The first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia into the North Caucasus. Hoping to find safety, they came to a region the Soviets had struggled to pacify over the preceding 20 years of their rule. The Jewish refugees were in especially unfamiliar territory, as the North Caucasus had been mostly off-limits to Jews before the Soviets arrived, and most local Jewish communities were thus small. The region was not known as a hotbed of traditional antisemitism. Nevertheless, after occupying the North Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 1942, the Germans exterminated all the Jews they found - at least 30,000 - aided by local collaborators. While scholars have focused on local collaboration during the German occupation and on the subsequent Soviet deportations of entire North Caucasian ethnic groups, the region has largely escaped the attention of Holocaust researchers. This volume, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, addresses that gap. Contributors present richly documented essays on such topics as German killing operations, decision-making by Jewish refugees, local collaboration, rescue, and memory, taking care to integrate their findings into the broader contexts of Holocaust, North Caucasian, Russian, and Soviet history.

During the Nazi regime in Germany, all police forces were centralised under the command of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The political police (Gestapo), the criminal police (Kripo), and the security service (SD) were all brought together under the RSHA umbrella in 1939, commanded by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich. Using RSHA in Berlin as the centre, the web of Heydrich’s control extended into every corner of Nazi-occupied Europe. British and American intelligence agencies tried to get to grips with RSHA departments at the end of the war, knowing who was who and what they did, relying on what captured RSHA personnel told them along with intercepted documentation. To provide Allied intelligence officers in the field with accurate knowledge, the Counter Intelligence War Room (CIWR) was established to provide this information and list further Gestapo, Kripo, SD, and Abwehr officials to be arrested and interrogated. The informative CIWR reports used here give a precise examination of the RSHA by department, some detailing how Nazi jealousies and rivalries were more helpful to the Allied war effort than the Nazi cause - a portrayal of how Nazi Intelligence agencies went wrong.

On 27 May 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained Czech agents who had parachuted into Czechoslovakia. He died of his wounds on 4 June 1942. Two days later, Gestapo Captain Horst Kopkow's department at Reich National Security HQ was given fresh directions. From 6 June 1942 until the end of the war, Kopkow was responsible for coordinating the fight against Soviet and British parachute agents dropped anywhere in Germany or German-occupied territories. This new direction for Kopkow made his name. Within months the "Rote Kapelle" Soviet espionage ring was uncovered in Belgium, who could be traced directly to Berlin and Paris. A new counter-espionage fight had begun, and any agents caught would pay with their lives. In France and Holland the Gestapo caught many Special Operations Executive agents trained in Britain. By spring 1944 almost 150 British agents had been caught and deported to German concentration camps, and almost all had been murdered without trial by the December. Kopkow was directly involved in these murders. Arrested by British forces after the war, Kopkow was extensively interrogated due to his counter-espionage experience. For the next 20 years, Kopkow was a consultant for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.