Soviet journalist Vasili Grossman documented German troops at Babi Yar digging up the corpses of 50,000 Jews so they could burn them to destroy evidence of a 1941 massacre.
"Are they so mad as to hope thus to hide their evil traces that have been branded forever by the tears and the blood of Ukraine?" Grossman wrote.
Wendy Lower, author of "Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine," quotes Grossman to make her point: the Ukrainian genocide was key to Nazi German imperialism, unprecedented in its violence, racism and anti-Semitism.
Lower, former director of the Visiting Scholars Program at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, was the keynote speaker Thursday for the University of Utah Holocaust Days of Remembrance.
"As many as 1.2 to 1.4 million Jews died in the Holocaust in Ukraine," Lower said. "Less than 2 percent survived the Holocaust . . . many died at gunpoint."
The largest single massacre recorded was at Babi Yar, where, according to Nazi records, 33,711 people were killed in two days, she said. Soviet accounts indicated the killing continued until 50,000 were killed at the site outside of Kiev, Ukraine's capital.
Unlike the concentration camps such as Auschwitz, the story of the Holocaust in Ukraine is not well known, Lower said, in part because much of the evidence wasn't available until after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In addition to Jews, the Nazis killed, or forcibly deported, millions of Ukrainians, Russian soldiers who had been captured, Communists and other so-called threats.
"It was imperial dreams that motivated the conquest from the start," Lower said, pointing to evidence from German leaders, including Adolf Hitler, who described Ukraine as a "future Garden of Eden" in 1941.
It was clear, Lower, said that Nazi Germany planned to remove Ukrainians and Jews in a German colonization effort.
However, experimental colonization efforts didn't go as smoothly as Germans had planned, she said. Ethnic Germans were largely impoverished under Stalin, few spoke German, and most of the skilled laborers were the Jews who had been removed. Some would-be colonists joined resistance efforts.
In the end, Lower said, "the legacy of Hitler's empire is Babi Yar, Auschwitz . . . mass murder sites and labor camps."
E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com