Suchergebnisse

Andrej Angrick's definitive work on Einsatzgruppe D is more than a history of the mobile killing unit, for the latter did not operate in a vacuum, but cooperated with the German military authorities to realize Nazi occupation policy in the south Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Angrick's words, Einsatzgruppe D was the "first and most radical instrument for the formation of the to-be-conquered Lebensraum" (p. 732). German determination to recast the ethnic composition of the U.S.S.R. was no "desk fantasy," as reflected in the priority placed on settlement planning, which required the disappearance of Soviet Jews. Unlike Jewish communities in the western U.S.S.R., where survival of some was guaranteed by the need for labor, survivors in areas "worked" by Einsatzgruppe D were "minutely few"(p. 733). Angrick notes that his work is "perpetrator history": his perpetrators permitted few victims to survive; and those who did were primarily peasants and Red Army soldiers whose stories were not told after the war. Nevertheless, postwar statements of the perpetrators assist the historian to "reconstruct … the internal history of the unit, down to the individual," although cautions about judicial and historical "truth" should be well taken.