Jewish Disloyalty 1918 Brandon

The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, by Ray Brandon (Editor), Wendy Lower (Editor). 2010

Jewish Russophilia, Aloofness to Poland, and Economic Dominance. Zydokomuna and HOLODOMOR

A number of features of this book stand out, and I elaborate on them below.

JEWISH ECONOMIC HEGEMONY, AND ABSENCE OF ATTACHMENT TO POLAND

Jews were very much the “Other”–by choice. Snyder writes: “By the middle of the nineteenth century, some three-quarters of merchants in Volhynia were Jews…After five generations of Russian rule, almost all Jews had lost contact with Polish traditions and the Polish language. The communities remained, impotent and quiet, representing a Jewish-Russian rather than a Jewish-Polish tradition…Volhynian Jews were indifferent, or sometimes hostile, to the Polish state established in 1918.” (p. 79). “In trade and commerce, Jews continued to dominate in Volhynia. Jews were about a tenth of the population in 1937, while two of three traders in the province were Jewish, and Jews owned as many industrial enterprises as the rest of the population combined.” (p. 84).

MASSIVE JEWISH COMPLICITY IN THE HOLODOMOR

Was the Zydokomuna, believed by many Ukrainians and Poles, simply anti-Semitic imagination, or was it based on reality? Recall the fact that the hated NKVD was the very instrument of raw Communist terror. Snyder, based partly on Soviet sources, comments: “As late as 1936, 60 of 90 ranking officers (captain and above) of the NKVD in Soviet Ukraine had declared themselves to be of Jewish nationality. As late as March 1937, Jews outnumbered Russians (38 percent and 32 percent, respectively) in the highest positions of the Soviet NKVD as a whole.” (p. 88).

Stalin’s subsequent purges and “de-Judaization” of the CP reduced the self-declared Jewish share of the entire NKVD to 4% by July 1939. Disregarding additional (undeclared) Jews, even 4% was still greater than the 1-2% Jewish share of the USSR’s population.

THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS

The first systematic (as opposed to episodic) mass murders of Jews by Nazis anywhere in Europe took place in the form of Einsatzgruppen units operating on the heels of the advancing Wehrmacht in mid-1941. Using documents, Pohl demonstrates how, over a few-month period, the targets were expanded from Jewish Communists, to all Jewish military-age men, and finally to all Jews. (pp. 27-28, 32). (This tends to support the functionalist interpretation of the origins of the Holocaust over the intentionalist one. The Nazi extermination of the Jews clearly developed gradually and incrementally during 1941, not all at once in pre-planned form before the war.)

UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST GENOCIDAL ACTIONS

Some 12,000–24,000 (p. 150) Jews were initially murdered by Ukrainian bands, often even before the arrival of the Germans (or Hungarians). Thus, rather than being German-sponsored, or spontaneous pogroms, or retaliatory acts for the retreating-NKVD murders of 10,000 Ukrainian-including political prisoners (p. 130), they were of an independent, genocidal nature. It was the Ukrainian fascist OUN which, desirous of copying “German methods” (pp. 131-132; see also p. 303, 316) had organized and incited this network of murderous bands. (p. 132).

Later, the Germans organized the indigenous Ukrainian collaborationist police (Schutzmannschaften). It played a major indirect and direct role in the extermination of the local Jews, and had 100,000 members. (pp. 54-55). Later, as Pohl points out, “Many UPA units consisted of deserters from the indigenous police who had persecuted and killed Jews before defecting.” (p. 53). They put their experience with “German methods” to use against the Poles. (e. g., p. 56).