8 | MARCH 31 • 2022 

opinion
What Zelensky Gets Wrong 
About the Holocaust in Ukraine
I

n his March 20 speech 
to Israeli lawmakers, 
Ukrainian president 
Volodomyr Zelensky invoked 
the Holocaust as analogous to 
what his country is currently 
experiencing. 
“I have the 
right to this par-
allel and to this 
comparison,” he 
said in his video 
address. 
But as a his-
torian of the 
Holocaust in Ukraine, I know 
how problematic this compar-
ison is. Zelensky, who played a 
history teacher on TV, should 
know better, too. 
The war is horrific, and 
Russia’s apparent deliber-
ate targeting of civilians is 
abominable. But like most 
wars, this war is being fought 
over the political control of 
a territory and the sover-
eignty of a people; unlike the 
Holocaust, it is not an attempt 
to murder every single mem-
ber of an ethnic, racial or 
national group. In contrast to 
Zelensky’s assertion, the threat 
is not the same. 
For example, Zelensky 
could, theoretically, turn over 
the power of government to 
a Russian appointed puppet 
and allow his people to live as 
a Ukrainian minority within 
an oppressive Russian state. 
It’s not a good choice, but it is 
a choice. The Nazis provided 
no such option for the Jews of 
Europe. There was no choice 
that led to physical survival, 
no offer to surrender.
Russian President Vladimir 

Putin, too, has invoked the 
Holocaust when justifying his 
invasion of Ukraine, claiming 
that it was his intention to 
“denazify” the country. That, 
too, is disingenuous. Ukraine 
is a free and democratic state, 
with a government that was 
popularly elected and that has, 
for the most part, protected 
the rights of all its citizens. 
It is little wonder, though, 
that the Holocaust has such 
resonance in Ukraine. Over 
one-quarter of the Jewish 
victims of the Holocaust, 
approximately 1.5 million 
people, were killed within 
the territory of what is now 
Ukraine. Millions of non-Jew-
ish Ukrainians also perished 
under German occupation 
as prisoners of war, slave 
laborers, soldiers, partisans, 
and ordinary townsfolk and 
peasants. Zelensky is right 
that the war was “a tragedy 
for Ukrainians, for Jews, for 
Europe, for the world.” 

Urging Israel to pro-
vide more military aid to 
Ukraine, Zelensky asked the 
“people of Israel” to make 
a choice, just as Ukrainians 
made their choice 80 years 
ago. With 2,673 Ukrainians 
recognized by Yad Vashem for 
their efforts to save Jews, 
Zelensky can legitimately 
boast that “Righteous Among 
the Nations are among us,” 
as he did in his speech. But 
this claim obscures the role 
that far more Ukrainians 
played in collaborating with 
the Germans and facilitating 
the murder of their Jewish 
neighbors. 
The Germans knew that 
Ukraine would be fertile 
ground for their extermina-
tionist plan. As I show in my 
recently published book, In 
the Midst of Civilized Europe: 
The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and 
the Onset of the Holocaust, only 
20 years earlier, Ukrainians 
opposing Bolshevik rule had 

murdered tens of thousands 
of their Jewish neighbors. The 
Jews and the Bolsheviks, they 
had falsely claimed, were one 
and the same. 
The Nazis purposeful-
ly revived this myth. They 
enticed Ukrainians to assist 
in murder as revenge for the 
crimes the Bolsheviks had 
inflicted in Ukraine — mass 
arrests and executions, and, 
most notably, forced grain 
requisitions that had resulted 
in a famine killing 3.5 million 
people in 1932-1933. 

A QUICK HISTORY
In Lviv, the first major city 
the Germans captured in 
Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers 
recruited from abroad with 
the false promise of German 
support for Ukrainian state-
hood, rounded up Jews and 
threw them to the crowds. 
“They were beating up Jews, 
killing Jews, beating them to 
death on the street,” recalled 
one witness. German special 
units with the collaboration of 
Ukrainian auxiliary police and 
militia killed between 2,000 
and 5,000 Jews in the city in 
July 1941.
Similar scenes were repeat-
ed elsewhere. During the 
first month of the German 
invasion, between 12,000 and 
35,000 Jews were killed in 
eastern Galicia and western 
Volhynia — two regions that 
the Soviet Union had taken 
from Poland in 1939. Many 
of these massacres were per-
petrated by locals, and some 
without even a German pres-

Jeffrey 
Veidlinger
JTA

A photo of one of the German army mobile killing units, or 
Einsatzgruppen, shooting Jews near Ivangorod, Ukraine, in 1942 
was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a 
Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting 
documentation on Nazi war crimes. 

HISTORICAL ARCHIVES/WARSAW

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