HOLOCAUST IN OCCUPIED REGIONS OF THE USSR: THE PROBLEM OF PERIODIZATION AND REGIONAL FEATURES

Abstract

The article provides a critical overview of the existing variants of the Holocaust periodization in the Former Soviet Union suggested by an Israeli historian and Holocaust researcher Yitzhak Arad and a Russian historian Iliya Altman. Describing periodization, both Arad and Altman rely on quantitative changes (beginning of the Jews’ extermination in the occupied regions of the USSR, liquidation of ghettos and labor camps) and external Holocaust factors (Wannsee Conference 1942), while the author of this article argues that the research-based periodization should rely on qualitative changes and reasoning behind the phenomenon under study (in this case, the Holocaust). Leaning on these principles, the authors infers a conclusion that the Holocaust in the USSR can be divided into two stages only. The first stage started on 22 June 1941 and lasted till the total destruction of the Jews; the second stage stemmed from that very moment and lasted till the complete liberation of the Soviet territory.

Having explored appropriate literature as well as German and Soviet documents (dispatches of German penal institutions, ESC reports), the author states that in different occupied areas of the USSR, the transition to total destruction of the Jews did not happen simultaneously, but at different time – in early July 1941 in Latvia and Belarus (Bialystok region), in mid-August 1941 in Lithuania and in the third decade of August 1941 in Ukraine. In the author’s opinion, such time difference was human-generated, and the fact that total destruction of the Jews had started in early July 1941 suggests that the key decision on destroying the Soviet Jews as Bolshevist Jews (the so-called «Führer’s Order», i.e. Hitler’s) was most likely to have been made before the German invasion of the USSR. The article provides postwar testimonies of a number of SD teams’ ex-»Führers», according to which the «Führer’s Order» had been announced before the «campaign against Russia» was launched.

Key words: Holocaust in the USSR, periodization of the Holocaust, occupied territory, extermination of Jews, mass shootings.