On the 22nd of June 1941, Nazi Germany launched the largest single invasion in the history of the world. Nearly four million German troops, along with their allies, crossed into the Soviet Union in three giant thrusts aimed initially at Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kyiv.
Along with resistance from Soviet forces, the German army was also met with an enthusiastic welcome by the people whose lands had been occupied by the Bolsheviks and subjected to de-kulakisation, collectivisation, and mass terror. To them, the Germans were seen as liberators, instead of conquerors.
“Girls would offer the soldiers flowers and people would offer bread. We were all so happy to see them. They were going to save us from the Communists who had taken everything and starved us.”
The celebrations were short-lived. Whatever positive expectations they had of life under German rule were quickly shattered; the catastrophe inflicted by the Nazis on Ukraine was widespread, violent, and brutal on an almost incomprehensible scale. By 1941 the Nazis had mastered their playbook for destroying other states, and once they entered Ukraine they knew exactly what they wanted to do.
The Holocaust arrived in Ukraine immediately, unfolding not in death camps hundreds of miles away but in the streets and public squares. Instead of deportation, mass executions of Jews (as well as Roma) were staged in front of their neighbours, at the edge of villages, and in forests.
Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war—between 800,000 and a million people. The legacy of “the Great Patriotic War”—and of the dark history of Ukrainian collaborators, who helped the Nazis carry out their mass killings—has been central in narratives pushed by the Russian state regarding the current conflict, and attempts to legitimise Russia’s imperialist ambitions.
The Hunger Plan
From its conception, the invasion of the Soviet Union—codenamed Operation Barbarossa—was to be a campaign of conquest and was seen as the solution to Nazi Germany’s chronic shortage of food and raw materials. The seizure of the resources of Ukraine and the Caucasus would prevent the Reich from being strangled by the blockade led by the Royal Navy, and possibly deter the United States from entering the war in Europe.
Barbarossa would enable Hitler to achieve his medium- to long-term objective of securing Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. He had articulated this aim at length for almost twenty years, and the looming conflict with the United States made it more urgent.
Only by “solving the questions of land thoroughly and finally” he argued, “will we be in a position in terms of material and personnel to master the problems we will face within two years”, by which he meant the belligerency of the United States. Lebensraum was central to Hitler’s economic theory; his main point of reference remained the global powers, especially the United States. The Americans not only had plenty of land, but it was also very fertile. “Our living space is too small” he reiterated, and needed to be supplemented by “colonies”.
By clearing the original population off the land, it would make way for German settlers to colonise and develop it. This in turn would give the Reich the land and resources necessary to survive in the world of huge global powers such as the British Empire and the United States.
“Russia would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.”
Like every occupying power in Ukraine, the Nazis ultimately had only one real interest: grain. Hitler had long claimed that “the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every domestic worry”, and that Ukrainian territory would ensure “no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.”
The planners of the German war economy began to think about how to manage the food question and came to a bleak conclusion: while Ukraine produced a surplus of grain, most other regions of the Soviet Union that would fall under German control did not. The entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food.
In order to ensure the Reich could survive the British blockade, about 30 million inhabitants of the USSR would have to be starved to death.
“Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone can only be at the expense of supplying Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out in the war; they prevent Germany and Europe resisting the blockade. With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.”
This was Stalin’s policy as he had implemented it a decade before, on an even greater scale: the elimination of whole populations through starvation. Mass hunger had returned to Ukraine.
The Nazis actually knew a significant amount about the Soviet famine of 1933: Joseph Goebbels had referred to the famine in a speech at the Nazi Party congress in 1935, where he spoke of five million dead. From the moment they arrived, German occupiers of Ukraine used the famine in their so-called “ideological work”. They intended to increase hatred towards Moscow, to remind the Ukrainian people of the consequences of Bolshevik rule. They were especially keen to reach rural Ukrainians, whose efforts were required to produce the food needed to support the Wehrmacht and send home to Germany.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the famine in 1942-3—at the height of Nazi power in Ukraine—many newspapers published material aimed at winning peasant support:
“All peasants remember well the year of 1993 when hunger mowed people down like grass. In two decades the Soviets turned the land of plenty into the land of hunger where millions perished. The German soldier halted this assault, the peasants greeted the German army with bread and salt, the army that fought for the Ukrainian peasants to work freely.”
Like everything else in the Nazi press, these were deeply tied to antisemitism. The famine—as well as poverty and repression—was repeatedly blamed on the Jews. Propaganda attempted to exploit pre-existing anti-Jewish sentiment and sharpen divisions between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours.
A war of extermination
Barbarossa, from the very beginning, was also a war waged as one of annihilation. It was with the assault on the Soviet Union that the full horrors of Nazism were realised.
The goal of eradicating the “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime of the USSR, together with its supposed biological underpinning (the Jewish race), combined with the aim of conquering a huge colonial area suitable for German settlement, the decimation of the Slavs and their subjugation by the Germans, and the creation of a gigantic economic region capable of withstanding blockade and achieving autarky.
Walter von Reichenau, the Commander of the Sixth Army, issued an order which revealed the extent to which Barbarossa was regarded as an ideological crusade:
“The fundamental aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete smashing of power of and the eradication of Asiatic influence in the European cultural realm. Duties hereby also arise for troops which go beyond the customary, one-sided military tradition. The soldier in the East is not only a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but is also the bearer of a merciless racial idea and avenger for all the bestialities which are committed against Germans and related peoples. Therefore the soldier must possess complete appreciation for the necessity of the harsh but justified sanctions against the primitive Jewish race.”
Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing squads of the SS—were permitted by the Wehrmacht to operate in its rear operational areas. Their task was to liquidate any and all people who might pose a threat to German rule and its worldview.
As set out by Reinhard Heydrich—one of the architects of the “Final Solution”—in July 1941, they were to execute:
All functionaries of the Comintern (and all professional Communist politicians in general),
The senior, middle-ranking, and radical junior functionaries of the Party, the Central Committee, the regional and district committees, People’s Commissars,
Jews in Party and State positions, miscellaneous radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc)
Similarly designated squads had already been in action from the beginning of the German occupation in Poland, where they had perpetrated massacres and engaged in campaigns to wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and elites. Whereas in Poland the numbers of victims had been in the thousands, in the occupied Soviet territories they soon were in the hundreds of thousands.
They engaged in the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish population within their reach.
However, with the Commissar Order, a new stage in Nazi war was reached: planned, systematic mass murder, explicitly ordered by the head of state and of the armed forces, and directly involving the army. With this order, “the Wehrmacht became an instrument in a war of race and extermination”.
German forces seized great swathes of territory and took vast numbers of prisoners—in particular in Ukraine, where on the 19th of September Kyiv was captured along with 400,000 Soviet prisoners (the largest number of prisoners ever captured in a single battle). Thousands of commissars were shot on capture or immediately after. So were tens of thousands of other Red Army troops. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war were starved or worked to death.
Behind the front lines, Nazi forces began their systematic extermination of the Soviet Jewish population; of the roughly 5.1 million Jews registered in the USSR before the war, about three million lived in territories which were occupied by German forces. Of these, roughly two million were murdered.
During the infamous murders at Babi Yar outside Kyiv in September 1941, a combination of soldiers from SS police battalions, Einsatzgruppen, and local collaborators murdered nearly 34,000 Jews in just two days by shooting them. This was killing on a scale that no death camp ever matched over a similar period.
The crimes which the Nazi regime succeeded in carrying out were dwarfed in their scope by plans that were being developed for the future Nazi empire. The fate envisaged for the subjugated regions of the USSR included deindustrialisation, the elimination of the “superfluous” urban population, and the conversion of the area into a huge source of raw materials and agricultural produce for Germany.
The immediate needs of the German war economy had priority, but in the long run “the newly occupied eastern regions will be exploited economically from colonial points of view and with colonial methods”. Vast programmes of settlement were foreseen, with Germans going out to “civilise” the conquered “wild east”. To bring this about, up to 50 million people, mostly Slavs, would be expelled from lands between Germany and the Urals to make room for racially “valuable” settlers.
The long-standing structural problems which had plagued German farming for decades would thus be solved, and the concern that Germany’s agricultural land was insufficient to feed its people would be met by settling Aryan farmers on the “living space” in the east.
That these murderous plans were not translated into reality was not due to any doubts or second thoughts on the part of those who imagined them, but because of the military success of the Allies in defeating the Third Reich.
Ukrainian collaboration and Putin’s rhetoric
The end of the Second World War did not quite bring a return to the status quo. Inside Ukraine the war altered the language of the regime. Critics of the USSR were no longer mere enemies or counter-revolutionaries, but “fascists” or “Nazis”. Tied to this, any discussion of the 1933 famine was dismissed as “Hitlerite propaganda”.
The memory of more recent horrors overlaid that of the famine as well. The murder of Kyiv’s Jews at the Babi Yar ravine; the battles for Kursk, Stalingrad, and Berlin, all fought with Ukrainian soldiers; the filtration camps for returning deportees, the prisoner of war camps, the Gulag, the massacres and the mass arrests, the burnt-out villages and destroyed fields—all of these were now also a part of Ukraine’s story.
In official Soviet historiography “the Great Patriotic War”, as the conflict that began with Barbarossa in 1941 came to be known, became the central focus of national commemoration, while the repression of the 1930s was never publicly discussed.
From the second half of the 1940s onwards, “denazification” and “denationalisation” took place in Ukraine and other Soviet republics and satellite states. In some parts of Soviet territory, such as Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, it was conducted even more thoroughly and violently than in West Germany and Austria, and it was massively politicised and used to detain all kinds of political enemies. Collaborators were actively targeted in the post-war era; whether or not a person had committed war crimes often mattered less in the Soviet judicial system than membership or support of an anti-Soviet movement.
Ukraine, like other European countries, had a radical nationalist movement that throughout the 1930s and 1940s created its own form of fascism. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established in 1929 by Ukrainian veterans of the First World War, and attempted to become a mass movement and to establish an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state.
During the Second World War, Ukraine witnessed numerous acts of genocide, and Ukrainians were often actively involved. The OUN adopted a policy similar to the Croatian Ustasa, which, like the OUN, had been a terrorist, underground organisation before the war and which in April 1941 were given control over a part of axis-occupied Yugoslavia. This puppet state, the “Independent State of Croatia”, could be maintained only with extreme nationalist violence, and Ukrainian nationalists shared the hope that a similar approach would result in recognition of an independent Ukrainian state.
Members of the OUN, as well as other Ukrainians, joined the Ukrainian police and supported the Germans in deportations to the extermination camp Bełżec and with the mass shootings in eastern Galicia and Volhynia. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, which formed mid August 1941, assisted by Einsatzgruppen and police battalions, rounded up Jews and undesirables for the Babi Yar massacre, as well as other later crimes in cities and towns across modern-day Ukraine.
Altogether, they supported the German occupiers in the murder of 800,000 Jews in western Ukraine, which was the half of all Jews murdered in Ukraine. Another major group of victims of the OUN were the Poles: as many as 100,000 were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 and 1944, which had been established by the OUN.
During this period, on 1 September 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn published in an article:
“All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated. We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganisation of Europe. The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocably be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people"
According to Timothy Snyder: "something that is never said, because it's inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian Communists collaborated with the Germans, than did Ukrainian nationalists." Snyder also points out that very many of those who collaborated with the German occupation also collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s.
This fact did not stop Vladimir Putin justifying his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission dedicated to the “denazification” of the country.
In his address to the Russian people on February 24th 2022, Putin claimed its purpose was to “protect” those who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide…for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine.”
The victims of this so-called “genocide” are Ukraine’s Russian speaking population; according to Putin, their plight exists “because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy.”
Putin styles the people of Luhansk and Donetsk as fighting against (neo-)Nazism and makes reference to the notorious Azov battalion—a paramilitary group consisting of Ukrainian right-wing volunteers that uses Nazi rhetoric and symbolism. This militia has fought in the Donbas region since 2014 and has been accused of torture, kidnappings, and summary executions.
The complex and complicated history of Ukraine is a troubled one and has been marked by war, genocide, and mass violence—especially during the first half of the 20th century.
Ukrainian fascism and radical nationalism are an undeniable part of this history, as well as collaboration in the Holocaust and the mass murder of the Poles. However, Putin’s equation of all Ukrainians with “Nazis” or “fascists” is ahistorical and cynical. Neither was fascism a major component of Ukrainian history, nor can Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s current government or the Ukrainian people be characterised as such.
Zelenskiy is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he considers “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family”. For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelenskiy asked in a public address after Russia’s invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”
The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honoured. For some Ukrainians, these veterans are viewed as freedom fighters, who only fought alongside the Nazis to resist the Soviets in their quest for an independent Ukraine.
The claim that Russia has to liberate Ukraine from a “fascist government” or a “Nazi occupation” is a crude pretext for invasion and serves as a ready excuse to escalate violence to that of the Second World War, when total mobilisation was required to rid Ukraine of its Nazi occupiers. This rhetoric also lowers the threshold for committing war crimes against Ukrainian defenders and civilians alike.
Putin’s selective telling of the past, including his refusal to recognise the Holodomor, exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy and self-determination more than he fears Nazism, and his concerns about genocide are exposed as hollow and merely serve to push his own political agenda.