Harvest of Despair : Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule

Rating:
Summary: Better than most books on an overdone subject
Review: The author's main purpose seems to be to usurp the title of the recent film documentary called Harvest of Despair by Leonard Klady about the Great Ukrainian Famine-Holocaust of 1932-33, and to discredit the many well-documented facts and figures in the film. There is nothing like getting attention from your enemies. Mr. Berkhoff's book only confirms the importance of the documentary film, even as it sets out to castigate, once again, the Ukrainian people as anti-semitic nazi sympathizers and collaborators. While a number of individulas did engage in deplorable anti-Jewish activities, the insinuations that Ukrainians and others as people, as an ethnic group are somehow guilty and even, as Morley Safer once put it on "60 Minutes", "genetically anti-smitic", is totally irresponsible and unacceptable. The Holocaust business is extremely sensitive to competition, especially to any from Ukrainians. And that, I believe, is one of Mr. Berkhoff's reasons for his book.

Rating:
Summary: More a harvest of lies-Ukrainians were nazi corroborators
Review: What about all the Ukrainian atrocities and pogroms against the Jews while under German occupation (27,000 Jews killed in wetern Ukraine by July 1941)?

How about some history of Ukrainian auxiliaries and police wiping out whole villages of Jews on their own initiatives?

Has Ukraine ever owned up to her shameful historical past?