Ukraine’s part in the Holocaust
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| In this July 16, 2007, photograph, French priest Patrick Desbois, front, and members of his team walk to what used to be a well where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive, in Bogdanivka, Ukraine, during World War II. |
Mr. Gershman referenced the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska as an example of what happened. But it would be useful to note what a U.S. federal court found in 1981 in the case of U.S. v. Osidach, in which it upheld the Justice Department’s stripping of the defendant’s U.S. citizenship. He had been charged with having served as police chief in Rava-Ruska, where he was responsible for rounding up the town’s 18,000 Jews.
The court had concluded that a careful review of the record shows “that what occurred in that town was not an isolated instance of conduct but totally consistent with the general pattern of persecutorial conduct by the Ukrainian police throughout the Galacia region.”
During the Germans' census of December 1941, local officials in Kharkiv
played a crucial role in identifying Jews, evicting them from their
apartments, and forcing them into a temporary ghetto in the barracks of
the Kharkiv Machine-Tool Factory and the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. The
tenth district council was particularly closely involved in
ghettoization, and formed a security team to help German soldiers
prevent escapes. Employees of that council, along with former ghetto
guards, looted the possessions of the Jews after the Germans and, with
other indigenous accomplices, helped murder them and dispose of the
bodies. The behavior of these local actors sheds new light on the
“Ordinary Men” debate.