The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Russian and East European Studies)

About this book

"This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and analyses Soviet responses to these events. The contributors view the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbours; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state's agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses."--Page [4] of cover.