Analysis Of Nazi Empire-Building And The Holocaust In Ukraine By Wendy Lower

In Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, Wendy Lower strives to fill in the scholarly gaps which exist in scholarship of the East in the Second World War. Using military, social, and political history, Lower examines the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine within the goals and practices of the Nazis in the East, and attempts to understand how individuals in the Zhytomyr region came to accept and carry out, in the name of progress, mass murder. Lower chose this particular region because it provided a case study for the administrative structures, personalities, and social conditions which Lower believed made the Holocaust possible.
Lower starts her study with the reasons for the Nazis’ attempt to build their own empire in a manner
This would contain a cluster of farms owned by ethnic Germans whose purpose was to cultivate the soil and the German race, and to eventually create a barrier, similar to the Maginot Line, against the Soviet Union. While living in these settlements, the relatively uneducated Volksdeutsche were to be turned into Aryans who would faithfully support the Fuhrer, the Reich, and the Aryan race. As Lower points out though, the destructive aspects of these programs, such as the forced relocating of Ukrainians and ethnic Germans, were easier to carry out than the constructive ones such as building and maintaining farms and supporting the people. This inability to construct effective farms, as well as the continuing losses of the Wehrmacht led to the failure of these settlements and the eventual evacuation of the Volksdeutsche in the latter part of
While Lower mentions how some officials felt regarding the mass execution of those deemed “undesirable,” she does not look into the effect the role of executioner had on the men themselves in manner similar to Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men:Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, even though she used his book as a source. Because of this, Lower does not take the opportunity to further investigate how these men could have continued to commit these atrocities not only once, but throughout the occupation. This omission weakens the argument as to how an individual could carry out these atrocities in the name of the greater good. Overall Wendy Lower takes an innovative look at the Nazi occupation of Ukraine through the lens of colonialism in an attempt to explain how people could collaborate with those committing genocide of their neighbors. While there were some minor weaknesses in Lower’s argument and use of sources, the strengths of this work surpassed them to take a closer look as to how the Nazis ran the occupation of Ukraine and how this occupation helped to support the mass murder of over one million innocent