Leading British historian Anthony Beevor has described a Ukrainian ban on his award-winning book Stalingrad as “utterly outrageous”.
The bestselling history, winner of the 1999 Samuel Johnson prize, tells of the battle for the Russian city during the second world war. A Russian translation was one of 25 titles on a list of books banned by Ukrainian authorities last week, alongside books by authors including Boris Akunin and Boris Sokolov.
In 2016, Ukraine passed a law that banned books imported from Russia if they contained “anti-Ukrainian” content, with an “expert council” assessing titles for such content.
Committee for State TV and Radio Broadcasting’s licensing and distribution control department told Radio Free Europe (RFE) that the ban was imposed because of a passage that details how 90 Jewish children were shot by Ukrainian militia “to save the feelings of the Sonderkommando”, the work units made up of the Nazis’ death camp prisoners.
“It’s a provocation,” he told RFE. “When we checked the sources he used, we found out he used reports of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. It was enough to discuss the issue at expert council and we are happy they supported us.”
But Beevor said the source was not an internal Soviet document, but a book by the anti-Nazi German officer Helmuth Groscurth. The book is noted as a source in Stalingrad, and the quotes attributed to Groscurth are sourced to it. Beevor also pointed to a harrowing but corroborating description of the incident in the the 1988 collection of firsthand recollections The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen By Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.
“It’s utterly outrageous. They have no reason for doing it. It’s quite clear both in the Russian edition and English edition what the source was and where it came from – this rather brave and religious officer [Groscurth] who protested strongly, despite threats he would be reported to Himmler … about this massacre of the children. There’s no way the Soviets would even have known about it,” said Beevor.
But he said that the topic was “very close to the bone” for the Ukrainians. “Of course, during the second world war, many Ukrainians who suffered desperately during the famines … were thoroughly anti-Soviet and that’s why so many of them welcomed the Germans when they arrived and even volunteered to serve with the Germans. That’s still desperately embarrassing for Ukrainian nationalism today. So this is one reason obviously why they are so sensitive and raw-nerved about the whole thing,” he said.
