Nazi Terrorists in Ukraine

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The preparation of this volume would not have been possible without the cooperation of the contributors, which is deeply appreciated. Gratefully acknowledged also is the assistance of Roman Szporluk and Romas Vastokas; Wasyl Veryha, who helped compile the chronology of events and made valuable suggestions; David Springer of the Chicago law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, who prepared the legal bibliography; Taras Pidzamecky, who allowed the use of his translations; the staff of the National Ethnic Archives at the Public Archives of Canada; Taras Hunczak, who discovered some of the rare photographs reproduced in this volume; and Myroslav Yurkevich, Boris Balan, Leonid Heretz, James Mace, and Roman Senkus, who provided much useful advice.

Permission to print previously published or forthcoming material was granted by Macmillan Press, London (for Bohdan Krawchenko's essay), and by Peter Potichnyj and Yevhen Shtendera (for selections from their forthcoming book, "The Political Thought of the Ukrainian Underground"). The map by Luba Prokop is courtesy of Bohdan Vitvitsky. Gratitude is also expressed to Petro Sodol, Stepan Welhash, Nestor Mykytyn, Wasyl Veryha, and others for their help in providing photographs. The contribution of Sylvia Pellman and the staff at the Office Works, who very ably handled the word processing, is gratefully acknowledged, as is the assistance of Laurie Lewis at the University of Toronto Press. Thanks are extended to all those who helped organize the symposium: Danylo Husar Struk; Yvonne Ivanochko, Myroslav Bodnaruk, and the Board of Directors of St. Vladimir Institute; Stepan Dnytzkyj, who made audiotapes of the symposium proceedings and provided copies; Yury Luhovy, Zorianna Hrycenko Luhova, and their assistants from Concordia University, who videotaped the proceedings; and the following members of the Ukrainian Students' Club at the University of Toronto: Andrij Chabursky, Roman Dubczak, Marta Dyczok, Danylo Dzikewicz, Natalia Lebedynsky, Christine Mushka, Peter Opar, Daria Skidaniuk, and Jeffrey Stephaniuk.

Advice and assistance at an earlier stage was kindly provided by Victor Goldbloom, president, Canadian Council of Christians and Jews; Olga Fuga; Olenka Demianczuk; Halya Kuchmij; Luba Zaraska; John Armstrong; Ihor Kamenetsky; David Roth, American Jewish Committee; the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee (Toronto); Cosbild Investment Corporation; S & B Realty; Yaroslav and Luba Osmak; the So-Use, Toronto, and Buduchnistcreditunions; Community Trust; the Taras Shevchenko Foundation; and the Ukrainian Studies Endowment Fund, York University.

Finally, special thanks are owing to numerous individual donors, to Manoly R. Lupul, director, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, who gave editorial and financial support, and to Roman Waschuk and Andriy Wynnyckyj for their research assistance.

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CONTRIBUTORS

MARK R. ELLIOTT, professor of history, Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky, is the author of Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America's Role in Their Repatriation and numerous articles on World War II.

TARAS HUNCZAK, professor of history, Rutgers University, is the author of Symon Petliura and the Jews: A Reappraisal and editor of Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution; Ukrainian Socio-Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (with Roman Solchanyk); and The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UP A) in Light of German Documents, 1942-45.

BOHDAN KRAWCHENKO, assistant director, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, is the author of Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine and editor of Ukraine after Shelest.

ROMAN KUPCHINSKY, president, Prolog Research Corporation, New York City, is the editor of Pogrom in Ukraine, 1972-1979 and The National Question in the USSR: Documents.

MYRON KUROPAS, former special assistant for ethnic affairs to President Gerald R. Ford, is the author of The Ukrainians in America; To Preserve a Heritage: The Story of the Ukrainian Immigration in the United States; and The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations (forthcoming).

DAVID MATAS, a Winnipeg lawyer, is senior legal counsel for the League for Human Rights, B'nai B'rith Canada, and former head of the Canadian Bar Association's International Law Committee. He has written several studies on the Canadian legal system and its role in prosecuting Nazi war criminals allegedly residing in Canada.

PETER J. POTICHNYJ, professor of political science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, is the co-author (with Howard Aster) of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations: Two Solitudes. Among his edited works are Poland and Ukraine: Past and Present; Chronicle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (with Yevhen Shtendera); and the forthcoming Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective (with Howard Aster).

ROMAN SERBYN, professor of history, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, is chairman of the Ukrainian Information and Anti-Defamation Commission (IADC), Montreal.

OREST SUBTELNY, professor of history and political science, York University, Toronto, is the author of The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the 18th Century and Domination of Eastern Europe: Foreign Absolutism and Native Nobilities, 1500-1715.

MYROSLAV YURKEVICH, research associate, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, is a specialist on Ukrainian Political movements and political thought. He is currently completing a major study of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

S. PAUL ZUMBAKIS, an attorney in private practice in Chicago, is a member of the American, Chicago, and Illinois bar associations and of the Association of Trial Lawyers in America. He has acted on behalf of defendants in trials initiated by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

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LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

• 1 Signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
• 2 & 3 Mass grave of victims of NKVD purges in Vinnytsia
• 4 & 5 Residents of Lviv identifying bodies of NKVD victims
• 6 Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky
• 7 Founders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
• 8 Andrii Melnyk, leader of the Melnyk faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
• 9 Volodymyr Kubiiovych, leader of the Ukrainian Central Committee in the General gouvernement
• 10 Stepan Bandera, leader of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
• 11 Roman Shukhevych, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
• 12 Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
• 13 Erich Koch, Reichskommissar of Ukraine
• 14 Hans Frank, Governor-General of Occupied Poland and Western Ukraine, and Alfred Bisanz, head of the Military Committee of the Galician Division
• 15 Otto Wachter, Governor of the District of Galicia
• 16 Kommando unit of Einsatzgruppe D in Drohobych
• 17 SS proclamation of death sentences against Ukrainians
• 18 Nazi execution of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
• 19 Survivors among the dead of Dora concentration camp

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PART I: Ukraine during World War II.

1. OCCUPATION

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INTRODUCTION

In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, the territory inhabited by the Ukrainian people was divided among four states: the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in the same year, the USSR seized Western Ukraine from Poland and with the assistance of German diplomacy soon wrested Bukovyna from Romania. In these newly acquired regions the Soviets applied severe measures similar to those which had served to solidify Stalinist rule in the rest of the USSR: national organizations were prohibited; ethnic Poles, politicians, and intellectuals were arrested and deported to Siberia; and preparations were made for the collectivization of agriculture. At the same time, in order to justify their forcible annexation of these territories, Soviet authorities promoted some Ukrainians to managerial and governmental posts that had been denied them under Polish and Romanian rule.

[n order to understand fully the war's origins and its unprecedented barbarity, one must look to the 1920s and 1930s. Roman Szporluk, a specialist on Eastern European history and national movements, has argued that World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution unleashed two major forces. that transformed Eastern Europe: political and nationalist exclusivity, and Stalinist class war. These forces led, in turn, to a profound crisis of national identity and legitimacy during the interwar period. Few states, including the Soviet Union, recognized the legitimacy of the Versailles Treaty. At the same time, some of the newly created nation states in Eastern Europe (for example, Poland and Lithuania) focused their political agenda on nation-building, identifying the political interests of the state with a particular national group. Whether the nations of Eastern Europe acted from a fascist, Stalinist, nationalist, or class political perspective, the goal was the same: to change the status quo.

But if these nations were recalcitrant, so too were the many minorities in Eastern Europe who did not emerge from World War I with a nation-state of their own and thus felt no allegiance to their new governments. Moreover, the dominant national groups in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (especially the Poles and the Russians) did not regard the minorities within their borders as equals but sought their enforced assimilation.

During the 1930s a bitter and at times violent struggle took place among the peoples of Eastern Europe, disguised, in Roman Szporluk's words, as "war by other means." 1 In the Soviet Union, Stalin purged the party of non-Russian cadres, declared war on the non-Russian peasantry, and rescinded rights that had previously been granted to minorities. In Poland, discrimination against the Jewish, Belorussian, and Ukrainian minorities became institutionalized. Poles were encouraged, for example, not to patronize Jewish merchants and shopkeepers, while social mobility, better paying jobs, and education became dependent on ethnic or national background. The culmination of this process were campaigns of violence directed against Ukrainians and the 1937-8 pogroms against Jews. These class and national tensions culminated in the tragic events of 1939-45.

Collaboration with a power seeking to challenge political authority in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union therefore seemed the only real alternative to some Ukrainians and other minorities. Not owing allegiance to any state, some minorities looked to any political movement, ideology, or state that promised or allowed them national self-determination. Many political groups believed that their own political agenda for national independence could be achieved through the expected struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union.

That this hope proved futile for Ukrainians and others is a matter of historical record. Nevertheless, their motivations must be placed within this historical context. To understand this crisis of legitimacy and identity in interwar Eastern Europe is to better appreciate issues that are still with us today and are the focus of part 1.

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Note

1 Roman Szporluk, "War By Other Means," Slavic Review 44, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 20-26. For another recent view on this period, see Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, 1848-1945 (London, 1983).

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The Soviet Occupation of Western Ukraine, 1939-41: An Overview
by Orest Subtelny

When the North American media deal with the topic of occupied Europe during World War II, they usually present a predictable, if substantially correct, image of countries overrun by Nazi armies, populations terrorized by the Gestapo, summary executions, and concentration camps. The behaviour of the occupied peoples is also depicted in standard fashion: the "good" people invariably resisted the Nazis while the "bad" collaborated. The essence of this version of the war is that the Nazis were the universal and exclusive enemy and that the only acceptable behaviour during World War II was to fight against them.

This position is valid in certain respects but misleading in others. Although the Nazi regime was generally despised, its oppressiveness varied from country to country. Some countries were brutalized more than others. And while a small minority in the occupied lands joined the anti-Nazi resistance or chose to collaborate with the Germans, the vast majority engaged neither in heroics nor in evil deeds. Most people in the occupied lands simply tried to survive. But perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the popular North American view of occupied Europe is the implication that only the Nazis brutalized the lands which they occupied.

Many peoples of Eastern Europe, among them the Estonians, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Western Ukrainians were persecuted not only by the Nazis but also by the Soviets. Tens of thousands were murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as well as by the Gestapo, and hundreds of thousands more were dispatched to Nazi concentration camps and to the Soviet Gulag. In 1939-41, it was the Soviets who first inflicted the horrors of occupation on much of Eastern Europe. After the Nazi regime was defeated in 1944, the Soviets returned once again to these Eastern European lands with their own brand of inhumanity.

For the Balts, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, foreign occupation during World War II presented a more complex problem than for the other occupied nations of Europe. Some tried to resist both the Nazis and the Soviets. (The Ukrainian Insurgent Army is a case in point.) Others considered this policy unrealistic and argued for the need, no matter how distasteful, of siding with one totalitarian regime in order to withstand the other. Since the Soviets had already occupied their lands once and were about to do so again, they were perceived by many Eastern Europeans as the greater long-term threat; hence the Baltic, Belorussian, and Ukrainian units that fought in the German army on the anti-Soviet front.

Unfortunately, the North American media have shown little appreciation for the unique dilemma of peoples caught between the Nazi and Soviet regimes. They judge the behaviour of BaIts, Belorussians, and Ukrainians in World War II according to the political context of Western Europe, where the Nazis were the sole enemy. This approach has led to irresponsible accusations of "collaboration," made by those who had obvious choices in World War II against those whose alternatives were less clear-cut and, consequently, more difficult to make. It is therefore important to focus on the "other side" of the occupation issue during World War II and to examine the conditions prevailing under Soviet rule and during the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine in 1939-41.

PRELUDE TO OCCUPATION: THE HITLER-STALIN PACT

On 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one of the most astonishing treaties of the twentieth century. As a result of the pact, the two heretofore bitterly antagonistic regimes secretly reached an understanding that, in the view of many historians, led directly to the outbreak of World War II. The major components of this treaty were a declaration of nonaggression, friendship, and co-operation; a trade agreement whereby the Soviets were to supply the raw materials necessary for the Nazi war machine in return for German technological help and machinery; and a secret protocol, the most important part of the treaty. This protocol divided Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, along with Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine (the latter two areas belonged to Poland at the time), were to be handed over to the Soviets, while the remainder of Poland and a part of Lithuania were assigned to the Germans.

Why did Stalin agree to sign a treaty which allowed Hitler to begin the most terrible war in history? Why, in the months that followed, did the Soviets faithfully and regularly supply the Nazi war machine, engaged against the Western Allies, with raw materials? And why did co-operation between the two regimes go so far that officers of the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD regularly met to deal with matters of mutual interest? 2 In short, why did the Soviets, for a period of almost two years, collaborate with the Nazis?

When these questions are put to the Soviets and their sympathizers, the response is usually that the collaboration was necessary because it served Soviet interests at the time. This view has some validity. In 1939, faced with diplomatic isolation, the Soviet leadership might have felt that it had few options other than to strike a political deal with Hitler. Today, Western scholars and the Western media in general are quite willing to take into account the Soviet dilemma and often obligingly bypass this embarrassing episode in the Soviet past.

This understanding attitude, this willingness to forgive and forget the Hitler-Stalin pact is noteworthy, especially today when the sensitive issue of collaboration has been brought up again, because it reflects a blatant double standard: while Soviet collaboration with the Nazis is explained away by both the Soviets and Westerners, the collaboration of various Eastern European peoples, which was on a much smaller scale, is denounced by the Soviets and the Western media as one of the worst crimes of the century. The same authorities who argue that one must take into account the context of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the problems that the Soviets faced in 1939 find it difficult to appreciate the context in which the Balts, Ukrainians, and others acted and the political dilemmas they had to face. Even more hypocritical is the attitude of the Soviets, who for years have been in the forefront of those who have made accusations of collaborationism.

The impact of the Hitler-Stalin pact on Ukrainians was to assign about 4.5 million Western Ukrainians, most of whom had previously lived under Polish rule, to the Soviet Union, without any choice or consultation. Nothing could have been worse for Western Ukrainians. Of all Ukrainians, they were the most fiercely nationalistic and desirous of independent statehood. And of all the great powers in Europe, none of whom cared the slightest about Ukrainian national aspirations, the Soviet Union was the most implacable enemy of Ukrainian nationalism and independence. Thus, on basic political issues, Western Ukrainians and the Soviets were uncompromisingly opposed to one other.

Western Ukrainian anti-Sovietism, however, was based not only on political and ideological differences. Only six years earlier, in 1932-3, millions of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union had starved to death as a result of Stalin's determination to carry out collectivization at all costs. And in 1937-8, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were either executed or exiled to Siberian concentration camps during the purges. 3 Western Ukrainians therefore had good reason to fear the arrival of the Soviets in Galicia, and their fears proved to be well-founded.

SOVIET OCCUPATION

On 17 September 1939 the Soviet armies entered Western Ukraine. This first Soviet occupation, which lasted twenty-one months, can be divided into two distinct phases.4 In the early phase the Soviets went out of their way to "win the hearts and minds" of the populace. Actually, they had little choice but to follow such a policy at the outset. Their formal justification for the occupation was that Soviet collaboration with the Nazis in the dismemberment of Poland was motivated by the desire to aid its oppressed minorities, the Ukrainians and Belorussians.

During this initial phase, the Soviets tried to impress Western Ukrainians with their regime's ostensible Ukrainianism. Soviet troops were led into Galicia by a general with an obviously Ukrainian name - Semen Tymoshenko. The segment of the Soviet armed forces that entered Galicia was called the Ukrainian Front. These symbolic gestures were meant to indicate that what was occurring was not a foreign invasion but a case of Ukrainians coming to the aid of fellow Ukrainians. The Soviets also put on a great show of being democratic. On 22 October 1939 they organized an election during which the populace was strongly encouraged to vote for the single slate of candidates supporting the annexation of Western Ukraine to the Soviet Union. (After World War II, similar "democratic" elections would take place in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland.)

Some early Soviet policies, when compared with those of the Poles, were an improvement for the Ukrainians.5 Ukrainian culture, severely repressed by the Poles, was allowed to flower. Ukrainian became the official language of Western Ukraine. Great efforts were made to improve the school system. And whereas the Poles had discouraged Ukrainians from entering universities, the Soviets allowed Ukrainians to obtain a higher education and Ukrainianized the universities. Health care improved. But perhaps the most popular measure was the Soviet expropriation of the Polish landlords and the promise to redistribute the land among the peasants.

Yet simultaneously with these reforms, steps were taken to deprive Western Ukrainians of the means for political self-expression. When the Soviets first arrived, they undertook a systematic campaign of arrests and deportations eastward of the Western Ukrainian political leadership. Politicians who were not arrested were forced to flee to German-occupied Poland. The largest Ukrainian political parties, which were centrist and relatively liberal, were disbanded. These measures resulted in the elimination in Western Ukraine of individuals and political parties representing middle-of-the-road, liberal tendencies. Western Ukrainians were left with only one viable political organization - the underground network of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Along with the growing numbers of arrests and deportations came other repellent aspects of the Soviet regime. Even before Galicia was formally incorporated into the USSR, the Soviets introduced their own administrative structure and laws. During 1940 they began to dismantle systematically almost all of the educational, cultural, and economic institutions that Western Ukrainians had laboriously developed over generations and in the face of strong Polish opposition. Thus, the occupation forces set out to destroy the entire infrastructure of Western Ukrainian society. 6

At the same time, the less attractive side of the early Soviet reforms became more evident. Lands that had been expropriated from Polish landlords and "given" to the peasants did not remain in their hands; instead, the Communists forced the peasants to combine their holdings in collective farms. Thus, the same intensely hated collectivization that had cost millions of lives in Soviet Ukraine was imposed on the Western Ukrainian peasantry. At this point, the vast majority of the peasantry, which had long been wary of the invaders, turned against them. The intelligentsia, many of whom were initially pleased by the jobs they found in the educational and cultural institutions, soon realized that they were expected to act as mouthpieces for ever more blatant Soviet propaganda, and that refusal to do so could mean arrest and deportation.

Because of the Western Ukrainians' strong commitment to their church, the Soviets initially treated the Ukrainian Catholic Church with a great deal of circumspection. They did not attempt to ban it but simply imposed what at first appeared to be relatively minor restrictions. However, in time these restrictions became more onerous. Priests were forced to carry special passports identifying them as clergy and were impeded in their attempts to fulfill their duties. The clergy was also saddled with much higher taxes. Anti-religious propaganda, present from the outset, steadily increased. By late 1940 it was evident that the future boded ill for the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

In the spring of 1940 the Soviets dropped their democratic guise, and repressions against both Ukrainians and Poles began on a massive scale. The most widespread and feared measures were the deportations. Without warning, without trial, even without formal accusations, thousands of supposed enemies of the people were arrested, usually at night, packed into cattle cars, and shipped to Siberia and Kazakhstan to work as slave labourers under horrible conditions. Many of the deportees, whose numbers included entire families, perished.

Who were these "enemies of the people"? The first waves of deportees consisted of leading politicians, industrialists, landowners, merchants, bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, retired officers, and priests. Later, in cooperation with Nazi officials, the Soviet authorities also rounded up the families of Ukrainian political activists and the 20-30,000 Ukrainians who had fled to German-occupied Poland. However, anyone vaguely suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian nationalism was liable to arrest. In the final stages, the deportations, which grew constantly in scale and brutality, seemed to lose all rhyme or reason. People who had relatives abroad or received letters from abroad (and almost every Western Ukrainian had relatives or friends in Canada or the United States), who were visiting friends when they were arrested, who were denounced for purely personal reasons or who, by accident, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were deported. The fear aroused by the deportations was described by an eyewitness:

During the war all of us had gotten used to the idea of death. When our town was bombed, many people got used to the bombing. They said that if someone was fated to die from a bomb, there was no way to avoid it. Therefore, instead of hiding in shelters, they moved about in the streets, oblivious to the shooting.... However, these very same people would lose their composure when they heard news that "the Bolsheviks will be shipping more out in the next few days". And no wonder. Those words encompassed one of the most horrible techniques of Bolshevik terror. 7

The deportations occurred in three waves. In December 1939 they were still selective and encompassed primarily the former leadership and elite. But on 13 and 14 April 1940 a new wave began that included vast numbers of people. "From then on," a survivor wrote, "no one, literally no one, was sure whether his turn would not come the next night." The final and most extensive wave of deportation occurred in June 1941, when the panic-stricken and suspicious Soviets herded thousands of arbitrarily chosen people on trains and shipped them eastward. Estimates of the population losses in Western Ukraine, which must rest on Soviet sources, are obviously difficult to come by. The Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, in a letter to the Vatican dated 7 November 1941, provided the following statistics: in the Lviv eparchy alone an estimated 200,000 Ukrainians had been jailed, forcibly evacuated, or executed. He put the losses of Ukrainian population for Galicia as a whole at approximately 400,000. The Polish government-in-exile in London placed total population losses for Poles, Ukrainians, and others in the Soviet-occupied areas of the former Polish state at about 1.5 million people. 8

The deportations, however, were not the worst of what the Soviet occupation inflicted upon Western Ukraine. A journalist who witnessed the final days of this occupation recalled how the NKVD carried out widespread massacres of political prisoners shortly before it fled the invading Germans:

During the twenty-one-month Bolshevik rule in Western Ukraine we had ample opportunities to become well acquainted with all the tricks of the Red regime and all of the repressions it inflicted upon the innocent population. People from Western Europe simply could not imagine the methods which they [the Soviets] applied. However, it was only in the final week of their stay in Lviv that we realized the extremes of horror and sadism that the cruelty of the Bolsheviks was capable of reaching. 9

Months before the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war, the NKVD began to arrest increasing numbers of people suspected of being potentially politically unreliable. However, the sudden advance of the Germans into Galicia caught the NKVD by surprise, and it did not have time to evacuate prisoners. The solution applied was simple and brutal: during the week of 22-29 June 1941 the NKVD set about slaughtering the inmates of its prisons, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for minor or major offences, or whether they were already convicted or merely awaiting questioning. Major massacres occurred in the following places: in Lviv (about 1,500 victims), in Sambir (about 1,200), in Stanyslaviv (about 2,500), in Zolochiv (about 800), in Chortkiv (about 800), and Dobromyl (about 500). These figures do not include the many small towns and villages where dozens of prisoners died. Thus, an estimated 10,000 prisoners were killed in Galicia. In neighbouring Volhynia, particularly in the towns of Rivne and Lutske, about 5,000 more were executed. 10

It was not only the numbers of the executed but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had been tortured before death; others were killed en masse. In Sambir on 26 June 1941 the NKVD dynamited two large cells crammed with female prisoners. In Stanyslaviv three huge cells were stacked to the ceiling with corpses that were so badly decomposed that no attempt was made to bury them. The townspeople simply cemented up the cells. In Zolochiv the people found cells full of mutilated bodies next to torture chambers strewn with tongues, ears, eyes, and tufts of hair. 11] These and similar findings, coming on the heels of months of growing terror, filled Western Ukrainians with a deep revulsion for the Soviets and reinforced their conviction that the Soviets were, and would always be, their worst enemy. These experiences later encouraged Ukrainians to join the German fight against the Soviets, and these bitter memories of 1939-41 impelled tens of thousands of Western Ukrainians to flee their homeland in 1944 when the Soviets were about to occupy it again.

In analyzing the events of 1939-41 in Western Ukraine, three points are most important. First, because Western Ukrainians had to deal with not one but two alien totalitarian invaders during World War II, they were forced to make choices that other peoples did not have to confront. Second, based on very recent and painful experiences - the Soviet crushing of attempts to establish Ukrainian independence in 1917-20, the famine of 1933, the purges of the 1930s, and especially the occupation of 1939-41 - Ukrainians had good reason to view the Soviets as their primary enemy and, after the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, as the greatest threat they would face in the future. Third, when many Western Ukrainians chose to side with the Germans to fight against the Soviets, they acted in what they perceived to be their best interests, as have other nations in similar circumstances.

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Notes:

1 For literature on the pact, see George Kennan, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1941 (New York, 1960); Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1967 (New York, 1968); for a Soviet viewpoint, see AA Gromyko and B.N. Ponomarev, eds., Istoriia vneshnei politiki SSSR, 1917-1975, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1966-).

2 "Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Judischer Verfolgter des Naziregirnes," Bulletin of Information, no. 25 (1985): 6.

3 On Soviet rule in Ukraine, including the famine and the purges, see Ewald Ammende, Human Life in Russia (Oeveland, 1984; reprint); Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (Harmondsworth, 1971); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (New York, 1985); Hryhory Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror (1929-1939) (Munich, 1960); Boris Levytsky, The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Service, 1917-70 (London, 1971); James Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Semen O. Pidhainy, ed., The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1953-5); and Olexa Woropay, The Ninth Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

4 For further discussion of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, see John Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2d rev. ed. (Littleton, Colo., 1980); the memoirs of Kost Pankivsky, Vid derzhavy do komitetu. (Lito 1941 u Lvovz) (New York-Toronto, 1957); Volodymyr Kubiiovych, Ukraintsi v Heneralnii hubernii, 1939-1941 (Chicago, 1975); the very valuable collection of memoirs of the Soviet occupation edited by Milena Rudnytska, Zakhidnia Ukra ina pid bolshevykamy (New York, 1958); and Hryhorii Vashchenko, "Vyzvolennia Zakhidnoi Ukrainy bolshevykamy," Ukrainskyi zbirnyk, vol. 1 (Munich, 1954),67-77. See also a useful overview by David Marples, "The Ukraine in World War II," Radio Liberty Research Bulletin, Radio Liberty Supplement 1185, 6 May 1985, 1-26. On the Soviet Union's treatment of Poles and Jews, see the following: Wladyslaw Studnicki, Das ostliche Polen (Kitzingen-Main, 1953); Z. Sobieski, "Reminiscences from Lwow, 1939-1946," Journal of Central European Affairs 6, no. 4 (1947): 350-74; Shimon Redlich, "The Jews in the Soviet Annexed Territories, 1939-41," Soviet Jewish Affairs 1, no. 1 (June 1971): 81-90; and Dov Levin, "The Jews and the Inception of Soviet Rule in Bukovina," Soviet Jewish Affairs 6, no. 2 (1976): 52-70. Especially enlightening and valuable materials may be found in Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross, eds., War Through Children's Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-1941 (Stanford, 1981).

5 For a Soviet treatment of their reforms in Western Ukraine, see V. Varetsky, Sotsialistychni peretvorennia u zakhidnykh oblastiakh URSR (Kiev, 1960).

6 On the Soviet dismantling of Ukrainian institutions, see Rudnytska, Zakhidnia Ukraina, 111-255.

7 Ibid., 453.

8 Cited in ibid., 456, n. 1. Some Polish sources put the estimated number of deportees even higher. For example, Wladyslaw Studnicki, in Panowanie Rosji Radzieckej w Polsce Wschodniej, 1939-1941 (Warsaw, 1943), argued that as many as 1.8 million were deported from Poland's eastern territories. This estimate, however, seems to be greatly exaggerated.

9 Rudnytska, Zakhidnia Ukraina, 465.

10 Ibid., 465-92. Most of the statistics cited by Rudnytska come from reports published in the newspaper Ukrainski shchodenni visti, which began to appear in the first week of July 1941. On pages 472-6 Rudnytska provides a list of well-known Western Ukrainians who were either executed or deported by the Soviets. For more statistical information on the numbers of executed, see Volodymyr Kubiiovych, ed., Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva (Munich-New York, 1949), 583, 587. For an example of the categories of people the Soviet authorities slated for arrest and execution, see the third interim report of the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 2d session, 1954, entitled Baltic States: A Study of Their Origin and National Development; Their Seizure and Incorporation into the U.S.S.R., International Military Law and History Reprint Series, vol. 4 (Buffalo, 1972),497-500, which contains translated copies of Soviet instructions to their secret police in Lithuania. Similar lists and instructions were most probably issued to Soviet authorities in Western Ukraine.

11 Rudnytska, Zakhidnia Ukraina, 477-91. The Soviet historian Roy A. Medvedev, in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1971), 248-9, corroborates the information regarding the brutality of Soviet occupation:

A large number of illegal arrests in 1939-41 occurred in Bessarabia, the Western Ukraine, West Belorussia, and the Baltic territories. Besides a few real enemies of the proletariat - agents of the tsarist secret police, reactionary politicians, members of fascist and semifascist organizations - thousands of completely innocent people were repressed. In some of these areas Stalin and the NKVD carried out a criminal deportation: tens of thousands of local people were arbitrarily sent east. This action caused widespread dissatisfaction among the local inhabitants, which led in turn to worse repression. Just before the war, all the prisons of Lvov, Kishinev, Tallin, and Riga were filled to overflowing. In the turmoil of the first days of the war, the NKVD in some cities (Lvov and Tartu, for example), unable to move prisoners, simply ordered them to be shot. The bodies were not even removed, and in Lvov, before the appearance of the Germans, the population came to the prison to identify the dead. This crime caused an outburst of indignation in the western areas, and was very useful to fascist propagandists and the followers of Bandera. The criminal actions of the NKVD were largely to blame for the slow development of the [Soviet] resistance movement against the fascist occupation in the western regions.

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Part 1 of 2

Soviet Ukraine under Nazi Occupation, 1941-4
by Bohdan Krawchenko

Ukraine had barely begun to recover from the traumas of the 1930s when it was plunged into World War II. It was the largest Soviet republic to be fully occupied by the Germans and was held longer than the areas of Russia under German control. 1 In the course of the conflict, 6.8 million people were killed, of whom 600,000 were Jews and 1.4 million were military personnel who either perished at the front or died as prisoners of war (POWs). More than two million citizens of the republic were sent to Germany as "slave labour." 2

By 1944, when the German armies were cleared from Soviet Ukraine, the republic was in ruins. More than 700 cities and towns, representing 42 per cent of all urban centres devastated by the war in the entire USSR, and more than 28,000 villages had been destroyed. Direct material damage amounted to 285 billion rubles (in 1941 prices), or more than 40 per cent of the USSR's losses. But the real cost of the war to the Ukrainian republic, in damage, war effort, and goods requisitioned by Germans, was estimated at an astronomical one trillion two hundred billion rubles (in 1941 prices). 3 During his travels in Ukraine in 1945, Edgar Snow reported that "the Second World War, which some are apt to dismiss as 'the Russian glory,' has, in all truth and in many costly ways, been first of all a Ukrainian war .... No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industries, its farmlands, and its humanity." 4

The German advance into Ukraine had been rapid and spectacular. The invasion was launched on 22 June 1941, and Kharkiv, on Ukraine's eastern border with Russia, was captured by 25 October. The Germans encountered an army with little will. One soldier reported, "Only a few small special detachments fought stubbornly. The great majority of Red soldiers was not influenced at all by a spirit of resistance." 5

The swift defeat of the Soviet troops was a natural consequence of the many weaknesses of Stalin's regime and of the population's experience during the 1930s. 6 The bureaucratic centralization of military decision-making in Stalin's hands also contributed to the collapse. 7 Ignoring the pleas of Ukraine's republican leadership for flexible manoeuvres and for a regroupment of forces in order to draw up new lines of defence, Stalin ordered haphazard, uncoordinated offensives that led to the encirclement and capture of entire armies. 8

During the 1936-8 purges, the Red Army suffered terrible blows to its fighting capacity. Almost 60 per cent of army commanders at the corps, division, and brigade levels were either executed or died in prison camps prior to the war. The replacements for the purged officers were unseasoned and less capable. 9 Local authorities, made servile by Stalin's bureaucratic system, did not exhibit the independent initiative demanded by a crisis and retreated instead. 10 As a result, enormous numbers of prisoners were taken by the Germans. As early as November 1941 the Germans held 3.6 million POWs, among whom were an estimated 1.3 million Ukrainians. 11

In the face of the German advance, Stalin's "strategic plan" was put into effect: "destroying all that cannot be evacuated." 12 Cities, factories, and food supplies were blown up. Tens of thousands of prisoners in the hands of the NKVD were executed. 13 Almost 45 per cent of all cattle owned by collective and state farms were driven across the Ukrainian border to Russia. More than 50,000 factories and plants were dismantled and removed. 14 Of the civilian population, approximately 3.5 million men, women, and children were moved into the interior of Russia and to Central Asia.15 Since "pull and friends were used to get out ahead of the Germans," it was mostly prominent party and state officials, the labour aristocracy, and the "higher intelligentsia" who were able to leave. 16 Given the Nazis' extermination policies, the evacuation was necessary. However, the administration made little effort to evacuate Jews; only those who were prominent in the Party and in state and other institutions were moved.

The departure of the most well-known members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia produced a leadership vacuum, 17 and the population could therefore not help but think that it was being left to face the Germans alone. This, combined with the widespread destruction accompanying the Soviet retreat, "helped infuriate the population against the Soviet regime." 18

The initial response of the civilian population toward the Germans has yet to be studied in a systematic way. However, the image of smiling Ukrainians in national costume welcoming the German "liberators" with the traditional bread and salt is grossly overwrought. This stereotype was promoted rather effectively during the Cold War as proof that American psychological warfare directed at the Soviet population would pay huge dividends.19 Its source was the measured welcome that the residents of the Western regions, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, offered the Germans. Popular moods toward the Germans in the Soviet regions during the first days of occupation were "considerably more complex," according to a 9 July 1941 report of the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces of specially selected police officials headed by SS officers from Heinrich Himmler's trusted circles. 20

Judging from eyewitness accounts and interviews with refugees, the vast majority of people were relieved to see the Soviets leave, but they were "completely disoriented" by the rapid turn of events. 21 Most saw "no reason to be overjoyed by the Germans," since common sense dictated that "they have not come to Ukraine to do good." 22 Others, notably some former urban petit bourgeois (small shopkeepers and the like), some intellectuals, as well as peasants whose families had had substantial holdings before the revolution, engaged in "watchful waiting." 23Their hopes were pinned on the expectation that "Germans are a cultured people," and that the events of World War I - when Germans occupied Ukraine in 1918 and "things were not so bad" - would be repeated. 24 (Tragically, some Jewish artisans also shared this illusion and thought that they would be permitted to open private shops. 25)

The announcement of a positive program in this initial period of uncertainty and confusion would have yielded results for the Germans. Their silence, however, was not an oversight. Giving consideration to the wishes of the conquered peoples would have meant compromising Hitler's goals. Confident of victory, German propagandists were strictly forbidden to say anything about the Nazis' plans for the occupied territories. 26

The hiatus between the evacuation of Soviet authority and the entrenchment of the German administration lasted approximately two months, from July to September 1941 in most regions. In this short span of time, numerous attempts at the self-organization of Ukrainian society (the establishment of a local administration, schools, and newspapers) were made. In explaining this unexpected activity, which often manifested itself days after the departure of Soviet officials, two factors must be taken into account. The first is the role of Western Ukrainians, several thousands of whom were sent into Soviet Ukraine by their revolutionary nationalist parties. The second was the development of national consciousness among Soviet Ukrainians during the previous two decades.

Western Ukrainian intervention in Soviet Ukraine is intertwined with the story of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929. The OUN propagated a brand of revolutionary integral nationalism, emphasizing voluntarism, self-sacrifice, discipline, and obedience to the leadership. Apart from a militant attachment to Ukrainian independence, its political and social program was confused, with an unimaginative recast of Italian corporatist ideology within an essentially populist framework. 27 When Hitler took power, a member of the OUN leadership condemned Nazi ideology as imperialist, racist, and anti-Christian. 28 The Soviet-German non-aggression treaty in 1939 and the subsequent Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, as well as Hitler's backing of Hungary's destruction of the short-lived Carpatho-Ukrainian Republic, whose defence forces the OUN helped organize, 29 reinforced OUN suspicions of German ambitions. Nonetheless, Germany was the only power opposed to the European status quo, and a German-Soviet conflict seemed to be the only way out of the impasse in which Ukraine found itself. For this reason the OUN counted on a new war to give it an opportunity to assert Ukrainian statehood. It prepared for this event by maintaining contact with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, and by mobilizing OUN cadres. 30

Soviet rule in Western Ukraine between 1939-41 alienated the Western Ukrainian population without completely destroying the cadres of the nationalist movement. Because of its conspiratorial nature, the OUN survived the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine better than socialist groups and the large electoralist parties, all of which collapsed. Indeed, the OUN used the opportunity to establish contact with Soviet Ukrainians. 31 The OUN also had members scattered throughout Western Europe. Many lived in German-occupied Poland, having crossed the border when the Red Army entered Western Ukraine.

In 1940 the OUN split. The younger, more radical elements followed Stepan Bandera (the OUN-B), while the others remained adherents of Andrii Melnyk (the OUN-M). Both factions formed expeditionary groups (pokhidni hrupy), whose task was to follow the Germans into Ukraine and seize power. The groups were also instructed to organize anti-German resistance if necessary. 32 In 1941 the OUN had close to 20,000 members, half of whom were under twenty-one. 33 It sent about 8,000 members into Soviet Ukraine as soon as the Germans launched their offensive. 34 Of this number, roughly 300 acted as translators with the German forces and were to facilitate the work of expeditionary groups. 35 The rest were formed into small detachments of ten to fifteen members and spread into all areas of Ukraine, where they helped fill the leadership vacuum.

When the expeditionary groups entered Soviet Ukraine, they encountered a population on whom, according to a Western Ukrainian observer, "the era of Ukrainization and the formal existence of a Soviet Ukrainian state had left a great mark." 36 Former members of the Ukrainian Galician Army who were in Ukraine in 1918-9 and who visited the country again in 1941 noted that "national consciousness is now incomparably greater than during the revolution." 37 The rise in national consciousness was also observed in Ukraine's industrial regions, whose human fabric had been transformed by the influx of Ukrainian peasants during the 1930s. 38 In the Donbas (Donets basin), according to a local resident, "the need for Ukrainian statehood was taken for granted." 39 This national awareness served as a basis for common action between Soviet and Western Ukrainians.

The political culture of Western Ukrainians differed markedly, however, from that of their Soviet compatriots and emerged as a point of tension. Western Ukrainian nationalists ignored socio-economic and civil rights issues and viewed the attainment of national independence as a panacea, while Eastern Ukrainians regarded these questions with great concern and rejected the integral nationalist doctrine as elitist, intolerant, and obscurantist. 40

But at a time when Soviet Ukrainians had no political organizations, and the democratic and socialist parties in both Western Ukraine and in exile in Western Europe were "absent from the scene," "what remained were only the nationalists." 41 People were prepared to work with Western Ukrainian nationalists in establishing a local administration and schools not only because these were essential institutions but also in order to give these institutions a national content. Self-organization at the local level was felt to be the first step toward achieving a national government. 42 The OUN's singleness of purpose and dynamism impressed the still-fragmented Soviet Ukrainian population and was taken by them as a sign that the activity being undertaken would be tolerated by the Germans. That the Wehrmacht had left a relatively free hand to the inhabitants in the first month or so reinforced this false belief. 43

Within a matter of weeks a local administration with various departments responsible for such areas as health and education was established at the municipal, village, and, in some areas, at the oblast level. These administrations, many of which were elected, served with the militias as organs of self-government and attempted to rebuild the shattered communities. Since these organs were targeted for control by the OUN, in many regions they became dominated by "separatist elements." 44 Where this occurred, the OUN together with its Eastern Ukrainian sympathizers Ukrainianized the administrations and transformed them into vehicles promoting Ukrainian national goals. The work of some administrations was marred by the factional conflict between the OUN-B and OUN-M, and by Eastern Ukrainians' resentment of OUN members' high-handedness, neglect of social welfare issues, and virulent anti-Russian attitudes. 45 However, as one eyewitness reported, the local administrations were initially headed largely by "honest people, intellectuals, and the [formerly] 'repressed.' There was no talk about them being puppets or German agents. People hoped that they would be the nucleus of a government." 46 Indeed, "the wildest rumours" circulated about the imminent arrival of the former head of the Ukrainian Directory during the Revolution, Volodymyr Vynnychenko (with his Jewish wife), and other well-known socialists who were to head a new government. 47

Throughout Ukraine many elementary, secondary, and vocational schools were repaired and reopened by community efforts. Wherever possible, universities and institutes renewed their activities. An All-Ukrainian Teachers' Union was founded, which had as one of its principal aims the production of new textbooks. 48 As a result of local initiatives, the school curriculum was revised in order to communicate a Ukrainian national message stressing language, history, and culture. 49 In Poltava, for example, children were taught national songs hitherto forbidden by Soviet authorities. 50 In Voroshylovhrad in the Donbas, a teachers' conference decided to make Ukrainian the language of instruction in all schools. 51 At the start of the German occupation, 115 Ukrainian-language newspapers were founded. 52 Some, such as the Kievan Ukrainske slovo (Ukrainian Word) established by the OUN-M, developed a substantial readership, with a circulation of 50,000. 53 Many newspapers "maintained an autonomous position." 54 They carried articles outlining the case for Ukrainian independence, exposes of events of the 1930s, discussions of the works of Mykola Khvylovy and of other cultural figures purged under Stalin, and popular accounts of Ukrainian history. 55 At the same time, scores of theatres and choirs were founded. 56 Peasants began to divide collective farms on the basis of the old principle of family size. 57 Co-operatives and an agricultural bank were established. Roughly two months after the Soviet evacuation, Zhytomyr oblast, for example, had an agricultural bank with 11 branches and a co-operative with 140 branches. 58 Prosvity, the adult education societies, were created. In the industrial centre of Kryvyi Rih, for instance, the Prosvita "was well organized, holding many courses and concerts . . . with branches in dozens of villages." 59 After one concert, attended by thousands of people, the entire audience rose in the spontaneous singing of the Ukrainian national anthem, which had been banned under Soviet rule. 60 In Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, the revived Prosvita was run by local trade unionists who established it as "the centre of Ukrainian cultural life for the region." Prosvita members debated "plans for Ukrainization and the methods to be used." 61 Trade unions were revived. In Kryvyi Rih these unions, together with the newly established Club of Ukrainian Engineers, began to reconstruct the factories and plants as well as to establish forms of self-management. 62 A Ukrainian Red Cross undertook the operation of hospitals and clinics, and it provided assistance for Ukrainian POWS. 63 Religious life began to flourish. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Autonomous Orthodox Church quickly gained support and established thousands of new parishes. 64 Streets were renamed in honour of Ukrainian national heroes, and in urban centres it was noted that "more Ukrainian is being spoken, since people no longer have the same fear of reprisals." 65

All this activity led to a strengthening of national consciousness. "People began to voice public opinion more freely, " according to a former resident of Dnipropetrovske. 66 Nationally conscious individuals came out of hiding. 67 Books and periodicals published during the 1920s and forbidden under Stalin circulated freely and were in great demand. The classics of Ukrainian history could now be read. 68 Teachers spoke openly in schools about national oppression. 69 During countless meetings and rallies hundreds of thousands of people became involved in the debate over Ukraine's future. Judging by contemporary reports, these discussions invariably focused on five "burning questions": the need for Ukrainians to have their own national state; the dismantling of collective farms and the introduction of an agrarian order that would allow peasants to "keep the fruits of their labour"; the "emancipation" of the working class; the reopening and Ukrainization of institutions of higher education in order to give youth opportunities for study; and the release of prisoners of war. 70 Nevertheless, caution and hesitation characterized these organizational initiatives and discussions, as a natural consequence of the atomization of society under Stalin and the often brutal behaviour of German troops.71 But in this early period the German occupation forces could not possibly penetrate Ukrainian society with anything approaching the same effectiveness as had the Soviet regime or the German civil administration that was to follow. This permitted a movement for national and social emancipation, coming from the grass roots of society, to manifest itself. Indeed, the strong Ukrainian patriotism that arose in response to subsequent Nazi terror can only be understood against the background of the mobilization of the population in this brief period.

On the basis of available information it is difficult to establish the exact composition of the Soviet Ukrainians who emerged as the leadership in this initial period. The composition appears to have varied from region to region. Surviving members of the "old intelligentsia" - those who participated in the 1917-20 revolution, individuals who had suffered repression during the Soviet period, activists of the Ukrainization era (1924-30), former state and trade union functionaries, teachers, members of the younger intelligentsia - all appear to have played an important role. Noticeably absent were the higher Soviet intelligentsia and party functionaries, many of whom had either evacuated or remained passive, fearing German reprisals. 72 Certainly, the expansion of higher education during the preceding decades ensured that, unlike the period of the 1917 revolution, there was no shortage of skilled, trained Ukrainian personnel to assume the management of society. For example, the small town of Zhytomyr, with a population of 40,000 in 1941, boasted more than 500 "very nationally conscious members of the intelligentsia." 73 In this process of cultural-national revival, as already noted, Western Ukrainians frequently found themselves in the roles of initiators and intermediaries. Thus, in Mariiupil (now Zhdanov) in the Donbas, when Ukrainian efforts to found a newspaper were blocked by Russians who remained in charge of the local administration, Western Ukrainians intervened and secured permission for the establishment of the newspaper. 74 Often it was they who called the first meetings and began the political discussion. But their role in the cultural, educational, and economic initiatives was considerably less pronounced than the part they played in the establishment of local administrations and the militias. 75

The period of national revival "passed like lightning." 76 The first concerted German campaign against Ukrainian national assertion began on 31 August 1941 in Zhytomyr and by the end of September 1941 had engulfed all of Ukraine. 77 The instruments used for the task were the Einsatzgruppen. 78 They struck at the cadres of the nascent Ukrainian national movement at the same time as they initiated the slaughter of Jews. First to fall victim in the attack against the Ukrainian movement were members of the expeditionary groups sent by the OUN-B and their Eastern Ukrainian sympathizers. In November, following a mass patriotic rally in Bazar (near Kiev) organized by the OUN-M, which demonstrated the strength of Ukrainian national sentiment and alarmed the Germans, an attack on the OUN-M and its Eastern Ukrainian supporters was launched. 79 By January 1942 most advocates of Ukrainian independence, Western and Eastern Ukrainians alike, who had openly participated in the founding of local administrations, militias, Prosvity, co-operatives, newspapers, and schools had been caught in the Nazi net. 80 A "colossal number" were executed in this campaign, which marked the entrenchment of German administration in Ukraine. 81

Among the Nazis there were important differences of opinion over the formal state structures that should replace the union republics. Alfred Rosenberg, a Russophobic Baltic German who was the Nazis' "theorist" on matters of race and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, favoured the establishment of a series of buffer states dependent on the Reich but exercising a measure of self-government, as a cordon sanitaire against Russia. He also advocated cultural policies that would "awaken the historical consciousness of Ukrainians" and serve to mobilize them against Russia. 82 His concepts, however, clashed with the views of the Nazi establishment, which wanted only to colonize and exploit the east. Hitler had spoken against the creation of any kind of Ukrainian state and advocated direct Nazi control over this and other eastern territories. 83 Thus the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (the German civil administration) was formed as a branch of the Ostministerium, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Since Hitler thought that Ukraine was "undoubtedly the most important Eastern district," he appointed a loyal servitor, Erich Koch, to head the Reichskommissariat. 84 Although nominally subordinate to Rosenberg, Koch could ignore the policies of his superior because he was favoured by such powerful figures as Bormann and Goering and had direct access to Hitler. In his inaugural speech, Koch described himself as "a brutal dog " declaring that "for this reason I was appointed Reichskommissar of Ukraine." His mission, said Koch, was "to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration for the feeling or the property of Ukrainians." 85 Whatever else can be said of Koch, he was a man of his word. 86 German policy paid not the slightest attention to Ukrainian national sensitivities. The country was divided: Galicia became a district of the General Government of Poland (the Generalgouvernement), while most of Odessa and parts of Vinnytsia and Mykolaiv oblasts, as well as northern Bukovyna, were assigned to Romania (which called the region Transnistria) as compensation for Romania's loss of Transylvania to Hungary. 87 Except for the eastern districts near the front, which remained under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht, Ukraine fell under the direct control of Koch. To emphasize the point that "Ukraine does not exist ... it is merely a geographical concept, " Koch made the small provincial town of Rivne the capital of the Reichskommissariat. 88

A vast German administrative network encompassing all spheres of activity was established in both the Reichskommissariat and the regions held by the Wehrmacht. As noted by a Soviet source, "in none of the countries hitherto occupied by the fascists was there such a large occupational force and such a numerous occupational apparatus" as in Ukraine. 89 Indigenous administrations operated only on the lowest levels - the village or groups of villages and in towns. Even here they were under the strict control of German supervisory personnel, who could dismiss indigenous staff at will. 90 By far the largest local administration was in Kiev. In 1942 its entire apparatus numbered 2,000 - a trifling figure for a city of 352,000 people. 91 Whereas other groups had national committees that acted as representative bodies, "it was the Ukrainians, alone of the non-Russian nationalities, who most of the time had no German-recognized National Committee." 92 A Ukrainian National Committee was formed only in March 1945 in Germany. If participation in civil administration under German occupation is taken as a measure of the level of collaboration, then in Soviet Ukraine collaboration was the lowest in occupied Europe, if only for the simple reason that the Germans did not allow it.

It should also be pointed out that when Germans used the adjective "Ukrainian" to describe the local administration and its officials they were referring merely to the territory of Ukraine. In fact, many officials were Russians or local ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsch). This was especially the case after individuals with a pro-Ukrainian orientation were repressed. 93 While many who served in the local administration did so only to survive the famine that ravaged urban centres, others did so because they were "opportunists" or because they were "Soviet agents."94 The national composition of the auxiliary police or militia was also varied. 95 As Ievhen Stakhiv observed sardonically, after the Nazi purges, all that remained of nationalists' efforts to Ukrainize the police was the name and the blue and yellow stripes on their uniforms. 96 The police, some of whom participated in the Nazis' round-up and extermination of Jews, was comprised of the "worst elements of society" and was" detested" by the population. 97

The police also "contained the strongest Communist infiltration." 98 a development greatly assisted by the German "practice of retaining the Soviet militsiia [police] as a matter of convenience." 99 If one takes into account the systematic penetration of the local administration and police by the Soviets, then the number of people who participated voluntarily in these institutions is thus considerably reduced. By the winter and spring of 1942, according to the official Soviet history of Ukraine, "members of the Communist underground had infiltrated the auxiliary local organs established by the occupiers. Very often these organs were in the hands of Bolshevik agents or Communists." 100 Finally, "only a very few" Ukrainian units were established in the German army. Their numbers have been greatly exaggerated because after the war the Western allies described all of the Wehrmacht's eastern units (Osttruppen), whatever their national origin, as "Ukrainian." 101

Another aspect of German policy that provoked mass indignation was the treatment of prisoners of war. Initially, Soviet POWs were segregated according to nationality; some non-Russian prisoners (including Ukrainians) whom the Nazis considered essential for harvesting the crops were released. 102 But after the OUN-B proclaimed an independent Ukraine in Lviv on 30 June 1941, against the wishes of German occupational forces, Berlin reversed its policies in the autumn. Hitler ordered the suspect Ukrainians to be held captive, while allowing the freeing of nationals of the Baltic states to continue. 103

Soviet POWs, unlike prisoners from the other Allied countries, were held under conditions designed to bring about their death. Paltry food rations, exposure to severe weather, diseases, beatings, and mass executions decimated their ranks. In Khyriv in far western Ukraine only seventeen out of a camp of 8, 000 troops survived until 1943; the rest perished from starvation. 104 Of the 5.8 million Soviet POWs who fell into German hands, two million are known to have died. Another million are unaccounted for, and it can be presumed that most of them met a similar fate. 105 The Soviet government, for its part, turned a blind eye to the fate of the POWs. It considered any soldier who fell into enemy hands to be a traitor and not deserving of protection, as International Red Cross officials discovered when they made overtures to Soviet authorities during the war to gain an understanding with the Axis powers regarding captives. 106 Since many of the camps were located in Ukraine, the population soon became aware of conditions in them. Indeed, the Ukrainian civilian population attempted unsuccessfully to bring food to POWS. 107 The "grapevine," a very developed form of communication in the USSR, soon spread information about the conditions of POWs to all corners of the country. The resistance of the Red Army and of the civilian population stiffened as the belief that the Germans were out to destroy the Slavic peoples became widespread. The treatment of POWs was considered by many to have been one of the biggest mistakes the Germans committed. 108 It was certainly not the last.

In agriculture, the striking characteristic of the agrarian order established by the Germans was that they preserved the entire Soviet collective and state farm system, including even work norms, price scales, and administrative machinery. Attempts to dissolve collective farms were "fought with the severest measures." 109 There were, of course, a few "innovations." Notable among these was the renaming of collective farms as "community farms" (hromadski hospodarstva). Some in the German hierarchy, such as Rosenberg and members of the Wehrmacht, argued that Ukrainians would never co-operate with the Germans until land had been distributed among the peasants. 110 In Rosenberg's program for a "new agrarian order, " the parcelling out of land to individual peasants was to take place through a transitional arrangement called an "agricultural association" (khliborobska spilka). During this phase peasants would receive a land allotment and be allowed to keep a portion of the harvest from it. Major agricultural operations would still be performed in common, under German supervision. 111 But Koch, backed by Goering's Eastern Economic staff, successfully resisted the implementation of this reform because it would hinder the seizure of surpluses. 112 By the summer of 1943, only 10 per cent of peasant households in the Reichskommissariat had received allotments under the agricultural co-operative scheme. 113 Outright distribution of land to the peasantry was not even seriously discussed. 114

Koch also made certain that Ukraine contributed "to the salvation of European civilization." 115 Of the six million tonnes of grain requisitioned by the Reich from the USSR between 1941-4, five million came from Ukraine. 116 In many regions, grain quotas imposed by the Nazis on collective farms were double the 1941 Soviet norm. 117 If Ukraine's peasantry avoided mass starvation it was because the Germans, following Soviet practice, permitted private plots. 118

A complex administrative network of German officials supervised Ukrainian agriculture. At the bottom of this pyramid were close to 15,000 Landwirtschaftsfuhrer or agricultural leaders, dispatched to Ukraine to supervise the peasants' work. These La-Fuhrer, as they were known, ruled collective and state farms as their private bailiwick. In Rivne, for example, they regularly beat peasants who failed to doff their hats. 119 Flogging was introduced for the non-fulfillment of work norms; curfews were imposed; the carrying of pocket knives was prohibited and punishable by death. These were but a few of the many new measures that harassed the peasants. 120 Mass executions as punishment for the peasants' voluntary or involuntary assistance to partisans were commonplace. As part of the Nazi campaign against the resistance, 250 Ukrainian villages and their inhabitants were obliterated. 121

One consequence of the Nazis' exploitation of Ukrainian agriculture was a disastrous food supply situation in the urban centres. In December 1941 German economic administrators decided to increase the delivery of foodstuffs to the Reich by eliminating "superfluous eaters," namely, "Jews and the population of Ukrainian cities such as Kiev."122 The reduction of the urban population was achieved by a drastic cut in food rations, the establishment of roadblocks to prevent food from entering towns and cities, and the closing of urban (collective) farm markets. 123 Some of these measures were subsequently repealed. However, by the end of 1943 food rations in Kiev amounted to less than 30 per cent of minimum requirements. 124 The urban population declined drastically. In Kharkiv, it dropped from 850,000 in 1939 to 450,000 by December 1941.125 During the German occupation 70-80,000 Kharkiv residents died of famine. 126

One of the most hated aspects of German rule in Ukraine was the Ostarbeiter or forced labour program. Initially, some Ukrainians volunteered to work in German industry in order to escape famine or to learn a new trade. 127 But the volunteers "were packed into freight cars without food or sanitary facilities and shipped off to Germany. Those who survived were put behind barbed wire and fed only enough to keep them alive." 128 Unlike Western Europeans and even Galician Ukrainian foreign workers, they were treated as social pariahs and were forced to wear a humiliating badge designating them as workers from the East (Ost) and were subjected to draconian labour discipline. A month or two after the departure of the volunteers, news of their treatment reached Ukraine, and by the summer of 1941, force had to be used to meet labour quotas. People were arbitrarily rounded up in cinemas, churches, and other public places and shipped to Germany. 129 In the summer of 1942 a mandatory two-year labour service in Germany for all men and women in Ukraine between the ages of eighteen and twenty was decreed. 130 Entire communities suffered severe reprisals for failure to comply with the labour quotas. Of the 2.8 million Ostarbeiter carried off to Germany, 2.3 million were from Ukraine. 131

The occupation had severe consequences for education, culture, and health. The Nazis' approach toward education was quite straightforward. As Hitler explained during his 1942 visit to Ukraine, Ukrainians "should be given only the crudest kind of education necessary for communication between them and their German masters." 132 In January 1942, it was announced that all schools above the fourth grade were to be closed. Only the occasional vocational school survived the implementation of this policy. 133 The printing of school textbooks was strictly forbidden. l14 So far as culture was concerned, most theatres, choirs, and operas were disbanded. The best of that which did survive was reserved for Germans. 135 Of the 115 newspapers founded in the early summer of 1941, only forty remained by April 1942. 136 Judging by the issues that are available in the West, these publications were heavily censored propaganda broadsheets. The publishing of books, journals, and magazines was not allowed. 137 The myriad of Ukrainian national organizations reborn following the Soviet evacuation were banned, from the Ukrainian Red Cross to sports clubs. 138 As for health, it was decided as much as possible to curtail medical services in order to check "the biological power of the Ukrainians," as Koch put it. 139 Policies such as these were utterly incomprehensible to a population on whom the ideology of progress had left such a deep imprint and who accepted as axiomatic the development of educational, medical, and social services.

Ukraine was also affected by Nazi racial policies. The genocide of the Jews has been well researched, but that of the Ukrainians has not been emphasized enough. 140 Unlike in most countries occupied by the Nazis, in Ukraine and Poland assisting Jews was punishable by death. Hundreds in Ukraine were executed for such actions. 141 Nazi racial doctrines toward Jews were qualitatively different from those applied to such Untermenschen as Ukrainians. However, by any other measure, Nazi views concerning Ukrainians were extreme. Goering thought "the best thing would be to kill all men in Ukraine over fifteen years of age." Himmler advocated that "the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia must be decimated .... Do away with it, and the leaderless mass would become obedient." Koch declared, "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot." 142 Such views resulted in a campaign of terror that has yet to be chronicled: the mass destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the execution of hundreds of thousands of hostages, the incarceration of countless others in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and other camps where Ukrainians were even denied the right to wear the letter "U" to indicate their nationality. 143 In daily life, in countless ways, including such seemingly petty things as stores and latrines marked "For Germans Only " the message of German racial superiority was driven home. 144

The "strong hatred" that Nazi actions provoked expressed itself in an affirmation of a Ukrainian national identity. 145 "The German occupation increased national consciousness in Ukraine," commented an eyewitness. "By their behaviour the Germans evoked a reaction in the form of a counter-chauvinism." 146 Another noted that "the idea of Ukrainian independence grew." 147 The national revival of the early months served as a reminder of unrealized ambitions and contributed to this "upsurge of Ukrainian patriotism." 148 In Transnistria as well, where the civil administration was less oppressive than in the neighbouring German-held areas, "the national consciousness of the Ukrainian population was ... stirred by Romanian behaviour." 149 Nazi policies also gave rise to large-scale resistance movements, both national and Soviet, that were influenced by this new patriotism.

From the military point of view the national resistance movement counted for something only in Western Ukraine. In Volhynia the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia or UPA) was established in 1941. By 1942 it had 15,000 men under arms and controlled a liberated zone of some 50,000 square kilometres and two million people. By 1943, after the UPA had come under the control of the OUN-B, the UPA began to extend its operations to Galicia. By 1944 the UPA had approximately 40,000 members. 150 In Eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, apart from a few forays by the UPA and the emergence of small "independent" guerilla detachments that were either quickly absorbed or, more often than not, destroyed by Soviet partisan formations, 151 the resistance movement did not take the form of armed struggle. 152

The Ukrainian national resistance was carried out predominantly by clandestine groups engaged in anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. 153 These groups were most successful in Ukraine's industrial heartland, among workers in Dnipropetrovske, Kryvyi Rih, and especially the Donbas. 154 In the Donbas, for instance, members of Bandera's expeditionary groups built an OUN network encompassing a dozen cities. Its organizational core consisted of more than 500 people, with some 10,000 others who could be considered "active sympathizers," that is, supporters who distributed leaflets and the like. 155 This organization was unquestionably more significant than the Communist underground in the Donbas. 156 The ingredients contributing to its success were varied. To begin with, having arrived in the Donbas after the Germans started purging and executing pro-Ukrainian elements in Right-Bank Ukraine (the region west of the Dnieper River), the OUN never attempted to work in the open there. It did not assume control of local administrations. Instead, it remained underground, thus preserving its cadres as well as its resolutely anti-Nazi reputation. Another factor was the readiness of Western Ukrainian OUN members to abandon, under pressure from Eastern Ukrainian workers, the integral nationalist doctrine in favour of a program calling for a radical democratization of socio-economic and political life. The workers in the Donbas, on the other hand, embittered by their exploitation under Stalin, and whose Ukrainian identity Nazi policies had reinforced, were more than willing to support what they called "the struggle to complete the social revolution of 1917 by giving it a concrete national form." Thus, in the Donbas the OUN advanced the slogan "For a Soviet Ukraine without the dictatorship of the Communist Party." 157

The rise of Ukrainian patriotism during the war was such that even Stalin was forced to concede to it in order to harness its force. Undoubtedly, for him this was merely an expedient to improve the battle-worthiness of the 4.5 million citizens of Ukraine who served in the armed forces in 1941-5. 158 Moreover, the 250,000-strong Soviet partisan force in Ukraine, of whom 60 per cent were Ukrainian, 159 represented a major force; and they, too, had to be permitted to communicate to the population a message somewhat more palatable than the dreary slogans that had previously characterized Soviet propaganda. In concrete terms, Stalin's concessions did not amount to much: Ukraine obtained its own ministry of foreign affairs and was eventually admitted to the United Nations; measures were taken to revive the study of Ukrainian ethnography, archaeology and history; the adjective "Ukrainian" was attached to the names of armies and fronts; and the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was created. 160

Nonetheless, these concessions had an enormous symbolic significance, for they legitimized the expression of Ukrainian national self-awareness. The opportunity was seized by the Ukrainian intelligentsia and party leaders and transformed into a major propaganda effort. In countless leaflets, posters, meetings, and publications, the historical continuity of the Ukrainian nation was affirmed and its uniqueness stressed. The struggle against Hitler was legitimized not by reference to the Party, to Stalin, nor to any of the other familiar themes. Rather, the traditions of the Ukrainian liberation struggle were invoked. 161 Ukrainians were called upon to fight Hitler in order to defend "our Ukrainian statehood," "our native culture, our native tongue." 162 or "our national honour and pride." 163 Important concessions to Ukrainians, it was felt, were in the offing. 164 This mood was reinforced by a rumour campaign, initiated by the Soviet underground, to the effect that collective farms would soon be disbanded. 165

The Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia and party leadership, which had been caught up in the surge of patriotism during the war, attempted to continue the momentum when the last German troops were chased out of Ukraine in the autumn of 1944. They were immediately stopped by Andrei Zhdanov's crackdown on liberalization, which began in Ukraine in 1946. The focus of this campaign was the struggle against the relaxation of ideological controls during the war, which had led "Ukrainian historians to publish books with a less Russified version of history," "prompted Ukrainian writers to press for freedom from censorship," and allowed others to commit a host of serious "krainian nationalistic errors." 166 The Donbas was singled out as requiring particularly "decisive measures" to correct shortcomings in the ideological sphere. 167 The Soviet Ukrainian citizen could be forgiven for thinking that, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. [“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” ]

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Part 2 of 2
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Notes

1 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2d rev. ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 107.

2 Stephan G. Prociuk, "Human Losses in the Ukraine in World War I and II, "Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 13, no. 35-6 (1973-7): 40; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York, 1975), 544; Ukrainskaia SSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza 1941-1945 gg., 3 vols. (Kiev, 1975), 3:153.

3 Ukrainskaia SSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 3:152, 157-8.

4 Edgar Snow, "The Ukraine Pays the Bill," Saturday Evening Post, 27 January 1945, 18.

5 Peter Kleist, Zwischen Hitler und Stalin, 1939-1945 (Bonn, 1950), 130.

6 Documents from the Smolensk Party archives, which were captured by the Germans during the war and thereafter fell into Western hands, provide much evidence of this. For example, a secret police informant reported the following conversation: "Now, comrades, it appears that war is approaching. Soviet rule will not last long, it will tumble in an instant .... People have been robbed and taxed heavily .... I, like many others, will not go to defend Soviet rule." Svodka No.7, I.IV.1933 (OGPU 3/0), Smolensk Archives, reel 20.

7 See S.M. Shtemenko, Heneralnyi shtab u roky viiny, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1980), 2:467, passim.

8 See Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston, 1970), chap. 6, and his Secret Speech (Nottingham, 1976).

9 Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (London, 1971), 213.

10 Harvard University Refugee Interview Project (hereafter cited as HURIP), no. 441, B6, 1.

11 Krakivski visti (Cracow), 11 November 1941; Oborona Ukrainy: chasopys Ukrainskoi narodnoi revoliutsiinoi armii, 1 August 1942.

12 M. Suprunenko, "Ukraina naperedodni i v vitchyznianii viini proty nimetskofashystskykh zaharbnykiv," in Borotba ukrainskoho narodu proty nimetskykh zaharbnykiv (Ufa, 1942), 33.

13 See HURIP, no. 33, B6, 2; Krakivski visti, 9 November 1941, 28 December 1941, and 24 February 1942.

14 Akademiia nauk Ukrainskoi RSR, Instytut istorii, Istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR: Ukrainska RSR u Velykii Vitchyznianii viini Radianskoho Soiuzu, 1941-1945 (Kiev, 1977), 7:69; Ukrainskaia SSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 1: 359-60.

15 Istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR, 7: 69.

16 HURIP, no. 441, B6, 2; no. 32, B6, 1.

17 Nastup (Prague), 18 October 1941.

18 HURIP, no. 33, B6, 1.

19 A good example of this genre is Wallace Carroll's "It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian," Life, 19 December 1949, 80-8.

20 Cited by Dallin, German Rule, 65n.

21 HURIP, 359, B6, 1.

22 Orest Zovenko, Bezimenni: Spohady uchasnyka novitnykh vyzvolnykh zmahan (n.p., 1945), 60.

23 HURIP, no. 441, 86, 2.

24 Ibid., no. 32, 86, 1.

25 Ibid. and no. 441, B6, 2; no. 359, B6, l.

26 Dallin, German Rule, 65; V. Samarin, "The Years of Turmoil: In the German-Occupied Regions of Russia from 1941-1944" (typescript, Research Program on the USSR, Columbia University).

27 See Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919-1929 (Boulder, Colo., 1980); John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2d rev. ed. (Littleton, Colo., 1980), chaps. 1-2.

28 levhen Onatsky, "Ideologichni i taktychni rozkhodzhennia mizh fashyzmom i natsional-sotsiializmom," Rozbudova natsii (Prague), no. 5-6 (1934): 142-9. I wish to thank Myroslav Yurkevich for supplying this reference.

29 In early March 1939, at the same time as the Nazis occupied Bohemia and Moravia, Hitler gave Transcarpathia, which had been part of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, to Hungary as a reward for its alliance with the Berlin-Rome Axis. That same month the Carpatho-Ukrainian people proclaimed the independence of their territory and, with the help of the OUN, took up arms against the Nazi-backed Hungarian invasion. They were defeated, and from 1939 to 1944 this region was part of Hungary. See Peter C. Stercho, Diplomacy of Double Morality: Europe's Crossroads in Carpatho-Ukraine 1919-1939 (New York, 1971).

30 See Mykola Lebed, "Do zviazkiv OUN z nimetskym viiskom," Suchasna Ukraina (Munich), 12 June 1960 and 26 June 1960.

31 See Stephan Hlld, Fragmenty zhyttia i muk: spohady z chasiv nimetskoi okupatsii Ukrainy (London, 1955), 17; Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 68.

32 Lev Rebet, Svitla i tini DUN (Munich, 1964), 98.

33 Alexander Motyl, "The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and the Galician Reality, " Meta (Toronto), no. 1 (1975): 64.

34 This figure includes the expeditionary groups of both OUN factions. Zinovii Matla, Pivdenna pokhidna hrupa (Munich, 1952), 22; Lev Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy OUN: prychynky do istorii pokhidnykh hrup DUN na tsentralnykh i skhidnikh zemliakh Ukrainy v 1941-1943 rr. (Munich, 1958), 12, 63n.

35 This figure includes both OUN factions. Interview with Mykola Lebed.

36 Krakivski visti, 16 October 1941.

37 Ukrainskyi visnyk (Berlin), 31 August 1941.

38 See Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy, 17-20.

39 HURIP, no. 356, B6, 3.

40 Differences between Eastern and Western Ukrainians are discussed in ibid. and in no. 446, JO, 67, and no. 102, B6, 5-6. See also Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 108-10.

41 HURIP, no. 356, B6, l.

42 Ibid. and no. 148, WT, 33; and Oleksander Semenenko, Kharkiv, Kharkiv (Munich, 1977), 213.

43 HURIP, no. 356, B6, 2-3.

44 Ibid., no. 56, B6, 3.

45 See Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 108-10.

46 HURIP, no. 33, B6, 3.

47 See HURIP, no. 356, B6, 2 for rumours to this effect which circulated in the Donbas. See also Ukrainskyi visnyk, 7 September 1941; Semenenko, Kharkiv, 212.

48 Krakivski visti, 27 November 1941; Nastup, 13 December 1941; Yolyn (Rivne), 1 October 1942.

49 Ukrainskyi holos (Kirovohrad), 1 October 1941.

50 Holos Poltavshchyny (Poltava), 7 December 1941.

51 Ievhen Stakhiv, "Natsionalno-politychne zhyttia Donbasu v 1941-1943 rr: na osnovi osobystykh sposterezhen," Suchasna Ukraina (Munich), 9 September 1956.

52 Ukrainskyi visnyk, 31 October 1943.

53 Nastup, 1 March 1942.

54 HURIP, no. 440, 86, 1.

55 Holos Poltavshchnyny, 7 December 1941; Ukrainskyi zasiv: literaturnyi chasopys (Kharkiv), no. 1 (1942); HURIP, no. 495, 85, 19.

56 Ukrainska diisnist (8erlin), 1 November 1941; 1 December 1941.

57 HURIP, no. 314, 86, 1; no. 102, 86, I, 3.

58 Nastup, 13 December 1941.

59 Krakivski visti, 18 November 1941.

60 Ibid., 15 November 1941.

61 HURIP, no. 495, 86, 4.

62 Ievhen Stakhiv, "Kryvyi Rih v 1941-1943 rr.," Suchasna Ukra ina , 22 January 1956.

63 Volyn, 24 October 1941.

64 Nastup, 13 December 1941; Ukrainska diisnist, 20 January 1942.

65 Krakivski visti, 18 October 1941.

66 HURIP, no. 102, 86, 2.

67 Interview with Ievhen Stakhiv.

68 Ibid. See also Ukrainska diisnist, 1 March 1943.

69 Stakhiv, "Kryvyi Rih."

70 Krakivski visti, 3 August 1941; 31 August 1941; and 3 December 1941.

71 Zovenko, Bezimenni, 65-6; HURIP, no. 314, 86, 6; Hlid, Fragmenty zhyttia, 12-13.

72 HURIP, no. 441, 86, 2, and no. 482, JR, 23-4; Nastup, 18 October 1941; Ukrainska diisnist, 1 December 1941; Volyn, 24 October 1941; Krakivski visti, 17 January 1942.

73 Ukrainskyi visnyk, 12 October 1942. Population data from Ukrainska diisnist, 20 January 1942.

74 Krakivski visti, 28 November 1941.

75 Interview with Ievhen Stakhiv; Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy, 6-14; Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, chap. 4.

76 HURIP, no. 356, 86, 3.

77 E. Pavliuk, "Borotba ukrainskoho narodu na skhidno-ukrainskykh zemliakh," Document C 52-I, archive of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, New York, 2.

78 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 106.

79 Ibid., 97, 106.

80 Pavliuk, "8orotba ukrainskoho narodu," 1-2.

81 Ibid., 2.

82 For example, Rosenberg supported the establishment of a major university in Kiev. See "Unsigned Memorandum, 16 July 1941, " in Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, 13 vols. (London, 1949-64), 13: 151.

83 "Memorandum by the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, 1 October 1941," in ibid., 319. See also Dallin, German Rule, 8, 49, 57.

84 "Unsigned Memorandum, 16 July 1941," in Documents on German Foreign Policy, 13: 153.

85 Cited by Jurgen Thorwald, Wen sie verderben wollen (Stuttgart, 1952), 74.

86 Koch was captured by the Western powers and turned over to Poland in 1950 for prosecution as a war criminal. It took Polish authorities nine years to bring him to trial and then only for crimes committed while Gauleiter of East Prussia. In 1959 he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out. He lives under very favourable conditions in the Polish prison of Barczewo. The USSR has never asked for his extradition. The reasons for this unprecedented "humanitarianism" on the part of the Polish and Soviet authorities remain a mystery.

87 For a good discussion of Romanian policies in Transnistria, see Alexander Dallin, Odessa, 1941-1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule (Santa Monica, 1957).

88 Cited by Ie. V. Safonova, Ideino-vykhovna robota Komunistychnoi partii sered trudiashchykh vyzvolenykh raioniv Ukrainy v roky Velykoi Vitchyznianoi viiny, 1943-1945 rr. (Kiev, 1971), 91.

89 Istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR, 7:141.

90 Ukrainska diisnist, 10 November 1942.

91 Ibid., 10 May 1942; Ukrainskyi visnyk, 20 September 1942.

92 George Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 21.

93 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 113-14n; HURIP, no. 356, B6, 4; no. 59, B6, 3.

94 Ibid., no. 542, B6, 3; no. 356, B6, 4.

95 See Stakhiv, "Natsionalno-politychne zhyttia Donbasu"; HURIP, no. 314, B6, 4; and V. Volodymyrovytch, L'Ukraine sousl'occupation Allemande (Paris, 1948), 36.

96 Stakhiv, "Natsionalno-politychne zhyttia Donbasu."

97 HURIP, no. 485, B6, 6.

98 Ibid.

99 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 218.

100 Istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR, 7:157.

101 Fischer, Soviet Opposition, 48. According to Hans von Herwarth there were 100,000 Ukrainians serving in the German army. This figure includes Western Ukrainians. See his "Deutschland und die ukrainische Frage 1941-1945" (typescript, Deutsches Institut fr Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit, Munich), 19. According to Fischer, Soviet Opposition, 45, there were some 500,000 former Soviet citizens bearing arms.

102 "Memorandum by an Official of the Department for German Internal Affairs, 6 August 1941" and "Memorandum by the Chief of the Reich Chancellery, 1 October 1941," in Documents on Gennan Foreign Policy, 13: 290, 319.

103 Ihor Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe: A Study of Lebensraum Policies (New York, 1961), 150-1.

104 Zovenko, Bezimenni, 672.

105 Dallin, Gennan Rule, 426-7.

106 Ibid., 420.

107 Krakivski visti, 4 February 1942; Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, 153.

108 HURIP, no. 27, B6, I.

109 Cited by Clifton J. Child, "The Ukraine under German Occupation, 1941-4," in Hitler's Europe, ed. Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee (London, 1954), 638.

110 Ibid.

111 Novyi chas: orhan Voznesenskoho gebitskomisara (Voznesenske), 12 July 1943.

112 Child, "The Ukraine, " 638.

113 Volyn, 10 June 1943.

114 See ibid. as well as the issue for 23 August 1942. Navyi chas, 12 July 1943, has a detailed discussion of Koch's agricultural policies that fails to mention the distribution of land. For an excellent analysis of rural life in Soviet Ukraine under German occupation, see Ukrainskyi visnyk, 4 April 1943.

115 Volyn, 23 August 1942.

116 Tabulated from Dallin, German Rule, table 2, p. 374.

117 Z. Shulha, "Borotba ukrainskoho selianstva proty nimetskofashystskykh okupantiv, " in Borotba ukrainskoho narodu, 39.

118 Ukrainskyi visnyk, 4 April 1943.

119 Dallin, German Rule, 317.

120 Shulha, "Borotba ukrainskoho selianstva," 38; HURIP, no. 314, B6, 2.

121 Ukrainskaia SSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 3:152.

122 Cited by Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, 146.

123 Ibid. See also "Kharkov under the Germans" (typescript, Research Program on the USSR, Columbia University).

124 Leontii Forostivsky, Kyiv pid vorozhymy okupatsiiamy (Buenos Aires, 1952), 48.

125 Krakivski visti, 7 March 1942.

126 Feliks Korduba, "Der Generalplan Ost," Ukrainskyi istoryk (Munich), nos. 1-4 (1981): 157.

127 HURIP, no. 314, 86, 2.

128 Carroll, "It Takes a Russian, " 82.

129 HURIP, no. 482, B5, 9.

130 Holos Dnipra: khersonskyi chasopys (Kherson), 23 May 1943.

131 Tabulated from Dallin, German Rule, table 2, p. 452.

132 Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, 106-7.

133 Volyn, 1 October 1942; Ukrainska diisnist, 10 November 1942.

134 Nikon Nemyron, "Probudzhena v ohni stolytsia Ukrainy," Suchasna Ukraina, 2 December 1956.

135 HURIP, no. 102, B6, 8; no. 121, B6, 13.

136 Ukrainska diisnist, 5 April 1942.

137 Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy, 8.

138 See Shankovsky, "Ukraina pid nimetskym chobotom," Kyiv (Philadelphia), no. 6 (1954): 275.

139 Cited by Dallin, German Rule, 455.

140 See HURIP, no. 33, 86, 3; no. 121, B6, 3; no. 441, B6, 7; no. 542, B6, 1; no. 548, 86, 2.

141 Nasha strana Gerusalem), 2 November 1983. See also HURIP, no. 500, 86-7 for a report of a large number of Ukrainians in Berdychiv executed by the "Ukrainian" police for assisting Jews.

142 Cited by Dallin, German Rule, 123, 127, 67, respectively.

143 Mykhailo H. Marunchak, Systema nimetskykh kontstaboriv i polityka vynyshchuvannia v Ukraini, 2d ed. (Winnipeg, 1963), 51-2; V.K. and A.T., Chomu svit movchyt? Ukraintsi v kontsentratsiinykh taborakh Nimechchyny 1940-1945 rr., 2d ed. (Paris, 1945-6), 36, 69.

144 HURIP, no. 102, 86, 3; no. 548, 86, 4.

145 Ibid., no. 314, B6, 7.

146 Ibid.

147 Ibid., no. 121, 86, 3.

148 Ibid., no. 441, B6, 8.

149 Alexander Dallin, Odessa, 1941-1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory Under Foreign Rule (Santa Monica, 1957), 290.

150 Oborona Ukrainy, 1 August 1942; Svoboda Gersey City), 24 September 1982.

151 Samostiinyk, 23 December 1943 (UPA underground publication); Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy, 192-9; HURIP, no. 542, B6, 7; no. 32, B6, 5; no. 314, B6, 7.

152 In part this was dictated by Eastern Ukraine's terrain which, unlike Volhynia, contained few forests. The wooded areas that could offer cover were in the north, on the border with Belorussia, and were under the control of Soviet partisans.

153 HURIP, no. 548, B6, 6.

154 See Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy, 132-92.

155 Stakhiv, "Natsionalno-politychne zhyttia Donbasu," Suchasna Ukraina, 9 August 1956.

156 Ibid., 23 August 1956. Stakhiv, an OUN organizer in the Donbas, claims that the Donbas Soviet underground did not produce a single leaflet during the German occupation. In fact, two were produced - one by a village Pioneer organization, another by a Komsomol group in Donetske. This is hardly an impressive output given the Donbas's importance in Ukraine. See Lystivky partiinoho pidpillia i partyzanskykh zahoniv Ukrainy u roky Velykoi Vitchyznianoi viiny (Kiev, 1969). For a discussion of evidence from Soviet sources regarding the existence of a Ukrainian national underground in the Donbas, see Ievhen Stakhiv, "Do dyskusii pro Oleha Koshevoho," Suchasna Ukraina, 3 February 1957.

157 Stakhiv, "Natsionalno-politychne zhyttia Donbasu," Suchasna Ukra ina , 9 August 1956. See also Pavliuk, "Borotba ukrainskoho narodu."

158 Istoriia Ukrainskoi RSR, 7: 509.

159 V.1. Klokov, Vsenarodnaia borba v tylu nemetsko-fashistskikh okupantov na Ukraine 1941-1944 gg. (Kiev, 1978), 57; Safonova, Ideino-vykhovna robota, 208.

160 Pravda (Moscow), 27 May 1944; Kulturne budivnytstvo v Ukrainskii RSR, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1959), 2: 56-7; Safonova, Ideino-vykhovna robota, 84.

161 See, for example, Ukraina v ohni: almanakh (n. p., 1942) and Lystivky partiinoho pidpillia.

162 Ukraina byla i budet sovetskoi: vtoroi antifashistskii miting predstavitelei ukrainskogo naroda 30 avgusta 1942 g. (Saratov, 1942), 63, 12.

163 Shulha, "Borotba ukrainskoho selianstva," 41.

164 HURIP, no. 121, B6, 3.

165 Ihor Kamenetsky, Hitler's Occupation of Ukraine, 1941-1944: A Study of Totalitarian Imperialism (Milwaukee, 1956), 58.

166 Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 48-9.

167 Safonova, Ideino-vykhovna robota, 17.  

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TARAS HUNCZAK Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Soviet and Nazi Occupations
by Taras Hunczak

"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones ... "

--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

In their attempts to understand Ukrainian-Jewish relations, scholars face several obstacles, the most troubling of which is the reliability and paucity of historical evidence. Because the available sources dealing with the subject are incomplete and often contradictory, it is impossible to reconstruct an objective record of the past. Furthermore, one frequently finds unconfirmed reports and stereotypical judgments which suggest that the matter of Jewish-Ukrainian relations is as much psychological as it is historical. As a result, various writers, using fragmentary and frequently questionable evidence, have created negative stereotypes whose emotional overtones have kept the Jewish .md Ukrainian communities in a state of permanent confrontation.

One should also bear in mind that relations between Jews and Ukrainians were almost never free of outside interference - there was .,Iways a third factor, a dominant power which often exercised a decisive influence. In previous centuries it was Poland and tsarist Russia, while in the twentieth century, particularly in the 1930s and during World War II, Ukrainian-Jewish relations stood in the shadow of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. These states exacerbated local social and economic tensions by fostering ideological intolerance and political confrontation.

Apart from these easily definable problems, an invisible wall separating the two communities, based on mutual suspicion, religious prejudice, ethnocentric beliefs and values, and popular myths, prevented Ukrainians and Jews from reaching a genuine understanding. The result has been virtually no communication, with neither group able to rise to a higher moral level so as to understand and empathize with the other's problems and aspirations. Seemingly victims of their own history, both groups are unable - or perhaps unwilling - to free themselves from the past.

This Ukrainian-Jewish dilemma was characterized very perceptively by Howard Aster and Peter Potichnyi, as "two solitudes" in close proximity, yet never neighbours in the real sense of the word. 1

Milena Rudnytska, political activist and member of the Polish parliament, commented on the estranged relations between Jews and Ukrainians:

[In Galicia] during the interwar Polish period, both the Ukrainian and Jewish communities lived their secluded lives separated by a wall of mutual resentments. It is strange that even political leaders who co-operated with each other in Warsaw maintained neither political nor personal contacts in Lviv. They did not even sit behind a common table in order to explain and decide upon mutual grievances and mutual claims. 2

World War II brought not only an unprecedented tragedy for the Jewish people but also severe trials for the Ukrainian people. From the moment the war began, Ukrainians in the western regions found themselves without political leadership, as the political parties, which had enjoyed considerable support in the 1930s, dissolved themselves. The resulting power vacuum was gradually filled by anew, dynamic, and rapidly growing force - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose central objective was to create an independent and sovereign Ukrainian state. It was this organization which eventually championed Ukrainian political aspirations during and after the war. 3

In April 1941 the OUN held its second congress in Cracow. One of the congress resolutions concerned Jews:

17. In the USSR the Jews are the most faithful supporters of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite-Bolshevik government exploits the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Ukrainian masses in order to divert their attention from the real perpetrator of their misfortune in order to incite them, in time of upheaval, to carry out pogroms against the Jews. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists combats the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime and simultaneously educates the masses to the fact that the principal enemy is Moscow. 4

The late Philip Friedman, a respected scholar, concluded that this passage reflected "the classical Nazi anti-Jewish equation of 'Jews- Bolsheviks'."5 Friedman, however, oversimplified the problem when he reduced the popular perception of "Jews-Bolsheviks" to a facile Nazi anti-Jewish equation.6 It is possible that the OUN's resolution could have reflected the views of some Ukrainians, irrespective of Nazi ideology. But what counts most is whether the popular perception (which is deeply buried in many other peoples, particularly in Eastern Europe) was founded in fact.

The popular perception of Jews as agents of Bolshevism resulted in violent mass outbursts against the Jewish people during the initial stages of the German war against the Soviet Union. The violence was more likely a response to a situation - the aftermath of Soviet rule - than to the OUN's political resolution. As Philip Friedman pointed out, the OUN resolution warned "against pogroms on Jews, since such actions only played into the hands of Moscow." 7

In the course of its two-year struggle against the Nazis, the OUN modified its ideology in several important respects. The changes were formally accepted at the Third Congress of the OUN, held in August 1943, which not only adopted the principle of democracy as the basic tenet of the future Ukrainian state but also modified its stand on the national minorities in Ukraine. The anti-Jewish resolution of the earlier congress was annulled and replaced by a provision calling for equal rights for all national minorities in Ukraine. 8

The ideas of democracy and equality for all national minorities were restated with even greater clarity in the constitution of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, established in July 1944. 9 The new organization was to be the revolutionary government directing both the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UP A) in their struggle for Ukrainian independence. The OUN's position vis-a-vis the Jews was disseminated through such official underground party organs as the journal Ideia i Chyn (Thought and Action), which published an article instructing OUN members "to liquidate the manifestations of harmful foreign influence, particularly the German racist concepts and practices" against Jews. 10

This shift in orientation seems to have had practical consequences for Ukrainian-Jewish relations. According to a German report of March 1942:

In Zhytomyr, Kremenchug and Stalino several followers of Bandera were arrested for trying to win over the population to the idea of political independence of Ukraine. At the same time it was established that the Bandera group supplied its members and the Jews working for its movement with false passports. 11

There is also information suggesting that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews entered the ranks of the UPA as physicians, dentists, hospital attendants, pharmacists, and craftsmen. Unfortunately, this evidence is not reliable, and one must rely on testimonies that cannot be verified. 12 What is certain is that some Jews served the UPA in various technical capacities, particularly as physicians. 13

It seems that the number of Jews in the UPA was large enough to establish special camps where they could work at their trades. According to Friedman, one such camp, near Poryts, Volhynia, contained 100 Jews. A larger camp with some 400 Jews was located in Kudrynky, some twenty miles from Tuchyn, also in Volhynia. At the end of the war seventeen Jews from the Kudrynky camp survived; the rest apparently perished. 14

Neither the Ukrainian underground movement nor any other organizations thus cultivated anti-Semitic programs or policies. They readily accepted Jews into their ranks and sheltered them from Nazi persecution, despite the popular perception of Jews as promoters of communism.

This perception naturally encouraged anti-Semitic attitudes and played into the hands of the Nazis, who hoped to enlist the various peoples of Eastern Europe - not just Ukrainians - in anti-Jewish campaigns. It was German policy to make violence against Jews appear to be initiated by the local population. An Einsatzgruppe A report described the policy:

... Native anti-Semitic forces were induced to start pogroms against Jews during the first hours after capture, though this inducement proved to be very difficult. Carrying out orders, the security police was determined to solve the Jewish question with all possible means and determination most decisively. But it was desirable that the German security police should not put in an immediate appearance, at least in the beginning, since the extraordinarily harsh measures were apt to stir even German circles. It had to be shown to the world that the native population itself took the first action, reacted naturally against the oppression by Jews during several decades and against the terror exercised by the Communists during the preceding period. 15

Thus, the people of Eastern Europe were to act as pawns in the hands of their German masters,16 and in some instances the people obliged. At the outset of the Soviet-German war this was relatively easy as the retreating NKVD, the Soviet secret police, left behind prisons full of mutilated corpses of Ukrainian youth. From reports of Sicherheitspolizei und SD, the German security police, a picture of horror emerges: in Stryi, 150 dead; Lviv, 5,000; Dobromyl, 82; Sambir, 520; Lutske, 2,800; Zolochiv, 700; Lublin, 100; Kremianets, 100-150; Dubno, a "severe blood bath" (ein schweres Blutbad); Ternopil, 600; Vinnytsia, 9,432. 17 It is obvious even from this incomplete list that the Soviet authorities perpetrated on Ukrainian soil a crime against humanity deserving of a Nuremberg trial. 18

The Germans, for their part, were quick to accuse Jews of acting as co-conspirators and perpetrators, while some Ukrainians accused Jews of participating actively. In some cities where the Soviet NKVD had committed mass murders, acts of violence occurred against Jews.

The perception of some Ukrainians was not without substance, since the rather significant level of Jewish participation in the Communist movement and in the subsequent Soviet government is a matter of record. Leonard Schapiro, a distinguished British specialist on Soviet affairs, wrote:

By the time the Bolsheviks seized power, Jewish participation at the highest level of the Party was far from insignificant. Five of the twenty-one full members of the Central Committee were Jews - among them Trotsky and Sverdlov, the real master of the small, but vital secretarial apparatus of the Party .... But Jews abounded at the lower levels of the Party machinery - especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD. . . . It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hands of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for themselves. 19

The perceptions of Jews by Ukrainians and other non-Jews of Eastern Europe were not new, and the events immediately preceding World War II only exacerbated them. To date, however, there is no thorough study of this important and highly complex question, and it is therefore impossible to render a final judgment about the nature of Jewish and Ukrainian behaviour during World War II. It would be just as outrageous to suggest that the Jewish people as a whole are responsible for the criminal acts perpetrated against Ukrainians by Jews who actively supported the Soviets, as it would be to maintain that Ukrainians as a whole are accountable for the anti-Semitic actions of a few.

Related to this problem is the oft-repeated charge of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. The issue of ethical behaviour under the domination of foreign power is an old problem. 20 For the majority of people subjected to such occupation, collaboration has always been a question of survival.

During World War II collaboration acquired a pejorative connotation reflected even in its lexical meaning - "co-operation with the enemy." For the definition to apply, however, the enemy must be clear. Western states such as France, Holland, and Belgium lost their national sovereignty as a result of German conquest and occupation; in their case the enemy was readily identifiable. In Eastern Europe and in the territories under Soviet control (apart from the Russian Republic), large segments of the population viewed Soviet authority as an extension of the Russian imperial state and the Soviet Union was therefore a supranational union that masked an occupying power.

Given the high level of national consciousness reinforced by Stalin's tyrannical rule, the population of the non-Russian republics viewed the Soviet government as the enemy and looked to foreign powers, including Germany, for national deliverance. 21 Within this context, a collaborator would be anyone who co-operated with the Soviet authorities. To be sure, the Soviet Union was on the side of the victors, who defined collaborators as those who co-operated with the other side - with either Germany or Japan. These being enemy states, the very concept of collaboration acquired a pejorative connotation. In such circumstances, power becomes the ultimate source of justification.

As a result, collaboration or co-operation with the occupying power became a worldwide phenomenon during World War II. Most leaders in the Philippines, for example, collaborated with the Japanese in establishing the Republic of the Philippines on 14 October 1943. 22

Collaboration, however, was much more complex in Europe than in Asia. Apart from those who collaborated with the Germans in order to gain power, financial advantage, special privileges, or to lighten the burden of occupation, some in Western Europe found the Nazi ideology attractive. Western European fascist movements had wide support and affected Western societies profoundly, particularly during the German occupation. France, for instance, not only espoused collaboration as its national policy under the Vichy government but also produced several political parties whose goal was co-operation with Germany, and made German victory a cornerstone of their political programs. 23

In differentiating between ideological and non-ideological collaborators, Bertram Gordon used the terms collaborator and collaborationist. In France collaborationists were committed to the victory of the Third Reich and actively worked toward that end. 24 In Ukraine there were no collaborationists seduced by Nazi ideology or by the seemingly irresistible Griff nach der Weltmacht (grasp for world power). Unlike the French, Belgians, Dutch, and Russians, Ukrainians did not establish fascist organizations and youth movements that promoted collaboration with Germany.

Although Ukrainians were not collaborationists, there were certainly many collaborators among them who volens-nolens co-operated with the Germans. They paid taxes, delivered grain quotas, went to Germany as labourers, and filled administrative posts. Even more significantly, Ukrainians joined various indigenous auxiliary police formations, 25 and the Galician Division was formed with the intention of being the nucleus of a Ukrainian national army.

What is important, however, is that Ukrainian co-operation was not intended to serve German interests. Documents of the period leave no doubt that the objective of all Ukrainian political groups was to promote Ukrainian national self-interest. 26 Moreover, it was precisely for that reason that the OUN challenged the right of the German occupation authorities to make political decisions on Ukrainian territory. 27 John Armstrong has argued that Ukrainian "collaboration" was pragmatic: the Germans were against the status quo, while the OUN was determined to establish an independent Ukrainian state, regardless of German political plans for Ukraine. 28

Thus, while the OUN was a factor in promoting collaboration among Ukrainians before the war and during the first phase of the Soviet-German war, it was also the first to oppose German policy actively,29 thereby negating the very idea of collaboration. The high point of the Ukrainian resistance to German domination was the organization of the UPA, which took up arms against the Nazi occupiers. 30

Non-political collaboration, whether voluntary or involuntary, active or passive, was, of course, an entirely different matter. Stanley Hoffmann suggests that there were almost as many forms of collaboration as there were practitioners. 31 Moreover, in any occupied country, collaboration was an inescapable fact of life. Although Jews were condemned to extermination, they, too, were forced to collaborate by forming Judenrats (councils responsible for helping enforce Nazi orders affecting Jews) and the ghetto police. 32 The ghetto police in particular were forced to perform functions which must have posed some serious dilemmas. Isaiah Trunk described their activities:

... They were burdened with the most inhuman tasks ... to help the German enemy tighten the noose around the necks of Jewish victims .... The police collected cash contributions and taxes; they assisted in raiding, guarding and escorting hungry, mentally exhausted people on their way to places of forced labor .... The ghetto police sentries formed the inside guard at the ghetto fences .... The Jewish police carried out raids against and arrests of inmates destined for shipment to labor camps .... In the final stages of the ghettos the Jewish police were called upon to assist in the "resettlement actions". In short, the ghetto police came to be identified with the inhuman cruelty of the Nazi ghetto regime. 33

The so-called Ukrainian police were also an arm of the German government, since they functioned on the orders of the German authorities and in the interests of the German state. Unlike the Jewish ghetto police, however, whose authority was restricted to Jews, the Ukrainian auxiliary police, at the behest of the Germans, could participate in the persecution of Jews; some even participated in their execution. Like other nations, Ukrainians had their share of scoundrels whose behaviour besmirched the good name of the Ukrainian people, although they in no way represented Ukrainians as a whole. The government merely availed itself of the services of criminal elements, which can be found in every society.

Nonetheless, in both the civil administration and in the indigenous Ukrainian auxiliary police there were decent, and even heroic, people who risked their lives to help Jews. One such individual was Senytsia, mayor of Kremenchuk. With the help of Romansky, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, Senytsia was able to save Jews by having them baptized and providing them with false documents. 34 An equally interesting case is that of Mr. Wawryniuk who, as a Ukrainian police officer in Lviv, hid a Jewish woman, Clara Zimmels-Troper, in his house. His courageous and selfless act saved her life. 35 These are but two examples for which this author has documentary evidence of Ukrainians in official positions helping Jews survive the Holocaust.

While the Germans pursued their policy of extermination of Jews and Gypsies, the Ukrainian nation was also locked in a struggle against the further depletion of her economic and human resources. According to Soviet data, the Germans destroyed and burned 714 towns and 28,000 villages, leaving some ten million inhabitants of Ukraine without any shelter. Five to seven million civilians and prisoners of war also lost their lives at the hands of the German authorities.36 Other Ukrainians lost their lives fighting in the German Army, the Red Army, in Soviet partisan groups, and in the UP A. Ukrainians were obviously not disinterested bystanders; whether they wanted to or not, they participated in the tragic drama of World War 11. 37

Many Ukrainians, particularly members of the OUN, perished in concentration camps. 8 In addition, an estimated 2.3 million Ukrainians were taken to Germany, where they worked as forced labourers under the most adverse conditions on the farms and in the factories, which were frequently bombed by the Allies.39 Among the workers were children, whom the Germans exploited as much as adults. In fact, the plight of children was one of the most tragic chapters of the war. The object of the German policy of Heu-Aktion in the territories of Eastern Ukraine was to apprehend 40-50,000 youths between the ages of ten to fourteen, who were earmarked for lithe German trades as apprentices to be used as skilled workers after two years' training." Similar action was taken in Galicia, where the objective of the German authorities was to obtain 135,000 labourers. Youths under seventeen were to serve as SS auxiliaries while those over seventeen were to be detailed to the Galician Waffen-SS Division. 41 Ukrainians therefore experienced a full measure of tragedy at the hands of the Nazis. 42

Yet in the midst of this inferno there were men and women who risked their lives and the lives of their families to save Jews. The precise number shall probably never be known because most records note those who were discovered and executed by the Germans. Of those not discovered by the Germans very little is known, because many Jews did not consider it proper to come forth to identify their saviours. This author knows of at least two survivors who did not make depositions or public statements, despite repeated urgings to do so.

Philip Friedman suggests that some idea of the Ukrainians who risked their lives to save Jews may be gained from the official German posters which named those executed and gave reasons. The posters show that from October 1943 to June 1944, at least 1,541 Ukrainians were sentenced to death. Many of them were executed for belonging to the OUN and UPA, but approximately 100 had concealed or helped Jews. According to Friedman, the number was substantial, for it reflected a much greater participation. 43

After the war some efforts were made to gather testimonies about those who saved Jews. Eleven Ukrainians were listed by Joseph Schwarz, who gathered testimonies from Jewish survivors. Among the more spectacular stories was that of Oleksander Kryvoiaza of Sambir, Western Ukraine, who helped save fifty-eight Jews. 44 Roman Biletsky and his father Levko rescued and hid twenty-three Jews in Zavaliv. 45 A Ukrainian forester tells how a group of twenty-five Ukrainians and five Poles helped 1,700 Jews who hid in the forests. Some others hid in the monastery of the Ukrainian Studite order. 46 There were many individual Ukrainians who, on penalty of death, tried to help Jews. Relying on memoirs, Philip Friedman enumerates several such cases. 47

The following letter illustrates individual heroism in defense of Jews:

With regard to the question of attitudes of the Ukrainian population toward the Jews during World War II, I would like to put on record the following facts concerning our family:

1. A Ukrainian priest Kouch ... in Przemyslany (Peremyshliany), near Lviv, baptized in 1942 my brother and myself in order to provide us with Christian (aryan) papers. He did such things so en masse that he himself was arrested by the Germans, deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed.

2. A Ukrainian family Sokoluk (from the village Borshchiv, near Przemyslany) was hiding us (my mother, my brother and myself) for about three monthsfrom June to September 1943 - after the liquidation of the ghetto in Przemyslany and thus saved our lives. They did this completely gratuitously. 48

In the archives of Israel's Yad Vashem this author was able to identify several other Ukrainians who helped Jews by concealing them or providing them with food. Jona Oliver from Mizeche told of several Ukrainians who were helpful. In addition to Danylo Rybak, Oliver mentioned M. Pachybula, who hid J. Bronsztejn, and another Ukrainian (unfortunately no name is given) who concealed Izie Bronsztejn and five other Jews. 49

Hermann Zenner, in a lengthy memoir, told of what he observed in Kolomyia, Rohatyn, Horodenka, and Tluste (Tovste). He also recounted his experiences with Franko Solovy, a Ukrainian farmer from Dobki who not onll hid Zenner but also helped him to maintain contact with his family. 5 Such self-sacrificing individuals reaffirm one's faith in humanity. What impelled a Ukrainian brother and sister, Orest Zahajkiewicz and Helena Melnyczuk, to hide Egek and Eda Schafler? Wherein lies the "soul of goodness?" 51

The role of the Ukrainian Church and Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky constitutes a special chapter in the history of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Sheptytsky's courageous stand against the persecution of Jews was probably unequalled in Europe. When the Nazis began to implement their policy of genocide against the Jews, Sheptytsky sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler in February 1942, protesting vigorously against it and the use of Ukrainian auxiliary police. 52 Himmler disliked Sheptytsky's letter and his office returned it to Lviv for appropriate action. The Germans were in a quandary, for Sheptytsky's arrest would have created an explosive situation in Galicia. To retaliate they terminated the activities of the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv, of which Sheptytsky was honorary chairman. 53

The problem did not rest with the Germans alone. Some Ukrainians, particularly members of the indigenous police, also participated in the persecution and murder of Jewish people. It was basically to them that Sheptytsky addressed his November 1942 pastoral letter, entitled "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (Ne ubyi). Read in all churches instead of the Sunday sermon, the epistle threatened with divine punishment all individuals who "shed innocent blood and make of themselves outcasts of human society by disregarding the sanctity of man." 54

In his efforts to help Jews, Sheptytsky became directly involved in rescue operations. Using his high office and church organization, he enlisted some 550 monks and nuns in saving the lives of 150-200 Jewish children. 55 The metropolitan's immediate partners in this undertaking were his brother Klymentii, who was the archimandrite of the Studite monasteries, and his sister Josepha, who was mother superior of the nunneries.

One of the boys saved by Sheptytsky, Kurt I. Lewin, son of the Rabbi of Lviv, described the rescue operation:

This labor of saving Jews was possible only because of the cooperation of a small army of monks and nuns together with some lay priests. They gathered the Jews into their monasteries and convents, orphanages and hospitals, shared their bread with the fugitives, and acted as escorts with total disregard of the danger of Jewish company .... Some of them, taught and guided by the Metropolitan Andreas, reached a new height in spiritual life, spread the teachings of their great Prince of the Church among the people, and followed his path in all things. They were the ones most active in giving aid and comfort to the hunted fugitives. Others, never completely free of their anti-Jewish prejudice, nevertheless helped Jews because of their abhorrence of German cruelty. There were those who were indifferent, but being summoned to help, obeyed that summons with eagerness and selflessness. All of them, regardless of motive or attitude, equally shared the grave peril, and helped to provide Jews with shelter and food. But most important of all, they gave moral support to those whom they hid, and hunted Jews deprived of every human right and stripped of any sort of protection, were made to feel wanted and thus allowed to regain their faith in humanity. And those monks, nuns and priests kept their faith by their silence. For two long years no outsider knew about the Jews who were hidden in each and every cloister, and even in the Metropolitan's private residence. 56

Among the fifteen Jews hiding in Sheptytsky's residence were Kurt Lewin's brother, Isaac Lewin, and David Kahane, who spent three years teaching the monks Hebrew and working in the metropolitan's library. 57 Isaac Lewin, whose memoirs recount his meetings with Sheptytsky, recalled a conversation in which the metropolitan told him:

I want you to be a good Jew, and I am not saving you for your own sake. I am saving you for your people. I do not expect any reward, nor do I expect you to accept my faith. 58

The respect Sheptytsky earned for his work is indicated by Rabbi David Kahane:

[Sheptytsky] was one of the greatest humanitarians in the history of mankind [and] certainly the best friend the Jews ever had .... If the Metropolitan was willing to risk his priests, nuns and churches, he was moved by true undiluted Christianity, by love of our Jewish people, and by a sense of national responsibility. He realized that the enemies of the Ukrainian people would lose no time in blaming the actions of pogrom mobs and militia scum on the entire Ukrainian nation. It was therefore the holy and sacred duty of every nationally-conscious Ukrainian intellectual and priest to save as many Jews as possible. 59[/quote]

Kurt Lewin admired Sheptytsky's moral fiber, leadership, and commitment to Christian principles: "World War II was an opening to the madness of the world which you see today and it's a privilege for me and for you to be able to see a man [like Sheptytsky]; it's like touching the stars and being inspired by it .... It's a ray of humanity at its best, a ray of religion and faith at its strongest."60

Besides Sheptytsky's efforts to help Jews, there were many initiatives by individual Ukrainian priests. Father Marko personally saved forty Jewish children. 61 Philip Friedman lists several others who helped Jews in a variety of ways. Indeed, even in the far-off city of Marseilles, a Ukrainian priest, Valentyn Bakst, hid Jews in his church and provided them with forged "Aryan papers," while serving the spiritual needs of Ukrainian dock workers. 62

The story of Jewish-Ukrainian relations during World War II is therefore a multi-faceted one. Problems between the two groups have their roots in past social, economic, and political relationships, which shaped the perceptions and attitudes of Ukrainians and Jews, placing them in adversarial positions.

Both groups developed collective stereotypes of each other, often of a semi-mythical nature, which not only influenced but perhaps even determined their attitudes and behaviour. It is unfortunate that such stereotypes have been reinforced by writers and scholars who lend them authority and respectability. 63 What seems to be missing in most writings on the subject is restraint, attention to details, historical context, and an understanding of the political aspirations of the other side. Probably no one will ever write a complete history of the tumultuous events of World War II, but we can contribute to it by eliminating misconceptions and distortions which render impossible a balanced view of the past.

Notes:

1 Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj, Jewish-Ukrainian Relations: Two Solitudes (Oakville, Ont., 1983).

2 Milena Rudnytska, "Pomer dr. Emil Zomershtein, kolyshnii lider halytskykh zhydiv," Svoboda Gersey City), 5 July 1957.

52 Part I: 1. Occupation

3 For a history of the OUN and its role during World War II, see John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2d rev. ed. (Littleton, Colo., 1980).

4 OUN v svitli postanov Velykykh Zboriv, Konferentsii ta inshykh dokumentiv z borotby 1929-1954 r. (n.p., 1955),36.

5 Philip Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Nazi Occupation," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 12 (1958-9): 265.

6 The identification of Jews with Communism stems originally from the period of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War (1917-21). Seethe study by Arthur E. Adams, Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign, 1918-1919 (New Haven, 1963), 142.

7 Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 265.

8 OUN v svitli postanov Velykykh Zboriv, 107-20. See part 3 of this volume, document 9, for a translation of the Third Congress resolutions. .

9 Ievhen Shtendera and Petro Potichny, eds., Ukrainska holovna vyzvolna rada: dokumenty, ofitsiini publikatsii, materiialy, vol. 8 of Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi armii (Toronto, 1980), 36-7.

10 Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 284.

11 Tatigkeits-und Lagebericht Nr. 11 der Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in der UdSSR (Berichtszeit vom 1.3. - 31.3.1942), 20, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, R70/31.

12 The problem of reliable evidence and testimonies is discussed in Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 284-7.

13 Mykola Lebed, head of the OUN-B in 1941-3, stated: "The majority of doctors in the UP A were Jews whom the UPA rescued from the destructive Hitlerite actions. The Jewish doctors were treated as equal citizens of Ukraine and as officers of the Ukrainian Army." See Mykola Lebed, UPA: Ukrainska povstanska armia (n.p., 1946), 35-6.

14 According to Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 286, B. Eisenstein-Keshev claimed that the OUN-B liquidated the Jews in the camps at the approach of the Soviet army. Freidman expressed some reservations about Eisenstein-Keshev's account: "The report of B. Eisenstein-Keshev is not sufficiently documented and both its figures and events are subject to question. In the middle of June 1943, the UPA was compelled to disband this camp not because of the advance of the Soviet Army, as Eisenstein-Keshev erroneously states, but because of an attack by a German motorized batallion under the command of General Huentzler. Conceivably, the Jewish inmates left behind fell into the hands of the Germans and were exterminated."

15 Einsatzgruppe A, "Comprehensive Report up to October 15, 1941," in Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10 (Washington, D.C., 1949-54),4: 155-6, 159.

16 Referring to the policy of setting neighbour against neighbour, the Nuremberg military tribunal declared: "Certain Einsatzkommandos committed a crime which, from a moral point of view, was perhaps even worse than their own directly committed murders, that is, their initiating the population to abuse, maltreat, and slay their fellow citizens. To invade a foreign country, seize innocent inhabitants, and shoot them is a crime the mere statement of which is its own condemnation. But to stir up passion, hate, violence and destruction among the people themselves aims at breaking the moral backbone even of those the invader chooses to spare. It sows seeds of crime which the invader intends to bear continuous fruit even after he is driven out." See ibid., 435.

HUNCZAK: Ukrainian-Jewish Relations 53

17 Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD Berlin, der 12Juli 1941. Ereignismeldung UdSSR, No. 20, Bundesarchiv, R58/214, 4, for the situation in Stryi. SS Brigadier General Erwin Schul, commander of Einsatzkommando 5 (of Einsatzgruppe C), testified at Nuremberg that 5,000 inhabitants were murdered in Lviv. For his testimony, see Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, 4:518-21. A report of 16 July 1941 states that about 20,000 Ukrainians disappeared from Lviv during Soviet rule. At least 80 per cent of them were members of the intelligentsia. The number of those murdered is estimated at between 3-4,000. See Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Ereignismeldung UdSSR, Nr. 24, Bundesarchiv, R58/214, 10. For pictures of those murdered, see The National Archives, Washington, D.C., T3121 617/8308287-8308296. In Dobromyl among those murdered were four Jews. Also in the Dobromyl area several hundred people were murdered in the salt mines, which were filled with bodies. See Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Ereignismeldung UdSSR. Nr. 24, Bundesarchiv R58/214, 10-11, 13, 15. The figures for Lublin, Kremianets, and Dubno can be found in Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD Berlin, den 20. Juli 1941, Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 28, Bundesarchiv, R58/214, 7-9. The German report most likely referred not to Lublin, which was under the Nazis in 1939-41, but either to the villages of Liuby or Liublynets, both in Volhynia. The report also indicated that, following the Soviet occupation in September 1939, some 2,000 Ukrainians lost their lives, and about 10,000 Ukrainians disappeared from Ternopil. In Vinnytsia, an international team of physicians examined a mass grave unearthed in 1943 and confirmed that the victims had been murdered by the NKVD in 1937-8. Their findings are contained in Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Winniza (Berlin, 1944).

18 For eyewitness accounts as well as reports from various parts of Western Ukraine, particularly from Sambir (Ivano-Frankivsk), where the NKVD tortured and murdered 1,200 Ukrainians, see Milena Rudnytska, ed., Zakhidnia Ukra ina pid bolshevyknmy, IX. 1939-VI. 1941 (New York, 1958),441-92.

19 Leonard Schapiro, "The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement," Slavonic and East European Review 40 (December 1961): 164-5. A recent Soviet publication provides some information on Jewish participation in the Soviet government; its reliability is unknown. See Avtandil Rukhadze, Jews in the USSR: Figures, Facts, Comments (Moscow, 1984), 23.

20 For a very perceptive and concise treatment of this problem, see David Daube, Collaboration with Tyranny in Rabbinical Law (London, 1965).

21 This explains why, in 1941, the Ukrainian population welcomed the German army, particularly in the territories of Western Ukraine.

22 Jose Veloso, a former member of the Philippine Congress, wrote a first-rate analysis of the problem of collaboration, putting it within the context of an occupied country's political, social, and economic realities. See "Collaboration as a National Issue: A Grave Government Problem," Lawyer's Journal (November and December 1945). He concluded that (1) anyone who did not actively fight the Japanese collaborated with them of necessity, obeying the law of self-preservation; (2) collaboration helped the people survive oppressive foreign rule; and (3) collaboration was not treason because "service to country in any form and under any circumstances is patriotic, so long as it is for the good of the people. The final judge as to whether the service is loyal or treasonable is the people concerned and they alone, because to them it was rendered" (p. 177). Nevertheless, collaboration was a much more complex matter in Europe than in Asia.

54 Part I: 1. Occupation

23 For a thoughtful article on this subject, see Eberhard Straub, "Der verdrangte Sundenfall: Die franzosische Kollaboration und ihre historische Voraussetzungen," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 November 1983.

24 Bertram N. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980).

25 See Starkenachweisung der Schutzmannschaft, Stand vom 1. Juli 1942, Abschnitt C, Geschlossene Einheiten, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, R.19 vol. 266; also Hans-Joachim Neufeldt, Jurgen Huck, and Georg Tessin, Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei, 1936-1945 (Koblenz, 1957), 3:17, 51, 55, 64-5.

26 For thought-provoking arguments on this controversial issue, see John A. Armstrong, "Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe," Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (September 1968): 396-410. Armstrong provides a history and analysis of the OUN and its programs in Ukrainian Nationalism, 2d rev. ed. (Littleton, Colo., 1980). See also Taras Hunchak and Roman Solchanyk, eds., Ukrainska suspilno-politychna dumka v 20 stolitti: dokumenty i materiialy (New York, 1983), 3:23-43.

27 The most direct challenge to the Germans was the unilateral proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state by laroslav Stetsko on 30 June 1941. The Germans considered this act a Ukrainian attempt at a coup d'etat. Stepan Bandera, head of the ~UN, when pressed by a German representative on 3 July 1941 to withdraw the proclamation of a Ukrainian state because the right to do so belonged to the German Army and the Fuhrer, replied that this right belonged to the ~UN. Personal archive, NSDAP Nr. 51, "Niederschrift uber die Rucksprache mit Mitgliedern des ukrainischen Nationalkomitees und Stepan Bandera vom 3.7. 1941," 11.

28 Armstrong, "Collaborationism"; see also Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism.

29 The reference here is to the OUN under the leadership of Stepan Bandera.

30 For the most comprehensive source on the UP A, see Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi arm ii, ed. levhen Shtendera and Petro Potichny, 10 vols. (Toronto, 1976-).

31 Stanley Hoffmann, "Collaborationism in France during World War II," Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (September 1968): 375.

32 To be sure, members of the Judenrats collaborated with the Nazis, convinced that they were serving the best interests of the majority of the Jewish population. In their desperate situation, they had to face some very difficult ethical questions. These questions were similar to some asked by David Daube, namely, whether a group of women should allow one of their number to be defiled by an oppressor in return for a promise to save the rest. See Daube, Collaboration with Tyranny, 2, 69.

33 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat (New York, 1972),499; see also 500-33.

34 For his subversion of the German policy, Senytsia was executed. See Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SO, Berlin, den 6. Marz 1942, Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 177, 3. Bundesarchiv, Koblenz R58/221.

35 Clara Zimmels-Troper lives in Paris. On 8 March 1984 she made a notarized deposition about her survival. A copy of her deposition is in my archives.

36 Akademiia nauk Ukrainskoi RSR, Instytut istorii, lstoriia Ukrainskoi RSR: Ukrainska RSR u Velykii Vitchyznianii viini Radianskoho Soiuzu, 1941-1945 (Kiev, 1977), 7:512. Bohdan Krawchenko gives a somewhat different figure. In the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Newsletter, February 1985,16, he states that Ukraine lost 6.8 million of its population. For a study of the Ukrainian losses, in both wars, see Stephan G. Prociuk, "Human Losses in the Ukraine in World War I and II," Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 13, no. 35-6 (1973-7): 40. For a more recent study of Ukraine's losses, see Wolodymyr Kosyk, "Ukraine's Losses During the Second World War" in The Ukrainian Review 33, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 9-19.

37 Ukrainians also fought in the armed forces of Canada and the United States, as well as in units organized by the London-based Polish government-in-exile, particularly the Polish forces under the command of Gen. Wladyslaw Anders.

38 For personal accounts of life in the concentration camps, see Petro Mirchuk, U nimets1cykh mlynakh smerty: spomyny z pobutu v nimets1cykh tiurmakh i kontslaherakh, 1941-45 (New York-London, 1957). See also Mykhailo H. Marunchak, Systema nimets1cykh kontstaboriv i polityka vynyshchuvannia v Ukraini (Rotterdam, 1947).

39 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945 (London, 1957),428-53. For the treatment of Ukrainian labourers, see Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (henceforth TMWC) (Nuremberg 1947-9), 25: 101-10; TMWC, 3: 416-511; TMWC, 15: 3-310; TMWC, 16: 548.

40 United States, Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C., 1946), 3: 71-2.

41 Ibid. For further reports on Ukrainian juveniles who were forced into German service, see TMWC, 27: 12-18; TMWC, 14: 501-04; TMWC, 15: 203-05; TMWC, 25: 89-92. See also Zenon Zeleny, Ukrainske iunatstvo v vyri Druhoi svitovoi viiny (Toronto, 1965).

42 It is unfortunate that Jewish authors writing about World War II portray the Holocaust only in terms of the Jewish experience. They rarely mention the human losses suffered by Ukrainians, Poles, or Gypsies, thus reducing the profound tragedy almost exclusively to one people. This kind of writing is not only insensitive, but it also makes for poor history. On 20 April 1985, for example, American Gypsy representative James Marks protested that Gypsies were "excluded from the Days of Remembrance observances, even though 500,000 Gypsies were killed by the Nazis." See "Gypsies Protest Exclusion From Holocaust Rites in U.S.," New York Times, 21 April 1985. One gets the impression that Jews were the only ones that suffered and that now one should remember only Jews.

43 Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 288. The originals of the German posters, or official announcements, are in the archives of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council in New York. See also the Harvard University Refugee Interview Project, no. 500, 56, 7 and Nasha Strana Oerusalem), 2 November 1983.

44 See Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 289.

45 For the story of the reunion of Roman 5iletsky with the survivors in New York, see "Pidhaietski zhydy v Niu Yorku viddiachylys ukraintsevi za riatunok," Svoboda, 24 February 1978.

46 See Petro Pik-Piasetsky, "Iak ukrainski lisnyky riatuvaly zhydiv," Svoboda, 9 April 1955.

47 Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 290.

48 Letter from Ida Pizem-Karezag to this author, 26 February 1982.

49 See "Uwagi do zeznania Jony Olivera z dn.8.3.1962," Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 03/2233, 9-10,12.

50 See "Erinnerungen des Herm Hermann Zenner (Steinkohl), Chicago," Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 03/3389, 20, 25, 71, 124. In fairness to the reports read by this author at Yad Vashem, it should be stated that they tell mainly the story of Ukrainian persecution of Jews. The reports about righteous Ukrainians are almost an exception to the rule. That, of course, does not mean that all the reports are true. When they deal with specific individuals, be they saviours or persecutors, they are probably true. The historical value of the reports' generalizations is suspect, however, for the writers discuss situations they did not witness or things that it would be almost impossible for them to know. On the whole, the depositions or reports of the survivors are tinted with anti-Ukrainian bias. A classic example is the testimony of Jan Artwinski Oakob Grinberg): "We travelled on the road to Brody .... Before Brody we saw in one forest forty-three Jews who were hanged by their feet. Among them were women, men and juveniles .... It was the work of the Ukrainians [emphasis added]. The same thing would have happened to us had we met up with them." See "Protokol zeznania swiadka," Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 03/1556, 3.

51 For some perceptive observations on the subject, see Daniel Goleman, "Great Altruists: Science Ponders Soul of Goodness," New York Times, 5 March 1985, CI-2.

52 See Stepan Baran, Mytropolyt Andrei Sheptytsley (Munich, 1947), 114-5.

53 Kost Pankivsky, Roley nimetskoi okupatsii (New York, 1965),29-30. Kurt Lewin, who worked in Sheptytsky's library and archives in 1943-4, confirms that he saw the metropolitan's letter and Himmler's rude rebuke telling the metropolitan "not to interfere in affairs which did not concern him." See Kurt I. Lewin, "Archbishop Andreas Sheptytsky and the Jewish Community in Galicia during the Second World War," Unitas (Summer 1960): 137-8.

54 Sheptytsky's pastoral letter was published in Lvivski arkhieparkhiialni vidomosti 55, no. 11 (November 1942): 177-83. An original translation of the letter into the German (probably by the German Security Service) is in this author's personal archives.

55 Philip Friedman says that some 150 children were saved ("Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 293), while Rabbi Kahane's figure is 200 children. See Leo Heiman, "They Saved Jews," Ukrainian Quarterly 17, no. 4 (Winter 1961): 328.

56 Kurt I. Lewin, "Archbishop Andreas Sheptytsky," 139-40. For other testimonies, see "Mytropolyt Andrei," Ukrainsleyi samostiinyk Oune 1966): 24-36; also Osyp Kravcheniuk, Veleten zi sviatoiurskoi hory (Yorkton, Sask., 1963), 97-104.

57 After the war David Kahane went to Israel, where he became chief chaplain of the Israeli Air Force.

58 Philip Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers (New York, 1978), 135-6.

59 Heiman, "They Saved Jews," 325. When David Kahane speaks about the humanitarianism of Metropolitan Sheptytsky and his friendship toward Jews, there certainly is sufficient evidence for such a judgment. When, however, he speaks about political motivations in helping Jews, one must wonder what his source is. It is doubtful whether the basis of Sheptytsky's altruism was political.

60 The interview with Kurt Lewin was conducted by David Mills on 31 May 1968. The original tapes of the interview are in this author's archives.

61 See Heiman, "They Saved Jews," 331.

62 See Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations," 294.

63 In this connection, one can note two highly respected Jewish authors, Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz. In The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961),585, Hilberg wrote: "Little is known about the guard forces of Belzec and Sobibor, except that they numbered in the hundreds and that, again, they were mostly Ukrainian." What is the evidence for such a statement? Lucy Dawidowicz presents an entirely different problem, because she distorts a document. In "Babi Yar's Legacy," an article that abounds with anti-Ukrainian bias, she states: "According to an official report, Sonderkommando 4A - assisted by the staff of Einzatzgruppe C, two units of Police Regiment South and the Ukrainian militia - 'executed' a total of 33,771 Jews in two days." What Dawidowicz does is add "and the Ukrainian militia" to the list of those who slaughtered Jews in Babi Yar. By doing this, she distorts the historical record of that tragic event. See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, "Babi Yar's Legacy," New York Times Magazine, 27 September 1981, 54. From a German report on the subject, one learns: "Consequently, the Jews of Kiev were requested ... to appear on Monday, 29 September by 8 0' clock at a designated place. These announcements were posted by members of the Ukrainian militia in the entire city .... In collaboration with the group [Gruppen] staff and 2 Kommandos of the police regiment South, the Sonderkommando 4A executed on 29 and 30 September 33,771 Jews." See Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Washington, D.C.), 4: 148.  

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PART I: Ukraine during World War II

2. COLLABORATION AND RESISTANCE
by Peter J. Potichnyj

Ukrainians in World War II Military Formations: An Overview

There is a great deal of confusion about the behaviour of Ukrainians during 1939-45, and it is not limited to non-Ukrainians. Forty years after World War II, some Ukrainians are themselves unclear on issues that affected them four decades ago and have influenced their thinking to this day.

The common view of the war is that of an enormous struggle between the forces of good and evil, in which the former triumphed. It follows from this view that the nations and individuals who were not on the side of the Allies (except, of course, for the neutral countries) must have been on the side of the Axis powers or, worse still, on the side of the Nazis. Whatever does not fit this neat pattern is either overlooked or misunderstood, and so it has been with the present debate over collaboration and war criminality among Ukrainians.

During World War II Ukrainians collaborated with all sides, for two main reasons. First, as one of the world's largest national groups without a sovereign state, Ukrainians did not control their destiny at a crucial time in world history. Second, not unlike Jews, Ukrainians were - and still are - scattered throughout the world; thus in 1939-45 they could be found in all kinds of places and situations.

Since the war's fiercest battles were on Ukrainian territory, it is not surprising that Ukrainians fought in various armies and military formations, in large numbers and on all fronts. In the Soviet army alone were 4.5 million citizens of Ukraine. According to Soviet statistics, 409,668 Ukrainians were awarded medals for bravery in the war; 961 became heroes of the Soviet Union; and 60 per cent of the 250,000- strong Soviet partisan force in Ukraine was Ukrainian.

Thousands of Ukrainians served in the Polish army of General Wladyslaw Anders and fought with him on the British side in Egypt, Libya, and Italy. Ukrainians also joined the Polish units that advanced with the Soviet army into Poland. Czech units attached to the Allied forces and formed in the USSR had Ukrainian troops. In 1943, of the 15,000 soldiers in the brigade led by General Ludvik Svoboda, 11,000 were Ukrainians. Most of them became members of the brigade after a three-year sojourn in Soviet concentration camps, where they had been kept since 1940. (Thirty thousand Ukrainians had originally fled to the Soviet Union from Subcarpathian Ukraine to escape the Nazi-supported Hungarian occupation of their territory. The Soviet authorities, suspicious of their national consciousness and eager to assure the Germans that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would be honoured, promptly arrested them and sent them to concentration camps.)

Ukrainians served in the Romanian and Hungarian armies, and they played an important role in bringing about peace between the latter and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Ukrainians fought on the side of the Serbian monarchist Draza Mihailovic and with Tito's Yugoslav partisans. A large number of Ukrainians served in the American and Canadian armed forces (an estimated 40,000 in the latter). They could also be found in the French Resistance.

World War II Ukrainian military formations fall into three categories: those established on the basis of a political agreement with the German authorities; those organized by the Germans without any regard to political considerations (precise figures on the number of Ukrainians in such units are not available); and those connected with the underground.

To the first category belong the Nationalist Military Detachments (VVN), the Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN), the Galician Division of the Waffen-SS, Ukrainian units in the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UW), and the Ukrainian National Army (UNA).

The Nationalist Military Detachments, organized in 1939 by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (still unified at the time), was put under the leadership of Colonel Roman Sushko. It had the blessing and support of the Germans immediately before the war with Poland, but existed for a very short time, being disbanded when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact came into effect. Many of its members later entered the Ukrainian auxiliary police, Werkschutz units, and the Baudienst. Its real importance lies in its efforts to renew the traditions of the World War I period, when a national legion, Sichovi striltsi, became the nucleus of the Ukrainian Army.

The Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists was also organized with the understanding and support of the Germans. It fought under the auspices of the Bandera faction of the OUN (OUN-B) and was divided into two groups: Nachtigall and Roland. Nachtigall had about 1,000 men in Lviv when a Ukrainian state was proclaimed in June 1941. After the arrest of the OUN-B leadership, both battalions were returned to Frankfurt an der Oder and there organized into Guard Battalion 201, which was sent to Belorussia to combat Soviet partisans. Because of various complaints about the Ukrainians' insubordination, almost all the Ukrainian officers were arrested and the unit disbanded. One officer, Captain Roman Shukhevych, escaped and later became Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UP A). He headed the Ukrainian underground until his death in a battle with Soviet MVD troops in March 1950, near Lviv.

The most important and largest regular unit in this first category was the Galician Division, organized in mid-1943 amid much controversy. Initially, the Ukrainian underground strongly opposed its formation, but once the Galician Division became a fait accompli, the underground used the division to train its own people. However, the trainees later deserted and rejoined the underground. Many division members also joined the underground after the division's defeat during the Battle of Brody in July 1944. The remaining troups regrouped in 1945 into a division that became the 1st Division of the UNA.

Other units were formed from Red Army prisoners of war. This was the case of the Sumy (Ukrainian) Division, created in late 1941 and early 1942, although without a political agreement with the Germans. The division was nearly destroyed during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-3, and its remnants were attached in 1944 to General Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army (ROA). As a result of Ukrainian protests, all Ukrainian units (but not all individual Ukrainians) separated from the ROA and reorganized as the Ukrainian Liberation Army in the spring of 1944.

In early 1945 former Red Army officers and soldiers formed an anti-tank brigade, Free Ukraine, near Berlin. The recruits came mostly from the Berlin fire brigades, 85 per cent of whom were allegedly composed of Ukrainians. The brigade was organized according to geographical region and included, among others, companies from Myrhorod, Lubni, and Chernihiv.

All of the above-mentioned units or their remnants were brought together under one command in early 1945, when the Ukrainian National Committee, headed by General Pavlo Shandruk, was established in Berlin. In a very difficult situation, pressured from all sides, the Germans finally agreed to the creation of the Ukrainian National Army. The core of the army was to be the reorganized Galician Division, which was to become part of the UNA's 1st Division. Although this plan was never fully realized because of Germany's defeat, the Germans' consent to Ukrainian control of these units gave Ukrainians a free hand to negotiate with the Allies at the war's end.

Once removed from the Eastern front, the Ukrainian units were often less than reliable. For example, two guard battalions of the 30th SS Infantry Division, composed of Ukrainian forced labourers in Germany who were pressed into service, were sent to fight the French underground. In late fall 1944 these units deserted to the French side and became part of the Forces Francaises de l'Interieur (the Resistance). The units were first named the Bohoun and Chevtchenko (Shevchenko) Battalions, and later became the First and Second Ukrainian Battalions. Both battalions were dissolved at the request of the Soviet authorities at the end of 1944. Another unit within the French resistance, led by Lieutenant Osyp Krukovsky and composed of the remnants of three battalions of the Galician Division sent to the West for training, immediately tried to desert to the French side. The attempt was thwarted by the Germans but a small group managed to escape in 1944. The rest were shipped back to Germany.

In the second category (formations organized by the Germans without any prior political agreement) were the guard and construction units: Werksehutz, Bahnsehutz, Baudienst, Hilfswillige (Hiwis), and the Sehutzmannsehaften, the Ukrainian auxiliary police. They were made up mainly of former Red Army soldiers who joined these units to save their lives, since Soviet POWs were not covered by the Geneva Convention and the Germans treated them most inhumanely.

In the third category were the formations of the Ukrainian underground, composed of those who joined neither the Soviet nor German forces. This third alternative became a possibility only when the brutality of the Nazi regime and its position on the question of Ukrainian statehood was no longer a mystery.

The first underground unit formed was led by Taras Bulba-Borovets. It was variously named the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Polissian Sieh, and the Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army (UNRA). The UPA originated in 1942. Initially, it was politically connected to the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) government-in-exile and was later associated with the OUN-M. It became a popular force so large that in 1944 the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) was created to lead the struggle and co-ordinate political activity. By then the UP A had come under the control of the OUN-B and was active well into the 1950s, when it was liquidated by the Soviets.

There are many misconceptions about the underground. One concerns its origins, and the approach to this question in the West has often been oversimplified. Because the underground was created by nationalists, many of whom had earlier served in units associated with the Germans, they were by definition considered fascists. Another misconception relates to its membership, since once the UPA began to operate, it drew on all organized nationalist groups. Many members of the auxiliary police forces, particularly in Volhynia, deserted and joined the UPA, as did members of the Galician Division. As a result, uninformed writers in the West and an absolute avalanche of Soviet publications give the impression that the Ukrainian underground was created by the Germans in order to fight against the USSR and, as such, harboured all kinds of war criminals.

What is overlooked is that the UP A drew its members from all areas of Ukraine and that Red Army soldiers also belonged to it. Many of the UP A's leading officers and political leaders were from areas controlled by the Soviet Union before 1939. Osyp Pozychaniuk, a former Komsomol member, was a prominent leader within the UHVR and in charge of its Information Bureau. He was not the only one. In his memoirs, Danylo Shumuk mentions members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine who eventually joined the underground units.

It is important to re-emphasize that Ukrainians were to be found on all sides during World War II. The main reasons were that Ukraine was one of the largest nations in Europe without an independent nationstate; the territory of the Ukrainian people was divided among four states on the eve of the war; and there existed a large and dynamic Ukrainian diaspora. Ukrainians who were in German military units were there for various reasons, few of which included sympathy for Nazi ideology or racial policies. Most nationalist Ukrainians had a political agenda - an independent Ukraine, which placed them squarely in opposition to the two main adversaries of the region, Germany and the Soviet Union.

References

Armstrong, John A. Ukrainian Nationalism, 1939-1945. 2d ed. New York, 1963.

Holovenko, V. "Bataliony 121 i 116." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, no. 9-10 (1953): 10-11.

Horbach, Oleksa. "Ukraintsi u viiskovykh formatsiiakh Druhoi svitovoi viiny." In Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva, 1186-8. Vol. 1, pt. 3. Munich, 1949.

- "Dyviziia Halychyna." In Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavsta, 589. Vol. 1, pt. 2. Munich, 1949.

Karov, D. Partizanskoe dvizhenie v SSSR v 1941-45 gg. Munich, 1954.

Kleist, Peter. Zwischen Hitler und Stalin, 1939-1945. Bonn, 1950.

Kovach, A. Vlasovshchyna. Germany, 1948.

Kovpak, Sidor A. Ot Putivlia do Karpat. Moscow, 1945.

Kubiiovych, Volodymyr. "Pochatky Ukrainskoi dyvizii 'Halychyna'." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, nos. 3-4 (41-2) (1954): 2-5.

Levytsky, Myron, ed. Istoriia ukrainskoho viiska. 2d rev. ed. Winnipeg, 1953.

Lysiak, Oleh. "Volynskyi batalion." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, no. 3 (1951).

- ed. Bii pid Brodamy: zbirnyk stattei u trydtsiatlittia. New York, 1974.

Matla, Zynovii. Pivdenna pokhidna hrupa. Munich, 1952.

Medvedev, Dmitrii N. Silnye dukhom. Moscow, 1951.

Nebeliuk, Myroslav. Pid chuzhymy praporamy. Paris-Lyon, 1951.

Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, 1929-1954. Paris, 1955.

Ortynsky, Liubomyr. "Druzhyny ukrainskykh natsionalistiv (DUN)." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, nos. 6-7 (20-21) (1952): 4-5.

OUN v svitli postanov velykykh zboriv, konferentsii ta inshykh dokumentiv borotby, 1929-1954. n.p., 1955.

DUN u viini 1939-1945. n.p., 1946.

Shandruk, Pavlo. "Tse bulo tak." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, no. 3-4 (53-54) (1955): 2-6.

Shtendera, Ievhen, and Petro Potichny, eds. Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi armii. 10 vols. Toronto, 1976-.

Shuliak, O. V imia pravdy: do istorii povstanchoho rukhu v Ukraini. Rotterdam, 1947.

Thorwald, Jurgen. Wen sie verderben wollen. Stuttgart, 1952.

Tytarenko, Petro. "Protypantsyrna bryhada 'Vilna Ukraina'." Visti Bratstva kolyshnikh voiakiv I-oi Ukrainskoi dyvizii UNA, no. 6-7 (20-21) (1952): 3.

Vershigora, P. Liudi s chistoi sovestiu. Moscow, 1951.  

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Galician Ukrainians in German Military Formations and in the German Administration
by Myroslav Yurkevich

During World War II, three Ukrainian formations functioned primarily in Western Ukraine: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN); the Ukrainian Central Committee, which participated in the German administration of the Generalgouvernement; and the Galician Division of the Waffen-SS, which was formed in April 1943 and surrendered in May 1945.

In Galicia, the most Westernized area of Ukraine, the process of nation-building had found greater expression than anywhere else in the country. 1 As a result of the first partition of Poland (1772), Galician Ukrainians came under Austrian control and benefited from the Habsburgs' divide-and-rule nationality policies. In order to limit the political power of their Polish subjects, the Austrian monarchs encouraged the revival of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which led to the formation of a Ukrainian clerical, and later secular, intelligentsia. During the period of constitutional rule after 1867, Galician Ukrainians established a strong network of independent cultural and economic institutions, as well as political parties. In 1914, Galician Ukrainians won the Austrian government's permission to establish the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen as a distinct unit of the Austrian army. (The Sich had been the Cossack stronghold on the lower Dnieper.) With the fall of the Habsburg monarchy in November 1918 and the proclamation of an independent Western Ukrainian People's Republic, the Sich Riflemen became the backbone of the Ukrainian Galician Army, which fought the Poles for possession of the territory until the summer of 1919.

Western Ukrainians' commitment to national sovereignty and readiness to fight in its defence distinguished them from their Eastern Ukrainian countrymen, who had been under direct Russian rule since the mid-eighteenth century. Russian absolutism made it impossible for Eastern Ukrainians to approximate the degree of national consciousness attained in Galicia. Publications in the Ukrainian language, for example, were forbidden by tsarist decree in 1863 and 1876. Consequently, until 1917 Eastern Ukrainian political aspirations were for the most part limited to autonomy within a democratized Russian federation.

A turbulent period of independence followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Ukrainian People's Republic was unable to withstand the superior forces of Soviet Russia. The latter's indigenous allies, the Ukrainian communists, were prepared, like their nineteenth-century populist predecessors, to compromise with the more powerful Russians.

Galicians reacted to political defeat in a very different manner. In 1921, former soldiers of the Sich Riflemen and the Ukrainian Galician Army combined under the leadership of Colonel Ievhen Konovalets to form the underground Ukrainian Military Organization. Throughout the 1920s, it waged a campaign of violence against the Polish administration and Polish colonial settlement in Galicia and Volhynia. (A former province of the Russian Empire, Volhynia came under Polish rule in 1921.) The decision of the Allied Council of Ambassadors, announced on 15 March 1923, to recognize Polish sovereignty over Galicia confirmed Ukrainian nationalists in the view that they would obtain no support for their aspirations from the liberal democracies.

In 1929, at a clandestine meeting in Vienna, representatives of the Ukrainian Military Organization and student nationalist groups in Western Ukraine and Czechoslovakia established the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv). Like virtually every European nationalist movement of the interwar period, the OUN explicitly rejected liberal-democratic ideas,2 and modelled its political program on the Italian corporatist ideal. It called for a national revolution to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state, which was to be ruled by a dictator with the assistance of a national council formed on the basis of corporate representation of citizens. The state was to have the deciding voice in every area of national life, from economics to religion. 3

Since Ukrainian nationalism had often been denounced by Russians and Poles as an artificial creation inspired by foreign powers, the OUN leadership took care to stress its independence of external models. It further claimed that Ukrainian nationalism differed in principle from Italian fascism. An editorial note in the OUN's official organ, Rozbudova natsii (Development of the Nation), made this point clear:

Fascism is the movement of a sovereign people; it is a current that developed out of a social environment and fought for power within its own state. Ukrainian nationalism is a national-liberation movement whose task is the struggle for statehood, to which it must lead the broadest masses of the Ukrainian people. Accordingly, Ukrainian nationalism not only cannot be identified with Italian fascism, but cannot even be compared too closely with it. 4

The OUN leadership's orientation toward the Italian model did not imply support for Nazi ideology. The OUN representative in Rome, Ievhen Dnatsky, who energetically lobbied Mussolini's government for support of the Ukrainian cause, maintained that German National Socialism was a different ideology from the Italian corporatist ideal. 5 Writing in the OUN's official journal in 1934, he condemned Nazism as imperialist, racist, and anti-Christian. 6 Similarly, the leading DUN ideologue Mykola Stsiborsky devoted a chapter of his major work, Natsiokratiia (Natiocracy), to a critique of Hitler's dictatorship. 7

Yet Germany was a much more powerful state than Italy and far more likely to go to war against the Soviet Union, thereby presenting Ukrainians with an opportunity to win their independence. The OUN leadership therefore called upon its contacts in German military and intelligence circles, attempting to interest them in the Ukrainian cause and providing information about Polish government activities in return for funds to finance OUN operations.8 Because the German military were considerably more pragmatic than their Nazi masters (Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence, would eventually foster opposition to Hitler's regime), the OUN leaders tended to discount the racism that motivated the Nazis. They believed it possible to arrange a quid pro quo with the Germans: the OUN would mobilize Ukrainian support for the German army in the impending war against Russia in return for German recognition of an independent Ukraine. This belief sustained them in 1939-41, when Hitler's deliberate avoidance of conflict with Stalin led to several major setbacks in Ukrainian nationalist aspirations.

In March 1939, when the Carpatho-Ukrainians took advantage of the destruction of Czechoslovakia to declare their independence, Hitler allowed Hungarian forces to overrun the area. The Carpatho-Ukrainian defence force, organized with the assistance of the OUN, was routed by the Hungarians. 9 Despite this blow, the OUN continued its co-operation with German military intelligence, which sanctioned the creation of a 600-man formation known as the Nationalist Military Detachments (Viiskovi viddily natsionalistiv) shortly before the German attack on Poland. 10 The formation, commanded by the prominent nationalist Roman Sushko, was made up of former soldiers of the Carpatho-Ukrainian defence force and members of the OUN living in Germany. After the completion of basic training in the Austrian village of Saubersdorf near Wiener Neustadt, small groups were taken to Germany for further training. Great pains were taken to keep the formation's existence secret. Its soldiers were given German pseudonyms and forbidden contact with the population. The Ukrainian letters "BBH" on their shoulder patches were interpreted for official purposes as standing for Bergbauern Hilfe (assistance to peasants in mountain regions).

Following the German invasion of Poland, the formation was attached to the southern German army group that advanced through Slovakia into Galicia. In accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, however, German forces were ordered to withdraw from Galicia, which was to be occupied by the Red Army. Sushko's detachments, which had already begun to assist Ukrainian refugees from the Soviet advance, were taken aback by the order to withdraw, and in December 1939 the nationalist leadership decided to dissolve the formation.

At the same time, tension between the OUN leaders, who were scattered in Central and Western European cities to escape Polish police repression, and their Western Ukrainian followers had reached the breaking point. The crisis had begun in May 1938 with the assassination in Rotterdam of Ievhen Konovalets, most probably by a Soviet agent.11 The choice of his successor polarized the older leadership and the younger Western Ukrainian membership, which bore the day-to-day risks of OUN activity and tended to see its superiors as idlers out of touch with the domestic situation. At a conference held in Rome in August 1939 with minimal Western Ukrainian representation, the leaders appointed one of Konovalets's associates, Andrii Melnyk, as his successor. Most of the Western Ukrainian membership refused to acknowledge the appointment and gave its loyalty to the so-called Revolutionary Leadership of the OUN, formed in February 1940 and headed by Stepan Bandera.

As the stronger OUN faction, Bandera's group (OUN-B) attracted the attention of the German army. The OUN-B held a conference in Cracow in April 1941, adopting a political program that stressed the vital importance of a Ukrainian army to the winning of independence. 12 In the same month, negotiations between the OUN-B leadership and the German military led to the formation of two Ukrainian units codenamed Nachtigall and Roland. Nachtigall trained in Neuhammer in Silesia; its officers were all Germans, but there was an unofficial Ukrainian staff headed by the prominent OUN-B member Roman Shukhevych. Initially, Nachtigall consisted of approximately 150 troops, but with the German invasion of the USSR it was expanded to battalion strength. 13 Roland,. a larger unit than Nachtigall, trained at Saubersdorf and was commanded de facto by Riko Jary, a member of the OUN leadership who had been particularly close to German intelligence in the 1930s. 14 His chief Ukrainian subordinate was Ievhen Pobihushchy.

The two units were given the collective name Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (Druzhyny ukrainskykh natsionalistiv) by the OUN-B leadership, which was by no means content to regard them as integral parts of the Wehrmacht. In the negotiations that led to the formation of Nachtigall and Roland, the Ukrainian nationalists insisted on concessions that would guarantee the units' independence and ensure that they would defend Ukrainian interests. The OUN-B leadership was to remain the units' political master, overseeing recruitment, training, and their eventual use in combat. The units were to be deployed exclusively against Soviet forces.1s When the Germans attempted to have Nachtigall swear loyalty to Germany and the Fuhrer, Shukhevych lodged a formal protest. Only after this step had been taken and a telephone call made to Bandera were Nachtigall's soldiers able to swear allegiance to Ukraine and the OUN-B leadership. 16 Both factions of the OUN also formed expeditionary groups whose task was to follow the Germans into Ukraine, organize the population independently, and seize power. 17

When the invasion occurred on 22 June 1941, Nachtigall advanced with the Wehrmacht to the Galician capital, Lviv, reaching it on 30 June. 18 Roland was sent with the German forces to southern Bessarabia. In Lviv, the OUN-B acted immediately to realize its political plans, hastily summoning a "National Assembly" and proclaiming an independent Ukrainian state in the name of Stepan Bandera and his lieutenant, Iaroslav Stetsko, who was given the title "Head of the National Congress."19 Nachtigall was represented at the congress by Shukhevych. 20 The OUN-B also succeeded in obtaining a statement of support from the Ukrainian Catholic primate, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. 21

Although the Germans had not been consulted about the proclamation, OUN-B leaders believed that the Wehrmacht would accept the fait accompli in order to gain Ukrainian support on the Eastern front. 22 They failed to understand, however, that German policy in the East was determined by the Nazi party, which considered Ukraine a territory for German exploitation and colonization; the Nazis regarded Ukrainians, like other Slavs, as subhumans who were to serve them as slaves. 23 Accordingly, the German secret police proceeded to arrest the OUN-B leaders and demand that they withdraw the proclamation of independence. Bandera and Stetsko refused and spent most of the war in German prisons and concentration camps. The Melnyk faction (OUNM), which had intended to proclaim Ukrainian independence in Kiev, was hunted down before it could proceed with its plan; Melnyk was kept under house arrest and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944. After having arrested the nationalist leaders, the Germans began a campaign of wholesale repression against the ~UN, imprisoning or killing as many of its members as they could track down. 24

Upon the arrest of the OUN-B leaders, Shukhevych addressed a protest to the Wehrmacht general staff, but this brought no positive result. 25 The Germans, concerned that Nachtigall and Roland might rebel against them, withdrew the two units from the front lines to Frankfurt an der Oder, where they were united into a single formation, Schutzmannschaftbataillon (Guard Battalion) No. 201. In April 1942 the battalion was sent to Belorussia to fight Soviet partisans.26 Its formal agreement to fight in the German ranks was to expire at the end of 1942, and the Germans insisted on renewal of the agreement in November of that year. The officers and soldiers refused, claiming that promises to give them equal rights with German soldiers and to provide assistance to their families had not been kept. 27 The battalion was then dissolved, its officers arrested and imprisoned in Lviv. Shukhevych and several companions managed to escape and join the Ukrainian underground. In 1943 Shukhevych became commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UP A) (Ukrainska povstanska armiia), remaining at this post until March 1950, when he and his men were surrounded and killed by the Soviet secret police. 28

The UPA was initiated by an independent activist in Volhynia, Taras Borovets, who established a Polissian Sich, which attacked retreating Soviet forces in 1941. 29 Conceiving of this Sich as the nucleus of a national army, Borovets allied himself with the OUN-M and, in the spring of 1942, undertook anti-German resistance. By that autumn, however, the OUN-B had begun its own resistance to the Germans and in 1943 managed to seize control of the UP A, which had grown to a peak strength of about 40,000. 30

Since the UPA was now fighting the Germans, who made a determined but unsuccessful attempt to destroy it, 31 the nationalist underground was obliged to shed any ideological affinities with totalitarianism. In 1943, both the UPA and the OUN-B adopted official programmatic statements condemning Nazi and Soviet imperialism and affirming the nationalist movement's commitment to political pluralism and to the traditional democratic freedoms associated with Western liberalism. 32 The revision of ideology did not come easily, and arguments about it within the emigre OUN-B caused the organization to split in 1954. 33 Nevertheless, the commitment of the OUN-UPA in Ukraine to the new political program was confirmed not only by documents but also by articles from the movement's publicists. 34 It was also attested to by the formation in 1944 of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska holovna vyzvolna rada), initiated by the OUN-UPA, and based on an explicitly democratic, pluralist platform. 35 The UPA continued fighting for an independent Ukraine after the end of World War II and was largely destroyed by 1948 as a result of joint Soviet, Polish, and Czechoslovak efforts. 36 Isolated units continued to fight unti11954, without assistance from any foreign power. 37

What of Ukrainian participation in the German administration of occupied territory? The only area in which the Germans allowed this to any significant degree during the occupation was in the Generalgouvernement, the territory of central Poland to which Galicia had been annexed in 1941. Mindful of Galicia's former status as an Austrian crown land (and therefore German territory) and of the presence there of many Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), the occupying authorities pursued policies less brutal than those of Erich Koch, who administered the rest of Ukrainian territory as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. 38

In the ethnically Ukrainian areas of southeastern Poland occupied by the Germans, local Ukrainian committees were established as early as October 1939 to represent the Ukrainian population before the occupation authorities, to assist refugees from the Soviet-occupied areas (who numbered approximately 30,000 by the end of 1939), 39 and to undertake economic and cultural activity previously forbidden by the Polish government. Schools, reading societies, choirs, and theatre groups were established, and some twenty churches were revived. 40 In November 1939 representatives of the local committees met with the head of the Generalgouvernement, Hans Frank, who permitted the establishment of an umbrella organization, the Ukrainian National Union (Ukrainske natsionalne obiednannia), headed by the prominent geographer Volodymyr Kubiiovych. Frank's favourable attitude may be explained by the hope that Ukrainians and Poles could be played off one against the other and that Ukrainians might be induced to co-operate with the Germans. 41 On 13-14 April 1940 a meeting of local committee representatives approved the leadership of the Ukrainian National Union, which in June became the Ukrainian Central Committee (Ukrainskyi tsentralnyi komitet), formally established under Kubiiovych's leadership. 42

Unlike such wartime collaborators as Quisling, Petain, and Laval, Kubiiovych was never recognized by the Germans as the head of a civil administration, and the Ukrainian Central Committee had no political standing. The two functions specified in its statute were: (1) the organization and provision of social services; and (2) co-operation with foreign charitable organizations through the mediation of the German Red Cross. 43

The regulations also required the committee to provide emergency assistance to the population in the event of natural disasters; to assist refugees, homeless children, and young people, the poor and unemployed; to "participate in combating immorality"; to help the families of prisoners of war; and to establish, support, and aid institutions that carried out work of this kind. 44 From 1940 to 1945 the committee, operating with 80-200 staff members, did much to help Western Ukrainians survive the conflict. Through the committee's efforts, approximately 85,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war from the German-Polish conflict were released. It was able to do much less for Soviet Ukrainian prisoners of war, whom the Germans treated with great brutality. In 1943, when the Germans began to kill Ukrainian peasants in the Zamosc region for alleged resistance, Kubiiovych wrote a memorandum of protest to Hans Frank and the killing stopped.45

Following a disastrous flood and subsequent famine in Transcarpathia in the spring of 1942, the committee was able to save and resettle 30,000 children. By the end of 1943, it had opened 1,366 kitchens that fed about 100,000 people. The committee provided medical care to the population, establishing clinics, disinfection stations, and rest camps, as well as organizing courses for paramedical personnel. A limited amount of assistance was given to Ukrainian labourers and political prisoners in Germany.

Since the German policy on Ukrainian education was not as ruthless in the Generalgouvernement as in the rest of Ukraine, the committee was able to establish student residences (in 1943-4, there were 131 residences housing 7,000 students) and provide scholarships (a total of 730, amounting to 1.35 million zlotys, were awarded in 1943). Although the committee had no control over the state-run school system, it did manage to organize teacher-training courses. The committee paid special attention to the needs of young people: it organized more than 100 youth groups, sports clubs, and camps. A network of educational groups was formed. There were sixty by 1944, with a total membership of more than 2,500. In 1943-4, when the Germans forcibly recruited Ukrainian adolescents for construction work and anti-aircraft defence, the committee managed to have them kept together in Ukrainian units.

The Ukrainian Publishing House (Ukrainske vydavnytstvo), established in Cracow under the committee's auspices, published school textbooks, classics of Ukrainian literature, works of Soviet Ukrainian writers suppressed in the USSR, and a daily newspaper, Krakivski visti (Cracow News). The publishers had to struggle constantly with the German censors, and their work was impeded by shortages of paper. 46 An important feature of the committee's work was the establishment of 808 Ukrainian educational societies with approximately 46,000 members by March 1941. Besides conducting adult-education activities, these societies strengthened the national identity of Ukrainians previously subjected to Polonization. In the economic sector, the committee was able to do very little, because Ukrainian economic institutions were forced to meet production quotas for the German war effort.

In the spring of 1943 the committee became involved in the formation of a Ukrainian division of the Waffen (Armed) SS. Unlike the Allgemeine (General) SS, which began in the 1920s as Hitler's bodyguard and grew into an all-powerful secret police in charge of the extermination of Jews, the Waffen-SS developed in the course of the war into a combat organization (the term dates from approximately 1940). 47 By the end of the war, the Waffen-SS consisted of thirty-eight divisions, of which some were only regiments. Nineteen were composed largely of non-Germans, including Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Albanians. 48 Originally, the Waffen-55 was as exclusive as the Allgemeine 55 and insisted that recruits be "racially pure" Aryans. After the disaster at Stalingrad on 31 January 1943, the need for cannon fodder overrode ideological considerations.

The initiative for the formation of a Ukrainian division came from the governor of Galicia, Otto Wachter, who agitated constantly for this idea in 1942-3. 49 On 1 March 1943 he personally suggested it to Heinrich Himmler, head of the 55, who expressed agreement in principle on 28 March. 50 Hoping that the formation of such a division would improve German policy toward Ukrainians, Kubiiovych supported Wachter's initiative. 51 Wachter held further discussions with German officials, and on 28 April he publicly proclaimed the division's formation and issued a call for volunteers. Shortly afterward, Himmler expressly forbade the use of the designation "Ukrainian" in connection with the division, and the order was strictly enforced within the division's ranks. 52 The formation was initially known as the SS-Freiwilligen-Division "Galizien"; on 27 June 1944 its designation was changed to 14. Freiwilligen-Grenadier-Division der 55 (galizische Nr. 1) (14th Volunteer Grenadier Division of the 55, 1st Galician). 53

As head of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Kubiiovych published an appeal to Galician Ukrainians to join the division. He stressed the necessity of facing Ukraine's "most terrible enemy - Bolshevism" with an army "strong enough to destroy the Red monster." 54 Kubiiovych also attempted to gain the support of influential Ukrainians for recruitment to the division. According to his memoirs, those opposed to recruitment argued that Germany's defeat was certain and that the Germans could not be trusted to keep any political promises they made. The formation of a Ukrainian division would only complicate relations with the victorious Western Allies. 55

Those who argued for recruitment prevailed. They pointed out that if Ukrainians did not participate in the division's formation, the Germans would recruit by force, thereby depriving Ukrainians of any opportunity to influence its character and defend the interests of its soldiers. The Germans offered training and weapons for a large military formation which, in the event of Germany's collapse, could well become the nucleus of an independent national army vital to the winning of Ukrainian sovereignty. The formation of a division could also be expected to strengthen the Ukrainian fact in Galicia and perhaps in other Ukrainian lands, as well as put Ukraine on the political map. 56 Metropolitan Sheptytsky, an outspoken foe of Nazism,57 declared himself in favour of the division, reportedly telling Kubiiovych that "there is virtually no price which should not be paid for the creation of a Ukrainian army."58 Sheptytsky designated one of his senior clergymen, Dr. Vasyl Laba, as the division's chaplain. 59 The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church also supported the division. 60 The OUN-B did not approve of recruitment but did little to prevent it,61 while the OUN-M was favourably disposed. 62 The UPA was hostile, dissuading youths from joining and attempting to draw recruits into its own ranks. 63 Once recruitment was under way, however, Shukhevych, the UPA commander, acknowledged the value of a properly trained and armed formation, and he agreed to send recruits back to the division. 64

In the negotiations which led to the division's formation, the Ukrainians demanded a guarantee that the division would be used exclusively against Soviet forces on the Eastern front. It is not clear whether there was a formal agreement to this effect, but the condition was not seriously infringed. 65 The Germans also agreed to the assignment of Ukrainian chaplains to the division and to the creation of a Military Executive Committee (Viiskova uprava) to oversee recruitment and represent the soldiers' interests before the German authorities. The Ukrainians expected Kubiiovych to be appointed head of the Military Committee, but Alfred Bisanz, one of Wachter's senior administrators, was named to the position instead. 66 The imprisoned officers of Nachtigall and Roland were released to join the division. 67

A number of the Ukrainians' conditions were not met. The division was not incorporated into the Wehrmacht, and senior officers' posts were reserved for Germans alone. The division's commander, General Fritz Freitag, and all the German officers except the chief of staff came from the sole police division in the German armed forces. 68 The division's name contained no reference to Ukraine, and its insignia was not the Ukrainian trident but the Galician lion. 69

Throughout May and the first half of June 1943, mass meetings were held in Galician towns to announce the division's formation. The response was enthusiastic: some 82,000 men volunteered, of whom 42,000 were called up and 27,000 accepted. 70 Ninety per cent of the recruits were aged between eighteen and thirty; very few had undergone any military training. 71 Ultimately, 13,000 actually became soldiers. 72

The recruits were dispatched for training on 18 July, and their departure from Lviv was marked by a public gathering at which more than 50,000 Ukrainians were present. 73 Training took place at the Heidelager camp near Debica in southeastern Poland and, from February 1944, at Neuhammer in Silesia. Officers were trained at twelve locations throughout Europe. 74 On 30 October 1943 the Ukrainian officers were sent to rejoin the division. There were eleven captains, fifty-three lieutenants, and twenty-nine second lieutenants. 75

Some recruits to the division were assigned to five police regiments, all of whose officers were Germans, and which underwent training near Gdynia and Bialystok and at various locations in France. In the course of their training, some of the soldiers were used against the French Resistance (Forces Francaises de l'Interieur). 76 Having no wish to fight the French, the Ukrainian soldiers made plans to desert to the Resistance but were arrested before they could do so. The train taking them out of France came under fire from Allied bombers, and a number of soldiers managed to escape. Led by Lieutenant Osyp Krukovsky, they joined the Resistance. Following protests from Wachter, the Ukrainian Central Committee, and the Military Committee against the formation of the police regiments, they were dissolved and their personnel returned to the division. 78 The Military Committee also lodged protests against the forced recruitment of Ukrainians to German paramilitary formations and to General Andrei Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army, formed under German sponsorship in 1944. Members of the committee made strenuous efforts to ensure that the Ukrainian recruits were reassigned to the division. 79

At the end of June 1944 the division was sent to reinforce the 13th German Army Corps near the Western Ukrainian town of Brody. As soon as the Military Committee heard of the assignment, it arranged secret negotiations with Shukhevych, since UP A units were operating in the area. Both parties agreed to keep out of each other's way, to refrain from encouraging desertion to either side, and to assist each other in case of need. 80 On 18 July advancing Soviet forces encircled the corps and destroyed it. 81 Of the division's 11,000 soldiers who fought at Brody, only 3,000 managed to break out of encirclement; the rest were either killed or taken prisoner. 82 Some of the survivors joined the UPA; 83 the remainder were sent to Neuhammer to regroup. The division was replenished with recruits and brought up to a strength of approximately 11,400. 84 In the autumn of 1944 it saw action against Slovak and Soviet partisans in Slovakia. 85

[x]

At this point, a significant political development occurred. The Germans, hoping to mobilize Ukrainian political support for their dying war effort, released Bandera, Melnyk, and other Ukrainian Proclamation issued on 21 January 1944 by the SS and Police Leader in Galicia informing the local population of death sentences passed against prisoners convicted of OUN and UPA membership and of sheltering Jews. Half of the prisoners had already been executed; the others were being held as hostages, with the promise of a pardon if attacks on Germans ceased. (Archives of the ZP UHVR - Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, New York) political prisoners. In November 1944 a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia was formed under the leadership of General Vlasov, and Ukrainians were expected to subordinate themselves to him. Instead, a separate Ukrainian National Committee (Ukrainskyi natsionalnyi komitet) was formed on the initiative of Bandera, Melnyk, Kubiiovych and members of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Andrii Livytsky, president-in-exile of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and a committee representing Eastern Ukrainians. The Ukrainian National Committee was headed by Major-General Pavlo Shandruk, a contract officer with the Polish army who had been imprisoned by the Germans in 1940. On 30 January 1945 Vlasov met with Shandruk to offer him a position as his senior military and political deputy, but Shandruk refused. 86 Faced with the Ukrainians' obduracy and unable to bring effective pressure against them, the Germans gave in. On 12 March 1945 Alfred Rosenberg officially recognized the Ukrainian National Committee as the sole representative of Ukrainians in Germany. Five days later, the committee appealed to the Ukrainian people for support and appointed Shandruk commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian National Army, which was to include all Ukrainians fighting in the German armed forces, primarily the Galician Division and the Ukrainian Liberation Army (Ukrainske vyzvolne viisko). 87

The division, which had fought Tito's partisans in Slovenia in early 1945, was sent at the end of March to fill gaps on the Austrian front near Bad Gleichenberg and Feldbach. On approximately 23-4 March Hitler ordered the division to disarm, claiming that he had not previously been informed of its existence and that Ukrainians were untrustworthy allies. 88 The order was not carried out. Shandruk joined the division on 19 April, and on 25 April its soldiers swore a new oath of loyalty to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.89 In the first days after the capitulation, General Freitag committed suicide, while Shandruk (by his own account) left the division for Bavaria to make contact with the American forces. Most of the division voluntarily surrendered to the British on 8 May near the town of Radstadt, Austria. Its senior staff officer, Mykhailo Krat, became commander during the division's internment. 90

With the defeat of Germany and the division of Europe into Soviet and Western Allied spheres of influence, hopes for the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty had to be abandoned. Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Germans faced prosecution as war criminals and the threat of forced repatriation to the USSR. The soldiers of the Galician Division were investigated by the British and found to have a clear record. Although Soviet propaganda has attempted to portray the division as a racist, Nazi-inspired formation, 91 no credible evidence has been produced to implicate it in war crimes of any kind. Polish and Soviet charges that the division was involved in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 have been refuted in a recent work by Vasyl Veryha. 92 It is particularly noteworthy that the leading Polish authority on German-Ukrainian relations during the war, Ryszard Torzecki, has accepted Veryha's refutation. 93

The Ukrainian Central Committee, which was forced to transfer its operations to Germany in order to escape the advancing Red Army, was formally dissolved by Kubiiovych on 17 April 1945. 94 Although the Soviet authorities attempted to have him charged as a leading collaborator, 95 his memorandum to Hans Frank protesting the killing of Ukrainians was introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. 96 The document was eloquent proof that Kubiiovych had sought only to defend the interests of the Ukrainian people.

For many in the West who have come to see Nazism as the historical embodiment of ultimate evil, the very fact of association with the Germans during World War II appears as prima facie evidence of ideological agreement with Nazism. Thus, the Canadian war-crimes investigator Sol Littman is reported to have said of the Galician Division, "It is patently ridiculous to call an organization volunteering to do Hitler's bidding 'freedom fighters'." 97 Yet ideological support for Nazism was the least important factor in Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. Even the OUN, whose ideology was inspired by integral nationalist models in the 1930s, made its collaboration conditional on German recognition of Ukrainian independence. When such recognition was not forthcoming, the OUN turned against the Germans. The Ukrainian Central Committee, for its part, sought to assist the Ukrainian population of the Generalgouvernement and protect it from German depredations. As for the Galician Division, those responsible for its creation may have failed to obtain the maximum possible concessions from the Germans, 98 but their motivation was anti-Soviet, not pro-Nazi. When Kubiiovych called on Galician Ukrainians to destroy "the Bolshevik monster, which is insatiably drinking our people's blood." 99 his rhetoric was doubtless inflated, but his perception of the threat posed to the Ukrainian people by Russian imperialism was, given the historical record, perfectly accurate.

Those inclined to view Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans as a betrayal of Western liberal-democratic ideals would do well to consider the West's own record in this respect. It has recently been established that Western governments were in possession of the facts about the famine deliberately created by Stalin in 1932-3 (which claimed millions of Ukrainian lives) but chose not to protest for fear of harming their relations with the USSR.100 After Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the Western democracies showed no compunction about collaborating with one dictator - Stalin - in order to defeat another who presented an immediate danger. Indeed, many influential Western liberals and socialists were prepared to overlook, excuse, or even cover up Stalin's crimes in the name of "progress." 101 Under these circumstances, Ukrainians committed to self-determination had no chance of obtaining support from the West. Most of them chose to throw in their lot with the perceived lesser of two evils, while a minority carried on the lonely struggle of the UPA, hoping for Western assistance that never came. It was their misfortune, in the final analysis, to have opposed a brand of totalitarianism whose destruction was not on the West's agenda.

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Notes

1 For comprehensive discussions of Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia, see Paul Robert Magocsi, Galicia: A Historical Survey and Bibliographic Guide (Toronto, 1983), and Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

2 On the beginnings of the OUN, see Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919-1929 (Boulder, Colo., 1980). For an overview of interwar Eastern European fascism, see Peter F. Sugar, ed., Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918-1945 (Santa Barbara, 1971).

3 The 1929 OUN program is reprinted in OUN v svitli postanov Velykykh Zboriv, Konferentsii ta inshykh dokumentiv z borotby 1929-1955 r. (n.p., 1955), 3-16. For a translation, see part 3 of this volume, document 1.

4 Rozbudova natsii, no. 8-9 (1929): 262.

5 For details of Dnatsky's efforts, see his published diaries: U vichnomu misti, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1954; Toronto, 1981).

6 Ievhen Dnatsky, "Ideologichni i taktychni rozkhodzhennia mizh fashyzmom i natsional-sotsiializmom," Rozbudova natsii, no. 5-6 (1934): 142-9; idem, "Kult uspikhu," Rozbudova natsii, no. 7-8 (1934): 162-9.

7 Mykola Stsiborsky, Natsiokratiia (Paris, 1935), 49-60.

8 Ryszard Torzecki, Kwestia ukraifrska w polityce III Rzeszy (1933-1945) (Warsaw, 1972), 128-9; Hans Roos, Polen und Europa, 2d ed. (Tubingen, 1965), 147-55. For contacts between the OUN and German military intelligence, see Lev Rebet, Svitla i tini GUN (Munich, 1964),94; and Anatol Kaminsky, Krai, emigratsiia i mizhnarodni zakulisy (New York, 1982), 78.

9 For a comprehensive account, see Petro Stercho, Karpato-ukrainska derzhava: do istorii vyzvolnoi borotby karpatskykh ukraintsiv u 1919-1939 rokakh (Toronto, 1965).

10 This account of the Nationalist Military Detachments is based on Roman Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi: spohady i dokumenty z pratsi u Viiskovii upravi "Halychyna" v 1943-1945 rokakh (Toronto-New York, 1978), 7-9.

11 On Konovalets, see Iurii Boiko, ed., Ievhen Konovalets ta ioho doba (Munich, 1974); on his assassination, see Ievhen Onatsky, Shliakhom na Rotterdam (Buenos Aires, 1983).

12 Text in OUN v svitli postanov, 24-47.

13 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 9; John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2d rev. ed. (New York, 1963), 74.

14 Armstrong, ibid.

15 Druzhyny ukrainskykh natsionalistiv u 1941-1942 rokakh (n. p., 1953), 5-6.

16 Zlochyny komunistychnoi Moskvy v Ukraini vliti 1941 roku (New York, 1960), 7; Myroslav Kalba, "Nakhtigal" (kurin DUN) u svitli faktiv i dokumentiv (Denver, 1984), 27-9.

17 On the expeditionary groups, see Lev Shankovsky, Pokhidni hrupy OUN: prychynky do istorii pokhiilnykh hrup OUN na tsentralnykh i skhidnikh zemliakh Ukrainy v 1941-1943 rr. (Munich, 1958).

18 Soviet propaganda has repeatedly charged Nachtigall with the murder of civilians upon its entry into Lviv. The civilians in question were Ukrainian political prisoners killed by the Soviet secret police as it prepared to retreat from Western Ukraine. The Soviet charges have been refuted not only by Ukrainian eyewitnesses (Zlochyny, 5-15,46-62), but also by a West German government investigation, carried out in 1960-1, into charges against the chief German organizer of Nachtigall, Theodor Oberlander (Hermann Raschhofer, Political Assassination: The Legal Background of the Oberlander and Stashinsky Cases, Tubingen, 1964). There have also been charges that Nachtigall was involved in the murder of thirty Polish professors in Lviv in July 1941. The leading Polish authority on this crime, Professor Zygmunt Albert, does not rule out the possibility of Nachtigall's participation, but lays the blame squarely on the Germans. See Zygmunt Albert, "Zamordowanie 25 profesor6w wyzszych uczelni we Lwowie przez hitlerowcow w lipcu 1941 r.," Przeglqd lLkarski 20, series 2, no. 1 (1964).

19 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 77-80. The text of the proclamation remains a subject of controversy, which turns on the presence in one version of the following sentence: "The newly arisen Ukrainian state will co-operate closely with National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and in the world and is helping the Ukrainian people to free itself from Muscovite occupation." For a comparison of the available texts, see S. V. Savchuk, '"Akt proholoshennia Ukrainskoi Derzhavy' 30-ho chervnia 1941 roku," Novyi litopys 1, no. 1 (1961): 3-25.

20 Zlochyny, 8.

21 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 80-1.

22 Ibid., 82.

23 For a detailed account, see Ihor Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe: A Study of Lebensraum Policies (New York, 1961).

24 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 83, 104-17. See also Petro Mirchuk, Stepan Bandera: symvol revoliutsiinoi bezkompromisovosty (New York-Toronto, 1961), 88-9; Dmytro Andriievsky, "Pid znakom Saksenhavzenu," in Nepohasnyi ohon viry: zbirnyk na poshanu polkovnyka Andriia Melnyka, holovy Provodu ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, ed. Zynovii Knysh (Paris, 1974), 242-54.

25 Druzhyny ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, 55; Kalba, "Nakhtigal," 29.

26 For an account of the battalion's anti-partisan activity, see Druzhyny ukrainskykh natsionalistiv, 11-41.

27 Myroslav Kalba, comp., U lavakh druzhynnykiv: spohady uchasnykiv (Denver, 1982), 136.

28 The only full-length biography of Shukhevych is Petro Mirchuk, Roman Shukhevych (Gen. Taras Chuprynka), komandyr armii bezsmertnykh (New York, 1970).

29 On Borovets, see his memoirs, Armiia bez derzhavy: slava i trahediia ukrainskoho povstanskoho rukhu (Winnipeg, 1981), and O. Shuliak (pseud. of Oleh Shtul-Zhdanovych), V imia pravdy: do istorii povstanchoho rukhu v Ukraini (Rotterdam, 1947).

30 For the figure of 40,000, see Myroslav Prokop, "UPA z perspektyvy 4D-richchia," Svoboda Oersey City), 24 September 1982. The methods by which the OUN-B came to control the UPA, especially the role of the OUN-B security service (Sluzhba bezpeky), remain highly controversial. See, for example, the accounts of the disarming of Borovets's formation in Armiia bez derzhavy, 267, and "Zaiava ZP UHVR i Obiednannia kolyshnikh voiakiv UPA," Suchasnist 22, nos. 7-8 (1982): 165-8.

31 Lev Shankovsky, "Ukrainska povstancha armiia," in Istoriia ukrainskoho viiska, 2d ed. (Winnipeg, 1953), 668-73. See also Taras Hunchak, ed., UPA v svitli nimetskykh dokumentiv, vols. 6 and 7 of Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi arm ii, ed. Ievhen Shtendera and Petro Potichny (Toronto, 1983).

32 DUN v svitli postanov, 9-120; Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi armii (Toronto, 1976-), 1:121-31. For the English translations, see part 3 of this volume.

33 The best account is that by Roman Krychevsky (pseud. of Roman Ilnytzkyj), Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv v Ukraini - Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv zakordonom i ZCh OUN: prychynok do istorii ukrainskoho natsionalistychnoho rukhu (New York-Toronto, 1962).

34 The best known UPA publicists were Osyp Diakiv (pseud. Hornovy) and P. Poltava (only his pseudonym is known). For Diakiv's collected articles, see Osyp DiakivHornovy, Ideia i chyn: povna zbirka tvoriv (New York, 1968); idem, The USSR Unmasked, trans. Walter Dushnyck (New York, 1976). For Poltava's articles, see P. Poltava, Zbirnyk pidpilnykh pysan (Munich, 1959). Articles by other publicists reflecting similar points of view may be found in various volumes of Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi armii (Toronto, 1976-).

35 "Pliatforma Ukrainskoi holovnoi vyzvolnoi rady," in Litopys Ukrainskoi povstanskoi armii (Toronto, 1976-),8:34-8. The English translation is included as document 11, part 3 of this volume.

36 The best account of the UP A is Shankovsky, "Ukrainska povstancha armiia." See also Yuriy Tys-Krokhmaliuk, UP A Warfare in Ukraine: Strategical, Tactical and Organizational Problems of Ukrainian Resistance in World War II (New York, 1972).

37 Lew Shankowsky, "Soviet and Satellite Sources on the Ukrainian Insurgent Army," Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 9, no. 1-2 (27-8) (1961): 256. See also Jan Rozdzyftski, "Wycofujac sie 'popelnilem samobojstwo'," Polityka (Warsaw), 6 October 1984, 14.

38 Koch's policies are discussed in Bohdan Krawchenko's contribution to this volume.

39 Volodymyr Kubiiovych, Ukraintsi v Heneralnii hubernii, 1939-1941: istoriia Ukrainskoho tsentralnoho komitetu (Chicago 1975), 47.

40 Ibid., 49-51.

41 Ibid., 61-5.

42 For a list of the committee's executive members, see Volodymyr Kubiiovych, "Ukrainskyi tsentralnyi komitet," in Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva (Paris-New York, 1955-), 2:3441.

43 Kubiiovych, Ukraintsi v Heneralni hubernii, 100.

44 Ibid., 100-1. The remainder of this account of the committee's activity is based on Kubiiovych, "Ukrainskyi tsentralnyi komitet," 3443-5.

45 Text of memorandum in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 42 vols. (Nuremberg, 1947-9), 27:298-324.

46 For a detailed account, including production figures, see Volodymyr Kubiiovych, "Ukrainske vydavnytstvo," in Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva (Paris-New York, 1955-), 2:3405-7.

47 George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-1945 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1966), xxx.

48 For a list of Waffen-SS divisions, see ibid., 296-8.

49 Robert Arthur Gelwick, "Personnel Policies and Procedures of the Waffen-SS" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1971), 614.

50 Basil Dmytryshyn, "The Nazis and the SS Volunteer Division 'Galicia'," American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 1 (February 1956): 3-4.

51 Volodymyr Kubiiovych, Meni 70 (Paris-Munich, 1970), 58-9.

52 Dmytryshyn, "The Nazis," 7.

53 Kurt Georg Klietmann, Die Waffen SS: Eine Dokumentation (Osnabrock, 1965), 193.

54 Text in Volf-Ditrikh Haike [Wolf-Dietrich Heike], Ukrainska dyviziia "Halychyna": istoriia formuvannia i boiovykh dii u 1943-1945 rokakh, trans. Roman Kolisnyk (Toronto, 1970), 225-7. Heike, the division's only Wehrmacht officer, served as its chief of staff. The original German version of his account, written in 1947, has been published under the title Sie wollten die Freiheit: Die Geschichteder Ukrainischen Division 1943-1945 (Dorheirn, n.d. [1973]). Reference in this paper is to the Ukrainian edition, which contains additional notes, bibliographic references, and appendices. For the original text of Kubiiovych' s appeal, see Krakivski visti (Cracow), 16 May 1943. A version of the appeal published in Lvivski visti (Lviv) on 6 May 1943 makes reference to "Muscovite-Jewish Bolshevism" and the "Jewish-Bolshevik monster." Lvivski visti was under the direct control of the German occupation authorities, while Krakivski visti was the newspaper of Kubiiovych' s Ukrainian Central Committee; thus it can be assumed that the Krakivski visti text - which makes no reference to Jews - is the authentic one. See also part 3 of this volume, document 8.

55 Kubiiovych, Meni 70, 59.

56 Ibid., 59-60; Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 171-2.

57 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 173.

58 Kubiiovych, Meni 70, 61.

59 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 39.

60 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 173.

61 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 24, 40.

62 Ibid., 24; Kubiiovych, Meni 70,61.

63 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 38, 48-9.

64 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 40-1.

65 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 172.

66 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 23; for a list of committee members, see p. 22.

67 Kalba, U lavakh druzhynnykiv, 143.

68 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 29.

69 For a list of demands made by the Ukrainian negotiators, see Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 21-2.

70 Ibid., 34.

71 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 25.

72 Ibid., 24.

73 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 37. Since the division's recruitment was not complete until July 1943, it could not have taken part in the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (19 April-8 May 1943), as charged by Sol Littman in his article, "Agent of the Holocaust: The Secret Life of Helmut Rauca," Saturday Night, July 1983, 23.

74 For a list of locations, see Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 65.

75 In ibid., 73, it is claimed that some 200 Ukrainian non-commissioned officers were sent for officer training, but there is no mention of whether their courses were completed.

76 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 47. Recently, Dimitri Simes inflated the police regiments' activity into the charge that "the SS division Galitchina [sic] .. .fought for Hitler in France." See "The Destruction of Liberty," Christian Science Monitor, 13 February 1985.

77 Myroslav Nebeliuk, Pid chuzhymy praporamy (Paris-Lyon, 1951), 195-201.

78 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 47.

79 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 76-7, 87-90.

80 Ibid., 92.

81 On the Battle of Brody, see Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 62-89 and Oleh Lysiak, ed., Bii pid Brodamy: zbirnyk stattei u trydtsiatlittia (New York, 1974).

82 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 96.

83 Lysiak, Bii pid Brodamy, 79-81.

84 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 128.

85 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 119-44.

86 Pavlo Shandruk, Arms of Valor, trans. Roman Olesnicki (New York, 1959), 220-3.

87 For an account of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, see Peter J. Potichnyj's contribution to this volume.

88 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 171.

89 Krokhmaliuk, Zahrava na skhodi, 176.

90 For the division's postwar history, see Roman Serbyn's contribution to this volume.

91 The most recent Soviet pamphlets on the division are Valery Styrkul, The SS Werewolves (Lviv, 1982), and idem, We Accuse (Kiev, 1984).

92 Vasyl Veryha, Dorohamy Druhoi svitavoi uiiny: legendy pro uchast ukraintsiv u zdushuvanni Varshavskoho povstannia v 1944 r. ta pro Ukra in sku dyviziiu "Halychyna," rev. ed. (Toronto, 1981).

93 Ryszard Torzecki, review of Veryha, "Dorohamy Druhoi svitovoi viiny," Dzieje Najnowsze, no. 4 (1981): 206-11.

94 Kubiiovych, "Ukrainskyi tsentralnyi komitet," 3443.

95 Kubiiovych, Meni 70, 73.

96 See note 45 above; d. Trial of the Major War Criminals, 12:119.

97 Alberta Report, 4 March 1985, 19.

98 This argument is made by Kostiantyn Zelenko in his critique of the division. See "Shche pro dyviziiu 'Halychyna'," Ukrainskyi samostiinyk 23, nos. 11-12 (November-December 1972): 26-32; 24, no. 1 (January 1973): 25-32; 24, no. 2 (February 1973): 30-41.

99 Haike, Ukrainska dyviziia, 225.

100 Marco Carynnyk, "The Famine the Times Couldn't Find," Commentary, November 1983, 32-40; idem, "The Dogs That Did Not Bark," The Idler, no. 1 (January 1985): 14-20; no. 2 (February 1985): 17-21.

101 On pro-Stalinist opinion in Europe, see David Caute, The Fellow Travelers (New York, 1973); in the United States, see William L. O'Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism. Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York, 1982). There is no comparable work in Canadian historiography.