The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: The Case of the Ukrainian Kharkiv Region

This paper is devoted to the specifics of the Holocaust in the Ukrainian Kharkiv region (Eastern Ukraine) in comparison with the other Nazi-occupied regions of Europe. The history of the Holocaust in Kharkiv is being considered against the background of many factors which defined its particularities. They are: the pre-war Jewish life in Kharkiv; the ideological status of Kharkiv in the German propaganda, as being the first capital of Soviet Ukraine; the attitude of the Nazis towards the non-Jewish ethnic and social groups of the Kharkiv population as motivation for the Holocaust in Kharkiv; the specifics of the Nazi occupation in the large Soviet cities of Eastern Ukraine. A discussion is being made on the fact that the genocide against the Jews took extremely brutal forms in Ukraine. Specific to the Holocaust in Ukraine was an interweaving of racial and ideological reasons for genocide. Soviet Jews were considered to be the racial-political enemy. The Holocaust in Eastern Europe cannot be considered as a phenomenon of Jewish history only, but at the background of the relationships between the Jews and the Slavs whose were victims of the Nazis, too; many non-Jewish people who tried to saved the Ukrainian Jews shared the "Jewish fate".