Eyewitness Account of the Nazi Occupation in the South of Ukraine: Diary of a Kherson Resident

Abstract

On March 31, 1944, Captain of Justice G.V. Shliamar, an investigator of the Military Prosecutor’s Office (a member of the Extraordinary State Commission), examined a diary with entries about the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Kherson, which was sent to the military prosecutor’s office and eventually ended up in the archives of the commission in Moscow. The introductory article to the diary describes the historical context and the time of its creation. The source contains a description of events from July 5 to September 15, 1941, which allows us to trace the situation in Kherson and Southern Ukraine during the first months of the German–Soviet war. In particular, the author of the diary recorded the creation of a Jewish ghetto in Kherson, shortly before its liquidation and the organization of mass murder of the city’s Jewish population. Preparation of the diary for publication began in 2021, 80 years after the occupation of Kherson by German troops. On March 2, 2022, during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation, Kherson was occupied by Russian troops. This caused historical parallels, in particular through the instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War during the Russian aggression.

Keywords

• second world war
• ukraine
• kherson
• ghetto
• holocaust
• diary