Roman Shliakhtych

Fellows from Ukraine (03/2024-05/2024)

Involvement of Local Police in the Holocaust on the Territory of the Southeast of Ukraine (On the Example of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson Regions)

Research of the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust has been neglected by Ukrainian historians for a long time. It was assumed that only the Nazis committed crimes in the occupied territories. These crimes were indeed initiated by the Nazis, but their scale would have been much smaller without the participation of local perpetrators. This project involves researching the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust. The project methodology is a history from below. It is planned to show the activities of the local auxiliary police through the eyes of the police, as well as of eyewitnesses and people who managed to escape. Such an approach will reveal behavior patterns of criminals, their victims, and outside observers. It will also make it possible to understand the motives of criminals, as well as to reconstruct the crimes themselves. It is also planned to involve the methods of social psychology for a more complete reconstruction of the functioning of the collective of local police officers and the relations within such a collective.

Roman Shliakhtych was born in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. In 2006 he finished his MA as Teacher of History and Law at the Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University. In 2011 he received his Candidate degree in History (equivalent to a Ph.D) at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy", Ukraine. Since 2021 he is a docent at the Department of Social-Humanitarian Science at the State University of Economy and Technology, Kryvyi Rih. Shliakhtych is the author of two monographs and published more than 40 studies in professional publications. Since 2014, he has been researching the participation of local policemen in the Holocaust on the territory of the Reichskommissariat "Ukraine". During this time, he was a fellow at leading Holocaust research centers such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yahad-In Unum, etc. Since 2023 he is a doctoral student of the Dnipro National University named after O. Honchara