Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust by Jeffrey S. Kopstein & Jason Wittenberg

Author:Jeffrey S. Kopstein & Jason Wittenberg [Kopstein, Jeffrey S. & Wittenberg, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, General, Eastern, Jewish, Holocaust, Political Science, Security (National & International), Social Science, Discrimination, Race & Ethnic Relations
ISBN: 9781501715273
Google: WDFEDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36763220
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Germans were certainly present, either as actual perpetrators or as sympathetic bystanders, for many acts of anti-Jewish violence in the weeks immediately after the invasion. It is difficult to believe, however, that their presence can account for the distribution of pogroms we observe. Consider our three Galician voivodships: Stanisławów, Lwów, and Tarnopol, where 125 pogroms occurred across 1,820 municipalities where Jews dwelled with non-Jews. Killers from Einsatzgruppe C roamed the west Ukrainian countryside but, as in the Polish Northeast, the rapid advance of German forces rendered their presence thin. Given the paucity of German boots on the ground, it would have been logical for whatever German forces that were devoted to persecuting Jews to concentrate on places with the most Jews. Although the median number of Jews in places where pogroms occurred (565) is far higher than in places where pogroms did not occur (34), fully one-quarter (around 31) of all Galician pogroms took place in municipalities with 52 Jews or less. By contrast, there were 545 municipalities with greater than 52 Jews and 80 places with greater than the median number of Jews that did not experience a pogrom. If the German presence had been the key factor, there is no reason the Germans would devote scarce resources to so many places with relatively few Jews while ignoring a large number of places with greater numbers of Jews.

One might argue that German incitement could cause violence even in the absence of any actual Germans present at the time of the violence. “After the movement of the front to the east,” testified Abraham Scholl about his hometown Niemerów, “the Ukrainian nationalists began their activities by arresting 38 Jews from a list and executing them outside the city. The Ukrainians took over the administration” (AŻIH 301-4950). Scholl’s testimony does not speculate on Ukrainian motivation, but it might well have been German encouragement. Certainly, this would be the view of those who seek to absolve local Ukrainians and Poles of responsibility. Yet, as Golczewski (2008, 132) notes, incitement only works when heard by a receptive population. Where Ukrainians were less apt to view Jews in such adversarial ways, the German message might have fallen on deaf ears, regardless of whether German personnel were present during the violence or not. According to Dumitru and Johnson (2011), such was the case of the Ukrainians in Transnistria, which was a part of Soviet Moldova during the interwar period. They argue that the overall unwillingness of Transnistrian Ukrainians to accede to German requests for “self-cleansing” actions can be traced to prewar Soviet policies promoting interethnic amity. Relative to their Galician Ukrainian cousins, who had spent the 1920s and 1930s in a Poland that discriminated against both Ukrainians and Jews, Transnistrian Ukrainians were less likely to commit pogroms and more likely to help Jews avoid persecution. The paucity of anti-Jewish violence in regions that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union twenty years earlier is ironic given the rather different effect that the Soviet occupation of eastern Galicia between 1939 and 1941 is purported to have had among both Ukrainians and Poles.

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