This Book Is a Narrative History of Everyday Life in Nazi Germany's

PREFACE his book is a narrative history of everyday life in Nazi Germany’s Tlargest colony and an assessment of the effect of Nazi rule on a territory that had known Soviet rule for over two decades: the Reichs- kommissariat Ukraine, founded in 1941 and ultimately dissolved in 1944. As such it is the first detailed description of what life there was like for the native population. My goal has been to write a territorial history, not a national one. In- stead of a study of Ukraine as a whole, this is a study of the Reichs- kommissariat Ukraine, which comprised much, but not all Ukrainian territory; and rather than a study of Ukrainians, it is a study of all its natives. This approach requires some explanation. In researching and writing the book, my premise has been that the best framework for studying Europe during World War II is to consider the territories that existed during that war. The vast majority of studies of German-ruled eastern Europe and Russia do not follow this principle. Ukrainian authors often assume that one can study collectively events during World War II in any territory where Ukrainians lived (among several, ruled by various states). Western and Russian authors often suppose that one can study collectively the wartime events in all territories that had been part of the Soviet Union in the middle of 1939, or even in early 1941. Polish authors, for their part, often decide that one can study collectively events between 1939 and 1945 “in the Second Republic” or “on the territory of the Second Republic,” even though there was no such republic after 1939 or 1945. This book deals only with events in the territory that ultimately became part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. My focus here is what I call “natives” or “the native population.” Al- though it is customary to consider as native only those people who have the titular nationality of the state in question, this is not the case here. (And I use the word without any derogatory intent.) Instead, natives here xi PREFACE are all those who lived in Ukraine before the Germans arrived. I have included the experience and perceptions not only of the Ukrainians but also, as much as possible, of Jews, Roma, Russians, and ethnic Germans. In short, the goal has been a multiethnic history. Yet the Ukrainians, who constituted the vast majority of the population of the Reichs- kommissariat, still get the most attention. The Poles of the Reichskommissariat do not take center stage. This is purely for practical reasons: this book focuses on events in the core of the Reichskommissariat, because doing so reveals best not only the nature of the Nazi regime, but also the long-time influence of the Soviet regime, which had ruled that central Ukrainian region for two decades. The Poles of the Reichskommissariat mostly inhabited western Volhynia, which had known Soviet rule for only a brief period between 1939 and 1941. To maintain the book’s conceptual focus on Ukraine’s central region, I also devote very little attention to the adjacent entity with a large Ukrainian population that was called the General Government, which included the Polish and Ukrainian cities of Kraków and Lviv as well as four of the infamous Nazi death camps. This book is primarily, although not exclusively, a history “from the bottom up.” Only in this way, I believe, will it be possible to provide the reader with a sense of the everyday experiences of the natives under the Nazi system. Even the Reich commissar in charge of the area, Erich Koch, gets relatively little attention. Because in everyday life the population hardly ever saw the leading Nazis—Koch spent most of his time out- side the Reichskommissariat, in East Prussia—omitting most details about them provides a more realistic portrait of the people’s predicament. I identify as “German” those who were officially citizens of the Third Reich during the war. “Nazi” refers only to members of the Nazi party. For the use of the adjectives “Nazi” and “German” there has been no specific rule. In referring to the two factions of the Organization of Ukrai- nian Nationalists, I write of Banderites and Melnykites. These informal designations of its two factions date back to the war period and I, unlike Soviet or other polemicists, use them not to disparage but to avoid a sur- feit of abbreviations. To promote consistency and readability, the transliteration of geo- graphic locations and personal names follows a modified Library of Con- gress transliteration based on Ukrainian usage. Some of these places, par- ticularly those in western Ukrainian regions, may be better known in xii PREFACE their Polish, Russian, or German forms. But in this book it is Rivne, not Równe, Rovno, or Rowno; Zaporizhzhia, not Zaporozhe or Saporoshje; and Kryvy Rih, not Krivoi Rog or Kriwoj Rog. A few place names are exceptional in that they appear here only according to common English usage; key examples are Kiev and Babi Yar. And personal titles are usually translated into English; for example, a Stadtkommissar becomes here a city commissar. xiii HARVEST OF DESPAIR.

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