“The biggest calamity that overshadowed all other calamities”: Recruitment of Ukrainian “Eastern workers” for the war economy of the Third Reich, 1941-1944

The thesis examines the recruitment of "Eastern workers" in Ukraine from the last months of 1941, when it began, to the very end of the Nazi occupation in 1943-44.

Chapter I approaches the recruitment as a process. It examines the bureaucratic mechanism of the recruitment of forced labor, its planning and execution on the local level as well as various regulations, ranging from registration and restriction of movement, which were supposed to limit the evasion of the labor duty and shipment of workers to Germany, to the all-out age-based draft in 1943.

Chapter II explores the recruitment more as a part of the history of mentality. It analyzes the German propaganda campaign to entice volunteers or, in the latter period, to dissuade the evasion, as well as the Ukrainians' responses to the recruitment. And Chapter III examines the brutalization of the recruitment and the practices of popular evasion.

The thesis demonstrates that the recruitment became the single most important event that turned the population against German rule. It became one of the chief factors leading to the growing perception of the Soviet regime by pre-1939 Soviet Ukrainians as the "lesser evil." In the long run it led to popular identification with the Soviet regime and acceptance of its narrative of the war. It facilitated the overshadowing of earlier Soviet brutalities in collective memory.