The Holocaust in Rovno ; the massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941

In November 1941, near the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads murdered over 23,000 Jews in what has been described as "the second Babi Yar." This meticulous and methodologically innovative study reconstructs the events at Rovno, and in the process exemplifies efforts to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust. Over three days in November 1941, in Sosenki Forest outside the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads supported by local collaborationists murdered some 23,500 Jewish men, women, and children. Often remembered as "the second Babi Yar," the massacre was one of nearly a hundred similar German-sponsored, large-scale, anti-Jewish killing operations perpetrated in Soviet zones during the early months of World War II on the Eastern Front. Preceding the adoption of the "Final Solution" by the Third Reich, Rovno and other mass killings in the East were testing grounds for genocide. This study of the Rovno massacre is based substantially on remarkable new research that blends sources from multiple archives (and archival traditions), national memories, and first-person testimony that places victims' accounts side-by-side with those of German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian eyewitnesses. In its meticulous reconstruction of these events, The Holocaust in Rovno exemplifies the burgeoning movement to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust Ca. 3,000-4,000 Jews were killed by local non-Jews and the German occupiers in Rovno in July-August 1941, in the course of "self-cleansing operations". 23,500 Jews (17,500 adults and 6,000 children) - all Jews who did not possess valid work permits - were killed by the Nazis on 7-9 November 1941 in two murder actions in the nearby Sosenki forest; this operation is regarded by historians as the "second Babii Yar". The rest of Rovno's Jews, ca. 7,500-8,000 "specialists", were assembled in a ghetto that was eventually liquidated in summer 1942. Focuses on the Nazi anti-communist and antisemitic propaganda that preceded the "action", on the passivity of Rovno's Jews in the face of the imminent mass murder, and on the behavior of the perpetrators. Presents many excerpts from eyewitnesses' accounts - by survivors, former perpetrators, and bystanders. Notes the specificity of the Holocaust in the Soviet territories: the murder of Jews was presented as a vital part of a "war of liberation" from Stalinism or "Jewish communism", it was perpetrated openly, and local collaborators knew the victims well. In the early 1990s a memorial to the Jewish victims was erected in Sosenki; now it is neglected. Today, Ukraine is reluctant to memorialize the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) "This shockingly powerful and original book is the most detailed account ever written of the 'Second Babi Yar' in Rovno. Clearly narrating the entangled history of the city and the region of Rovno, it presents an excellent example of transnational history." - Hiroaki Kuromrya, Professor of History, Indiana University, USA, and author of Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin's Ukraine, 1952-1953 (2012) Cover 1 Half-Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Epigraph 7 Contents 8 List of Figures 9 List of Tables 11 Acknowledgments 13 Introduction: The 18 1 Holocaust East versus West: The Political Economy of Genocide 23 2 Aktion: The Holocaust in Rovno 35 3 Aftermath: The Legaciesof the Rovno Massacre 97 Bibliography 129 Index 148