SUMMARY:

The article studies the treatment of the Karaites by the Nazi occupiers in Ukraine, particularly in Kharkiv. It describes a paradoxical situation when an ethnoconfessional group could enter into negotiations with the Nazis regarding its fate, and a political decision regarding this matter made at the highest level was not communicated down the line by the notorious “German bureaucracy.” Massacred in some locations along with Jews, in other places, or in other periods of time, the Karaites were granted the same rights as local gentile populations, so that Jews sought to procure certificates of their “Karaite” origins as a way to legalize themselves. Karaite community leaders composed memos for the Nazi authorities with references to studies by prerevolutionary Russian physical anthropologists who argued that Karaites were “racially different” from the Jews, as well as to the imperial practice of legal nondiscrimination against Karaites. These memos were accepted by the Nazis and spared Karaites’ lives, but when the highest Nazi administrative organs followed the same logic in establishing the Karaites’ non-Jewish status, it did not stop Einsatzgruppen from eliminating Karaites in multiple locations across Ukraine, including Kharkiv. The case of the Karaites offers a more nuanced view of modern population classification in the region and the limits to the effectiveness of a modern – Nazi – state.