THE DOCUMENTS OF THE NAZI FORCE STRUCTURES OF THE DISTRICT OF GALICIA AS A SOURCE OF THE HOLOCAUST STUDIES (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF THE UKRAINIAN ARCHIVES)

Abstract

The documents of the force structures of the Nazi occupational power are analyzed in this article. The Holocaust mostly happened as the result of the combination of deeds of the members of the civilian administration and the SS and police employees. The author has studied archival materials which are held in Ukraine. Their informational potential and inner content is also learned. The saved SS and police documents allow us to investigate the process of destroying the Jewish community of Galicia. There were more than half of a million people, living there before the war. Most of them were killed by Nazis. The persecution had been continued for almost two years since July 1941 till June 1943. Nowhere else murders had been carried out for such a long period time. According to the different sources only two or three percents of the Jewish community survived. After the collapse of the USSR a lot of documents in the archives became easy of access. The SS and police materials from the Ukrainian archives are the one we are interested in. Thanks to the study of their inner content we can trace the implementation of the anti- Semitic policy. The information from the archival documents helps us to understand how the deportations to the death camps and the mass shootings on the spot were carried out. The material is also a very important source to learn the use of the Jewish labor. The SS and police documents allow us to make clear how the process of plundering the Jewish property on the territory of the district of Galicia took place. As a rule, the studying of these materials by Ukrainian scholars is additionally complicated because the documents are written mostly in the German language. So, this article is partially intended to make easier the possibility of the following studies on the fate of the Galician Jewish community. Our goal is to specify what kind of information we can use for the Holocaust studies.