extort, and kill were not lost in the larger crowd of humanity, but rather stepped to the fore.""
[Ref.66:  John Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews during the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors," in The Fate of the European Jews, ed. Frankel, 172.]
- "According to the Einsatzgruppe C reports from August and early September 1941, "Almost nowhere could the population be induced to take active steps against the Jews.""
- "According to scholars Karel Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, the OUN-B document states that "at a time of chaos and confusion liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite, and Jewish activists is permitted, especially supporters of Bolshevik-Muscovite imperialism." "
[Ref.84: Berkhoff and Carynnyk, ‘‘The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,’’ 153.]
- "In July 1941, the head of the newly declared Ukrainian state, Iaroslav Stets’ko, wrote in his autobiography: "Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews,who are helping Moscow enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like." " [W.Z. ???]
- "Thus Nazi leaders assumed that Ukrainians would start pogroms, but Ukrainian nationalist activists who infiltrated the rural administrations instructed their sympathizers to avoid disorganized massacres of Jews."

Chapter 5 The Zhytomyr General Commissariat, 1942–1943
- "As regards the Eastern Territories . . . I wish only broad instructions to be issued from Berlin; the settlement of day-to-day issues can safely be left in the hands of the respective regional commissars.
-- Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1942"

- "On 16 July 1941 Hitler convened Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Lammers, Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring, and Martin Bormann at his headquarters."
[W.Z. There is substantial evidence that Martin Bormann was a Soviet agent.]
- "As for Ukraine, Hitler ordered that the Crimea be totally cleansed of foreign elements and settled by Germans. Likewise, the old Austrian territory of Galicia was to be a Reich territory."
- "In the discussion over the appointment of the Reich commissar for Ukraine, Rosenberg nominated Fritz Sauckel; however, Göring insisted that Erich Koch was the better candidate." "The Führer asserted that "the most important region for the next three years is undoubtedly the Ukraine. Therefore, it will be best for Koch to be appointed there." "

pp101-106: The Administration of Hitler’s Garden of Eden
- "There would be no indigenous elites besides the Reich and ethnic Germans. Ukrainians, who were to be denied any education beyond the fourth grade, were deemed useful as long as they supplied the Germans with everything demanded, supplying grain to all of Europe, slaving on a plantation-style collective farm, and performing all the necessary but unpleasant grunt work that was considered beneath the superior Aryans."
- "By 1943 there were about 18,400 Ukrainians working in the rural German police stations and commissars’ outposts. At least 2,000 served as village elders. Hundreds staffed various German administrative offices in the cities of Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia."

pp106-110: The Commissars: ‘‘Golden Pheasants,’’ ‘‘Egotistical Hyenas,’’ ‘‘Carpetbaggers,’’ and ‘‘Ordensjunker’’
-"Kurt Klemm, Fritz Magass, ???"
- "After being stranded for some time in Pomerania, the commissars’ "special transport" of thirty-nine railway cars with 150 staff members finally arrived in early November 1941 to a snow-covered Zhytomyr with bitter, subzero-degree temperatures."

pp110-110: German-Ukrainian Interaction; Fraternization, Black Marketeering, and Plundering
- "Since the leadership could not prevent sexual relations between Germans and Ukrainians and the leadership’s aim was to reduce the non-German population, Hitler, Himmler, and Koch promoted sterilization of Ukrainian women and abortions."
- "In addition to demanding the public shaming of Ukrainian women, Hitler and Bormann insisted that "the reproductive ability of the women must be lowered to decrease the race." "
- "Nonetheless, the commissars and their staff -- and certainly other Germans stationed in Zhytomyr -- were also actively engaged in the black market and other activities with Ukrainians."

pp114-117: The Commissars’ Ukrainian Policies; The Land Question
- "From the beginning of the German occupation, Ukrainian peasants clamored for the privatization and redistribution of land, and yet the commissars failed to implement a unified land policy."
- "In actuality the collectives were kept intact with German overseers, Ukrainian agronomists, and ethnic German managers. To the added disgust of the Ukrainian peasants, the Germans forcibly "evacuated" tens of thousands of peasants from their cultivated farms and handed over the produce and land, including private plots, to Volksdeutsche settlers."
- "Ukrainian peasants soon realized that German promises about privatizing the land were absurd. So they increased the use of individual, private plots and secretly stored food, indeed more successfully than under Stalin’s rule."

pp117-118: Ukrainian Schools and Popular Culture
- "Hitler and his sycophant Koch had ordered that schooling only be allowed up to the fourth grade"; whereas "Rosenberg tried to persuade Hitler and other German leaders to pursue more pro-Ukrainian policies that supported culture and education."
- "By the end of 1942, however, the functioning of Ukrainian schools beyond the elementary level had become a farce, because thirteen-year-old children had become targets of labor raids; if they were not working in the field under their parent’s supervision, they were being placed in German concentration camps for youths."
- "On the other hand, the commissars supported Ukrainian cultural performances." -- mainly to entertain the Germans.

P118-122: Religion
- "Among the various Christian Orthodox factions that sprang up during the war, the two largest ones were the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church centered in Kiev and the Russian Autonomous Church with its patriarch in Moscow. In December 1941 the Germans allowed for the revival of the Autocephalous Church by appointing Bishop Polikarp (Sikorsky) the "Temporary Administrator of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church in the Liberated Lands of Ukraine."... In May 1942 Koch’s deputies in Rivne announced that in addition to the Autocephalous Church under Polikarp that the Autonomous Church was allowed to exist under the leadership of Bishop Aleksii."
[W.Z. One wonders if Soviet agent Martin Bormann had anything to do with the recognition of the Moscow-controlled "Russian Autonomous Church" headed by Soviet agent Aleksii.]
[Ref.88: The friction between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches became evident, to the Germans at least, in May 1942; the general commissar’s office described how both churches vied for popular support through leaflets, declarations, and pastoral letters. See Klemm, "Lagebericht," 3 June 1942, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R6/310.]
[Ref.91: On the scandals and infighting within the Ukrainian churches, largely centered in Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia, see Berkhoff, "Was There a Religious Revival . . . ?"]
- "The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church had openly supported the OUN-B’s declaration of independence in July 1941, and German policy toward Ukrainian nationalism had changed to a blanket condemnation of the movement, leading to the systematic murder of its local leaders and sympathizers."
- "Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in Zhytomyr, about one in ten (ages thirteen to fifty-five) were deported to Germany as forced laborers."

pp122-126: Ukrainian Forced Labor Inside and Outside the Commissariat [Ostarbeiter]
- "In June 1942 ... Feierabend determined that a total of 40,462 men and women had been deported to the Reich and 140,000 more were to follow them."
- "The district commissar’s office, with the help of the police, held hostages from villages until a sufficient number of laborers could be gathered."
- "When Sauckel’s agents or Rosenberg’s commissars received a labor quota for their districts, they employed whatever means available to capture and intern the Ukrainians who were then deported to the Reich."

pp126-128: The Case of General Commissar Klemm and the SS-Police
- "Klemm complained to his superiors in Rosenberg’s ministry about the labor shortage and on more than one occasion indirectly blamed the shortage on the Reich’s anti-Jewish policies."
- "In May 1942 Klemm met with Reich Commissar Koch, Higher SS and Police Leader for Ukraine Prützmann, and Reich Minister Rosenberg at Rivne." and complained again. Himmler reprimanded Klemm, who shortly resigned and was replaced by Ernst Leyser.
- "The general commissar could issue orders to individual members of the regional police in the Schupo (Schutzpolizei) and gendarmerie but not to the SS and police district leader (SS- und Polizeigebietsführer)."

Chapter 6 The General Commissariat’s Machinery of Destruction; The Holocaust in the Countryside and Jewish Forced Labor, 1942–1943
- "During the second phase of the Nazi occupation, when the civil administration was in place, mass executions of Jews continued, but with very few exceptions killing actions did not reach the scale of several thousands as they often had in 1941."

pp130-132: The Local SS-Police Apparatus; Germans, Ukrainians, and Volksdeutsche
- "In the SS and police hierarchy, the Ukrainian auxiliaries were at the bottom of the chain of command structure."
- "On 3 December 1941 General Commissar Klemm ordered the district commissars to dissolve the Ukrainian militia."
- "During the regular patrols of rural areas, or in response to local requests, Ukrainian Schutzmänner and German gendarmes combed the region and uncovered Jews in hiding."

pp132-135: The Nazi Search for Jews in the Countryside
- Multiple examples where Ukrainian police searched for and shot Jews in 1942-43. Also several examples where Ukrainians tried to help.

pp135-138: Indigenous Police Forces and the Holocaust; Their Size, Influence, and Ideological Training
- "After the big recruiting drives of August 1942 and initiation ceremonies of September 1942, the headcount of Schutzmänner in the entire Zhytomyr region was 5,200. Later in April 1943, after the Germans forced more Ukrainian men to join, it jumped to 16,400 auxiliaries, while the number of German gendarme leaders was about 1,100 men."
- After repeatedly vilifying Ukrainians, Ms. Lower concludes this section by stating: "It must be stressed, however, that the Germans initiated and controlled anti-Jewish policies as well as steered Ukrainian involvement in the "Final Solution.""

[Ref. 32: Black, Peter "Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard."]

pp139-143: The Commissar as Central Coordinator of Anti-Jewish Policy; Interagency Collaboration at the Local Level

pp143-150: "Vernichtung durch Arbeit"; Jewish Laborers on DG IV and Nazi Headquarters

pp150-161: Jewish Laborers and Nazi Elite Headquarters
- "Vasilii Grossman, who collected testimony in 1943-44 about the Holocaust in Berdychiv, learned that the Germans shot these last Jewish laborers as the Red Army advanced on Zhytomyr."

Chapter 7 Himmler’s Hegewald Colony; Nazi Resettlement Experiments and the Volksdeutsche
- "Who would have dreamed ten years ago that we would be holding an SS meeting in a village named Hegewald, situated near the Jewish-Russian city of Shitomir. . . . This Germanic East extending as far as the Urals must be cultivated like a hothouse of Germanic blood. . . . The next generations of Germans and history will not remember how it was done, but rather the goal.
-- Heinrich Himmler, 16 September 1942"

- "On 16 September 1942" ... "SS-Volksdeutsche colony" ... "Himmler announced to the SS and police leaders of the East that 10,000 Volhynian Germans would be concentrated in the Hegewald settlement."
- "Hitler wedded the forces of the traditional Drang nach Osten to a radical, racial worldview, forcefully arguing that the push to the East was a biological imperative for Germans."
- "In Lublin, for example, Himmler’s loyal henchman SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik carried out the most aggressive operations to transform his district into the European center of Volksdeutsche farms, Nazi death camps, and SS-run industrial enterprises."
- "Ukrainians were also deported by the thousands to forced labor camps outside the area and in the Reich."
- "During the Cold War, German scholars, politicians and Russian-German émigrés in America lobbied on behalf of the ethnic Germans who suffered under the Soviets, while they ignored the significant role the Volksdeutsche played as collaborators in the ‘‘Final Solution’’ and other Nazi occupation policies in the East." [W.Z. Note how Ms. Lower demonizes everybody except Jews in the Ukraine bloodbath.]

pp166-168: Initial ‘‘Germanization’’ Effort
- Created a list of Volksdeutsche; German schools for children, etc.

pp169-171: Sowing the Seeds
- "in July 1942, these female Reich welfare workers (ages eighteen to twenty-one) flowed into the area. They traveled to remote rural areas around Zhytomyr, establishing schools, birthing centers, and nursing stations."
- "Simply put, the boys were to become soldiers for the Reich, while the girls were to serve as "baby machines." "

pp171-177: Himmler’s "Garden" -- Hegewald
- "The thousands of Ukrainians to be deported from their homes in the Hegewald area were to be dumped in an area as yet to be determined."
- "A month later, on 10 October 1942, the resettlement action began. German police units of Higher SS and Police Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann, members of the local gendarmerie, and VoMi officials rounded up 10,623 non-Germans from the area and, along with some livestock, placed them on 770 freight cars bound for Dnipropetrovs’k. At the same time columns, or as the Nazis called them, ‘‘treks,’’ of ethnic Germans totaling 6,362 persons (1,579 men, 2,371 women, and 2,412 children) moved into Hegewald from various points in Zhytomyr’s northern districts. Both the ethnic Germans and Ukrainians were forcibly moved under police guard."
- "About a month later, on 12 December 1942, Hegewald was officially declared a distinct administrative unit exempt from the jurisdiction of Rosenberg’s ministry; it was 200 square miles in size with a population of 9,000 Volksdeutsche." Later this increased to 10,178 persons.

pp178-179: The Failure of Nazi Lebensraum Plans
- "The concept of an "Aryan" Volksgemeinschaft and other Nazi appeals centered on the Führer did not effectively integrate Reich and ethnic Germans to the extent that Party propagandists and Nazi demographers expected."

Chapter 8 The Unraveling of Nazi Rule, 1943–1944
- After "The February 1943 German surrender at Stalingrad" ... "Like the rest of Eastern Europe, the Zhytomyr region became a battlefield of brutal partisan warfare that was not solely a Nazi-Soviet struggle. Regional civil wars erupted among various ethnic and political groups (Stalinist, communist, nationalist, Zionist), which on the one hand sought to defeat Nazism and on the other tried to establish power in the areas once occupied by the Germans."
- "Thus, in contrast to postwar stereotypes of Ukrainians -- either as mass collaborators or as pro-Soviet partisans -- the history of resistance efforts in Zhytomyr reveals that Ukrainian society was far from unified."

pp181-187: The Emergence of Partisan Movements
- "In the Zhytomyr region the partisan movement was mainly divided among the Ukrainian nationalist factions, roving bands of resistance fighters, and Stalin’s larger partisan brigades deployed from Moscow (for example, the Lenin Mounted Brigade). Actually the largest of these movements, the Soviet one, contained few communists and even fewer Party members." [W.Z. ??? Were these Russian imperialists?]
- "in Vinnytsia, in August 1943 there were 25,850 partisans operating in the city and its surrounding districts, of whom only 4,913 (or 19.1 percent) were Communist Party members or candidates for membership. Though the region was between 80 and 90 percent Ukrainian, the Stalin Brigades were only half Ukrainian, whereas the nationalist forces led by Andrii Mel’nyk and Stepan Bandera were, as one might guess, mainly Ukrainian (at least 70 percent)."
- "the Germans turned on the Ukrainian nationalist movement and crushed its local networks in the fall of 1941 and early 1942."

**** p182 (203 on pdf counter) ****
First, Mel’nyk’s top leaders were assassinated on the streets of Zhytomyr, most likely by Bandera’s agents, who were assisted by the Germans. A month later, the Germans suppressed Bandera’s movement. At the end of November 1941, Einsatzgruppe C members issued a death warrant against Banderites, declaring them‘‘enemies of the Reich’’ who were to be ‘‘arrested and after a complete hearing exterminated in the greatest secrecy as pillagers.’’ The German crackdown intensified in the spring of 1942 when the commissariat’s SS-police administration was in place. German secret police found and killed Zhytomyr’s OUN-B leader Roman Marchak at the end of March. Sipo-SD interrogators extracted from a prisoner the location of Bandera’s headquarters in Zhytomyr. On 8 February 1942 the German police raided the basement of a bombed-out building in Zhytomyr, where they uncovered a false identification printing operation and dozens of secret files about the nationalists’ underground activities there as well as in Kiev, Kharkiv, and Poltava. German investigators were incensed by the discovery of receipts that showed that the nationalists had been selling forged papers to the Jews. This was not an altruistic rescue operation to save Jews. In fact, Bandera’s agents had been financing their local activities by extorting money from the Jews, and, in at least one case, they blamed the Jews when the Germans uncovered caches of arms belonging to Bandera’s underground militia groups.

The nationalists’ administrative files containing their treasured lists of supporters had fallen into Nazi hands and facilitated the destruction of the movement. Supplied with names and information on where to find the people in question, the German secret police under Zhytomyr’s commander, Franz Razesberger, began to arrest and interrogate hundreds of Ukrainians deemed to be partisan threats. At the beginning of April 1942, Razesberger reported to his superior in Kiev, the Security Police chief for Ukraine, Max Thomas, that in Zhytomyr they had identified 356 nationalist suspects and had arrested 200 members.

By the summer of 1942, Ukrainian nationalists who escaped the clutches of the German secret police were in hiding and waiting for instructions from one of three nationalist factions led by Bandera, Mel’nyk, and Taras Borovets. Like other nascent resistance movements in the region, they sought out followers, more arms, and reliable information channels. Attacks against German headquarters in the region’s cities, as well as assassination attempts against German officials and bombings of German offices, occurred sporadically.
**** p183 (204 on pdf page counter) ****

[Ref.7: Andrii Mel’nyk’s people secured their base at Zhytomyr with two of his top leaders from the Provid, Omelian Senyk and Mykola Stsibors’kyi. On 30 Aug. 1941 Senyk and Stsibors’kyi walked across a street intersection in Zhytomyr’s center and were approached from behind by a young man. The man shot Senyk and Stsibors’kyi. Senyk died instantly, and Stsibors’kyi "bled to death a few hours later." See Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 68. Apparently a Bandera agent (with German help) carried this out.]

- "In December 1941 General Commissar Klemm ordered that for every German who was shot at and not injured or killed, ten civilians were to be executed, and for every German injured or killed by partisans, 100 local civilians would be executed."
- "On 18 July 1942 (as part of Operation Bamberg), units in Mazyr, Korosten’, and in other parts of El’sk destroyed five villages and murdered all of the roughly 1,000 inhabitants, except for the Volksdeutsche and Schutzmänner living in these locales."
- "Actually the Germans never had complete control over the northern stretches of the region along the Pripiat’ River. Under the leadership of C. F. Malinkov and the command of S. Kovpak (a Ukrainian-born Communist, who claimed to be a descendent of the Zaporozhian Cossacks), Soviet guerrillas who had been parachuted into the region established stationary camps along the border with Belorussia. In the last week of July 1942, Security chief Razesberger reported to his superior in Kiev, Sipo-SD general Thomas, that Russian parachuters were landing in the areas of Mazyr, Bragin, and Ovruch."
- "In the months that followed this directive [Hitler 18Aug1942], German antipartisan policies resulted in the destruction of 108 villages and the mass murder of more than 2,300 people in the region."

**** p185 (206 on pdf counter) ****
According to a Soviet account, in early 1943 the Germans burned to the ground more than 100 communities and killed or left homeless thousands of civilians from these ‘‘dead zones." In March and April 1943, Leyser’s commissars specified in their reports 617 clashes with partisans, which left over 600 peasants homeless; plus several hundred more were dragged away by the partisans. Just as the Germans prepared their early 1943 offensives, Malinkov and Kovpak’s forces moved deeper into the heart of the region, conducting periodic raids southward from the Olevs’k district.They captured (temporarily) the German district commissar capital of Lel’chytsi and assassinated the German SS and police district leader of Bragin. In the spring of 1943, Kovpak commanded a total of 3,000 Soviet partisans operating in two groups along Zhytomyr’s northern border. Attacks on Germans, their facilities, and military transports had increased significantly; in one week, German commanders counted twenty-nine clashes and thirteen attacks on major transport lines. German SS and police commanders complained that because of inadequate forces and matériel, and harsh weather conditions, they could not crush Kovpak’s  units. Meanwhile, Stalin sent in additional Soviet forces southeast of Vinnytsia with orders to drive northward to meet Kovpak’s units.

The Moscow command had learned months earlier from one of their agents, a Schutzmann named Mel’nichenko who had access to the SD office in Zhytomyr, that Himmler’s headquarters and vast SS and military installations were located in the city’s vicinity at Hegewald. Already in the summer of 1942, underground movements in Kiev and Vinnytsia radioed to Moscow that Hitler had built a bunker near Vinnytsia as well as a ‘‘Prominente’’ POW camp, where Andrei Vlasov and other Soviet commanders were being held. Soviet partisans (renamed by Stalin as Red Army rear units) converged on this important Nazi stronghold. Soviet intelligence operatives in the area attempted to assassinate Hitler while he was based at the compound.

But the Soviet partisans were not alone in their effort to destroy the Nazis "behind the lines." While the Soviet partisans came to dominate the Zhytomyr region and also managed to infiltrate areas near the Hitler-Himmler headquarters, the anti-Soviet nationalist partisans operated in the more vulnerable plains and forested patches found in the central districts and western borders of Zhytomyr.36 The Mel’nykites in Vinnytsia and Banderites along the commissariat’s western border with Luts’k formed smaller mobile units (although some reached battalion size) and waged a small-scale local campaign of sabotage and propaganda. They pursued their own campaigns to ‘‘purify’’ Ukraine of its Russian, Jewish, and Polish elements.

In the Zhytomyr region, another nationalist partisan group sprang up; it was commanded by the son of Zhytomyr’s chief Ukrainian administrator, the young Iatseniuk, who was a former Mel’nyk supporter and had fled the Germans in the wake of the Bazar demonstration of November 1941. Indeed, Iatseniuk led the only independent nationalist partisan group to have emerged within the borders of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine. Iatseniuk and his supporters in Zhytomyr waged an effective propaganda campaign against the Germans that spoke directly to the local conditions and population. In May 1943 the leaders of the disparate Ukrainian nationalist partisan groups connected to Borovets, Iatseniuk, and Bandera considered combining their groups under one single command structure. But these negotiations broke down. They were resumed only a few months later, when the Red forces under Kovpak penetrated western Ukraine and, along with Bandera’s forces, threatened the smaller nationalist factions. Borovets, Mel’nyk, and Iatseniuk had little choice but to join their nationalist movements under the most militant and popular of the nationalist leaders, Bandera.

The merger of nationalist partisans under Bandera meant that a unified approach ultimately triumphed. However, this merger also represented a defeat for the moderate nationalist forces. As a native of the Zhytomyr region, Iatseniuk carried out his underground campaign with a concern for the security and livelihood of the peasantry and townsfolk; Borovets also waged his attacks with the cooperation of the peasantry. The Banderites, however, like the Red Army forces, often conducted their partisan campaign in ways that sacrificed the local population to the punitive measures of the Germans.
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pp187-190: Relations between Zhytomyr’s Population and the Partisans
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Before they could gain control over a community, both the Soviet and nationalist partisans found that they had to contend first with the German-appointed village elders. One of their initial tasks was to determine whether the elder could be a trusted sympathizer. Before 1943 resistance fighters often moved to another location if the elder was deemed unreliable, but during 1943 they simply did away with the unsupportive elder (and often killed or abused his wife and children). Such murderous actions complied with official Soviet partisan warfare policy. A former chief of the local Soviet partisan movement around the city of Zhytomyr, Leontii Antonovich Kozaritskii, recalled:

We had many of our own leaders among the starosty, and they were not all Ukrainians. In one case the ethnic German elder proved to be helpful and for that the Germans killed him. His replacement, a Ukrainian, refused to assist us and reported our whereabouts to the Germans, who then planned a major air strike over the forest where we were encamped. So the partisan commander put out a death warrant against the starosta who had moved into a protected German headquarters. The partisans dressed as Ukrainian policemen, entered the headquarters, seized the starosta, and shot him in the forest.

Consistent with Kozaritskii’s account and several others found in the German documentation, Soviet partisans attacked uncooperative elders and Ukrainian or ethnic German policemen (and their families), whose mutilated bodies were often later discovered in subsequent patrols of the forests.

By June 1943 resistance forces controlled about 60 percent of the region’s cultivated land. They killed 2,568 German officials and administrators and their Ukrainian and ethnic German allies.
**** p188 (209 on pdf counter) ****

- "In a joint SS-commissar reprisal action on 22 March 1943, the village of Kazymirivka (district Mazyr) was destroyed, and 500 inhabitants were murdered; 450 of them were women and children."
- "They killed 4,018 persons, deported at least 18,860 as forced laborers, and razed 61 villages."

[W.Z. German control simply disintegrated -- despite punitive actions, attempts at bribery, rewards for pro-German actions, etc. Many German-appointed Ukrainian policemen (Schutsmanner) went on robbing and killing sprees.]

pp190-193: Women and the Partisan Movement; Maria Atamanskaia and Maria Kondratenko
- 16-year-old Maria Atamanskaia reported encountering Soviet partisans on the collective farm; was seized by the Ukrainian police; tortured to unconciousness; was deported to Germany as an Ostarbeiter..
- "In September 1943 German gendarmes in Koziatyn went from village to village under orders to kill the wives and family members of Ukrainian auxiliary policemen who had deserted their posts and presumably fled to the partisans. The Soviet partisans had been practicing the same policy against Ukrainian collaborators for over a year."
- "The prominent role of a female partisan leader in Korosten’ named Maria Kondratenko alarmed Nazi leaders and challenged their gendered prejudices about women’s capabilities."
[W.Z. Ms. Lower describes this "Soviet" partisan in glowing terms; she escaped when the Germans ambushed her group; killing the commander "a Jewish man known as Black Misha" and her lover Fedoruk. Ms. Lower does not relate that women played an important role in the UPA.]

pp194-195: German Atrocity Propaganda; A Ukrainian ‘‘Katyn’’ at Vinnytsia
- "The new Nazi propaganda effort should, in Leyser’s words, "stress Soviet crimes.""
- "The Nazis’ biggest propaganda event in Zhytomyr was the unearthing of mass graves at Vinnytsia containing 9,432 victims of Stalin’s 1937 purges."

- "The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church supported the entire Nazi campaign, especially its anti-Semitic content. During one of the funeral processions, the Autocephalous bishop Hryhorii told the mourners that the Jews had tortured and killed the victims of the 1937 massacres. Then he lashed out further:
"Well then, my dear ones, rise up at once and, like Christ, ask the bloodswollen torturer, ‘the father of all workers,’ Stalin, for which of the good deeds that we have done for you and your Jews throughout our lives, you torture us so much? Maybe for our hard labor in the kolkhoz fields, where we worked without straightening our backs, growing high wheat, so that your Jews would have a tasty roll for shabbas and Passover? Or maybe for filling our eyes with sweat as we worked on sugar beats [sic] so that your kikes would have sweet things?"

[W.Z. Wendy Lower's treatment of the Vinnytsia Massacres is disgusting!]

- "As historian Amir Weiner’s work has shown, after almost three years of Nazi anti-Semitic practices and propaganda, few flinched at or even questioned such grotesque and vitriolic distortions."
- "Moreover, Ukrainians who were caught in the middle of the Nazi-Soviet war naturally threw in their lot with the perceived winner. After Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 and the unsuccessful German offensive in the summer of 1943, siding with the Soviets seemed to be the safer bet."

pp195-199: The Collapse of Nazi Colonization Experiments; Hegewald under Attack
- "Later, on 5 July 1943, Himmler’s Generalplan Ost was abruptly shelved when Hitler ordered a halt to ethnic German resettlement and land "grants" until after the war."
- "Soviet attacks against Volksdeutsche settlements and households, which began in 1942, increased considerably during 1943". "Outside Hegewald -- for example, in Mazyr -- partisans massacred ethnic German families. Across the northern part of Zhytomyr, partisans continually ransacked ethnic German farms for livestock and produce."
- "By further demoralizing Zhytomyr’s inhabitants -- many of whom were bereft by the loss of loved ones in the partisan warfare or were left homeless -- the strongest of the movements, the Soviet insurgency, was able to effectively stifle any Ukrainian resistance to a Stalinist reoccupation of Zhytomyr. Instead, Ukrainians developed a new patriotic attachment to the victorious Red Army, a source of unity that Stalin among others effectively exploited in the postwar period." [W.Z. "a source of unity"?]

Chapter 9 Legacies of Nazi Rule
- "The next day, 4 January 1944, Soviet troops entered Berdychiv."
- "On 12 November 1943, the day after General Commissar Leyser fled the city of Zhytomyr, the ethnic Germans departed in four "treks.""
- "Months before the Red Army first pushed the Germans temporarily out of Zhytomyr on 12 November 1943, Ukrainians prepared themselves for the return of Soviet power."

- "As a political movement, Ukrainian nationalism continues to be tainted by its wartime history. Eastern Ukrainians remain suspicious of Galician-based nationalism and condemn the OUN for its collaboration with the Nazis and perpetration of atrocities against Poles and Jews. Meanwhile, the revered "heroes of the Soviet Union" and other medal-adorned Red Army veterans who valiantly defeated Nazism are fading from the scene. And the Soviet empire that they fought for is now discredited -- deemed another disastrous political experiment that, along with Nazism, destroyed Ukraine’s twentieth century and now haunts its twenty-first."
[END p207]

p296 [317/328 pdf] Bibliography: Articles and Conference Papers
[Black, Peter. "Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard: Shedding Light on the Trawniki Training Camp through Documents from Behind the Iron Curtain." Conference on the Holocaust and Intelligence, City University of New York, 2-4 June 2003.]