Lecture 42: World War II and Nazi German rule

Professor Paul Robert Magocsi — Ukraine: A History Course.

The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter is pleased to present a lecture series by Paul Robert Magocsi titled Ukraine: A History Course. Magocsi recorded 45 lectures in 2023 at the University of Toronto, where he holds the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and is a history and political science professor. He is also a Board Member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

Magocsi, one of the world’s leading experts on Ukraine, explores this fascinating country in all its complexity, from its history, culture, geography, politics, and multi-ethnic composition. The lectures are an important counterweight to Russian propaganda and explain Ukraine’s importance to global security today.

Time stamps are available for each lecture. Auto-translate is available in Ukrainian, major European, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.

Recordings of the lecture series were made possible with the support of the Temerty Foundation.

All the lectures are available on YouTube here.

6:21 Ukraine 1941–1944 map
7:54 The destruction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, 18 August 1941. The flooding killed up to 120,000 Ukrainians living downstream
8:36 Soviets dismantle and evacuate a factory in Zaporizhzhia, July 1941
9:47 map
14:09 Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk
18:34 Hans Frank, governor-general of Nazi Germany's Generalgouvernement, reviewing Galicia Division volunteers, L'viv
28:21 German officers in the special extermination task force (Einsatzgruppen) executing a Jew before a mass grave near Vinnytsia in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; German army mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) executing Ukrainian Jews near Ivangorod, Ukraine, 1942
29:29 Murder of Jews in Ukraine, 1941–1944 map; Hungarian gendarme checks a woman entering the Mukachevo ghetto, photo, April 1944
31:02 Supervised by the Nazis, Soviet POWs destroy the evidence of the massacre of Kyiv's Jews at Babyn Yar, October 1943
32:45 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi; Children under the care of Studite monks, Monastery of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary at Univ. Three are Jewish, saved by Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi, including Levko Chaminski (Dr. Leon Chameides of Connecticut), 3rd row, 3rd from the left. Photo, fall 1943
35:29 Adolf Hitler meets with Erich Koch, chief Nazi official near Vinnytsia, Ukraine, summer 1942
36:35 Erich Koch
40:13 Ukrainians from the Cherkasy region being deported to Greater Germany as forced laborers in the Ostarbeiter program, 1942
42:34 Taras Bulba-Borovets
45:55 A Polish-inhabited village in Volhynia burned down by the Ukrainian Insurgnt Army, summer 1941; A Ukrainian-inhabited village in Volhynia burned down by Polish guerilla forces, summer 1943
46:53 Units of the Soviet Ukrainian partisan commander, Sydir Kovpak, during a daring raid into the Carpathian Mountains, June 1943

For further information, you may wish to consult: A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Robert Paul Magocsi
Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada, September 2023.