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Overview
What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using powerful eyewitness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, Martin Dean's new book reveals local policemen as hands-on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbors from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murders. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot-soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.
Synopsis
Examines the key role of local police units in the genocide of the Jews in Belorussia and Ukraine under German occupation.
Library Journal
Dean, a research fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, has mined numerous archival sources to reconstruct the number, activities, and postwar fate of Nazi collaborators in the Ukraine and Belarus. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, especially Jews, were tortured and killed by these Nazi auxiliaries. Why, then, have the specific details of this story gone untold until now? Dean argues that the Cold War made it politically expedient for the Allies to forget wartime collaboration, while postwar Soviet historiography covered up the extent of the collaboration in order to paint a picture of a unified Soviet people fighting the Nazis. An impressive amount of research backs up sound conclusions. Recommended for larger public libraries, specialized collections, and research libraries.--Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.