The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Pitt Russian East European)
“This valuable collection, the result of foresight by its outstanding editors, is an important milestone on the way toward a fuller scholarly understanding of the Holocaust in the East—and thus of the Holocaust itself.”—Timothy Snyder, Yale University“The study of the Second World War and of the Holocaust has gained immeasurably from the shift to the European East, to the sites of the fiercest battles and the most horrendous acts of annihilation. With a keen eye to the challenging questions of newly available but often haphazardly available and tainted sources, this volume of essays focuses on two main themes. First, microhistories reveal both the ‘modern’ ferocity and the startling varieties of destruction and extermination. Second, the puzzling ambivalence of the Soviet reaction to the Holocaust suggests at the very least that the Soviet Union was not a friend of Nazism’s main victim, the Jews. Neither was anyone else in 1941, which is the most sobering realization that emerges from these pages.”—Michael Geyer, University of Chicago