Ukraine

Ukraine occupies two connected positions in the novel’s eastern geography: it is a territory the Reich presents as available for German settlement, and part of the wider landscape of war and organized persecution exposed by the documents Xavier March investigates. The contrast between promotional claims of prosperity and reports of deprivation makes the place a measure of the distance between official narratives and lived realities under Nazi rule.

Territory and the Eastern War

The Reich’s news presents Ukraine as a theater of continuing conflict. A report describes fighting on the Siberian Front and the execution in Rovno, capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, of five people accused of organizing the killing of a German settler family. The newspaper places the report alongside news of a new German nuclear submarine, converting violence in the east into part of a triumphant state narrative.

That narrative has a longer background in March’s recollection of the postwar order. After Germany’s 1946 peace with the United States, the conflict had dwindled into guerrilla warfare on the margins of the empire, including the struggle against Soviet-backed forces east of the Urals. The fighting is described as still grinding on twenty years later. Ukraine therefore appears not as a settled imperial possession but as territory within a prolonged and costly conflict.

Settlement Promises and Reported Conditions

The East Ministry’s weekly appeals invite Germans to move to the General Government with promises of a free farmstead and income guaranteed for five years. Their advertisements picture prosperous colonists. Reports that have filtered back contradict the sales pitch: settlers face poor soil and exhausting work, and must return to drab satellite towns by dusk for fear of local partisans.

The novel explicitly ranks the General Government as worse than Ukraine, Ostland, and Muscovy, making Ukraine a point of comparison within a broader hierarchy of occupied eastern territories. The contrast is significant: the state’s settlement program presents eastern land as a birthright and a route to comfort, while the conditions reported from the region reveal hardship and insecurity. The appeal also links personal opportunity to the Reich’s expansionist system, in which settlement is promoted across conquered territory.

Ukraine in the Evidence of Mass Murder

Ukraine is also placed within the geographical scope of the “Final Solution” described in the Wannsee conference minutes. The document counts nearly three million Ukrainian Jews among the populations covered by the plan, a figure that makes clear that its reach extends far beyond Germany. In the same records, the conference’s administrative language describes forced movement eastward and the exploitation of those deemed capable of labor.

The minutes preserve evidence of the policy’s practical development. Reinhard Heydrich’s handwritten amendments strike at the account of mass-shooting as an inadequate method, while Rudolf Lange’s report compares shootings near Riga, gas trucks at Kulmhof, and Zyklon B experiments at Auschwitz. Ukraine’s named population count sits within this record of decisions that turned persecution into a system of deportation and killing; the document’s bureaucratic categories conceal the human consequences behind totals and procedures.

The Camp Inspection and the Administrative System

Martin Luther’s inspection notes provide a further view of the killing system described in the documents March reads. At Auschwitz, a transport of Jews from France arrives in freight cars; nearly two thousand people are then directed along separate routes, with those considered able to work sent toward the work camp and the rest led to a concealed killing facility. The notes record the killing operation, the processing of possessions and hair, and the cremation of bodies. This is evidence about Auschwitz rather than a scene set in Ukraine, but it clarifies the broader machinery within which the minutes’ population figures, including those for Ukrainian Jews, must be understood.

The records also show how administrative routines extended beyond killing itself. A 1942 circular orders concentration-camp human hair to be collected and put to industrial use, including the making of socks for U-boat crews and felt stockings for railways; monthly quantities are to be reported separately for female and male hair. Read beside the camp inspection and conference minutes, this instruction exposes the connection between classification, killing, and resource extraction. Ukraine’s significance in the novel thus lies not in a single described local episode, but in its place within an imperial project whose public promises, military violence, and bureaucratic crimes are revealed through competing accounts.