The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as...

Using wartime records and postwar West German and Soviet investigative materials, this book probes the local dynamics of the German occupation and the collaboration in the Holocaust in southern Ukraine. Through the lens of a regional study, it contributes to recent scholarly interest in the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.