The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during the World War II and the Holocaust (1941–45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews. Arad’s examination of the differences between the Holocaust in the Soviet Union compared to other European nations reveals how Nazi ideological attacks on the Soviet Union, which included war on “Judeo-Bolshevism,” led to harsher treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union than in most other occupied territories.

 

This historical narrative presents a wealth of information from German, Russian, and Jewish archival sources that will be invaluable to scholars, researchers, and the general public for years to come.

Yitzhak Arad served as the director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, from 1972 to 1993. He is now retired but continues to research and write about the Holocaust. He is the author or editor of several books, including Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, 8th edition (Nebraska 1999); Ponary Diary, 1941–1943: A Bystander's Account of a Mass Murder; and Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps.

The publication of this series was made possible by the generous gift of the Ike and Roz Friedman Family Foundation, in loving memory of Ike Friedman and Janis Friedman Yale and all those who perished in the Holocaust.