Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine / Edition 1

by Wendy Lower

Overview

On 16 July 1941, Adolf Hitler convened top Nazi leaders at his headquarters in East Prussia to dictate how they would rule the newly occupied eastern territories. Ukraine, the "jewel" in the Nazi empire, would become a German colony administered by Heinrich Himmler's SS and police, Hermann Goring's economic plunderers, and a host of other satraps. Focusing on the Zhytomyr region and weaving together official German wartime records, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, Wendy Lower provides the most complete assessment available of German colonization and the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Midlevel "managers," Lower demonstrates, played major roles in mass murder, and locals willingly participated in violence and theft. Lower puts names and faces to local perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, as well as resisters. She argues that Nazi actions in the region evolved from imperial arrogance and ambition; hatred of Jews, Slavs, and Communists; careerism and pragmatism; greed and fear. In her analysis of the murderous implementation of Nazi "race" and population policy in Zhytomyr, Lower shifts scholarly attention from Germany itself to the eastern outposts of the Reich, where the regime truly revealed its core beliefs, aims, and practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807858639
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/27/2007
Edition description:	1
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Wendy Lower is research fellow and lecturer in the department of Eastern European history at Ludwig Maximilians Universitat in Munich. She is a former research fellow and director of Visiting Scholars Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Lower should be commended for linking German and, more generally, European imperialism to the Third Reich's war of extermination in the former Soviet Union. When placed into this context of European conquest and exploitation, the brutality of the German occupation becomes somewhat more comprehensible. . . . Lower has produced a very important study on Nazi occupation goals and practices that not only highlights the centrality of the Holocaust to all German institutions in the occupied Eastern territories, but also stresses the collapse of unanimity between these same institutions concerning the construction of the German East.—H-German

Lower presents an extremely important addition to our knowledge of the eastern front in the Second World War. By treating the Holocaust and German colonization policies at the local level, Lower presents social history as the consequence of political history. The 'bottom-up' and the 'top-down' perspectives are beautifully integrated here.—Timothy Snyder, Yale University

Wendy Lower's book on the town and district of Zhytomyr under Nazi occupation is a model regional study that both vividly captures the details of local experience and throws light on broader issues. Alongside a succinct and perceptive analysis of the continuities and particularities of Nazi colonialism and empire-building 'in the East,' Lower portrays the devastating consequences for Jews, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans of the lethal Nazi combination of utopian illusion and policies of unfettered exploitation and destruction.—Christopher Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Editorial Reviews

Lower's excellent study offers important insights into the nature of National Socialist racial visions and efforts to transform colonial fantasy into reality, as well as into the tragic consequences for the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Ukraine.—Holocaust and Genocide Studies



A carefully nuanced picture of Ukrainian responses to Nazi occupation. . . . Both specialists and general readers seeking new insights into the Holocaust and the history of Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe will benefit greatly from [this] important study.—Journal of Modern History



An exemplary local study of . . . the administrative entity encompassing much of the German-occupied Ukraine in World War II.—Central European History



An excellent study that bravely attempts to put the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in comparative context, and uses newly opened archives to extend our knowledge of the true horror of the era.—Europe-Asia Studies



A very useful contribution to the field of Holocaust studies. . . . An excellent analysis of Nazi empire-building and the Holocaust in the Zhytomyr district.—English Historical Quarterly



First-rate.—Journal of Modern History



Valuable. . . . An assured, meticulous, and accessible presentation. . . . This is a monograph of considerable value which deserves a wide readership among scholars and students of the Holocaust and genocide.—Journal of Genocide Research



Focusing on the Zhytomyr region—where Adolf Hitler's headquarters were located in summer 1942—this excellent book reconstructs the regime's attempt to implement its colonial vision by murdering the Jewish population, enslaving the Ukrainians, and transforming the local ethnic Germans into the new Master Race of this rich agricultural region. Lower has uncovered fascinating documentation.—Times Literary Supplement



An exemplary local study. . . . Lower integrates the Ukrainian version of the Shoah as one component—albeit a major one—within this fastidiously researched, thorough, insightful, and flowingly readable examination of the Nazi racial vision as implemented in one locale of the occupied East.—Central European History Review



[Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine] offers an excellent regional account of the Holocaust, carefully unpacking the interaction between higher orders and lower level initiatives in the unfolding of genocide.—American Historical Review

From the Publisher