Hitler's Basement: My Search For Truth, Light, And The Forgotten Executioners Of Ukraine's Kingdom Of Death

by Ron Vossler

Who murdered tens of thousands of Odessa's Jews in World War II? How was this terrible secret kept hidden for over three quarters of a century? And what connects those questions to a small town on the North Dakota prairie? Hitler's Basement provides the answers, as well as offering startling new perspectives on the Holocaust in an isolated region of Ukraine that Hitler called Transnistria. Part detective story, part redemptive quest, Hitler's Basement carries the reader deep into an ethnic labyrinth of guilt and memory to discover links between Soviet terror in the 1930s and the Holocaust in Transnistria, and how relatives of a German-speaking minority who didn't immigrate to the prairie became cogs in the Nazi machinery of death. In a shocking twist, the author traces one of the shadowy executioners to America, to his own Dakota hometown--and, finally, to the edges of his very own family.

386 pages, Paperback

Published January 14, 2016

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helps fill in an extremely important period for ethnic Germans in Russia, and by extension for the German-Russian community in North America. In the three years between Hitler's 1941 invasion of Russia and the expulsion of his armies, the NAZI machine enacted a ruthless plan to "cleanse" Eastern Europe of Jews and other "undesirables," as if these people were vermin whose existence polluted the landscape and hosted malignant diseases capable of contaminating all of human civilization. As Vossler shows, numerous ethnic Germans living in these territories were drawn into this plan of extermination. Their participation was all the more to be expected given the horrendous atrocities that the German-Russian communities had suffered under the hands of Soviet Communism, which the NAZI invasion was avenging.

Vossler relates how many of his fellow German-Russians resisted his discoveries about that period, and resented him for putting them forward. Their objections are human and understandable. But this book and the realities it points to are not going to go away. Having once recognized the nature and magnitude of Hitler's project, and having once seen the outlines of Vossler's evidence, it becomes impossible to imagine that large numbers of ethnic Germans in Russia were not participants in the NAZI campaign to remake Eastern Europe.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard teaching. Ron Vossler's investigation of the participation of Germans of the Black Sea colonies in the murder of Jews during Nazi occupation strikes close to home and is challenging to German-Russian collective memory. More extended review in the weekly feature, Plains Folk.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, disturbing, powerful, artfully written.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part deep research. This would have been a difficult book to write.