Review: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union September 13, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Books on the holocaust have, broadly speaking, two choices. They can either focus on the big picture and describe the liquidation of an entire people from this or that national territory, or they can focus on an individual, family or a village and concentrate, instead, on the micro-tragedies: an excellent example of the latter is Alexander Stille’s Benovelence and Betrayal for Italy. Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (2009) is, instead, almost seven hundred pages of murder from Imperial Russia’s anti-semitic pogroms through to the ending of the Nazi’s dream of Lebensraum in the foothills of the Urals: in its scope and its ambition it very much belongs to the first category. This is the holocaust as it unwound not in a valley or on a street but over half a continent and the list of killings is numbing: Beach never so needed a long hot shower as after reading this book.
This listing of Nazi crimes creates a serious problem for a narrator. How do you make this or that ‘800’ or ‘1000’ or ‘2600’ different from the scores of those incinerated, gassed or, more often, shot on the previous page? YA doesn’t try and this is probably the right approach: the cascade of blood might be monotonous, but the trickle becoming a stream and then a river has its own hypnotic dignity; it would be vulgar to demean the catalogue with stylistic considerations. Then there are the little tweaks and strokes of orginality that the Einsatzgruppen and their colleagues in the Wehrmacht carried out that give each slaughter its unique autograph: in some cases ‘enemies’ were packed into buildings and fires were started; in others they were led into mines or holes in the ground and the entrance was exploded, those inside being left to suffocate; in others they were dropped down wells with hand grenades; and still in others they were pushed into vans driven with carbon monoxide pumping into the back. Then there are the individual stories that emerge on each page. Who could forget, for example, Lea’le’s mother whose hair turned white in a single night after having her younger daughter ripped from her by a German killer?
Arad is very good at charting the anti-Semitism of the local populations throughout the east, in parallel to Christopher Hale’s excellent work here, and the different political backdrops to Soviet domination in a given area: Estonia and Odessa were not just geographically far apart. The acts of pogrom on the part of Romanians, and Ukrainians are difficult to forgive: but in the end there is a sense that this is hick anti-semitism, a form of hate that has emerged from the bog of the Catholic or Orthodox Middle Ages, dripping mud and marsh moss. German acts in the east were and are inexplicable (at least to this blogger): this was after all, in the words of one protagonist ‘the Germany of Kant and Goethe’ and yet at Malyi-Trostiniets about ten Jews were placed on top of a pile of bodies, one Jewish woman being raised on a pole, and then all were burnt alive by a squad jointly led by a criminologist, Dr Georg Heuser. Today we fetischise the gas chambers in the extermination camps from 1942 onwards: Apollonian genocide. But if you want to really get to the essence of what happened in the German mind then travel to the killing fields of the east where men, like Heuser, made genocide Dionysian. These individuals had been brought up with Eine kleine Nachtmusik tapped out on the piano and Nietzsche on their parents’ bookshelves, yet they brought mothers and children to pits and machined gunned their way beyond good and evil.
Heuser, incidentally, got this reader’s curiosity ticking: the German Wikipedia page notes that he became a police chief after the war in Germany, was tried in 1962 in that country and sentenced to fifteen years for killing just over 11,000 innocents. He served about half the sentence.
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