Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44

by Martin Dean

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using powerful eye-witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, Martin Dean's new book reveals local policemen as hands-on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbors from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murders. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot-soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

Genres: Holocaust, Ukraine

261 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 1999

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent accounting of the local ethnic collaborators in Nazi-occupied zones of the former USSR. Ethnic chauvinists grouped around German Nazi patronage to settle ethnic and racial scores with Jews (or Russians or Poles), and now try to distance themselves from this dark and shameful past. Hitler's willing executioners did their dirty work so well they often made the Nazis themselves blush. These are the "national patriots" who are now being glorified and memorialized throughout these collaborative killing fields. One is tempted to state that just for this alone, they deserved Stalin's return in 1944. But of course I won't type such an outrageous thought. . . .

Necessary addition to the literature on Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. Those in power in post-Maidan Ukraine, as in so much of modern east Europe, are the the direct grandchildren of these killers; demanding respect for their "holocausts" while carving marble in their honor. For the victim's direct testimony of this time and place catch the English translation of Ilya Ehrenberg's "Black Book of Soviet Jewry."