Commentary

        Research historian Tanja Penter was visiting from Heidelberg, Germany and welcomed at UCRDC on March 13-14, 2018, which included an interview. Ms. Penter was searching for materials on the Holodomor Famine Genocide in Soviet Ukraine 1932-33, particularly, first-hand diary accounts, personal letters or oral history interviews about violence perpetrated against individuals or groups of persons. Similarly, she was also keen to come across eye-witness accounts of Nazis and Soviets (and those complicit with them) to commit atrocities of personal violence in occupied Ukraine during World War II. First-hand accounts are preferred for their immediacy and accuracy of events over later made recollections, such as those found in memoirs, where memory sometimes could become compromised.

        Tanja Penter is a professor of Eastern European History at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research interests include: comparison of dictatorships, Soviet war crimes trials, questions of transitional justice and compensation for Nazi crimes and memory policies in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Her books include: Kohle für Stalin und Hitler. Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass 1929 bis 1953 (Essen 2010). She is a member of the German-Russian and the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians among other institutions.

        Prof. Penter was at the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs, to deliver a talk on March 14 entitled "Child victims and female perpetrators: Dealing with the Nazi-murder of disabled children in the post-war Soviet Union". In November 1943, shortly after the liberation of Nazi occupied Soviet Ukraine, three mass graves with the bodies of 144 disabled children were discovered in Zaporizhia oblast. They had been shot in two mass murder actions by a German SS special unit in October 1941 and in March 1943. Seven male and female former Soviet  employees of the disabled children's colony were put on trial and convicted for complicity with the Germans in the crime. The trial documentation in many ways presents a fascinating historical resource... from Munk School of Global Affairs U of T web-site.

        The Munk talk was sponsored by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, and the  Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at U of T.                                                             

                                                                        By John Pidkowich, UCRDC Board Member