The Significance of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe
Contrary to the image often portrayed to students and the public, Eastern Europe was the epicenter of the Holocaust and the overwhelming majority of Jews killed were Eastern European. The first large- scale killing of Jews began with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and escalated into full- fledged mass murder first in the occupied Soviet Union. The Nazis built industrialized extermination centers in the East because the majority of Jews to be murdered lived there. The Holocaust in the East obliterated a vibrant and diverse Jewish community that had existed for over a thousand years. In addition, Eastern Europe was the focus of the larger Nazi genocidal project (including the Holocaust) that envisioned German colonization of this territory and explicitly planned for the mass deaths of thirty to forty million people, most of them non- Jews. Placing this massive killing in context, the 165,000 German Jews murdered by the Nazis represent less than three percent of those killed in the Holocaust.
The Ninth Fort, Vilnius, Lithuania
(Photo Credit: Dr. Beorn)
We must shift our gaze from West to East in order to fully understand the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s poignant and tragic experience, for example, was not typical of the Holocaust (insofar as any experience is “typical.”) More Jews lived in the Polish city of Lwów than in all of the Netherlands where Anne hid and wrote her famous diary. Yet, her important story has achieved a level of visibility and awareness that obscures this fact. More Jews lived in the Warsaw ghetto than in all of France. More Jews were murdered on November 14, 1941 in the small Polish town of Slonim than were saved by Denmark’s unmatched, massive rescue attempt of its Jewish population. Pointing out the primacy of the East in the Holocaust does not minimize the deaths of those in other places; engaging in any form of competitive suffering is a losing endeavor for all involved. However, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is critically different from the Holocaust elsewhere, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Several important characteristics distinguish the Holocaust in the East from that in the West, apart from the sheer scale of victims. First, it was conducted largely in public and was no secret to local populations. Second, far more collaborators participated in all aspects of the Nazi genocidal project in the East. Moreover, this collaboration exceeded in severity any in the West, with large numbers of locals acting as killers and co-perpetrators.Third, the Holocaust in the East was a profoundly local affair. Most victims were not deported hundreds of miles to a gas chamber, but were shot near their homes and villages. Finally, unlike Western Europe, which has confronted its Holocaust experience with varying degrees of success, the East remains reluctant to come to terms with the murder of its Jews— at either the public or private level. For all these reasons, we must never neglect Eastern Europe in our study of the Holocaust. (From the introduction to The Holocaust in Eastern Europe)