http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1016/42/379578.htm
The Heart of Hitler's Darkness
17 July 2009By Alexander J. Motyl
Nazi Germany's greatest war crime is the Holocaust, of course, but the
genocides against Ukrainians and Belarussians constitute a close second. And
yet, while the Holocaust is common knowledge, few know much about the
extermination of Ukrainians and Belarussians -and Germans may know about this
least of all. The tragedy of these peoples' suffering in the war has been
compounded by the world's almost complete ignorance and indifference.
That lamentable condition may be about to change, if only among professional
historians. In a ground-breaking article that was published in the July 16
issue of The New York Review of Books, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder
describes in excruciating detail just how Nazi policy was directed at
exterminating first the Jews and then the Slavs. Since Belarus and Ukraine were
occupied for almost four years, they suffered enormous population losses.
According to Snyder, "Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either
killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be
said of any other European country. . The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews
above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of
the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the
German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark
continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness."
The devastation that affected both countries is even greater when one considers
their experiences in the Stalinist 1930s and in World War I. Ukraine lost at
least 3 million people in the genocidal famine of 1933. Both countries also
served as the main killing fields of the Eastern Front during World War I
(1914-18), the Civil War in Russia (1918-21) and the Polish-Russian War
(1919-21).
According to a recent study of the Moscow-based Institute of Demography,
Ukraine suffered close to 15 million "excess deaths" between 1914 and 1948:
. 1.3 million during World War I
. 2.3 million during the Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the famine of
the early 1920s
. 4 million during the genocidal famine of 1933
. 300,000 during the Great Terror and the repressions in Western Ukraine
. 6.5 million during World War II
. 400,000 during the post-war famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian
nationalist movement
Ukraine and Belarus experienced nearly 40 consecutive years of relentless death
and destruction, starting in 1914 and ending with Stalin's death in 1953.
Although Soviet Russia bears a great deal of responsibility for the killing,
the lion's share falls on Germany.
And yet Germany, which so assiduously remembers its crimes during the
Holocaust, has still to build one monument to the millions of Belarussians and
Ukrainians its armies killed in the 20th century.
How can this blindness be explained?
Partly, it's a function of ignorance. The German media devote almost no
coverage to Belarus and Ukraine. It is also partly because Germans just don't
"see" these countries.
Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll's 1949 novel "The Train Was Punctual" provides
a good example of this cultural mindset. The novel describes a young German
soldier's return to the front in southern Ukraine. As he travels eastward from
his furlough, he traces his route on a map and "visits" various cities, towns
and villages in Ukraine. He speaks of Poles and Jews and Russians in great
detail, but he doesn't mention Ukrainians once, even though they formed the
vast majority of the country and were the people whose farms he and his
comrades probably plundered on a daily basis. Imagine a trip through the
American South without a single reference to the black population.
But why don't Germans "see" people who are so manifestly there? To some degree
it's because the "Untermenschen have remained Untermenschen" - economically
underdeveloped peoples with silly cultural practices who either can't get their
political act together (Ukraine) or are proud to be Europe's only dictatorship
(Belarus).
The more important explanation is that German elites have traditionally viewed
their neighbors to its east through the prism of great-power politics. Russia
is big and strong and therefore demands respect. Its ruler may be a dictator,
and its policies may be neo-imperialist, but these matters are easily
overlooked. Former German Chancellor Gerard Schröder still managed to describe
former President Vladimir Putin as a "true democrat" at precisely the time that
Putin was doing all he could to crush Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Poland may
be prone to polnische Wirtschaft (the derisive term for Poles' inability to do
things efficiently), but they're right next door and have to be dealt with.
But Belarus and Ukraine? They're just places with pipelines that carry Russian
gas to German homes and factories.
Alexander J. Motyl is professor of political science at Rutgers
University-Newark in New Jersey.
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