1. Introduction
In September 1941, Hryhorii (Grigourii) Kibets, the city mayor of Kamenets-Podol’sk, a town situated in the southern corner of Podolia, Ukraine, published an article on the front page of the local newspaper Podolianin, the ‘organ of the city administration’, of which he was also the chief editor. After thanking the field commandant (Feldkommandant), Lieutenant Colonel (Oberstleutnant) Müller, for his reception and warm words, Kibets appealed to the population to support the new order: ‘But the Ukrainian people, in their infinite gratitude and obligation are proud to help the German people, their redeemers, to destroy everything old and unnecessary and to build in its place something better and more beautiful.’Footnote 1 Naturally, as recently appointed head of the city administration, Kibets had to publicly endorse the new regime. However, how is such a statement to be evaluated, published only two weeks after more than 23,000 Jews had been shot by the German occupation authorities in the outskirts of Kamenets-Podol’sk? This notorious mass killing has been labelled as a quantitative and qualitative leap in the attempt to murder all the Jews in Europe.Footnote 2 To what extent did local administrators like Kibets endorse the extermination of the local Jewish population, and how did they help the implementation of the Holocaust practically, on the ground? These are some of the questions the present article would like to address.
In recent years, research on the perpetrators of the Holocaust has moved away from the focus on the central institutions in Berlin and has concentrated more on responsible actors in the field. This includes studies of German occupation personnel as well as research on the role of locals supporting the German occupation apparatus.Footnote 3 In this context, local administrators in Nazi-occupied Europe have become a topic of research interest.Footnote 4 Major works have been published on the role of local administrators in Belgium and the Netherlands, primarily utilising written archival documents as their source base and covering the involvement of local administrators in the persecution of the Jews.Footnote 5 For the occupied Soviet Union,Footnote 6 relevant contributions on local administrations are to be found in studies on the Russian FederationFootnote 7, BelarusFootnote 8, LatviaFootnote 9, LithuaniaFootnote 10and Estonia.Footnote 11
For Ukraine, the research conducted by Father Patrick Desbois since 2002 has demonstrated that the involvement of many locals in the implementation of the Holocaust is much broader than previously perceived.Footnote 12 Desbois describes the roles of locals as pit diggers, drivers, collectors of clothes or cooks around the execution sites and their importance for the mechanics of the destruction of the local Jewish population. Research on administrative co-operation of locals in Ukraine with the German occupiers has focused intensely on members of the various formations of Ukrainian auxiliary police.Footnote 13 This research on indigenous police forces has in part been initiated by judicial proceedings in the United States, Canada and other countries, where former auxiliary policemen from Ukraine were faced with war crimes charges or denaturalisation proceedings. In contrast, the activities of members of the local administration (Hilfsverwaltung) in Ukraine have not been the specific topic of any research.Footnote 14 Similarly, while scholars have begun to research relationships between the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, UPA) on the one hand and members of the local police, on the other,Footnote 15 the same cannot be said of the link between the OUN and local administrators.Footnote 16 Dieter Pohl comes to the conclusion that the participation of the local administration in Ukraine in organising the mass murder of the Jewish population remains to a large extent unclear.Footnote 17 In this context, this article is an attempt to analyse the history and function of the local administration in Ukraine under German occupation.
In occupied Ukraine, both in areas under military and civil administration (the latter subsumed in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU)), the Germans did not allow a collaborationist regime or any other local representation beyond the regional (oblast) level.Footnote 18 However, both in urban centres and in rural areas, a local administration was established, headed by a city mayor (Bürgermeister) in the towns, a raion chief (Rayonvorsteher) in the districts, and a village elder (starosta) in the villages. The local administration had considerable personal manpower: the city administration in Kiev employed up to 19,000 people, the one in Stalino (Donetsk) 6,500.Footnote 19 Ukrainians, Russians and ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) worked in the auxiliary administration and were also employed in the administrative bodies of the German military and civilian administration.Footnote 20
This article examines first the functioning and modus operandi of the Hilfsverwaltung under German occupation and analyses the relationship between the local administration and the OUN (§2). The article then describes the involvement of the Hilfsverwaltung in supporting the extermination of the local Jewish population, mainly in 1941 and 1942 (§3).Footnote 21 A subsequent section presents the city administration in Kamenets-Podol’sk as a case study for the role of the Hilfsverwaltung (§4). The conclusion (§5) tries to determine why locals in occupied Ukraine joined the local administration. It argues that, whatever the original motives were to join, the specific circumstances of the German occupation inevitably led to responsibilities for crimes committed during the occupation.
The article is largely based on primary research in regional archives in Ukraine. The authors are of the view that contemporaneous records from regional archival holdings are still largely unexploited in research into occupation history published in Western Europe and North America.Footnote 22 These contemporaneous records were to a large extent written in Ukrainian or Russian by local administrators themselves in the normal course of their day-to-day work; to a lesser extent, they were created by the German occupation authorities and written in German. Due to their immediacy, in the view of the authors, these documents remain the most reliable and telling source to describe the history and function of the local administration.Footnote 23 Contemporaneous documents also provide some insights into the question why individuals joined the local administration. Other source categories have recently been utilised in research into perpetrators, in particular Soviet investigation material generated by the Soviet police and security Services (KGB/MGB/NKGB/NKVD). This Soviet trial material has to be used with caution.Footnote 24 Soviet investigative material can be useful especially in order to obtain some basic biographical information about a former city mayor or local police chief, which then allows inferences to be drawn about the motives of this individual in co-operating with the German occupiers. The use of Soviet investigative and trial material is particularly problematic if the material dates from the immediate post-war period. Investigations from the period of 1943–5 were almost always conducted in a very prejudiced and one-sided way. These investigative files in most cases are very thin and contain very few and short witness statements. Entire villages were condemned as nests of collaboration; inhabitants, including former mayors and village elders, were rounded up en masse, some killed, others deported.Footnote 25 Investigations conducted in later years may, however, contain useful information on the personnel, structure and activities of the occupation regime, including the local administration, and have been utilised in research work on occupied Ukraine.Footnote 26 Similar types of information, especially pertaining to the prevailing mood of the local population in occupied Kiev, can be distilled from the NKVD surveillance reports of occupied Kiev.Footnote 27
Memoirs of former administrators, another potentially relevant source group, may contain useful details, but tend to over-emphasise a genuinely nationalistic agendaFootnote 28 or do not cover at all the author's former role within the local administration.Footnote 29 Post-war testimonies of victims might also provide insight into the motives of individual local administrators.Footnote 30 As source categories, however, both memoirs and post-war testimonies are by nature highly subjective documents and often selective when it comes to certain events and roles. They probably say as much about the process of remembering actions during wartime as about the actions themselves.
2. Functioning and modus operandi
Before June 1941 the German leadership had no detailed plans as to what the future administrative shape of a Ukraine under German occupation would look like.Footnote 31 Shortly after occupying the territory, the newly-arrived military and police authorities established a local administration from ‘reliable’ segments of the local population. These local administrative units were supposed to pass on the orders of the occupiers and, at the same time, to secure public order.Footnote 32 As early as the end of August 1941, the security division (Sicherungsdivision) 444 regarded the process of installing the heads of the local administration as more or less completed.Footnote 33 In some cases, as in Vinnitsa, Kiev or Dnepropetrovsk, oblast administrations were established, but dissolved after only a few months.Footnote 34
The German civil administration also intended to establish a ‘Ukrainian Committee’, which was meant to be the link between the district commissar (Gebietskommissar) and the city mayor.Footnote 35 It does not seem that the Ukrainian Committee was systematically established throughout the RKU, but there is some documentary evidence for its existence in Vinnitsa, Zhitomir, and Kamenets-Podol’sk. For instance, in Shepetovka, the Ukrainian Committee, headed by a certain Petrovskii, signed documents on behalf of the Gebietskommissar and was in a position to give orders to the raion heads. As examples for its activities, the Committee distributed the property of murdered Jews, took measures to enhance the development of the local industry and also collected gifts for the German army.Footnote 36 In some cases, the head of the local administration also became a member of the Ukrainian Committee in town.Footnote 37
Political and ethnic reliability and professional competence were the most important selection criteria for the Germans to appoint heads of the local administration. At times, the Germans left the acting administrative heads appointed in Soviet times in power; at times, the military commandant travelled within his area of responsibility to select and appoint appropriate candidates from within the local population.Footnote 38 In Dnepropetrovsk, the field headquarters (Feldkommandantur, FK) described the local city mayor as ‘a deliberate, by Ukrainian standards remarkably energetic, and smart individual’Footnote 39. The city mayor of Zaporozh’ie was characterised as ‘without doubt intelligent, eager and interested’Footnote 40. It appears that the rank-and-file personnel within the local administrative offices were usually transferred from Soviet administrative structures.Footnote 41
German security police (Sicherheitspolizei, SD) units or the secret military police (Geheime Feldpolizei) ran regular security checks for candidates who were to be employed in leading positions of the local administration. The district military headquarters (Ortskommandantur, OK) in Melitopol appointed the new city mayor (the former head of the electric power plant) ‘in agreement with the SD’. This security check also included a potential link to the OUN.Footnote 42 In reality, however, it turned out to be difficult for the occupation authorities to always double-check information submitted in a CV or questionnaire.Footnote 43
In regions of Ukraine with large settlements of ethnic Germans (for instance around Zhitomir, Melitopol and Zaporozh’ie), a high percentage of ethnic Germans were promoted to leading positions within the local administration. The occupiers supported a policy of appointing local Germans, as Volksdeutsche were considered to be reliable both politically as well as ethnically (volkstumsmässig).Footnote 44 However, local occupation bodies soon complained about the incompetence and lack of professional attitude on the part of the ethnic Germans.
Many tasks that the local administration fulfilled during the years 1941 to 1944 were routine administrative tasks, which would have been performed by any local administration. Situation reports written by city mayors and raion chiefs focused on questions such as: agricultural production; budget problems; health issues; monthly birth rates; cattle diseases; the state of roads, sidewalks and bridges; and housing issues. These ‘ordinary’ functions of administration were also reflected in the structure of the local auxiliary administration (with subsections for labour; passports; police; finance; schools; industry and commerce; agricultural matters; housing; health care).Footnote 45 Only in some larger cities, like in Dnepropetrovsk, did the existence of a specific desk officer for Jewish questions (Judenreferent) structurally demonstrate that the city administration was directly involved in implementing the specific goals of German occupation policies.Footnote 46
Local administration and OUN
In the autumn of 1941, representatives of both fractions of the OUN (OUN-Bandera and OUN-Melnyk) were fairly successful in placing their candidates into key posts within the local administration. This policy showed results predominantly in Ukraine west of the Dnieper, especially in rural areas.Footnote 47 For central and eastern Ukraine, the OUN-B had set so-called ‘marching groups’ (pokhidni grupy) in movement in advance, parallel to or behind the German army.Footnote 48 The achievements of these marching groups have been subject to debate: while it has been claimed that the OUN managed to establish Ukrainian structures that continued to exist even when the German ceased to co-operate with the OUN in 1942 and 1943,Footnote 49 it has also been argued that the influence of the OUN east of the Dnieper remained very limited and that this failure encouraged the OUN to systematically infiltrate the local police.Footnote 50
In some cities, the Germans favoured the appointments of locals over OUN groups arriving from elsewhere. For example, in Zaporozh’ie in October 1941, an OUN-B group arrived only after the occupiers had already appointed two ethnic German city mayors, and did not manage to gain influence within the local administration.Footnote 51 Similarly, in mid July 1941, two representatives of the OUN arrived in Kamenets-Podol’sk, coming from Lvov and distributing pamphlets of nationalistic content. The local FK anticipated the possibility ‘that members of the national-Ukrainian party intended to gain influence within the local administration’.Footnote 52 There are no further reports on this matter, but it can be inferred that the OUN members did not gain any significant influence in the city administration, as Kibets had already been put in power as city mayor.Footnote 53
Initially, in the summer and early autumn of 1941, the German authorities were tolerant towards the presence of these OUN representatives, but starting in the autumn of 1941 and at the latest by the spring of 1942, they systematically eliminated everybody suspected of having ties to Ukrainian nationalists from the local administration.Footnote 54 It remains a topic for future research to systematically analyse if and how the OUN, through the marching groups or any form of representation, created structures in parallel to the local administration, if they took over the Hilfsverwaltung or failed to gain any influence in it. John Armstrong's early work, largely based on interviews with former nationalist leaders, claimed that the OUN more or less exploited the local administration for its own nationalistic goals. Similarly, Frank Grelka has argued that in particular the OUN-M leadership sabotaged the local administration. In this view, the local administration was used as a vehicle to influence the Ukrainian population against the occupation regime,Footnote 55 and became in essence an organ of resistance against the occupiers. However, when analysing the role of OUN members in the local administration, one also has to consider the extent to which they supported the crimes that were an integral part of German occupation policies. What John-Paul Himka has argued for the relationship between the OUN and the local policeFootnote 56 is also applicable to the OUN and the local administration: the fact that the OUN deliberately sought influence in the local administration does not automatically mean that locals joined the Hilfsverwaltung specifically to implement the Holocaust. However, it does mean that they joined an entity that played a role in supporting the murder of the Jews on the local level, and that, by doing so and despite their initial motives, they helped to facilitate the crimes initiated by the German occupiers.
The city administration (mis’ka uprava) of Kiev might serve as an example of the resulting ambivalence. It was initially controlled by members of the OUN-M, who arrived in the city shortly after the Germans in September 1941. Following the suggestion of the OUN-M representatives, the occupation authorities appointed the historian and former university professor Oleksander Ohloblyn,Footnote 57 who was Kiev city mayor from the end of September to the end of October 1941. On October 29, the Germans replaced Ohloblyn with his deputy, Volodymyr Bahazii, who was also a loyal member of the OUN-M. While in power, Bahazii brought other OUN-M members into key posts within the auxiliary administration, including the auxiliary police and the propaganda section. Bahazii's decrees included, amongst others, the introduction of Ukrainian as the official language and the establishment of a Ukrainian Pedagogical Institute and a publishing house for Ukrainian school books. At the end of December 1941 Bahazii was arrested and shot in Babi Iar in February 1942 in a wave of executions of OUN members.Footnote 58
Bahazii's politics have been labelled as success of a nationalistic policy in disguise as, on the surface, he demonstratively showed loyalty to the German city commandant.Footnote 59 Both Ohloblyn and Bahazii also headed the local administration in Kiev during a period when the massacre in Babi Iar occurred and the city administration got itself involved in administering the belongings of the murdered Jews. The Event Report USSR (Ereignismeldung) of the German Sipo/SD mentioning Babi Iar included a reference to the fact that the valuables of the murdered Jews had been processed by the city administration.Footnote 60 On 10 October, Ohoblyn published an order, asking that all unattended goods be registered by a specific commission. The house administrators (upravdomy) as well as private homeowners were to submit lists of unattended goods to the city administration according to a given template (house number, full name of the owner, ethnic origin, list of goods, quantity and value). The local police was to supervise the execution of his order. All persons who were hiding belongings of Jews without official permission ‘will be held responsible with harsh consequences’.Footnote 61 Later, the local Ukrainian auxiliary police in Kiev, under the head of OUN-M member Roman Bidar,Footnote 62 became a key organ in the implementation of forced labour deportations in the city. Its first commander, Andrii Orlik, a OUN-M member as well, ordered all house administrators in Kiev to hand over all Jews in hiding to the Ukrainian police or the closest Gebietskommissariat.Footnote 63
Another example shows that OUN members in the local administration had a genuine anti-Semitic agenda even before the Germans arrived.Footnote 64 At the end of July 1941, before the arrival of the German troops, in Litin, west of Vinnitsa, a local militia prohibited free movement for the local Jewish population in the fields and villages of the raion. The ‘provisional revolutionary committee of the Shpikov Raion’ ordered in early August that, within five days, all local Jews had to wear a white armband with a blue star of David.Footnote 65 Survivor accounts indicate that the local administration at this early point in time was dominated by three OUN-B representatives by the names of Sokor, Cigolnik and Kolesnik.Footnote 66 In the context of isolating the Jews, the raion administration in Shpikov (incorporated into the Romanian-controlled ‘Transnistria’ from August 1941 onwards) ordered all Jews to move away from the town centre.Footnote 67 A few weeks later, the raion chief ordered that Jews were forbidden to use all main roads. The Jewish elder was advised that all Jews had to wash themselves on a regular basis, as every ‘dirty Jew’ would from now on be shot.Footnote 68 In early December 1941, local Jews in Shpikov had to hand over their valuables to the head of the local administration, OUN-B member Sokor, before they were transferred to the concentration camp in Pechora.Footnote 69
3. Facilitating and supporting crimes: The extermination of the Jewish population
Members of the local administration participated directly in the mass shootings of the Jewish population only in very exceptional cases.Footnote 70 However, they were essential in providing preparatory and follow-up work to support the extermination of the local Jewish population. As the Germans lacked manpower and knowledge of local details, without this kind of support, the occupation authorities would have encountered difficulties in implementing the policy of mass murder in the way they did. Within the framework of a division of labour, the occupation authorities assigned the local auxiliary administration with tasks targeted at identifying, registering and isolating the local Jewish population. Before and after the mass executions, the local administration was assigned with administering and exploiting Jewish property, thereby providing mayors and raion chiefs with the opportunity for personal enrichment.
In the summer of 1941, one of the ‘immediate tasks’ (Sofort-Aufgaben) assigned by the German military administration to local mayors and raion chiefs was the establishment of a local Jewish council (Judenrat) and a thorough registration of the whole local population, identifying Jews (and ethnic Germans) in separate categories.Footnote 71 The registration lists compiled by the local administration enabled the occupation authorities to identify the local Jewish population quickly and precisely, as Jews were often listed separately together with their professions.Footnote 72 These lists were normally signed by the raion chief or village elder, together with a representative of the local registration office or head of the housing department of the administration (uprava) for larger cities.Footnote 73
In the bigger cities, Jewish survivors of the first killing wave in the summer and autumn of 1941 were transferred to a ghetto and thereby further isolated from the rest of the population.Footnote 74 A separate section of this article is dedicated to the case study of Kamenets-Podol’sk, where the local administration was in charge of the local ghetto and its workforce (see §5).Footnote 75
The local administration was also directly involved in exploiting Jewish property before and after the murder of the Jews. The occupiers assigned the town or village administration with the authority to determine a specific amount that the local Jewish community had to transfer into the local budget (Busszahlung).Footnote 76Administrative forms for the raion budget in 1941 had an entry for ‘Jewish tax’ (Judensteuer) or ‘Jewish contribution’ (Judenabgabe).Footnote 77 Part of the salary paid for the forced labour duty performed by Jewish workers in the occupied territory was directly transferred into the village or town budget as so-called ‘saving salary’ (Sparlohn).Footnote 78
After the Jews had been transferred to a ghetto or had been murdered, personnel in the local administration were supposed to register and provisionally administer the remaining propertyFootnote 79 and then either transfer it to the occupation authorities,Footnote 80 or, as in the case of Babi Iar, to distribute it to local inhabitants. In some cases, members of the local administration directly profited from ‘sold goods’ (realizovane maino) or ‘sold unattended goods’ (realizovane bezgospodarche maino). In Belaia Tserkov' the military authorities ordered the city mayor to collect items from ‘the Jewish inheritance’(aus dem jüdischen Nachlass), in particular clothes and tools, and bring them to the OK.Footnote 81
In numerous cases, local inhabitants submitted written applications to obtain a certain item that had belonged to the murdered Jews.Footnote 82 This distribution of ‘Jewish property’ came under the authority of the local administration. As an example, the Gebietskommissar in Shepetovka explained to an applicant that he needed to address the matter of some requested footwear to the raion chief, ‘whom I entrusted with the distribution of Jewish clothing (Judenkleider)’.Footnote 83 The raion administration and the Ukrainian Committee (the latter intended to be the link between the Gebietskommissar and the city mayor or raion head) ordered the clothes of the murdered Jews to be transferred to the local medical school for disinfection,Footnote 84 before they were distributed amongst the local population.Footnote 85 In Slavuta, the raion chief asked the Gebietskommissar for permission to distribute furniture of former Jewish and communist enterprises (gewesene Juden- und Kommunistenwirtschaften) among the local population.Footnote 86 Vacated ‘Jewish houses’(Judenhäuser) in particular became items of interest for locals.Footnote 87 When moving into ‘vacated’ apartments, the city administration issued documents certifying that the move had taken place according to the rules.Footnote 88 The city administration in Proskurov (Khmeln’nitskii) presented the orderly move into vacated Jewish apartments as one of its major achievements in the local newspaper.Footnote 89
The buyer of ‘Jewish goods’ usually paid the money directly to the village head, who was supposed to transfer it into the bank account of the raion finance department.Footnote 90 In Zaporozh’ie, the process of selling ‘Jewish property’ was very important to balance the budget of the city. During the period October 1941 to February 1942, a third of the city's revenues resulted from selling ‘unattended goods’. Selling Jewish property therefore, for this early period of the occupation, replaced taxes as the main source of revenue for the city budget.Footnote 91
4. The example of Kamenets-Podol’sk
Kamenets-Podol’sk was conquered by German and Hungarian army troops in early July 1941.Footnote 92 On July 31, FK 183 reported that the city mayor of Kamenets-Podol’sk ‘willingly’ co-operated with the military authorities.Footnote 93 Kibets’ motives for becoming city mayor remain unclear; potential indicators might have been inferred from his Soviet investigative file, but, unfortunately, according to information received by the Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy, SBU) in Ukraine, such a file does not exist anymore.Footnote 94 When Hungary started to ship off several thousand Jews from Transcarpathia over the border and into the Reichskommissariat,Footnote 95 the Jewish population of Kamenets-Podol’sk, the first larger city beyond the border, rose from around 12,000 to around 26,000 in early August 1941.Footnote 96 As early as the end of July, FK 183 complained that the newly-arrived Jews caused difficulties in terms of food supplies and enhanced the danger of spreading epidemic diseases; therefore, the FK asked that the Jews be immediately removed.Footnote 97 The FK also instructed the local administration to check the personal data of twenty-one individuals, allegedly of German origin, who had arrived in the city. Ten of those had come from Chernovtsi and were listed as ‘Romanians and Ukrainians’. The other eleven came for the most part from Budapest and were listed as ‘Hungarians’. If the particulars of these individuals turned out to be true, they were to take up residence and start to work in the city.Footnote 98
Before the transfer of the city from German military to civil administration, the ‘higher SS and police leader Russia South’, Friedrich Jeckeln, organised the mass shooting of 23,600 Jews.Footnote 99 Only around 5,000 Jews survived in Kamenets-Podol’sk, and they had all been murdered by November 1942.Footnote 100
Local administration and the Jewish ghetto
The earliest document showing that the local administration administered Jewish items dates from August 8, 1941: in a bilingual form, the local administration authorised tenants ‘to administer and to protect (in Schutz nehmen) the house, the land, the inventory and all other valuables of the Jews who lived previously in the house’.Footnote 101 Also in early August, the city administration received first applications from locals who wanted to move into apartments ‘vacated’ by Jews.Footnote 102 A first direct proof for the existence of the ghetto is included in an instruction of city mayor Kibets, dated 11 August 1941, when he asked the local police to bring Jewish skilled workers from the ghetto to do repair work at the premises of the city administration.Footnote 103 The following day, the housing office received six more staff to compensate for the additional work caused by the registration of Jewish property after the transfer of Jews to the ghetto.Footnote 104 The housing department of the town administration was ordered by Kibets to transfer all articles of Jewish religion to be identified in the process of registration to the German FK.Footnote 105 In mid August, the local police chief summoned 300 Jews from the Old Town to paint the barracks.Footnote 106
From August 19, the local administration addressed its orders directly to the Jewish council (Judenrat) of Kamenets-Podol’sk.Footnote 107 On August 22, Kibets authorised the public printing house to print the stamp and seal of the ‘Jewish Council of Kamenets-Podol’sk’.Footnote 108 The establishment of the Jewish council was in line with the immediate tasks assigned to local mayors by the military authorities. On August 26, immediately before the beginning of the mass shootings, Kibets instructed the Jewish council, explicitly located in the ‘Old Town’, to provide fifteen workers who were to report to the technical staff of the city administration the next morning.Footnote 109 The timing of this instruction may indicate that Kibets and his staff had not been informed in advance about the large operation to murder most of the inhabitants of the ghetto at the end of August.
On August 30, immediately after most Jews had been shot, the city administration asked all Jews still hiding in the Old Town to register with the local police.Footnote 110 The city mayor distributed fifty copies of an announcement to the local police chief, specifying that all Jews in hiding had to register with the police office at the central square before 6 a.m. on August 31.Footnote 111 The local administration and local police thereby helped the occupying authorities to complete the murder of the local Jewish population in as comprehensive a manner as possible. In another public announcement, Kibets authorised access to the Old Town solely with special permits issued by the local police; these announcements were to be put up at all entrances to the Old Town.Footnote 112 After the shootings, around twenty Ukrainians had started to plunder Jewish property in the Old Town; the local auxiliary police had subsequently confiscated their passports.Footnote 113
In early October 1941, FK 183 ordered Kibets to secure, in a locked location, all wash pans, jars and buckets that were left behind by the murdered Jews.Footnote 114 These items had been distributed amongst the locals without any control system in place. In subsequent months, the city administration drafted numerous lists with ‘Jewish goods’, in which items were provisionally assigned to a local inhabitant.Footnote 115 Also in October, a doctor residing in the ghetto informed the Jewish council that, without any soap, it would become more and more likely that epidemic diseases would spread. Only if ghetto inmates had the opportunity to wash themselves with soap regularly, would the administrative and medical personnel in the ghetto be able to maintain the necessary standards of hygiene.Footnote 116 When informed of the matter by the Jewish council,Footnote 117 the deputy city mayor ordered the immediate distribution of ten kilogrammes of soap to the ghetto inmates, which he requested from the local factory processing chicken meat.Footnote 118 In early 1942, Kibets prohibited any access to the ghetto due to the imminent danger caused by epidemic diseases. At the same time, he reminded the population that access to the ‘vacated’ Old Town remained prohibited and that it was forbidden to sell items to Jews or buy something from them.Footnote 119 The local administration subsequently became responsible for the demolition of the Old Town, which was supervised by a special demolition office (Abreisskantor). The city administration was tasked to screen, store and administer all material that resulted from the demolition of the Old Town. In June 1942, Kibets received specific instructions from Gebietskommissar Reindl; the houses in the Old Town were to be destroyed; and the wood resulting from the destruction was to be used for heating purposes.Footnote 120 The Abreisskantor regularly reported to Kibets on the progress of the project (providing indicators by cubic metres of wood produced).Footnote 121 Reindl needed to remind Kibets in August 1942 that the city administration had to transfer the proceeds of selling this material to a special account, which was then to be used for the reconstruction of the city.Footnote 122
Jewish forced labour
As mentioned above, in August 1941, Kibets issued various orders to request Jewish workers for labour duties outside the ghetto;Footnote 123 in September, after the mass murder, he continued to issue such orders for the surviving Jewish workers,Footnote 124, for example, when he needed workers for the public grain and cattle enterprises.Footnote 125 In September, the local administration compiled a list of Jewish craftsmen residing in the city; these were to be exempted from the next wave of killings.Footnote 126 The local police chief recommended a tailor specialising in uniforms and asked Kibets to include this person into the list of skilled workers.Footnote 127 Three other Jewish tailors addressed Kibets directly in early September with the request to continue working in their professionFootnote 128 and to open their own tailor's shop.Footnote 129 In early October 1941, Kibets asked the Gebietskommissar if the Jewish tailors could at least temporarily reside outside the ghetto. The tailor's shop was overworked, Ukrainians had not yet been sufficiently trained, and, in their present situation, the Jews spent too much time travelling from the ghetto to their workplace and back.Footnote 130 The same day, Kibets told the labour office to allow the Jews to leave the ghetto for work purposes, which implies that Gebietskommissar Reindl has given his approval.Footnote 131 The local dairy and brewery also asked if their Jewish employees could be allowed to reside outside the ghetto, otherwise efficient work would not be possible.Footnote 132 Other locals requested that Kibets allow a Jewish hairdresser and his son to reside in their former apartment outside the ghetto.Footnote 133
All these measures executed under Kibets’ supervision demonstrate that local administrators were directly involved in the administration of ghettos and acted as direct counterparts of the Jewish councils. In their function, they controlled access to the ghetto and its inmates; controlled access to the Old Town after the Jews had been killed; administered the property of the murdered Jews and its distribution; had the power to request Jewish labourers from the ghetto, to authorise their temporary release from the ghetto for work purposes and to ask the Gebietskommissar to allow Jewish skilled workers to reside outside the ghetto. Local Jews were only able to survive if their value as members of the workforce was acknowledged; by making sure that this value was registered, local administrators had the power to prolong the survival of some of the skilled Jewish workers in their town.Footnote 134 There is no direct proof that the local administration in Kamenets-Podol’sk directly assisted in killing the Jews.Footnote 135 However, the existing documentation leaves no doubt that Kibets and his staff had day-to-day dealings with the ghetto and its inmates, and, in this way, must have been informed about all major developments, including the ongoing killings, the harsh conditions of forced labour and the terrible standards of hygiene.
5. Conclusion
Available sources provide limited information as to why certain inhabitants of occupied Ukraine joined local administrative units. Archival documents of the local administration ordinarily consist of correspondence, orders, decrees, and instructions issued by a city mayor or raion chief, but only limited information is contained about the professional background or motives of their authors. Some information about the profile of more senior local administrators is contained in the reports of the occupation authorities. Especially in the beginning of the occupation period, the respective military or police authority described why certain individuals were deemed suitable for the position of mayor or not. These documents, however, are written from the extremely prejudiced view of occupation personnel that might not have been able to truly identify motives and attitudes within the population, including members of the local administration.Footnote 136 Other information might be found in the Soviet investigative material, especially in the initial parts of an interrogation, covering the biographical background of an individual. Source-related limitations of this material as well as of memoirs and survivor accounts have been highlighted in the introduction of this article. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the following incentives played an important role when local people decided to join administrative units during the German occupation.
As in the case of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, a common motive for working as a local administrator was likely to be the prospect of material gain and social promotion.Footnote 137 Working in the local administration guaranteed job security, a decent salary, a food supply, the chance to help family and friends, exemption from forced labour deportations; and an opportunity for personal enrichment. In some cases, former tsarist civil servants re-emerged. The mayor of Berezovka, for example, a Ukrainian, had already been mayor of the same town in tsarist times.Footnote 138
Dissatisfaction with the policies of the Soviet regime could also play a role. Especially in the early days of the occupation, the Germans were greeted by the population with expectations that they would improve the standard of living and would help to correct some of the failures of the Soviet system.Footnote 139 This attitude, especially dominant in rural areas, resulted from the Soviet policies of collectivisation and starvation in Ukraine in the early 1930s and was fostered by intense rumours of the abolition of collective farms (kolkhozy) by the new regime. Many of the formerly repressed ‘kulaks’ returned to their homes and sought restitution of their property and land.Footnote 140 This, combined with the inefficient functioning of the Soviet regime might explain why individuals, even including members of the Communist Party, initially volunteered to join the local auxiliary administration. For the Zhitomir region, Wendy Lower described indigenous leaders of this early period with the following characteristics: mostly over 40 years old; with at least middle school education; from the local professional class of teachers, doctors, priests, and bookkeepers; previously in a leadership position. A few of the older ones had been middle-ranking civil servants during the tsarist period.Footnote 141 This group might initially have been motivated to work towards better governance and a more effective economic system, and their anti-Soviet sentiment might not have primarily been motivated by the experience of repression.Footnote 142 The head of the oblast administration in Vinnitsa, Kezar Bernard, an engineer by training, in the autumn of 1941 provided his superiors with numerous suggestions as to how to improve the working and functioning of the administration of the district, thereby demonstrating that he was clearly interested in more effective governance.Footnote 143 Sooner or later, it became clear to these local administrators that the occupiers would not fulfil their expectations,Footnote 144 but, by then, most of them had already been caught up in supporting some of the crimes committed by the Germans.
Ethnic Germans in particular had suffered from persecution under the Soviet regime in the 1930s and were now treated with preference by the new occupation powers.Footnote 145 They might have regarded the new regime as an opportunity for promotion, possibly also for seeking revenge for some of the discrimination they had previously suffered. The Zaporozh’ie city mayor, Wiebe, had been a tsarist administrator with a university degree, and then worked as an accountant during Soviet times. His deputy, Isaak Reimer, had lost his job as a teacher under the Soviets and had, according to the FK, ‘greatly suffered under the bolshevist reign’.Footnote 146 Some documents indicate that the occupiers tried to pursue a policy of preferring the appointments of Ukrainians to Russians.Footnote 147 Orders issued by local administrative units discriminating against the local Jewish population indicate an existing anti-Semitism in place at about the time of the Germans’ arrival, but it will need further clarification to determine to which extent anti-Semitism, and not direct economic gains from confiscation of Jewish property and valuables was a relevant motive for joining the local administration under German occupation.
Nor should nationalist motives be discounted. For at least an initial period in 1941, representatives of both wings of the OUN occupied key posts in the local auxiliary administration, especially west of the Dnieper. The leadership of the OUN had encouraged its members to join local administrations (and the police) and use the administration as a vehicle to fight the goals of the German occupiers,Footnote 148 thereby in essence becoming an organ of resistance. The official tolerance of the Germans for this strategy ended in autumn 1941,Footnote 149 but in some cities, nationalistic groups seemed to have maintained their influence on the local administration far beyond that time. A detailed analysis of their activities after the end of 1941 has yet to be carried out.Footnote 150
The turnover amongst local administrators was high,Footnote 151 and, if a mayor was deemed unreliable, the Germans did not hesitate to murder him (as is the case of mayor Bahazii in Kiev). It was therefore difficult and dangerous for local people to avoid carrying out orders issued by the Germans. Notwithstanding the original motives of local people for joining the Hilfsverwaltung – out of economic, ethnic, nationalist reasons, a desire for better governance, or a combination of all these – it seems that, when the occupation authorities ordered the identification, registration and isolation of the Jews, the establishment and administration of ghettos, the administration of the belongings and houses of the murdered Jews, and later the selection and collection of young Ukrainians for forced labour deportations – some local people, as part of the Hilfsverwaltung, were available and willing to execute all these measures. The city administration in Kamenets-Podol’sk serves as a representative and at the same time well-documented example for occupied Ukraine.
Within a framework of division of labour, the German occupation authorities in Ukraine assigned many tasks to be executed by local administrative units and personnel. They regarded the local administration as the supporter and executor of German interests rather than as an equal partner. The discretion of the local administrators was quite limited; at the same time, city mayors and raion chiefs found themselves in an exposed position. They were often too weak vis-à-vis the occupiers to defend independent positions; at the same time, they were made responsible by the local population for many of the draconic measures of German occupation policies.Footnote 152 Sources suggest that, in some cases, local administrators used the little discretion they had to enrich themselves rather than to support or protect the local population.
A military occupation requires that, up to a certain level, the occupying power and the local people have to work together in order to guarantee the survival and well-being of at least sections of the indigenous population.Footnote 153 The problem in using the term ‘collaboration’ with all its negative connotations for this kind of administrative ‘working together’ has been frequently discussed in research on Nazi-occupied Europe.Footnote 154 The term ‘co-operation’ seems more suited to capturing the realities and necessities of living under military occupation. Administrative co-operation in the specific circumstances of German occupation in the Second World War, however, automatically implies involvement in the crimes that were an integral part of the German occupation policy. In the case of the local administration in occupied Ukraine, co-operation led in most cases to involvement in those crimes, above all in facilitating the murder of the local Jewish population.
