Language:
English
Year of publication:
2013
Titel der Quelle:
Yad Vashem Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
41,1 (2013) 63-98
Keywords:
World War, 1939-1945 Collaborationists
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Jews
Abstract:
Many historians tend to depict the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police as merely technical auxiliaries of the Nazi murderers, lacking initiative and playing secondary roles in the Final Solution. Relating to Soviet Ukraine (1939 borders), they depict Ukrainian policemen as not being influenced by the Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists and by their "integral nationalism". Examination of extant documents and eyewitness testimonies shows a different picture. The emissaries of the West-Ukrainian OUN were avidly involved in the formation of the police forces in the Kharkiv region, with its mixed Ukrainian and Russian populations. All the policemen underwent political indoctrination courses. The UAP played an active role in the murder of Jews in the region. It did not take part in the massacre at Drobitsky Yar in the city of Kharkiv, but it played the main role in murders in towns and villages of the region. After Drobitsky Yar, the UAP received a free hand to kill Jews; its members killed individual Jews without any orders and even without hope of material gain. Only a minority of the killers acted out of conviction; the majority consisted of either "creative conformists" or "ordinary enforcers". Their eagerness to serve the occupiers, and their cruelty, stemmed from their prewar experience, from the Civil War to the Famine of 1932-33; on the part of some groups in the UAP (former POWs, young people who could be sent to Germany as forced laborers, etc.) it was a strategy of personal survival.
Note:
In English and Hebrew.
URL:
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