Pogroms and Anti-Jewish Violence in Ukraine's (Other) Civil War

Frankel Institute Detroit Lecture Series on Jews and Empires

On September 8, 1919, the New York Times reported on the murder of 127,000 Jews in a spate of ethnic violence in Ukraine. Anti-Jewish violence, or pogroms, had been a sporadic part of life in Ukrainian lands for decades, but this time the scale was different and the prognosis was more ominous: “Six Million Are in Peril,” the headline warned. The article concluded by warning that “the population of six million souls in Ukraine and in Poland have received notice through action and by word that they are going to be completely exterminated.” Twenty-two years later, Hitler’s army, together with local collaborators, began fulfilling the prophecy. Such dire predictions were commonplace in the era, and contemporaries widely saw the threat ahead. Yet these early warning signs of the Holocaust have been largely expunged from history. This lecture will look at the pogroms of 1918-1921, and suggest connections between the violence of that era and the Holocaust.