Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 marked the beginning of the most monstrous war of enslavement and extermination in modern history. The goal of the invaders was to eradicate the Soviet system and turn the conquered territories in the East into German colonial ground. The campaign, code-named “Operation Barbarossa”, was primarily conceived as a crusade against Communism, or “Jewish Bolshevism” in Nazi parlance, as the Nazis believed that communism was a Jewish ideology created for the purpose of bringing down the German race. “World Enemy No. 1” was how German propagandists referred to the Soviet state. For this reason, every German soldier in the East was instructed to exterminate Soviet Jews as supposed carriers of the “Bolshevik plague.” While focusing on Soviet Jews, German wrath against the enemy in the East extended further. It targeted non-Jewish communist officials as well as millions of Soviet soldiers, most of whom were believed to be “infected” by Bolshevism. Countless Soviet civilians were killed on charges of fighting the occupiers as partisans (“bandits”), in keeping with Hitler’s explicit orders to shoot dead anyone “who even looked askance”. Millions of survivors suffered abuse as forced laborers for the Germans.
While the Germans sought to pulverize the Communist order, their policies and methods had the unintended opposite effect of actually revitalizing the Soviet war effort. Extremely harsh and unforgiving, the Stalinist regime was widely feared before the war. Yet the humiliations as “subhumans” and slaves that the people experienced at the hands of the Germans prompted many to reset their moral compass. Nazi occupation rekindled older Soviet loyalties among some, or made others aware of their Soviet identity for the first time. Over the course of the German occupation, more and more Soviet civilians yearned for liberation by the Red Army. Most of the interviews presented in this edition were taken in the immediate aftermath of liberation – they reverberate with the emotions of wartime and narrate stark memories of the time of occupation.
Although Germany’s “war of extermination” in the East has become a common term in the German and English-speaking public, its dimensions and effects are still largely in the dark. This is primarily due to the fact that the German mass crimes were committed against a communist state that became a renewed opponent of the Western powers after the end of the Second World War. Soviet citizens continued to be regarded as inhuman and were not accorded with a memory of their suffering. In the shadow of the Cold War, a culture of remembrance developed in the West that commemorated the six million murdered Jews of Europe, while not taking into account the Soviet place of origin of their murder. Soviet testimonies bearing witness to mass crimes against non-Jewish citizens were under general suspicion of being inflated or downright falsified. The fact that Soviet memorials and statistics, in line with their universalist ideology, did not single out the murdered Soviet Jews, but instead emphasized the suffering of all “peaceful Soviet people”, fed the suspicion among Western observers that the Soviet Union was “denying” the Holocaust.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, reams of invaluable documents dating from the war were discovered in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian archives: the transcripts of hundreds of interviews that Soviet historians conducted with Soviet witnesses of the German occupation regime. The survivors were interviewed at the scene of the events and in the immediate vicinity of the events described. This lent their interviews a richly shaded texture as well as a great deal of local precision. With their recurring descriptions of humiliations and forms of physical violence that the witnesses had suffered themselves, the accounts paint a disturbing and largely new picture of the German regime in Eastern Europe.
Among the contemporary witnesses are many women and old people, representatives of those population groups who were generally not evacuated, who experienced the enemy occupation more unprotected than others, but who are rarely mentioned in the historiography.