The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in theNazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945 by Lucjan Dobroszyski; Jeffrey S. GurockReview by: John D. KlierThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 347-349Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212107 .

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REVIEWS 347

The Germans, bound by Nazi doctrine to repress terror with terror, set out to behave atrociously, with only too much success. Instead of multiplying examples, Mazower has picked on a few massacres, such as the one at Komeno on i 6 August I 943, when a battalion of the First Mountain Division -a crack unit - set the whole village on fire and shot over three hundred of the villagers, irrespective of age or sex. Colonel Salminger, who supervised the killings on the spot, was later killed in a guerilla ambush; Blume, head of the Sicherheitspolizei, after a brief spell in jail, lived out the rest of his life as a businessman in Dortmund.

By the spring of I944 urban tensions had become as keen as rural ones. Mazower demonstrates how civil war had already begun between the Greeks before the Germans withdrew in the autumn; and he is able to explain how under-informed the British forces of occupation under General Scobie were, when they reached Athens near the end of the year. They did not realize the suspicion with which most citizens had come to view the security battalions raised, under German auspices, to help the Germans hold down the country; moreover, many Greeks, with their passion for political intricacies, suspected that the British were 'really' behind the security battalions for reasons of anti- Communism. Anti-Communist prejudice by the Americans became only too evident, as the Cold War began.

Altogether this volume provides us with a refreshing exercise in revisionist history.

London M. R. D. FoOT

Dobroszyski, Lucjan and Gurock, Jeffrey S. (eds). The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, I94I-I945. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, and London, I993. Xii + 260 pp. Notes. Index. Tables. $59.95: C24.95.

THE common theme which links the diverse contributions to this book devoted to the Holocaust on Soviet soil is the question of responses. How did theJews respond to the approach and implementation of mass murder? How did non- Jews react and participate in the fate which befell their Jewish neighbours? How did the Soviet system respond to the events of the Holocaust, both at the time and after? These themes are particularly appropriate for study, for they all come encrusted with myths. The contributors can hardly hope to resolve the myriad legends involved, but they do provide the important service of disentangling them, and identifying the areas which require further study.

Consider the response of the Jews. By the time the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in I94I, they had already been brutalizing the Jews of Poland for almost two years. Ghettos were in place, and the regime was already moving in the direction of systematic mass murder. Indeed, an important element of the German attack on the USSR was the activity of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile murder squads devoted to the liquidation of Communists andJews. SovietJews, unlike PolishJews in I939, could not plead ignorance of the implications of German occupation. Indeed, as

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348 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Mordechai Altshuler suggests, opposing the assumptions of historians like Solomon Schwartz, Soviet Jews 'had access to a significant amount of information on the subject' [of German atrocities] (p. 87). So why were so manyJews caught by the German advance? Altshuler also casts valuable light on the question of the evacuation of Jews from areas threatened by the Germans. He reaches the conclusion and explains why, although there was no co-ordinated Soviet policy to evacuateJews, the proportion ofJewish refugees was higher than their percentage of the population as a whole.

As other contributions reveal, there was no uniformity in the fate of those Jews who failed to escape German occupation. Dalia Ofer explores the case of Transnistria, demonstrating sufficient anomalies to justify her description of it as 'a special case of genocide' (p. I33). Gertrude Schneider examines the Jewish ghettos in Riga, which offer a useful point of comparison with the ghettos situated on Polish soil whose history has been more fully investigated.

The role of native populations in the implementation of the Holocaust has always been painful and controversial, and especially prone to myth-making. Many scholars, including several of the contributors to this volume, accept thatJews welcomed the Soviet occupation of Poland in I939, and the Baltic States in I940. An important corollary is thatJews were well-represented in the Soviet security forces. Jan Gross provides a valuable challenge to these historical cliches. He argues that theJews were no more welcoming of the Red Army than were other national minorities, that they suffered as much, if not more, from the policies of Soviet occupation, and that there is no hard evidence for the claim that theJews occupied pride of place in the instruments of Soviet oppression. On the other hand, Andrzej Zbikowski accepts the claim of Jewish collaboration to explain the under-explored phenomenon of a widespread outbreak of anti-Jewish pogroms in the occupied territories of Eastern Poland duringJune andJuly I94I, often before the arrival of German forces. In his contribution, Zvi Kolitz seeks to explain the 'diabolic fervour' (p. 200) displayed by the Lithuanians in their extermination of the Jewish population.

Of particular value are the two opening chapters by Zvi Gitelman and the late Lukasz Hirszowicz on post-war treatments of the Holocaust by the Soviet system. The operative word here is treatments, for both authors amply demonstrate that, contrary to legend, there was no uniform Soviet policy to ignore the Holocaust. Rather, the subject was always at the mercy of ideological considerations and variously glossed over, suppressed or universal- ized, but never denied. Gitelman offers a number of plausible explanations for changing Soviet attitudes. Hirszowicz presents chapter and verse in his exploration of how the Holocaust was handled in the context of war reporting, war crimes trials at home and abroad, and in Soviet literature. Here again, Soviet treatment appears more nuanced than generally assumed.

The final section of the book examines sources for the study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the book was produced before Soviet archives dealing with the Holocaust were fully opened, so there is little sense here of the research opportunities that are now available in the former USSR. A number of contributors hint that prospects for research may be less

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REVIEWS 349

satisfactory in the newly independent states, where local collaboration complicates the objective analysis of events.

This is a valuable work, and an important starting point for anyone interested in the Holocaust on Soviet soil.

Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies JOHN D. KLIER University College London

Giurescu, Dinu C. Romania's Communist Takeover: The Rddescu Government. East European Monographs, 388. East European Monographs, Boulder, CO, 1994. 202 pp. Appendix. Index. (24.oo: $36.oo.

THE coup of 23 August 1944, by which King Michael of Romania removed the pro-German dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu from power, was the most decisive of World War II. It exposed the German army's southern flank and opened the whole of south-eastern Europe to the Red Army which was now able to move into Bulgaria. At a stroke, Hitler lost an ally who had twenty divisions on the Soviet front and twenty-five in Romania itself. Stalin used the armistice of I2 September between the Allies and Romania to subvert the effects of the 23 August coup which had threatened to wrest the initiative in Romanian affairs from him. In order to regain that initiative, the Soviet leader fashioned from the armistice a legal framework for securing a dominant political and economic interest in Romania. By its terms, Romania was to provide twelve infantry divisions for the Allied cause and to allow free passage to Soviet troops. She was to pay in kind a sum in reparations of three hundred million dollars over a six-year period and restore property taken from the Allies. War criminals were to be arrested, fascist organizations disbanded, and censorship imposed if the Soviet authorities considered it necessary. The territorial clauses recognized the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and the Vienna award which had given Northern Transylvania to Hungary was annulled. Implementation of the armistice terms was to be supervised by an Allied Control Commission which operated under the significantly named Allied (Soviet) High Command.

Stalin's policy towards Romania after the signature of the armistice was initially dictated by military considerations. The Soviet representatives on the Allied Control Commission, by invoking the need for stability in a country that was in the rear of their front as they pursued their war effort westwards against Germany, insisted upon control of the forces of law and order the army, the police, and the judiciary. Direction of the Ministries of the Interior, Defence andJustice thus became a prime target of the Communist Party. In the new caretaker government of General Sanatescu (23 August to 2 November I 944), set up to direct Romania's new war course, the majority of ministerial posts had gone to military officers, with only the Ministry of Justice being secured by the Communists in the person of Patra'?canu. While the Intelligence Service, the SSI (Serviciul Special de Informa4ii), was purged of most of its senior officers after December I 944, the personnel of the Ministry of the Interior and of the Siguranfa remained largely unchanged. It was the failure to replace these figures that provided a pretext for the Communists to

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