Black Earth(60)

The Nazi leadership could reconcile, after its own fashion, the Jewish and the Ukrainian nationalist appeals. Hitler did favor the elimination of Jews from Europe, as Stern understood. But he had no desire to create a Jewish state, even beyond Europe, even as a way to draw Jews away from Europe. Germany was willing to use Ukrainians, as Ukrainian nationalists hoped. But that was only because the Germans were intent upon conquering Ukraine. The Nazis opposed Ukrainian statehood and would imprison the Ukrainian nationalists who declared independence. Insofar as Ukrainians collaborated with Germans, it would be as local administrators and policemen, with no political authority. It was precisely the murder of Jews that would become the Nazi substitute for political activity in Ukraine (and elsewhere). In 1941, the Nazis would tell aspiring political collaborators that the liberation to which they could contribute was liberation from the Jews, and that any future political cooperation would depend upon participation in this project. Thus Berlin addressed its Jewish and its Ukrainian problems together, twisting political aspirations toward racial murder and thereby beginning a murderous Final Solution.

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In 1940, the application of Soviet power in eastern Europe during the German conquest of western Europe drove the Jews into an impossible position. Jews suffered as much or more than any other group under Soviet rule. They lost much from the end of Polish law, which was the basis of the commerce by which many made a living and of the property rights that gave their urban existence a foundation. They lost the communal autonomy that they had enjoyed under Polish rule and the associated rights to practice religion, run schools, and maintain contacts with Jews around the world. Jews were deported to the Gulag in large numbers in April and June 1940. The Jews of the second group were refugees of the German zone of Poland who imagined that the war would end and that they could return to their homes and businesses in places then occupied by the Germans. They thus declined Soviet citizenship, unaware that what they were being offered was a choice between that and the Gulag.

In the first half of 1940, when eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets but Lithuania was still an independent state, Jews fled from the enlarged USSR to Lithuania in the tens of thousands. Along with the large-scale attempts of Jews to return from the Soviet to the German occupation zone and the mass refusal by Jews of Soviet passports, this was another very strong sign that most Jews did not actually wish Soviet rule for themselves. The NKVD reported that Jewish refugees were particularly hostile to Soviet rule. But the Jews’ options were narrowing. The German victory over France in June 1940 meant a long war and thus no immediate prospect for the restoration of Poland. The Soviet occupation of Lithuania that same month destroyed the possibility of shelter within a neighboring and relatively supportive state. Judging from how Jews voted with their feet, the general order of preferences had been (1) Lithuania, (2) Poland, (3) the Soviet Union, and (4) Nazi rule. As of summer 1940, the possible rulers of east European Jews were reduced to two: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Since emigration was for most east European Jews all but unthinkable—Palestine and America being closed—their mental geography was now limited to these two options.

With the wider world unattainable, with conventional states destroyed, with Nazi Germany on the march, Jews had no choice but to see the USSR as the lesser evil. For most of them, this was indeed a choice between varieties of evil. The joke among Jews in ?uck was that the life preserved by Soviet power was life imprisonment. As one Galician Jew remembered, already under the Soviet regime “fathers of families had become like loosely hanging limbs. The framework of their lives was torn away; their families became unsteady; their desire for society disappeared; and the authority of Jewish conscience crumbled.” The special Nazi enmity to Jews put them in a different position from all of their neighbors under Soviet power in 1939 and 1940, who could at least imagine that a German invasion would put Soviet repression to an end. The combination of a German threat and a Soviet reality left Jews doubly vulnerable. Given their greater fear of Nazi Germany, Jews could seem like the collective ally of the Soviet power that had in fact just dismantled their traditional communities and deported or killed many of their most active men and women.

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The Jewish and Ukrainian questions are only a faint suggestion of the political resource that Soviet occupation delivered to Nazi Germany. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Lehi were fringe groups representing national minorities who could imagine that somehow the destruction of states provided opportunities. An infinitely greater political resource arose when the Soviet Union destroyed entire nation-states, such as Lithuania and Latvia. Soviet state destruction made the political perspective of people who had been marginal right-wing national terrorists seem like the mainstream.