Holocaust East versus West: The Political Economy of Genocide

Abstract

Three main elements distinguished the Holocaust in the East from the Holocaust in Western and Central Europe. First, the Holocaust in the East was presented to the public as a war of liberation from Stalinism, from Soviet “Jewish-Bolshevism.” Second, the Holocaust in the East was by and large carried out openly, in the presence of non-Jewish locals. In the West, most Jewish victims of the Holocaust were rounded up and forcibly transported in sealed trains to concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe. This distance generated considerable space for deniability: sustaining the myth that Jews had been the victims of deportation and forced labor, not of mass annihilation. In contrast, a much smaller proportion of Soviet and East European Jews were exterminated in camps. While most Western and Central European Jews perished in the “industrial efficiency” of the camps, most Jews in the Soviet and Eastern European zones were shot, and the overwhelming majority were massacred at designated killing sites in or near their own homes by predominantly local ethnic nationalist militias who played the central role in their executions. Third, the Holocaust in the East mobilized a considerable proportion of the local population as co-perpetrators.