Roman Shliakhtych

VWI Fortunoff Research Fellow (10/2025 – 07/2026)

Involvement of local policemen in the implementation of the Holocaust policy on the territory of the ‘Reichskommissariat Ukraine’

The role of local police in the Holocaust has long been neglected in Ukrainian historiography, which often attributed crimes in the occupied territories solely to the Nazis. While indeed Nazi-led, these atrocities relied heavily on local perpetrators, whose participation greatly amplified their scale. This project examines the social history of the Holocaust in Ukraine, focusing on the behaviour, motives, and roles of auxiliary police and local authorities in the discrimination, exploitation, and extermination of Jews. It reconstructs patterns of involvement, exploring how different auxiliary police units participated in violence, and uses methods of sociology and psychology to analyse the motives behind such actions. Drawing on eyewitness and survivor testimonies, particularly on video evidence from the Fortunoff Archive, it offers a deeper understanding of how local collaboration functioned at the grassroots level. By uncovering the strategies and choices of these actors, the study sheds new light on the complex dynamics of complicity and the human dimensions of mass violence in occupied Ukraine.

Roman Shliakhtych is a lecturer in the Department of Social-Humanitarian Science at the State University of Economy and Technology in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Since 2023, he has been a doctoral student at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, researching the involvement of members of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in the implementation of Holocaust policy in the ‘Reichskommissariat Ukraine’. Roman is the author of two monographs, and over fourty scholarly works. He has been a fellow at leading Holocaust research centres, such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yahad-In Unum, and, from 2023 to 2024, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

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