In the Midst of Civilized Europe

In The Holocaust Before Hitler, Jeffrey Veidlinger, himself the son of a holocaust survivor, offers readers a vivid and disquieting examination of this forgotten pogrom, illuminating how the Russian Civil War created the preconditions for the genocidal violence that took place in the same towns and against the same people twenty-two years later. It is a groundbreaking work of history.The slaughter of over one hundred thousand Jews during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921, in the very same places in which the mass murders of the Holocaust began, has been largely forgotten. The Holocaust is rarely associated with the actual genocidal violence perpetrated against Jews in the wake of the Russian Revolution. There is barely a word about this bloodshed in any of the major histories of the Holocaust, nor in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or in Israels Yad Vashem. When the German Wehrmacht and mobile killing units rolled into Ukrainian towns in the summer of 1941 to exterminate Ukraines Jewish population, they were inserting themselves into a decades old battleground in which the mass murder of innocent Jews was a well-recognized pattern.