Internationalism, patriotism and disillusion: Soviet Jewish veterans remember World War II and the Holocaust

To what extent did the Holocaust figure in the Soviet Union's struggle against the Nazi invaders in World War II? Soviet historiography tended to ignore or downplay the fate of the estimated 2,711,000 Russian Jews who perished. One reason for this was sensitivity about local collaboration in their murder. Another was the official view of the Holocaust as less the result of anti-Semitism than of capitalism. Those Jews who served in the Red Army did so not primarily as Jews but as Soviet citizens. A selection of extracts from oral histories with Jewish Soviet army veterans occupies the latter part of this paper.