The Holocaust in Ukraine

The Holocaust in Ukraine
SS paramilitaries murder Jewish civilians, including a mother and her child, in 1942, in Ivanhorod, Ukraine.
LocationUkrainian SSR
Date22 June 1941 to 1944
Incident typeImprisonment, mass shootings, concentration camps, ghettos, forced labor, starvation, torture, mass kidnapping
PerpetratorsErich Koch, Friedrich Jeckeln, Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel and many others.
Various local Nazi collaborators, including Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
OrganizationsEinsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, Axis occupation forces (Hungarians, Romanians), and local collaborators
Victims850,000–1,600,000 Ukrainian Jews
MemorialsIn various places in the country

The Holocaust saw the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the east of Reichskommissariat Ukraine (all of those areas were under the military control of Nazi Germany), in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region (all of those areas were then part of Romania, with the latter three areas being re-annexed) and Carpathian Ruthenia (then part of Hungary) during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine (except modern-day Transnistria).

Between 1941 and 1945, between 850,000 and 1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine, which included assistance of local collaborators.

According to Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder, "the Holocaust is integrally and organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg, the war in 1941, and it is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine … Had Hitler not had the colonial idea to fight a war in Eastern Europe to control Ukraine, had there not been that idea, there could not have been a Holocaust." According to Wendy Lower, the genocide of the Ukrainian Jews was closely linked to German plans to exploit and colonize Ukraine.