Language:
English
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Cahiers du Monde Russe
Angaben zur Quelle:
52,2-3 (2011) 441-473
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
War crime trials
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
The mass arson of villages in the occupied Soviet Union and the plight of the inhabitants - who were executed, burnt alive, or deported - has left a lasting impression on the minds of Eastern Europeans, whereas the genocide of Jews in those regions was disregarded for decades. Shows that the theme of burnt down villages pervaded official discourse from very early on in the war and competed with the narrative of the mass killing of Soviet Jews. The trials that immediately followed the war, in Nuremberg as well as in the Soviet Union, gave the Stalinist leadership an opportunity to apply the new judicial concept of crimes against humanity to various categories of Soviet victims of the Nazi occupation. Examines, also, the contrast between the popular remembrance of Soviet Jewish and non-Jewish victims during the 1960s-80s. Focuses on the construction of a memorial complex at Khatyn (near Minsk) in 1969 to commemorate the torched villages in Belarus, which became a site of pilgrimage for most of the Soviet population, while the Babii Yar monument, constructed after a stormy controversy, broadly commemorated all Nazi victims of massacres in Kiev.
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