<p>Ethnic Germans and Jews lived alongside one
another in Southern Ukraine for over a century prior to the Holocaust. They
were as Shimon Redlich observes of Jewish-Gentile relations in his Polish
hometown, "together and apart." Both groups started out the twentieth
century closer together than they had ever been, and interactions between them
were and remained comparatively normalized and less violent than Jews'
experiences with the other groups surrounding them on Ukraine's
pre-Revolutionary landscape. Yet, by 1941, with the joint Romanian-German
occupation of the region, ethnic Germans enthusiastically plundered, exploited,
and murdered their Jewish neighbors with little prodding from the Romanian and
Nazi occupation regimes. How did over a century of ethnic German-Jewish
coexistence devolve into local violence? Which historical processes fueled some
ethnic Germans' conversion from neighbors to murderers, and when exactly did
this transition begin?</p><p><br></p>
<p>This project examines coexistence, confluence,
and conflict between ethnic Germans and their Jewish neighbors in Southern
Ukraine from the late Tsarist period through the Holocaust. It builds upon the
work of formidable scholars like Jan Gross, Jan Grabowski, Jeffrey Kopstein and
Jason Wittenberg, Timothy Snyder, Wendy Lower, Karl Berkhoff, Eric Steinhart,
and Doris Bergen, all of which examine the impact of double, sometimes triple
or more, occupations on intergroup relationships and/or local collaboration in
occupied territories. However, unlike many of these case studies, which root
collaborators’ motives in the years immediately predating the war, or in the
war itself, this project seeks to understand the impact of decades of
occupation and revanchist policies (Austro-German, Soviet, Romanian, Nazi) on
the groups’ interactions with and perceptions of one another. Moreover, as
opposed to splitting the region into two separate entities, as the Romanian and
Nazi regimes did, this project illuminates some of the continuities across the
river Buh, as lived and died, by ethnic Germans and Jews in Ukraine prior to
and during the Holocaust. This longue durée analysis illuminates the roles
sustained violence and occupational policies played in disrupting centuries of
interactions between ethnic Germans and Jews. By 1941, the two groups had been
violently reconfigured, pulled together, and pushed apart in profoundly
consequential ways. The Nazi and Romanian occupiers, equipped with vernaculars
of violence and nation erected by the Soviet state and its predecessors,
capitalized on ongoing historical processes, quickly incorporating ethnic
Germans into their genocidal machine. </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/15054951 |
| Date | 26 July 2021 |
| Creators | Amber N. Nickell (11109429) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/BROTHERLANDS_TO_BLOODLANDS_ETHNIC_GERMANS_AND_JEWS_IN_SOUTHERN_UKRAINE_LATE_TSARIST_TO_POSTWAR/15054951 |
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