(This takes approximately seven minutes to read.)
We all know that the Shoah was not the first instance of mass violence against Jews in history, but I suspect that few of us have wondered what the largest loss of Jewish life was before then. The answer lies in the pogroms of the 1910s and the early 1920s: with the possible exception of the Polish–Cossack War of the mid‐17th century, this was the deadliest massacre of Jews before the 1940s. Quoting Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe in The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19: Prelude to the Holocaust, pages vii–viii:
The pogroms […] between 1917 and 1921 represent the largest and bloodiest anti-Jewish massacres prior to the Holocaust. The estimated number of Jews murdered in Ukraine in the aftermaths of World War I ranges from 50,000 to 200,000,¹ with many more Jews suffering violence, rape,² and loss of property.
Altogether 1.6 million Jews were affected by these violent events. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of these pogroms, there is no doubt that this was the largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence before the Shoah[.]
[…]
Being overshadowed by the Holocaust, the pogroms in Ukraine are still not widely known. This unfortunate state of affairs is due to a number of factors. […] The relative lack of research on these events provides a further explanation of why the […] pogroms are much less known than the persecution [that] the Jews suffered at the hand of the [Axis] and other perpetrators during the Shoah.
If, over the last 70 years, research on the Holocaust has resulted in several thousand publications, which can be housed only in the library of a large institute such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the publications relating to the pogroms of 1917−1921 would fill no more than two or three shelves.
As you can see, this catastrophe is so obscure that it does not even have an official name, and Herzlians theirselves hardly ever discuss it for more than a few seconds. (A rare exception is the Times of Israel’s interview with Jeffrey Veidlinger in 2021.) I have dubbed it the ‘proto-Shoah’ for convenience’s sake. I suspect that if the upper classes regularly promoted its memory, it would raise awkward questions as to why they did not impose an ethnostate on Palestine in the 1920s if the Shoah was indeed the primary (or sole) reason for that in 1948.
The proto-Shoah, contrary to what Rossoliński-Liebe implied, was neither limited to the Ukraine nor did it last for only four years. On the contrary, we could argue that it started as early as 1914 before persisting all the way up to 1923, and it affected other regions, such as Poland:
In the last week of November, there occurred in the eastern Galician city of Lemberg (or, in Polish, Lwow), amid fierce fighting for control of the region between the Poles and Ukrainians who — along with very numerous Jews — jointly inhabited it, the most violent and deadly of all Polish pogroms of the postwar- and indeed the interwar years.
In three days 72 Jews were murdered and 443 others injured; 38 houses were burned, and in the pogroms aftermath 3,620 damage claims were officially submitted. It was, together with lawless civilians, mainly troops of the Haller legions who, with the connivance or toleration of their military superiors, carried out the pogrom.
One has only to recall the extermination of the Jews by Konstantin Konstantinovich Mamontov’s cavalry units during his famous raid through the rear of the Red Army in the fall of 1919. In this case, the massacre of the Jews occurred on Great Russian territory (Elets and other cities), and thus Ukrainian territory could have had nothing to do with these slaughters.
The mob that attacked the Jews in the villages of Diszel and Marcali in late summer of 1919 apparently wanted to force their “racial enemies” out of their communities (and in the process line their own pockets). Yet, in the end, they not only expelled middle-class Jews and stole their cash and valuables, but they also brutally murdered two families[.]
The Kingdom of Romania:
Although hostilities ceased in most of Europe in November 1918, Romanian soldiers continued fighting in Transylvania. The rhetoric of the war framed it as a crusade against communism after Béla Kun came to power in Hungary on 21 March 1919.
That November police distributed antisemitic posters around the country on the orders of the short-lived government led by Arthur Văitoianu (1864–1956). These posters identified members of Béla Kun’s Communist Party as Jewish and denounced all Jews as Bolsheviks who had to be liquidated. Isolated attacks on Jews and on Jewish property followed, including some by Romanian soldiers acting under orders, with no legal repercussions.⁵²
And so on. All told, I suspect that European antisemites exterminated more than 115,000 Jews from 1914 to 1923, and not merely in the Ukraine.
Many historians have interpreted this disaster as a precursor to the Shoah, but we need more research establishing links between both. Per Polly Zavadivker:
none of the recent scholarship has provided empirical evidence that links the anti-Jewish violence of that era to that of 1939–1945 as an origin event. Veidlinger, too, focuses on the descriptive history of the pogroms, but leaves the claim—the framing device of the book that makes it compelling to a wide readership—entirely unsubstantiated.
It would be quite an exaggeration to argue that the proto-Shoah ‘caused’ the Shoah, but we have a few clues indicating that the proto-Shoah probably influenced the Third Reich. For byspel:
Another German soldier in Galicia was disgusted with the Jewish merchants [whom] he encountered. “Before the peace,” he wrote, “I could not understand why there were pogroms in Russia. Since I have seen the Jewish way of doing business, it is no longer a puzzle how a hard-working farmer could beat one of these pests to death.”
The soldier concluded with a sentiment expressed by leading figures in the Third Reich: “Here is further proof [the encounter with Jews] that anti-Semitism is always a healthy reaction to seeing the Jewish masses represented. This, too, is a legacy of the front!”³⁸ While these excerpts traded in traditional anti-Semitic tropes, the “masses” of Jews cited in this context soon devolved into the specter of transient revolutionaries threatening the German frontier.
Der Frontsoldat erzählt published that soldier’s sentiment in 1939. Clearly, there were at least a few Third Reich officials familiar with the proto-Shoah, and it would be a most astounding coincidence if none of the leading officials were even aware of it. Quoting Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of Nationalism Socialism, 1917–1945, page 191:
In an article in an August 1923 edition of the Völkisch Observer, “The Ukraine and Russia,” Rosenberg, presumably, on behalf of the “editorial staff,” drew attention to Poltavets-Ostranitsa’s newspaper The Ukrainian Cossack. The essay argued: “We believe that Great Russians and Ukrainians will finally decide for a more federal arrangement of their empire after the smashing of Jewish-Bolshevik Moscow.” The piece emphasized that the Ukraine, where “patriots” were struggling against a “centralized dictatorship,” occupied a similar position to Bavaria, where rightists were opposing the “November Republic.”¹²¹
As far as I can tell, none of the politicians in Berlin had any major complaints against the anti-Jewish tyrant Symon Petliura, and somebody there wanted to exploit the French library dedicated to him. Quoting Patricia Kennedy Grimsted’s ‘The Odyssey of the Petliura Library and the Records of the Ukrainian National Republic during World War II’:
When France was invaded by [the Fascists] and Paris fell to occupying forces in 1940—still during the period of the [German]–Soviet pact—Hitler was already planning his Drang nach Osten. As one phase of the preparations, [Axis] specialists had targeted various Slavic émigré libraries in France and other countries in Western Europe as important intelligence sources, and their followers as potential allies in the [Axis’s] subsequent anti-Soviet campaign.
As librarian Ivan Rudychiv confided in his diary in January 1941, the notion “was circulating among Russian émigré circles [in Paris] that Petliura was the first great nationalist, and that Hitler was a student of Petliura.” Furthermore, it was rumored, Hitler was already endorsing Ukrainian independence.¹⁶
For [Axis] propagandists, although the [Ukrainian National Republic] was traditionally pro-French and pro-Polish and anti-German, Petliura’s antisemitic reputation made him a symbol to be manipulated for the [Axis] cause. The Petliura Library had an additional appeal, in that its martyr patron died at the hand of an acquitted assassin who sought revenge for Petliura’s alleged rôle in anti-Jewish pogroms.¹⁷
Speculations that his assassin had been encouraged by Soviet intelligence sources could also increase the usefulness of Petliura’s martyrdom to [Axis] propagandists anxious to exploit anti-Soviet sentiments abroad and in the soon-to-be occupied Ukrainian lands.
(Keep in mind that the Kingdom of Italy and the Twoth Reich were on opposing sides in World War I, and later that was all water under the bridge. Thus, it would be unsurprising if the Third Reich’s head of state was indeed ‘a student of Petliura’ as rumoured here.)
As the Western Axis powers steadily occupied in the Soviet Union, it inspired anti-Jewish fury in Ukrainian anticommunists. Quoting David Engel’s The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927, page 95:
From 25 to 27 July 1941, Ukrainian police in the service of the recently-completed [Axis] occupation of Lwów were joined by mobs of Ukrainian peasants from nearby villages in brutal attacks upon Jews in the city streets and in their homes, in a fashion reminiscent of the pogroms of two decades previous. Upwards of 2,000 Jews were killed over the course of three days. The events were presented at the time as an act of revenge for the death of a Ukrainian national hero on the fifteenth anniversary of his murder. They have been known ever since as “the days of Petliura.”³³⁹
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
While the evidence linking the proto-Shoah to the Shoah may be circumstantial and insufficient (for now), Stefan Ihrig’s investigation of the links between the Meds Yeghern and the Shoah has shown that an impressive quantity of circumstantial evidence can make a ‘smoking gun’ practically superfluous. A great potential for research exists here.
There is more that I want to write about the proto-Shoah, but this topic is getting lengthy enough as it is. Suffice it to say that even if by some bizarre coincidence all of the leading Axis officials were unaware of this catastrophe, there can be no doubt that it further normalised anti-Jewish violence for many: if so many anticommunists could get away with plundering as well as slaughtering so many Jews, it would have been all too easy for Axis officials or collaborators to look at that and think that they could do the same.
Further reading: In the Midst of Civilized Europe: the Pogroms of 1918–1921
