Black Earth(79)

In any large Soviet city, the Germans could install a local authority without Jews, but they could hardly manage without educated Soviet citizens—who were often members of the communist party. For most of the Soviet population, the equation of Jews with communism was highly convenient, since it ethnicized Soviet history and thus liberated most Soviet citizens of any guilt for Soviet practices. When the Kharkiv Municipal Authority defined its role as “the final and utter defeat of the Jew-Bolshevik gangsters,” it was expressing both the interest of the Germans in pretending that they were conquering communism by killing Jews and that of Soviet citizens in pretending that they had had nothing to do with communism. The politics of the greater evil meant proclaiming the destruction of Jewish communism while arranging for communists to kill Jews.

When the Kharkiv Municipal Authority decreed its right to distribute the property of Jews who had fled the German advance, it was transforming a German war of conquest into the possibility of relative social advancement for local Soviet citizens. Naturally, the capacity to redistribute extended also to the property of any Jews who might disappear for other reasons. The Kharkiv Municipal Authority ordered the building supervisors to carry out a census of their buildings, placing remaining Jews on a “yellow list.” In early December 1941, the building supervisors created troikas to help them establish where the remaining Jews lived. On December 14, an announcement appeared around the city requiring Jews to report to a tractor factory the following day on pain of death. The following day, a long and miserable procession of Jews walked along Moskovs’kyi Prospekt, guided by local policemen and a few Germans. One woman stopped at the side of the road and gave birth, there and then, to twins; she and the babies were immediately shot. In the barracks of the tractor factory Jews were guarded by their fellow Kharkiv residents. These guards had the right to kill Jews, and sometimes did. The building supervisors reported that their houses were free of Jews and that apartments and movable property could be redistributed.

The mass shooting of the Jews of Kharkiv that began on December 27, 1941, was carried out by Germans: Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C along with Security Police Battalion 314. By January 2, 1942, the men of these units had murdered some nine thousand people. The bulk of the work that brought Jews to their places of death was done by their fellow Soviet citizens, working within institutions that resembled Soviet models and behaving much as they had under Soviet rule. A few of the local authorities acted from political conviction as anti-communists. Some residents of Kharkiv did hate Soviet rule as a result of the terror of the late 1930s and the famine of the early 1930s. The main political lesson of those experiences, however, had been submission. For the most part, the people who made the murder of Jews possible were simply products of the Soviet system, following a new line, adapting to a new master. The hunt for surviving Jews, ordered by the mayor, was carried out under the banner of the elimination of “Jewish-Communist and bandit-Bolshevik trash.” This language is a hybrid of Soviet form and Nazi content.

No matter where the Germans arrived in the Soviet Union, the result was essentially the same: the mass murder of Jews who remained, planned by the Germans but achieved with much assistance from people of all Soviet nationalities. The Judeobolshevik myth separated Jews from other Soviet citizens and many Soviet citizens from their own pasts. The murder of Jews and the transfer of property eliminated the sense of responsibility for the past, creating a class of people who had gained from the German occupation, and seeming to promise relative social advance in a German future. Soviet Gypsies were not presented as an ideological enemy to the same extent, and did not provide the same degree of harmonization of German worldviews and local fears and needs. But they, too, were murdered in the occupied Soviet Union, and their property was also reallocated by the collaborating local administrations. In Kharkiv, the Gypsies were rounded up at the horse market.

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Kharkiv, though a Russian-speaking city, was one of the cradles of Ukrainian culture; the same could not be said of the city named after the leader of the Soviet Union. Stalino, the major industrial city of southeastern Ukraine, known today as Donetsk, was something close to a model Soviet city. Its coal mines and industry, although they predated the Bolshevik Revolution, had been vastly expanded during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933. Its hinterlands had been starved during the famine of 1932–1933 and resettled by people from throughout the Soviet Union. The growing city itself attracted workers from Soviet Russia and elsewhere. Stalino was a Soviet melting pot, a Russian-speaking city where Ukrainian national identity was far less present than in Kharkiv, and perhaps less so than anywhere else in Soviet Ukraine. The political identity seems to have been a Soviet one—if so, this was no more hindrance to collaborating with the Germans than anything else. The murder of Jews proceeded in Stalino much as elsewhere.