Ukraine During World War II: History and its Aftermath

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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.

_______________

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.  

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Soviet Military Collaborators during World War II
by Mark R. Elliott

World War II, with its thirty million fatalities, exacted the largest human toll of any military conflict in history. The fighting also scattered nations as never before: estimates of civilians made homeless - forty million - are greater than for any other war. Europe alone had thirty million refugees. The Soviet Union, with more than twenty million dead and another twenty million displaced, witnessed the largest human upheaval of any country. While Siberia and Central Asia received twenty million civilians fleeing European Russia, Germany took well over eight million Soviet POWs and forced labourers. 1

The Wehrmacht overwhelmed the Red Army in the first months of fighting, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners at a time: 300,000 in the battle of Smolensk in mid-July; an astounding 650,000 in the Kiev encirclement in late September. 2 In 1941, the Germans captured 3-4 million members of the Red Army; for the entire war, approximately 5.75 million. 3 The size of the captive population stemmed in part from the speed with which motorized Wehrmacht divisions devoured Soviet territory. The German Blitzkrieg advanced from the frontier in late June to the suburbs of Moscow by December 1941. The Germans benefited from Stalin's self-defeating standfast orders, which contributed to the needless capture of millions of Soviet soldiers. In addition, many soldiers disenchanted with the Soviet regime surrendered voluntarily. 4

Although a Soviet demographer claims that Red Army personnel "perished by the thousands," the deaths actually ran into the millions. Alfred Rosenberg, German commissioner for the Eastern European region, complained to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel as early as February 1942 that of 3.6 million Soviet prisoners, "only several hundred thousand are fully capable of working. The overwhelming majority perished." 5 Belated, grudging improvements in prisoner treatment ultimately saved some souls from extinction, but fatalities in this lost Soviet army of POWs, mostly in the winter of 1941-2, still numbered 2-3 million. 6

Germany's inhumane treatment of millions of Soviet POWs ranks among the worst atrocities of the war. The disaster resulted from deliberate systematic destruction, neglect, and the lack of international protection for prisoners on the Eastern front. The Nazis methodically singled out special categories for extinction. The most certain to perish were Communist party members, military commissars, Jews, and the ill-defined category of intellectuals. 7

Given the Nazis' loathing of Slavs, being Russian or Ukrainian offered little protection. Camp commandants often refused to allow civilian donations of food to starving prisoners. This harsh treatment and the primitive conditions in POW compounds came as the first great shock to the population of the occupied regions. If starvation did not overcome the captives, lack of protection from the elements, physical abuse, or epidemics might. In the first year of fighting in the East, almost all prisoner compounds suffered at least 30 per cent fatalities, and in some the rate of attrition approached 95 per cent. 8

The lack of legal protection under existing international agreements also contributed to the plight of Soviet POWs. The USSR did not sign the 1929 Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, nor did it formally ratify the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions on Land Warfare. Soviet spokesmen claimed Moscow's adherence to the turn-of-the-century treaties and invoked all three in arguing German criminal responsibility for POW and civilian atrocities - but without mentioning the awkward lack of official accession in every case. 9

How much Soviet adherence to the Hague and Geneva conventions would have helped the POWs is open to question. By 1941 Hitler had amply demonstrated his willingness to disregard inconvenient treaties. Moreover, the Eastern races were not reckoned to be much superior to Jews. "As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs," Hitler declared, "we will mold the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigsties, and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilizing him goes straight off into a concentration camp!" 10

Heinrich Himmler, powerful chief of Nazi elite troops (SS), shared the Fuhrer's racial convictions. Der Untermensch (The Subhuman), a pamphlet partially written by Himmler, gives a plain statement of the Nazi opinion of Slavs: "Whether under the Tatars, or Peter, or Stalin, this people is born for the yoke." The subhuman, it was explained, resembled a human in certain anatomical respects, but in reality was more closely related to lower orders of the animal kingdom. His natural habitat was the swamp. 11

The Germans hindered their own war effort by treating Slavs much worse than other paws. The Wehrmacht developed elaborate propaganda to encourage desertion from the Red Army, but the prevailing Untermensch philosophy frequently prevented preferential treatment from being accorded to deserters over ordinary POWs. 12 Had it not been for substantial covert opposition to the destruction of Soviet captives, the death rate would have been even higher. Some German officials looked upon the question of decent treatment from a utilitarian perspective. Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and some of his coterie, for example, realized that Himmler's crudity in pamphlets like Der Untermensch would deeply insult Soviet captives and cripple Wehrmacht recruitment in POW camps. The Untermensch policy also alarmed intelligence specialist General Reinhard Gehlen, who argued that unless there was an end to the "subhuman" approach to Soviet civilians and paws, partisan warfare could not be controlled. 13 Also, General Ernst Koestring fought energetically for a more enlightened policy toward occupied Eastern territories. But Koestring became the head of the Osttruppen (Eastern troops of Soviet origin) too late to make more than cosmetic reforms in German treatment of Eastern units. Many commanders saved Soviet captives from the harsher regimen of POW camps and Nazi labour drafts by quietly diverting them into auxiliary units. In general, the greater the distance from Hitler, the greater the likelihood that German officials would regard the Soviet population under their control as a potential source of labour. Millions of paws perished, but the fraction that did survive benefited from individual captors within the Wehrmacht who were more utilitarian than racist. 14

Appalling conditions in the camps no doubt simplified matters for Wehrmacht recruiters, since the dangerous step of joining enemy ranks could appeal only to persons in the most hopeless of predicaments. On other occasions, the semblance of voluntary enlistment gave way to conscription. The captors simply handed out German uniforms, even weapons, and only the foolhardy refused. 15

Nazi Untermensch philosophy, which coldly anticipated POW mistreatment and starvation, was not the only official policy accelerating the rate of enlistment among Soviet captives. The Kremlin itself contributed to the movement by an ill-conceived decree that branded all captives as traitors simply for having been taken alive. That information only made POWs more susceptible to German suggestions that they take up arms against Stalin. 16

Osttruppen in German Ranks in World War II: Nationalities and Numbers

I. TROOPS IN GERMAN FRONTLINE UNITS

Unit and/or Nationality / Size and Date / Pawns 1

162nd Turkish Infantry Division2 / ?/June 1943-45; / 14/n36 Sumy Division (Ukrainian) / 10,000/1942-43 / 14/ n37
SS Halychyna (Galicia) Division (Ukrainians) / 17,000/April 1943- July 1944 / 14 n37  

1st Ukrainian Division (reorganization of the above) / 10,000/fall 1944-May 1945 / 14/n37; 173/n36

1st ROA (Vlasov) Division 3 / 15-18,000/May 1945 / 84-85/n23,26

2nd ROA (Vlasov) Division 3 / 18,000/May 1945 / 85/n26

Russians / 310.000 4/December 1942 / 15/Gehlen, Service, 86; Gordon, "Partisan Warfare," 66,67; Thorwald, Illusion, 73; OSS, "Reichswehr," 6.

Estonians 5 / 10,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Latvians 5 104,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Lithuanians 5 / 36,800/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Crimean Tatars 10,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Kalmyks / 5,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

North Caucasians / 15,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Georgians / 19,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Armenians / 7,000/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Azerbaidzhani Turks 2 / 36,500/December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

Other Turks 2 / 20,550 6 /December 1942 / 15/Ibid.

TOTAL FRONTLINE UNITS / Approximately 500,000 (excluding Balts) / 7 / 14-15/n23,26,36,37 1 Mark Elliott, Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America's Role in Their Repatriation (University of Illinois Press, 1982). Text page(s) and sources with endnote numbers.

2 There is overlap among various Turkish units.

3 There is overlap between figures for Kaminskii and ROA troops.

4 This figure undoubtedly includes Ukrainians and probably Belorussians as well. Almost certainly this estimate encompasses some of the above division.

The employment of substantial numbers of Soviet prisoners in the German war effort began almost immediately after the surprise attack on the USSR, on 22 June 1941. German troop strength did not equal the Soviets' even at the outset of hostilities, and the Wehrmacht's dramatic advances could not change the fact that its early losses were costly, even if Red Army losses were costlier. The invader's casualties took on dimensions incomparably greater than in earlier campaigns. Up to the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, Wehrmacht progress went unchecked and victories were sweeping. Nevertheless, German losses for the summer and fall soared to 800,000. Hilfswillige (auxiliary volunteers) quickly became indisfensable, constituting up to 40 per cent of some support formations. 17

II. TROOPS IN GERMAN ANTI-GUERRILLA UNITS

Unit and/or Nationality / Size and Date / Pawns 1

Graukopf Battalion (Belorussia) / 10,0001? / 16/n40  

Voskoboinikov unit 8 (Lokot, between Orel and Kursk) / 20,000/January 1942 / 16/n41  

Kaminskii Brigade 8 (Lokot, Pripet Marshes, Berezina River region, Warsaw) / 10,000/1942-August 1944 / 16/n42,43   

Rodionovites / ?/1943 / 16/n45

1st Cossack Division (Russians, Ukrainians) / 20,000/June 1944 / 14/n35  

Osttruppen (France) (transferred from anti-guerrilla to combat units) / 115,500/fall 1943-summer 1944 / 17/n46; OSS, "Reichswehr," 7, 9,12; OSS Intelligence Report 52267, NA RG 226  

TOTAL ANTI-GUERRILLA FORCES including units not enumerated above (most apparently Russian) / Approximately 500,000/December 1942 7 / 16/n39  

TOTAL FRONTLINE AND ANTI-GUERRILLA FORCES / Approximately1,000,0007 19/n55

5 Balts fighting in German ranks were not Soviet citizens but were considered part of the Osttruppen forces. An unknown number of Western Ukrainian Osttruppen likewise had not been Soviet citizens in the interwar period.

6 Volga Tatars [sic], Kazakhs, Turkmen, and Tadzhiks.

7 It is likely that there is some overlap between the frontline and anti-guerrilla unit totals since Germany used some Osttruppen in both capacities. Conversely, it is unlikely that all Hiwis (auxiliary troops) are included in these estimates.

8 There is overlap in the figures for these units.

 

At first the Germans used these Hilfswillige (or Hiwis) in noncombat roles: in paramilitary maintenance, supply, transport, engineer, and labour battalions. But before the summer was out, Red Army volunteers began to appear in regular Wehrmacht combat formations, even in small all-Soviet units under German command. 18

All this movement from POW compounds into Wehrmacht ranks had to be done discreetly, for Hitler's proscriptions were explicit. Commanders bent on circumventing early prohibitions against arming Soviet nationals took care to mislead headquarters. Rather than report all captured enemy personnel, shorthanded officers recruited a portion of their catch on the spot, concealed them among their troops, and bypassed prisoner compounds altogether. Some "all-German" units quietly admitted Soviet POWs up to a level of 10 or 15 per cent. In 1942 Hitler reluctantly recognized the presence of ex-Red Army prisoners in German uniforms as a fait accompli. Wary of racial contamination and even more so of redefection, he did, however, prohibit the formation of any large-scale collaborator forces from among Red Army prisoners. 19

This viewpoint prevailed until Nazi advances turned into retreats; and when the Germans began to ignore the original restrictions, they turned first to units of Soviet minority nationalities, thought to be more trustworthy than Russians. A number of such formations, all under German leadership, achieved division size, including a Cossack division within the regular army but supplied by the SS, a Turkish division, the Sumy (Ukrainian) Division, and a Galician (Ukrainian) SS division. Curiously, the Nazis exempted Cossacks - the Russian empire's frontier warriors of mixed ancestry - from Untermensch classification. Pulled from Soviet POW camps, they saw action in German ranks as early as 1941. The Wehrmacht deployed some Cossacks in front-line action, but more often assigned them to anti-partisan operations. The majority served in that capacity until well past the war's midpoint. 20

In the spring of 1943, Hitler authorized the formation of the 1st Cossack Division under General Helmut von Pannwitz. The division's six regiments numbered 20,000 by June 1944. Pannwitz's personal bodyguard of old Cossacks, with their imposing, if antiquated, uniforms, crisscrossed with munition belts, added a novel, even bizarre touch to twentieth-century total war. But the natives of Croatia, where the division first served, saw nothing quaint in the Cossacks' time-honoured ravaging of war zones. Achieving moderate success battling Tito's partisans, they seem to have been even more adept at plundering and pillaging. 21

Unlike the 1st Cossack Division, the 162nd Turkish Infantry Division maintained a fifty-fifty German-Osttruppen personnel ratio, an experiment that worked better than most. In late 1942 troop-training took place at Neuhammer in Silesia, instead of in occupied Soviet territory, since the Wehrmacht knew that ready knowledge of German mistreatment of the civilian population damaged Osttruppen morale. Primarily engaged in anti-partisan activity, the Turkish Division saw action from June 1943 in Croatia, Istria, and northern Italy. 22

The Wehrmacht's use of ex-Soviet Ukrainians included the 10,000-strong Sumy Division, which fought at Kharkiv and disintegrated at the Battle of StaIingrad in 1942-3. More is known about the SS Galidan Division (organized in April 1943 in the district of Galicia), under Soviet control from 1939 to 1941. Soviet forces badly mauled this formation of 11,000 Ukrainians in German uniform at the Battle of Brody in July 1944. A desperate Himmler permitted the unit's reorganization in the fall of 1944. After a stint in Slovakia, it made its way to Austria by the war's end.23 The Cossack, Turkish, and Ukrainian divisions accounted for only a fraction of the Soviet Union's national minorities in German uniform and not even all of these groups in enemy ranks. Altogether, at least a score of the USSR's ethnic groups could be found in substantial numbers dispersed in smaller units throughout the Wehrmacht, including Finns, Belorussians, Crimean and Volga Tatars, Kalmyks, North Caucasians, Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaidzhanis.24

Russian collaborators did not play nearly as large a role in German combat ranks as did various Soviet minority nationalities. Probably well under half the total of nearly one million Soviet military collaborators were Russian. 25 Because of the Germans' special fear and loathing of them, Russian "volunteers" were recruited in quantity later than other Soviet nationalities, and were relegated to the least responsible positions. From 1941 until well into 1944, they were usually in support roles; when Russian combat units were formed, the Wehrmacht carefully scattered them throughout the ranks. When the German-sponsored Russian Liberation Army (ROA) under ex-Red Army General Andrei Vlasov finally did appear, it barely reached division strength by the war's end.

Vlasov's army was inconsequential, but Russians did play an Important role in the German military effort - not on the front lines, but an anti-partisan warfare. Here their help was enlisted early and had some effect. Vlasov was fond of saying, "It takes a Russian to beat a Russian." He never got a real chance to prove it, but a substantial number of Germans appreciated the sentiment, as demonstrated by their liberal recruitment of Russian paws to fight Soviet partisans. The Soviet territory Germany conquered proved too vast for effective occupation, especially since the forests and swamps of northern Ukraine and Belorussia served as perfect guerrilla bases. The Wehrmacht quickly turned to native collaborators to help counter Soviet resistance behind the lines. By the end of 1942, the Wehrmacht employed about a half million ex-Red Army men in its anti-guerrilla operations, most of whom were Russian. 26

In Belorussia, the Graukopf Battalion (so named for its commander's gray hair) numbered 10,000 at one point. 27 The Germans found an especially efficient collaborator in engineer Voskoboinikov, who ran Lokot, a town of 6,000 and region of 100,000. His territory - between Orel and Kursk - ultimately encompassed 1.7 million inhabitants, which he controlled with 20,000 men and twenty-four tanks. In exchange for local autonomy he killed partisans, collected taxes, and paid regular tribute in provisions. Moscow so feared the experiment that parachutists were sent in to kill him, which they did in January 1942. 28

After Voskoboinikov's death, the Kaminskii Brigade, the most notorious of all the anti-partisan units, commandeered the Lokot base. In the next nineteen months Bronislav Kaminskii, an engineer like his predecessor, expanded operations into the Pripet Marshes and the forests along the Biarezina River, finally commanding 10,000 troops with as many camp followers. 29 Widely known for his brutal treatment of captured partisans, he vied in cruelty with the SS in suppressing the 1944 Warsaw uprising. An emigre wrote, "The Kaminsky [sic] brigade has the most sinister reputation among the Russians and was highly valued by Himmler." 30 Somehow, the brutality of his brigands exceeded what even the Germans would tolerate. Kaminskii was shot by the SS in August 1944. 31

The troops under Gil-Blazhevich, alias Rodionov, were nearly as infamous. Poles and Jews especially had reason to dread the appearance of Rodionov' s men. But one act set Rodionov apart from Kaminskii in notoriety: his redefection in 1943, after the tide had turned against the Germans. Moscow rewarded this erstwhile traitor with the Order of the Red Star for the overnight creation of a "partisan region" in northeast Belorussia. It has not, however, advertised the postwar fate of Rodionov's followers, which was imprisonment at best. 32

Line-crossing was not an isolated phenomenon. Soviet redefectors, either unaware of the harsh reception awaiting them, or dreading it less than remaining in Wehrmacht ranks, multiplied in proportion to German defeats. Hitler, viewing the large-scale defection and revolts of 1942-3 as confirmation of his low opinion of Eastern nationalities, ordered Osttruppen units disbanded or transferred to another front. Some collaborators, especially Hiwis, remained on the Eastern front, scattered throughout the German army (up to twelve per company), but the great majority was moved to other parts of occupied Europe in the early fall of 1943.33 They were dispersed widely, from the fjords of Norway to the islands of Greece. Earlier, Soviet nationals in German uniform had seen service even farther south, in Libya. The tides of war now scattered Osttruppen in every direction: to Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France; into Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete; and, as the war concluded, into Italy, Austria, and Germany. 34

In 1943 France became the destination for more Osttruppen than any other country. There were 115,500 dug in by D-Day, 6 June 1944.35 Allied forces were dismayed to find former Soviet soldiers among captured Germans. American intelligence had amassed voluminous data on the Osttruppen - not only head counts, but also precise knowledge of unit movements, current locations, even troop morale, but this information rarely filtered down to front-line units, who were bewildered to encounter German paws who could not speak German. 36

If American and British officers knew anything at all about the "volunteer" units, they mistakenly labeled them as part of Vlasov's army, which received the most publicity and the least combat experience, boasted of more and amounted to less, than most ex-Soviet contingents in Wehrmacht ranks. Throughout most of the war, influential Nazis viewed this movement merely as propaganda. Serious consideration for anti-Stalinist Russians in a viable military capacity came only as a last-minute act of desperation. 37

The organization and training of Russian forces under Vlasov's authority did not begin until November 1944, and only one division ever became operational. Pieced together from Russian battalions, recent POW recruits, and the remnants of Kaminskii's guerrillas, the 15,000-strong formation fought briefly and ineffectively along the Oder River in mid-April 1945, then moved south against German orders. In a bizarre ending too incredible for fiction, these Vlasovites helped Czech partisans drive the Nazis out of Prague on 6-8 May and then surrendered to the U.S. Third Army, beginning on 10 May. 38

Soviet collaborator forces under Vlasov were thus inconsequential, but at the same time no nation in Hitler's path provided the Wehrmacht with as many recruits as did the Soviet Union. Certainly, its citizens did not find the black logic of Nazism any more appealing than other Europeans. On the contrary, the Slavs, whom Hitler dismissed as subhumans, had more to fear from Germany's racial determinism than any group save the Jews. Rather than any positive attraction to Wehrmacht enlistment, large-scale military collaboration on the Eastern front stemmed from the size of the Soviet POW pool to begin with, the absolute wretchedness and brutality of their incarceration, and the grievances of many who had suffered under Stalin's rule.

If all the diverse auxiliary and fighting formations are included, close to one million Soviet soldiers served in German ranks in World War 11. 39 This "army of the damned," as an American documentary styled it, amounted to the largest military defection in history.40

In terms of ethnic distribution of Soviet nationals abroad in World War II, the displaced were least likely to have been Russians. This was the case for Ostarbeiter, paws, military collaborators, non-returners, and those ultimately repatriated. The largest contingent of displaced persons was Ukrainian. They accounted for 52.6 per cent of all non-returners who had held Soviet citizenship prior to World War II, whereas in 1939 they constituted only 16.5 per cent of the Soviet population. In comparison, Russians amounted to 14 per cent of the postwar emigration yet made up 58.1 per cent of the total Soviet population in 1939.41

There are three main reasons for the disproportionately large non-Russian, especially Ukrainian, representation among Soviet nationals abroad. First, Ukrainians were charged with, and persecuted for, "bourgeois nationalism" more often than Russians, particularly during Stalin's purges of the 1930s. This made Ukrainians and other minorities less hostile to Berlin than Moscow, at least initially, before German occupation policies took their toll. Second, the Germans occupied the entire Ukraine, whereas only a portion of the Russian population had to endure German occupation. 42 Third, Wehrmacht Army Group North, in direct control of the Germans' one major region of Russian population, vigorously resisted deportations to the Reich because forced labour drafts fueled the partisan movement. But in the south, the army had less control over occupation policy; consequently, Nazi manhunts netted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.

Dramatic as the story of Vlasov and other military collaborators may be, altogether they accounted for only a fraction of Soviet nationals caught up in the German war effort. Millions more, civilians as well as paws, had no choice but to work in the Reich's factories and fields. In 1942 alone, the Nazi invaders commandeered two million Soviet nationals to work throughout German-occupied Europe. 43 For the war as a whole, Germany mobilized between 2.8 and 7 million Soviet forced labourers, with nearly 6 million a likely figure. 44 More than 0.75 million died from mistreatment and wretched conditions. 45

In looking at repatriation statistics, it is important to note that the majority of Soviet citizens returned to the USSR did not collaborate with the Germans. Red Army men captured in Wehrmacht ranks accounted for only 17 per cent (about 900,000 of 5,236,130) of Soviet citizens going home after World War II. Even among military repatriates, collaborators constituted less than one-third (29 per cent, or 900,000 of 3,100,000) of the total. 46 That is to say, approximately 71 per cent of surviving Red Army paws had refused to join German ranks despite vigorous recruitment and horrendous camp conditions. Of five million repatriates, 83 per cent were not collaborators - unless forced labour is defined as collaboration; that, to be sure, is unthinkable.

Without question, the collaborator phenomenon included those who were anti-Semitic and who treated Jews and others condemned to death by the Germans despicably. Some did not share their captors' racial perversions, preferred life to death in POW camps, and fought against Stalin rather than Hitler. Simply put, a Soviet soldier in German ranks did not necessarily constitute a Soviet soldier sympathetic to the German cause. Without an ounce of sympathy for the opportunistic, ruthless Rodionovs and Kaminskiis, it must also be pointed out that other Soviet soldiers chose German uniforms to avoid starvation or a bullet in the head. It is essential, then, to differentiate among the collaborators. The word pawns was chosen by this author for the title of his study of Soviet displacement and repatriation in World War II in order to emphasize the plight of so many who, caught between the likes of Hitler and Stalin, had scarcely a prayer or a choice.47

_______________

Notes:

1 Andrei Amalrik, "Victims of Yalta," Harper's, May 1979, 91-2; Boris L. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration (Santa Monica, 1955),5; Mark Elliott, "The Repatriation Issue in Soviet-American Relations, 1944-1947" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kentucky, 1974), 10-21; Nancy Eubank, The Russians in America (Minneapolis, 1973),74; Edward A. Raymond, "The Juridical Status of Persons Displaced from Soviet and Soviet-Dominated Territory" (Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1952), 172. 100 Part I: 2. Collaboration and Resistance

2 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945 (New York, 1957), 69; Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941-45 (London, 1971), 125, 130; Boris Shub, The Choice (New York, 1950), 50; Sven Steenberg, Vlasov (New York, 1970),4.

3 Amalrik, "Victims," 91; V. P. Artiemev, "Crime and Punishment in the Soviet Armed Forces," Military Review, 42 (November 1962): 73; Dallin, German Rule, 69, 417, 427; Dvinov, Politics, 38; Eugene Kulischer, The Displacement of Population in Europe (Montreal, 1943), 152; Norman Luxenburg, "Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Literature and the Returned POWs Issue" (paper presented at the Midwest Slavic Conference, Cleveland, Ohio, 2 May 1975), 4; Vladimir Petrov, My Retreat from Russia (New Haven, 1950), 274-5; Shub, Choice, 63.

4 Mikhail M. Koriakov, ['11 Never Go Back: A Red Army Officer Talks (New York, 1948), 128-9. A powerful Soviet novel depicting these disasters is Konstantin Simonov's The Living and the Dead (New York, 1962).

5 Boris Urlanis, Wars and Population (Moscow, 1971), 172, 176. See also Dallin, German Rule, 417; Shub, Choice, 63.

6 Jay Warren Baird, "German Home Propaganda, 1941-1945, and the Russian Front" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, 1966),27; Patricia Blake, "Solzhenitsyn: An Artist Becomes an Exile," Time, 25 February 1974, 39; Dallin, German Rule, 426; Edward L. Hornze, Foreign LAbor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1967),80; Petrov, Retreat from Russia, 274-5; Janusz Sawczuk, Hitlerowskie obozy jenieckie w Lambinowicach w latach 1939-1945 (Cieszyn, 1974), 226-7; Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945 (New York, 1964), 703.

7 The Fate of a Man (Moscow, 1957), 25-6; Dallin, German Rule, 418.

8 Oleg Animisov, The German Occupation in Northern Russia during World War II: Political and Administrative Aspects (New York, 1954), 28-9; Dallin, German Rule, 418.

9 Heinz L. Ansbacher, "The Problem of Interpreting Attitude Survey Data: A Case Study of the Attitude of Russian Workers in Wartime Germany," Public Opinion Quarterly 14 (Spring 1950): 126; Dallin, German Rule, 445; George Ginsburgs, "Laws of War and War Crimes on the Russian Front during World War II: The Soviet View," Soviet Studies, 11 (January 1960): 254; Alexander Pronin, "Guerrilla Warfare in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, 1941-1944" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1965),36-7; Aron N. Trainin, Hitlerite Responsibility under Criminal Law (London, n.d. [1945]), 34-5, 47. The Nazi perspective is at least as self-serving: see Albrecht, "The Legal Situation Existing between Germany and the Soviet Union," appendix I of German Camps for Russian and Polish War Prisoners, by Adolph Westhoff, National Archives Record Group (hereafter cited as NA RG) 338, Foreign Military Studies, P-046. Albrecht was chief of the legal branch of the German foreign office.

10 Quoted in Baird, "Home Propaganda," 25-30. See also Hornze, Foreign Labor, 79; U. S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C., 1946),8:646; EUCOM, Historical Division, "Displaced Persons" (Carlisle Barracks, Pa., Military Historical Research Collection, 1947),6; and Jurgen Thorwald, The Illusion: Soviet Soldiers in Hitler's Army (New York, 1975), 32-3.

11 Baird, "Home Propaganda," 40-1. See also International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947-9), 29:122; and Alan Clark, Barbarossa, The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (New York, 1965), 205.

12 John Buchsbaum, "German Psychological Warfare on the Eastern Front: 1941-1945" (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1960), 97-8; Shub, Choice, 63-4. For more on German attitudes toward Russians, see "The German Concept of the Russian Mind," in Buchsbaum, "Psychological Warfare," 73-85; Francis Sampson, "Paratrooper Padre," American Ecclesiastical Review 116 (February 1947): 118.

13 Baird, "Home Propaganda," 29, 39-4l.

14 Ibid., 28; Viacheslav Naumenko, Velikoe predatelstvo (New York, 1970), 2:381; Thorwald, Illusion, 181-2; Office of Strategic Services (055), "Use of Soviet Citizens in the Reichswehr," 5, NA RG 59, no. 2297, 13 December 1944; Hans von Herwarth, "Memoirs: 1904-1945" (unpublished manuscript), 229, 231-4; Ernst Koestring, "The People of the Soviet Union," 20-1, NA RG 338, C-035; ass, "Reichswehr," 1, 9, 11; Hans Seraphim, "Eastern Nationals as Volunteers in the German Army," iv, 95, NA RG 338, C-043; Maj. Gen. Alfred Toppe et al., "Political Indoctrination of War Prisoners," 64, NA RG 338, P-Ol8d; Interrogation Report of General Ernst Koestring, 30-31 August 1945, p. 7, 9, NA RG 165, Shuster Mission. For a description of these interrogations, see Oron J. Hale, "World War II Documents and Interrogations," Social Science 47 (Spring 1972): 75-8l.

15 George Fischer, "The New Soviet Emigration," Russian Review 8 (January 1949): 11; Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1971), 467; ass, "Reichswehr," 17-18.

16 Mark R. Elliott, Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America's Role in Their Repatriation (Urbana, m., 1982), 168-71; Burton, "The Vlasov Movement," 14; Dvinov, Politics, 51; Ft. Dix interviews, NA RG 59, 711.62114/8-1045.

17 Animisov, German Occupation, 26; ass, "Reichswehr," 12; Seaton, Russo-German War, 175.

18 Baird, "Home Propaganda," 29; Alexander Dallin, "Portrait of a Collaborator: Oktan," Survey, no. 35 Oanuary-March 1961): 117; Alexander Dallin and Ralph Mavrogordato, "Rodionov: A Case-Study of Wartime Redefection," American Slavic and East European Review, 18 (February 1959): 25; Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen (New York, 1972), 73-92; Koestring Interrogation, 8; ass, "Reichswehr,"9; Wladirnir W. Posdnjakoff, "German Counterintelligence Activities in Occupied Soviet Union 1941145," 63, NA RG 338, P-I22; Toppe et al., "Indoctrination," 22.

19 Gary Howard Gordon, "Soviet Partisan Warfare, 1941-1944: The German Perspective" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1972),63; Koestring Interrogation, 7-8; Koestring, "People"; ass, "Reichswehr," 1; Posdnjakoff, "German Counterintelligence," 179.

20 Ibid., 92; Gordon, "Partisan Warfare," 62; Herwarth, "Memoirs," 235.

21 Alexander von Bosse, "The Cossack Corps," 6,8, 17, NA RG 338, P-064; Koestring, "People," 12; ass, "Reichswehr," 17; Steenberg, Vlasov, 116-18, 124; Toppe et al., "Indoctrination," 63.

22 Koestring Interrogation, 8; Seraphim, "Eastern Nationals," iii, 36-37, 41; Thorwald, Illusion, 77.

23 Yaroslav J. Chyz, "Ukrainians in America, Political Attitudes and Activities," vol. 10 (American Council for Nationalities Service, Box 5, Minneapolis, 1953); University of Minnesota Immigration History Research Center, Koestring Interrogation, 8; Volodymyr Kubijovyc, ed., Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1971), 2:1087-8; Steenberg, Vlasov, 163; Thorwald, Illusion, 233-4.

24 Elliott, Pawns, 15.

25. Thorwald, Illusion, 228.

26. Gordon, "Partisan Warfare," 66, 148.

27 Ibid., 64; Steenberg, Vlasov, 52-62.

28 Posdnjakoff, "German Counterintelligence," 81; Steenberg, Vlasov, 76-7; Donald B. Vought, "An Inquiry into Certain Aspects of the Soviet Partisan Movement 1941- 1944" (M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 1963), 148.

29 Alexander Dallin, "The Kaminsky Brigade: A Case-Study of Soviet Defection," in Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nicolaevsky, ed. Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch (Bloomington, Ind., 1972), 227; " 'Haunted Forests': Enemy Partisans behind the Front," 11, NA RG 338, C-037; Vladimir D. Samarin, Civilian Life under the German Occupation, 1942-1944 (New York, 1954), 58; John J. Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925-1945 (New York, 1978), 27; Vought, "Inquiry," 149.

30 Dvinov, Politics, 57.

31 Clark, Barbarossa, 394; Paul Petelchuk, "The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists: A Study of a Russian Freedom Movement Group" (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1970), 76-7; Seaton, Russo-German War, 456; Steenberg, Vlasov, 79-80, 170-1; Thorwald, Illusion, 243.

32 Aleksei I. Briukhanov, Vot kak eto bylo: o rabote misii po repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan. Vospominaniia sovetskogo of its era (Moscow, 1958), 12-13; Dallin and Mavrogordato, "Rodionov"; Col. P.Z. Kalinin, "Uchastie sovetskikh voinov v partizanskom dvizhenii Belorussii," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 10 (October 1962): 34-7; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1973), 1:257; Steenberg, Vlasov, 106-10.

33 Dallin and Mavrogordato, "Rodionov," 30; Dallin and Mavrogordato, "The Soviet Reaction to Vlasov," World Politics 8 (April 1956): 320; Kalinin, "Uchastie," 347; Koestring Interrogation, 8-9; ass, "Reichswehr," 1, 9, 13, 16; Seraphim, "Eastern Nationals," 93-6; Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement, 1941-1945 (London, 1970), 174; A. V. Tishkov, "Predatel pered sovetskim sudom," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 2 (February 1973): 93; Toppe et al., "Indoctrination," 66. Herwarth unconvincingly downplays the defections as a cause for the transfers; see his "Memoirs," 267.

34 OSS, "Reichswehr," 11-12; Seraphim, "Eastern Nationals," 91; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 1: 246.

35 OSS, "Reichswehr," 7, 9, 12; OSS Intelligence Report 52267, NA RG 226.

36 OSS files, NA RG 226 and 59. See, for example, ass, "Reichswehr," 4.

37 Dvinov, Politics, 82; John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin's War with Germany (New York, 1975),322,331; George Fischer, "General Vlasov's Official Biography," Russian Review 8 (October 1949): 299; Albert Seaton, The Battle for Moscow, 1941-1942 (New York, 1971), 167, 204; Steenberg, Vlasov, 21-8. For Vlasov's biography, also consult Robert B. Burton, "The Vlasov Movement of World War II: An Appraisal" (Ph.D. dissertation, American University, Washington, D.C., 1963); Paul Carrell, Hitler Moves East 1941-1943 (London, 1964), 430-1, 439-41; Mark Elliott, "Andrei Vlasov: Red Army General in Hitler's Service," Military Affairs 46 (April 1982): 84-7; Institute for the Study of the USSR, Who Was Who in the USSR (Metuchen, N.J., 1972), 588; B. Osokin, Andrei Andreevich Vlasov: kratkaia biografiia (New York, 1966); Petrov, Retreat, 274-300; Michael Schatoff [sic), Bibliografiia osvoboditelnogo dvizheniia narodov Rossii v gody vtoroi mirovoi voiny (1941-1945) (New York, 1961); Strik-Stikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler; Thorwald, Illusion. For hostile Soviet accounts of Vlasov's career, see Yuri Bondarev, "A Russian View," in The Last Circle (Moscow, 1974), 66; Jean Taratuta, "Tell Me Who Your Friend Is," in ibid., 114; P.A. Zhilin, "How A. Solzhenitsyn Sang of the Vlasovites' Betrayal," in ibid., 104-7; Tishkov, "Predatel," 91-2.

38 Dallin, "Kaminsky," 227; Dvinov, Politics, 109; Koestring Interrogation, 11; Petelchuk, "National Alliance," 86; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 1: 258-9; Tishkov, "Predatel," 95-6.

39 All but a few estimates, and the great majority of the most believable ones, run between 0.75 and 1 million. Furthermore, two Germans intimately involved in Osttruppen activities, Vlasov's interpreter, Capt. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, and Koestring, both set the number at one million. Some figures probably include old tsarist emigres and Baltic nationals, whose homelands were independent prior to World War II. But these minor sources of inflated calculations cannot be compared to Germany's systematic, wholesale underestimates, which the Wehrmacht used to hide the extent of Soviet collaboration from a wary Hitler and which makes many approximations conservative. George Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 108, cites 0.5 to 1 million; Tappe et al., "Indoctrination," 33, cites 0.75 million; Eugene Lyons, Our Secret Allies, the Peoples of Russia (New York, 1953), 243, claims 0.8 million, as does David Footman in his introduction to Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler, 4, and Kubijovyc, Ukraine, 2: 1986-87, Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand: The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia, 1939-1945 (New York, 1960),99; Frederick Wyle, "Memorandum on Statistical Data on Soviet Displaced Persons" (Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.), cites 0.8 to 1 million; Thorwald, Illusion, 228, records 0.9 to 1 million. The figure of one million is cited by Army of the Damned (CBS, 1962), by Hans de Weerd, "Operation Keelhaul," Ukrainian Review 2 (December 1955): 26, by A.I. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: Smersh from the Inside (Boston, 1972), 127, by Steenberg, Vlasov, 104, and by Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler, 49. Burton, "Vlasov," iv, and Posdnjakoff, "German Counterintelligence," 179-80, both say more than one million; Ernst Koestring, General Ernst Koestring (Frankfurt -am- Main, 1966),324, says at least one million.

40 CBS, 1962. Audio-Brandon Co. rental.

41 The percentages are based on the following calculations: 150,000 Ukrainians and 40,000 Russians among 285,000 non-returners from pre-1939 Soviet territories. This excludes an estimated 220,000 refugees from the annexed Baltic states. Warren W. Eason, "Demography," in Handbook of Soviet Social Science Data, ed. Ellen Mickiewicz (New York, 1973),58; Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 39; Eugene Kulischer to Robert Feldmesser, 13 August 1953, "Estimated Ethnic Composition of USSR Migratory Gains and Losses 1939-1951," Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

42 Walter Kolarz, Russia and Her Colonies (New York, 1952), 11; and Ivan Bahryany, "Why I Do Not Want to Go 'Home,''' Ukrainian Quarterly 2, no. 3 (Spring 1946): 236; John Panchuk to Gallan, 10 June 1945, folder 5, John Panchuk papers, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Animisov, German Occupation, 29-30.

43 E.A. Brodskii, Vo imia pobedy ruui fashizmom: antifashistskaia borba sovetskikh liudei v gitlerovskoi Germanii (1941-1945) (Moscow, 1970), 10; G.A. Kumanev, "Sovetskaia istoriografiia ob uchastii grazhdan SSR v antifashistskom dvizhenii soprotivleniia v Evrope," in Vtoraia mirovaia voina i sovremennost, ed. P.A. Zhilin (Moscow, 1972), 262.

44 Baird, "Home Propaganda," 30, claims 2.8 million; Werth, Russia at War, 701, says "nearly 3 million"; International Military Tribunal, Trial, 41: 186, and Petrov, Retreat, 274-5, both say five million; Kumanev, "Sovetskaia istoriografiia," 262, claims almost six million by 1944; Thorwald, Illusion, 216, gives six million; Steenberg, Vlasov,174, reports 6-7 million.

45 Amalrik, "Victims," 94; Dallin, German Rule, 451-2.

46 Michael K. Roof and Frederick A. Leedy, "Population Redistribution in the Soviet Union, 1939-1956," Geographical Review 49 (April 1959): 211, say "five million plus"; George Ginsburgs, "Soviet Union and the Problem of Refugees and Displaced Persons, 1917-1956," American Journal of International Law 51 (April 1957): 348, cites 5,115,709; Mikhail I. Semiriaga, Sovetskie liudi v evropeiskom soprotivlenii (Moscow, 1970), 327, quoting Gen. Golikov in Pravda (Moscow), 4 October 1945, says 5,200,000; Malcolm Proudfoot, European Refugees, 1939-52 (Evanston, Ill., 1956), 212, cites 5,213,000; Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-47 (New York, 1948), 308, cites 5,236,000; "Repatriation of Soviet Citizens," International Labour Review 52 (November 1945): 533, records 5,236,130; Fischer, Soviet Opposition, 111, says 5,326,445. See also Dallin, German Rule, 427; A. Nemirov, Dorogi i vstrechi (Munich, 1947), 39.

47 Elliott, Pawns of Yalta.

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PART II: History and Its Aftermath

INVESTIGATING WAR CRIMINALS IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

INTRODUCTION

Part 2 examines issues related to bringing alleged Nazi war criminals living in Canada and the United States to justice.

In the United States, owing to the efforts of several members of Congress, especially Elizabeth Holtzman, a bill (Law 95-549) amending Section 212 (a) 33 of the Immigration and Nationality Act was introduced on 30 October 1978 and signed into law on 19 December 1978. The bill further clarified and extended the class of "aliens ineligible to receive visas and excluded from admission (to the United States)," to include:

Any alien who during the period beginning on March 23, 1933, and ending on May 8, 1945 under the direction of, or in association with:

a) the Nazi government in Germany;

b) any government in any area occupied by the military forces of the Nazi government of Germany;

c) any government established with the assistance or cooperation of the Nazi government of Germany; or,

d) any government which was an ally of the Nazi government of Germany; ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.

The amendment also provided that adjudicated Nazi persecutors could not evade deportation by availing themselves of a previous immigration law provision authorizing the withholding of deportation if the deportees might be persecuted in the country to which they were ordered deported.

Up to the early 1970s the U.S. government, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), had filed nine cases against persons suspected of Nazi collaboration or of persecuting the innocent. By the summer of 1977 the INS had established a Special Litigation Unit (SLU) to investigate and prosecute alleged Nazi war criminals living in the United States, but little activity was undertaken. With the passage of the Holtzman amendment, however, the Justice Department transferred the INS to its Criminal Division, where the SLU became the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) on 28 March 1979.

The first director of the OSI was Walter J. Rocker (to March 1980), a former prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He was succeeded by Allan A. Ryan Jr. (April 1980-August 1983), a lawyer in the Solicitor General's office. Today the OSI is headed by Neal Sher. It has a three-million-dollar annual budget and a staff of fifty lawyers, investigators, historians, and linguists.

A recent statement from the OSI notes that 3-400 suspected Nazi war criminals are now under investigation. They are alleged to have come to the United States under assumed identities or to have misrepresented their wartime histories when applying for admission to the United States. The OSI's Digest of Cases for 24 May 1985 states that it is now involved in eleven cases relating to denaturalization (the revoking of citizenship on the grounds of false or misleading representations for failure to disclose material circumstances in applying for admission to the United States, which thereby vitiates the accused party's qualifying period for application for U.S. citizenship and renders the citizenship revocable). The OSI also has fifteen cases in the second stage of this process - deportation. Twenty cases are "no longer active" because of deaths or forced departures (deportations), of which there are presumed to have been at least four. In almost all of the above-mentioned cases, the defendants were of Eastern European origin. Up to 1 July 1984, for example, the OSI had forty cases pending against individuals: two were born in Germany; the others were from the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.

The activities of the OSI have stirred some criticism from various quarters. Their views need not be summarized here; they are discussed in the papers that follow. But a recent study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith provides another perspective. 1

One of the controversial aspects of the OSI's prosecution activities has been its use of information from the Soviet Union. Some critics of the OSI maintain that this information has been" fabricated," that it has played an inordinate role in OSI prosecutions, and that the Soviet Union's motivation in providing this information has been political and not humanitarian - that it is seeking to discredit its "anti-Communist enemies" who fled in the 1940s, not to bring war criminals to justice. The ADL's view is that these critics have seriously exaggerated the role that Soviet-provided evidence plays in OSI prosecutions because some of the defendants have themselves admitted to their wartime past; moreover, incriminating evidence from Western sources has been vital in these prosecutions.

The ADL has also argued that all Soviet evidence has been subject to "rigorous scientific testing by experts from the U.S. Government and by experts hired by the defendants." It believes that testimonies from Soviet witnesses are reliable because no American, Canadian, or other judges have concluded that witnesses lied or that documents from the Soviet Union were fabricated. This was true in cases tried in West Germany as well as during the 1946-9 Nuremberg trials, when Soviet-provided evidence was used by these courts to prosecute former Nazis. Soviet witnesses are not one-sided in their testimonies, the ADL has claimed, because their testimonies have in some cases helped to clear suspects.

To the ADL, therefore, the use of Soviet-provided evidence is of practical importance and even necessary:

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis during World War II took place on territory now behind the Iron Curtain (where, for example, all of the Nazis' extermination camps were located). Hence, evidence from Soviet-controlled areas, especially documents left behind by the Nazis and captured by Allied Forces, including those of the Soviet Union, is of obvious importance.

For similar reasons, many witnesses still reside in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Soviet-annexed lands. 2

Critics of the OSI have also argued that to deport any former citizen of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania would be tantamount to recognizing the USSR's forcible annexation of the Baltic states, thus contravening the U.S. government's official policy of non-recognition of these Soviet annexations. The ADL, however, maintains that this argument misrepresents and misunderstands both the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and official State Department policy. According to the act, adjudicated Nazi war criminals are deported to any country willing to take them, while the State Department is on record as maintaining the non-recognition policy despite deportations from the U. S. to the USSR.

As can be seen, the views of the OSI's critics and its supporters diverge considerably. Both sides have been presented here to allow readers an opportunity to better judge the validity of the arguments presented in part 2.

In Canada accusations have surfaced periodically against residents suspected of having committed war crimes under the Nazi regime. The sources of the accusations have been both within and outside Canada. As in the United States, most of the people in Canada against whom accusations have been made came originally from Eastern Europe, mainly from territories now within the Soviet Union.

To date, no person in Canada has been prosecuted for war crimes. However, in June 1982 Helmut Rauca, a Canadian citizen, was arrested and charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 10,500 Jews in 1941 in Kaunas, Lithuania. Rauca was ordered extradited on 4 November 1982 to stand trial in West Germany. He appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada but later abandoned the appeal. He was extradited and on 28 September 1983 was charged in a Frankfurt court with the murder of the 10,500 Lithuanian Jews. Rauca's case did not, however, come before the court because he died on 29 October in a Frankfurt prison hospital.

In response to renewed calls for a more thorough investigation of accusations against suspected war criminals living in Canada, the Canadian Minister of Justice, John Crosbie, announced in February 1985 the creation of a commission of inquiry whose mandate was to ascertain whether Josef Mengele did or tried to immigrate to Canada; to determine whether there were war criminals living in Canada; and to recommend to the government the steps and measures that could be taken to bring such criminals to justice. The commission, headed by Quebec Supreme Court Justice Jules Deschenes, was to report to the Government of Canada by the end of December 1985. (See Appendix B for the commission's terms of reference.)

Justice Deschenes has encouraged concerned citizens to present their views at the commission's public hearings, and has allowed four organizations to designate representatives to defend their interests: the Canadian Jewish Congress, the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith, the Brotherhood of Veterans of the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army, and the Civil Liberties Commission of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee.

In Canada and in the United States extensive media coverage of the OSI and the Deschenes inquiry's investigations into Nazi war criminality has generated considerable public discussion on the substance of the issue as well as its handling by the media.

_______________

Notes:

1 Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, "The Campaign Against the U.S. Justice Department's Prosecution of Suspected Nazi War Criminals," ADL Special Report (New York, June 1985).

2 Ibid., 12-13.  
 

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Part 1 of 2

PHOTOS

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Signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Moscow, August 1939. From left to right: Viacheslav Molotov, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin.

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Bodies of victims of NKVD purges of 1937-8, part of a mass grave of more than 9,000 bodies unearthed in Vinnytsia 1943. (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

[x]

[x]
Shortly before retreating the Soviet NKVD security police murdered its prisoners. Residents of Lviv try to identify the victims at the main NKVD prison, 30 June 1941. (Bundesarchiv, Koblenz)

[x]

[x]
Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, primate of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, 1865-1944.

[x]
Andrii Melnyk, leader of the Melnyk faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M). (Ukrainian National Federation, Toronto)

[x]
Founding congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Vienna, 1929.

[x]
[i]Volodymyr Kubiiovych, leader of the Ukrainian Central Committee in the Generalgouvernement.

[x]
Stepan Bandera, leader of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). (Marika Bandera, Toronto)

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Part 2 of 2

[x]
LEFT Roman Shukhevych (Gen. Taras Chuprynka), Commander-inChief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), photographed in Western Ukraine in 1947. (Litopys UPA, Archives)

[x]
Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi German Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Hanged in Nuremberg as a war criminal in 1946.

[x]
Erich Koch, Reichskommissar of Ukraine and Gauleiter of East Prussia. Presently serving a life sentence in Barczewo, Poland. (Staatsbibliothek Berlin)

[x]
Otto Wachter, Governor of the District of Galicia. (Wasyl Veryha; Toronto)

[x]
Hans Frank (on left), GovernorGeneral of occupied Poland and Western Ukraine, and Alfred Bisanz, head of the Military Committee of the Galician Division, address a meeting in Stanyslaviv, 1943 (Wasyl Veryha, Toronto)

[x]

[x]
Kommando of Einsatzgruppe D upon its arrival in Drohobych, 1-6 July 1941. Mobile killing units such as this one were responsible for the murder of the local population.

[x]
Nazi execution of DUN members in Stanyslaviv, September 1943.

[x]
Survivors among the dead after the liberation of Dora concentration camp, where Ukrainian and other political prisoners worked on the Nazis' "V" rockets. (Ivan Mykytyn, former Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dora inmate, Toronto)

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Bringing Nazi War Criminals In Canada to Justice
by David Matas

In Canada we have belatedly begun to come to grips with the problem of Nazi war criminals in our midst. For forty years we did virtually nothing. There was only one extradition, that of Albert Helmut Rauca, in 1983.1 There have been no denaturalizations, no deportations. There were seven Canadian prosecutions in Germany immediately after the war, but there have been none in Canada. Now we are facing a deadline: all the witnesses, all the surviving victims, all the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust will soon be dead. If justice is to be done, it must be done quickly.

CONCERNS

The commencement of activity relating to the investigation and trial of Nazi war criminals has caused some concern. Simon Wiesenthal has said that he believes that 218 former Ukrainian officers of Hitler's SS, which ran death camps in Europe, are living in Canada. Sol Littman, a Canadian spokesman for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that records prove that twenty-eight Nazi war criminal suspects in Canada belonged to Ukrainian SS units.

Spokesmen for the Ukrainian Canadian community objected to these claims. John Nowosad, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), stated that the allegations reflect badly on Ukrainians and people of Ukrainian descent born in Canada. Orest Rudzik, past president of the UCC of Toronto, pointed out that many Canadians have the impression that all Ukrainians collaborated with the SS. These community leaders emphasized their desire to see war criminals brought to justice, but they expressed fear of a witch hunt reminiscent of the McCarthy era.

The matter was raised in the House of Commons. Alex Kindy, MP (Member of Parliament) for Calgary East, urged that the efforts to bring war criminals to justice not be allowed to reflect poorly on entire ethnic groups such as the Ukrainian Canadian community. Don Blenkarn, MP for Mississauga South, expressed a similar concern about Canadians of German descent. He claimed that, in an effort to assure the world that Canada does not harbour war criminals, it has seemed to some that the government has set out to castigate the German people. He warned that justice is not advanced by reviving old memories of torture, injustice, and bitterness. He asserted that Canada has an obligation not to suggest that Canadians of German descent are war criminals.

RESPONSE

These fears need not be realized. Indeed, we must try to avoid ethnic slurs in the process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. In criminal cases, the accused are usually not identified by their ethnic origin, nor should war criminals be identified in this way. We should not, however, be so fearful of ethnic slurs that we do not attempt to try suspected Nazi war criminals in Canada.

The prosecution of a war criminal is not a prosecution of the people to which he or she belongs; it is prosecution of the individual. When we prosecute other kinds of criminals, we do not normally consider the prosecution a slur or an attack on their community. The notion that war crimes were individual crimes with individual guilt is the very antithesis of the notion of collective guilt. It is the notion of collective guilt - not individual guilt - that is an incitement to hatred.

The Jewish community, which has been pressing for action to bring Nazi war criminals in Canada to justice, has no desire to inflict collective guilt on others, since it has been for millennia the victim of collective guilt for the death of Christ. It was only in 1961, twenty-four years ago, that the World Council of Churches resolved that Christians should repudiate the idea of Jews' collective guilt. In 1965 the Roman Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council declared that what happened to Christ should "not be charged against all the Jews without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

When taken to an extreme, this fear of linking ethnic slurs to the Nazis' murder of eleven million innocent civilians (including six million Jews) leads to Holocaust denial. Witnesses in the Ernst Zundel trial testified how they felt better about being German once they believed Zundel's claims that the Holocaust never happened.2 For example, Armin Auerswald is reported to have testified that "his feelings of guilt for being German were not rooted in reality." Jurgen Neumann is reported to have testified that he did not want his children "to grow up with an unjust stereotype of the Germans, to think badly of their father and grandfather."

An appropriate response to Holocaust denial is not just to inform people about the existence of the Holocaust but also to reject the linkage between the existence of the Holocaust and the perception of an attack on the Germans or any other group. We should approach this matter not as ethnic Jews, or Germans, or Ukrainians, but simply as Canadians who are concerned that the innocent go free and that the guilty are punished, that Canada not be a haven for war criminals. If we have that attitude, we cannot go wrong.

FORGETTING

Mr. Blenkarn maintains that justice is not advanced by reviving old, painful memories. However, it is important to remember the past precisely because justice is denied by repressing of memories of torture and injustice. We owe it to the victims to remember and not to forget their murderers. Bringing the victims' murderers to justice is a small attempt to salvage something from the meaninglessness of their deaths.

Moreover, as the Zundel trial illustrated, we are faced with the problem of Holocaust denial. Forgetting about the Holocaust, not reviving its memory, encourages those who would have the world believe it never happened.

There is, in addition, one regrettable fact: the Nazi Holocaust was not unique. History is replete with tragedy. For example, during the artificial famine in Ukraine in the 1930s the Soviets forcibly exported food and prevented the importation of food; millions starved. Forgetting tragedy means forgetting history.

Today not just one people faces extinction, but the entire human race is threatened with extinction by nuclear holocaust. Jonathan Schell, in The Fate of the Earth, wrote that Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people is the closest event in human history to a precursor of the extinction of the human race. If we are to avoid the ultimate holocaust, we must not forget the Nazi Holocaust. We can learn from it that insane crimes are not prevented from happening just because they are unthinkable; on the contrary, such crimes may be all the more likely to occur for that very reason. We can better understand, to use Schell's words, the "gaping un mendable holes in the fabric of the world" these crimes cause. Though the Jewish people have survived, the shtetl culture of Europe has gone and will never be revived. We cannot face squarely the dangers that threaten us by forgetting the disasters we have suffered.

JUSTICE

In my report "Bringing Nazi War Criminals in Canada to Justice," published by the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith, I discussed the range of legal options available for bringing Nazi war criminals in Canada to justice. The report is technical in nature, but it has a simple point to make: the crime of murder should not go unpunished; Nazi war criminals in Canada should be brought to justice.

Canada has no statute of limitations for murder. The Canadian government asked the West German government to extend its statute of limitations at a time when the German statute would have had the effect of barring prosecution of Nazi war criminals in Germany. Because they were able to enter Canada after World War II, Canada should not impose a statute of limitations for their crimes. It is an irony of history that their intended victims - Jews fleeing the Holocaust - were denied entry by Canada before and during the war.

Canada has said that the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity constitutes a universal commitment for all states. It has maintained that position year after year at the United Nations, from 1946 to the present. In 1981, at the General Assembly, Canada even proposed that position. It should now do what it has committed itself at the United Nations to do. It must not say one thing abroad and do something else at home. Canada must respect all its basic principles of human rights when bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. No human rights principle requires Nazi war criminals to go free, and Canada would be violating human rights in the grossest way imaginable if it allowed the crime of murder to go unpunished.

There are three important legal issues related to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals: the use to be made of Soviet-supplied evidence; the defence of duress; and the bringing to justice of other, non-Nazi criminals against humanity.

EVIDENCE

First, what is to be made of Soviet allegations? What is to be done with Soviet-supplied evidence? At a meeting I attended of nongovernmental organizations with the Canadian delegation to the Human Rights Experts Meeting, held in May 1985 in Ottawa under the Helsinki Accords, Peter Kondra, of the national office of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, asked: Should we not object to Russian interference in Canadian affairs when Russia gives to Canada a list of Ukrainian criminals, a list of witnesses, but does nothing about its own criminals?

One of the great achievements of the international human rights movement is acceptance of the principle that violations of human rights are not only matters of internal domestic concern but are also matters of international concern. A government is not free to brutalize, to imprison arbitrarily, to terrorize, to torture, to murder its own population, free from international reproach.

The Soviets are quick to charge interference in internal affairs whenever the West raises the question of human rights violations. If Canada were now to mimic Soviet rhetoric, when the Soviets produce lists of Nazi war criminals or lists of witnesses, it would reinforce the Soviets' claim to non-interference when Canada raises other human rights matters with them. Rather than reject Soviet lists or witnesses, Canada should examine seriously all information the Soviets supply, and our seriousness should serve as an example to them when we raise concerns about Soviet human rights violations.

If the Soviets make allegations, Canada should examine the allegations. If the Soviets have witnesses, Canada should examine and cross-examine the witnesses. Canada should make its own assessments, using Canadian standards of justice.

Because Canada has done so little about bringing Nazi war criminals in Canada to justice, the guilty have not been punished nor have the innocent been truly free. We have been left with speculation and a cloud of suspicion.

We cannot do nothing about criminals in our midst simply because the Soviets do nothing about theirs. Rather we should act, and use our own action as an argument for the Soviets' bringing criminals in their midst to justice.

DURESS

Second, there is the question of duress. In a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, Mykhailo Marunchak wrote: "Mr. Wiesenthal's statement about Ukrainian officers who allegedly participated in running death camps is false and unfounded. In some cases, the Gestapo used some individuals from local police forces to patrol barracks from the outside and to assist in transportation of prisoners, but all of them served as ordinary robots in such situations. Their services were similar to services of the Jewish police in Jewish ghettos."

Duress is a defence under the Canadian Criminal Code. The actual provision in the code reads, in part: "A person who commits an offence under compulsion by threats of immediate death or grievous bodily harm from a person who is present when the offence is committed is excused for committing the offence, if he believes that the threat will be carried out, and if he is not a party to a conspiracy or association whereby he is subject to compulsion." The defence does not apply to a number of offences, among them murder and attempted murder. The courts have held that the defence does apply to aiding and abetting murder.

The defence of duress is different from the defence of "orders of superiors." By Canadian law, as well as by international law, "orders of superiors" is not a defence.

Whether the defence of duress applies in a particular case depends on the facts of the case. It is not a general defence applicable to all Nazi war criminals. The evidence in some cases has been that if a person did not want to work in or for the death camps, that person would still have to work for the Nazis but would be transferred to another task. The evidence in other cases has been that the accused believed in the genocide that was taking place and participated enthusiastically.

People are not guilty of war crimes simply because of their nationality or ethnic origin. Nor are they necessarily innocent of all war crimes simply because of their nationality or ethnic origin. Only a functioning legal system, where the facts are properly assessed and presented, can distinguish the innocent from the guilty.

OTHER CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity are not the only ones. What should Canada do about other war criminals, other criminals against humanity?

In an address to members of Toronto's Lithuanian community, Romas Vastokas called for a reopening of the Nuremberg trials to bring to light atrocities committed by the Soviet regime. He urged other Eastern Europeans to join in the fight to bring Soviet war criminals to trial.

The Canadian War Crimes Act, which is one legal recourse by which Nazi war criminals in Canada could be brought to justice, is limited to wars in which Canada took part after 9 September 1939. It does not apply to crimes against humanity inflicted outside of the context of war, like the famine inflicted on Ukraine in the 1930s, nor to war crimes in wars in which Canada is not a participant, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

I proposed to the Canadian Bar Association a resolution that new legislation be passed to allow for prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, whether or not the crimes were committed during wars in which Canada has been or may be engaged. That resolution passed the 1981 bar convention and now represents the policy of the association.

More recently, in my capacity as national chairman of the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith Canada, I proposed a similar amendment to Bill C-18, the so-called drunk-driving bill, which came before the House of Commons. The bill proposed adding to the list of extraterritorial offences already in the Criminal Code the offences of hostage-taking and theft of nuclear materials. The league suggested adding to the list war crimes and crimes against humanity. The amendment could have the effect, as well, of allowing civilian trials for war crimes. The War Crimes Act provides for military trials. The amendment would prevent the raising of some technical objections that have been raised to the use of the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions Act.

The Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs has already ruled that it will refuse to hear witnesses on this proposal, on the grounds that the proposal is not germane to the bill. It is an indication that the proposal itself will be ruled out of order. It would be a ruling I would regret.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago: "When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

In Canada there is a trial going on right now - not a trial of a Nazi war criminal but of the Canadian justice system. If Canada is not to be left with a permanent stain on its justice system, we must act to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

Notes:

1 Albert Helmut Rauca, a former SS officer, was extradited to West Germany in 1983 to face war crimes charges. He was accused of aiding and abetting the execution of 10,500 Jews in Kaunas, part of occupied Lithuania, in 1941. Rauca died in a West German prison before being brought to trial. (Ed.)

2 In March 1985 Ernst Zundel was tried and convicted in Toronto on charges of knowingly spreading false information about the Holocaust. In a series of publications Zundel had denied that the German genocide of Jews had taken place. (Ed.)  

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Alleged War Criminals, the Canadian Media, and the Ukrainian Community
by Roman Serbyn

In response to the recent widespread allegations and attacks against Ukrainians outside Ukraine, as well as the biased handling of Ukrainian topics by the Canadian media, a media watch group was formed in Montreal, the Information and Anti-Defamation Commission (IADC) of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee. 1 The following analysis of the treatment of Ukrainian issues by the Canadian media is based on material gathered by the IADC and on its experience in public relations.

On 7 February the Hon. John Crosbie, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, announced the establishment of "an independent commission of inquiry ... to conduct ... investigations regarding war criminals in Canada," to be headed by Mr. Justice Jules Deschenes. 2 The document outlining the commission's terms of reference consists of two parts: a preamble of three paragraphs, and instructions concerning the prerogatives and the functioning of the commission, elaborated in eleven points. 3 The first two paragraphs refer specifically to Nazi crimes; there is mention of Josef Mengele and of "the activities of Nazi Germany." 4 The third paragraph speaks of bringing to justice "any such criminal currently residing in Canada." This paragraph can be interpreted to include all war criminals, both Nazis and others. The rest of the document, which defines the commission's mandate, is couched in general terms, without specific reference to Nazi crimes.

This author's reading of the document is that the present inquiry into the presence in Canada of alleged war criminals was brought about by the efforts of the Jewish community to flush out Nazi war criminals. Since almost all the crimes against the Jewish people committed during World War II were perpetrated under the aegis of the Nazi regime, it is understandable that the Jewish community would tend to identify "war crimes" with "Nazi crimes." However, war crimes were committed not only under the authority of Nazi Germany. Countless atrocities against the civilian population were also committed by Communists and by criminal collaborators in the service of the Soviet Union. Limiting the work of the Deschenes Commission only to Nazi criminals is selective and incomplete justice, and it cannot be the intention of the Canadian government. That is why the rest of the terms of reference of the Deschenes Commission should refer to all war crimes and war criminals.

Various members of both the Ukrainian and Jewish communities have stressed the necessity of bringing all war criminals to justice. In a recent publication, Mr. David Matas, senior counsel for and former chairman of the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith, wrote: "Though this report looks at the particular problem of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the author, of course, believes that all war criminals, all criminals against humanity, should be brought to justice." 5 Although this author agrees fully with his statement, and wishes to emphasize that each ethnocultural community may rightly be preoccupied with the crimes committed against its members, a Canadian commission must not discriminate in pursuit of justice. It must deal with all alleged war criminals, irrespective of the regime on whose behalf the crimes were committed. Unfortunately, the media has taken a narrower view of the problem.

The day after Mr. Crosbie announced the formation of the Deschenes Commission, news about it began to appear in Canadian newspapers. On 8 February 1985 the Globe and Mail carried a story from Ottawa with the headline, "Ottawa Sets Up Commission to Pursue Nazi War Criminals." The opening paragraph made it clear that the commission was to deal only with Nazi war criminals. Other newspapers took the same approach, mentioning only Nazi war crimes and Nazi war criminals. That same day, the Winnipeg Free Press printed allegations by Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Documentation Center in Vienna, and Sol Littman, a Canadian journalist, to the effect that there were still 2,000 Nazi wartime collaborators alive in Canada of the 3,000 who originally came to this country. Ukrainians figure prominently in the article, as they do in the lists of alleged criminals prepared by Mr. Wiesenthal and the Soviet Embassy. 6

However, the news item that most upset the Ukrainian community was an Israeli radio interview with Mr. Wiesenthal carried by all the Canadian media. The first report, published on 10 February by the Toronto Star, noted: "The Israeli radio quoted Mr. Wiesenthal as saying he believes 218 former Ukrainian officers of Hitler's SS (elite guard), which ran death camps in Eastern Europe, are living in Canada." 7 This quotation, in one form or another, appeared in newspaper, radio, and television reports across Canada. It encompassed all the elements of sensationalism: "SS," "Hitler," "elite guard," "death camps," and, of course, "Ukrainians." It was also false and defamatory.

Mr. Wiesenthal's interview begs several questions. First, for the historical record, most Ukrainians who served in the SS did so in the Galician Division, which was not an "elite guard" but a Waffen or combat unit. It was used once on the Eastern front against the Soviet forces; it was never used to guard concentration camps. Moreover, both Soviet and British screening teams cleared the division of any participation in war crimes. The immigration to Canada of individual division members was sanctioned by the federal cabinet after considerable deliberation and further investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 8 Second, it was grossly unfair of the Canadian media to give such prominence to Mr. Wiesenthal's radio interview in Israel, containing questionable information that damaged the Ukrainian image, while failing to cover a press conference organized a few days later by the Ukrainian community in order to refute some of the allegations. There was nothing about the press conference on the Canadian Press (CP) wire service, nor did the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have anything to say on the "National," an evening news feature program, or during its morning radio show the next day. 9

Moreover, there is a discrepancy between the reported Israeli radio interview and the article on the same topic in Mr. Wiesenthal's Bulletin of Information. The following passage from the Bulletin throws a very different light on the issue:

Shortly before the parliamentary elections in Canada, the Documentation Center submitted a list of 218 SS officers who had been volunteers of the Ukrainian SS-division and of general SS formations, to Canada's Solicitor General, Robert Kaplan.

Out of these 218 SS officers, none had been registered dead after the end of war nor was anyone, to the Documentation Center's knowledge, in Europe by that time. Since Canada happens to be the most favoured immigration country of Ukrainians, there is a possibility that at least some of these former SS officers may have emigrated there. Up till 1953, former SS men were barred from entering Canada by Canadian law. We presume, however, that many Ukrainians managed to bypass this restriction by withholding information about their wartime past from the Canadian immigration authorities. This is particularly likely to have been the case during the Cold War period. 10 [emphasis added]

Whatever the merits of the list of 218 officers, Mr. Wiesenthal's statement in the Bulletin is quite different from that reported in the Israeli radio interview. Why had this discrepancy not been pointed out to the media by the office of the Solicitor General?

The allegations by Mr. Wiesenthal, Mr. Littman, and the Soviet Embassy provoked a lively response from the Ukrainian community. "In Edmonton," wrote the Montreal Gazette, "Ukrainian-Canadian academics Bohdan Krawchenko and Myroslav Yurkevich demanded that Nazi-hunter Sol Littman prove his allegation that Alberta is a haven for Ukrainian war criminals. The allegation is historically doubtful and a slur on all Ukrainian-Canadians, they said." 11 It is of some interest to note that the CP wire service was the source for this short item. The Montreal Gazette used it, but the Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, ignored it. Protests came from other centres as well, and some were reported by the media. 12

When all the pieces of the unfolding saga of alleged war criminals in Canada are put together, a pattern emerges. There is a shift in emphasis and focus. "War criminals" are reduced to "Nazi war criminals," and "Nazi criminals" become strongly identified with "Ukrainians." The Galician Division's identity as a combat unit (Waffen SS) is ignored, and a false identity as Hitler's elite guard is forged. The distinction between "war criminals" and" alleged war criminals" is completely blurred, and the two terms are used interchangeably. Ukrainians are never mentioned as having suffered either from Communist or Nazi oppression. They are rarely credited with saving Jews from extermination, and never is it mentioned that many Ukrainians lost their lives for giving shelter to Jews. In this way the Canadian media contributes to the emergence of a new image of Ukrainian Canadians. Gone are the men in sheepskin coats, and a new breed of sinister, criminal collaborators with the Nazis begins to appear. Is it any wonder that the Ukrainian community feels insulted, trapped, and on the way to becoming a scapegoat for a new witch hunt?

The treatment by the media of the current accusations against Ukrainians is not surprising if one examines how the media has been manipulated in recent years. Simon Wiesenthal's Documentation Center has contributed its share to the denigration of Ukrainians outside Ukraine. In an interview given to the Jerusalem Post in 1979, and later reported in Canada, Mr. Wiesenthal blamed the Ukrainian community for the Canadian government's inaction on war criminals residing in this country. According to the Suburban, "He [Mr. Wiesenthal] attributes the attitude of the Canadian government to the fact that Ukrainians, who make up most of the war criminals" - in other interviews Mr. Wiesenthal puts the number of war criminals at 800 to 1,000 - "are the second largest ethnic minority in Canada" (elsewhere he speaks of one million Ukrainians in Canada). "They have political clout and no party wants to alienate them." 13 What kind of documentation and information centre makes such blunders in basic, easily verifiable data, and then uses this faulty information to construct outrageous accusations? There are some 530,000 Ukrainians in Canada, not one million; they are not the second-largest ethnic group but come far behind German Canadians and Italian Canadians. If any ethnic community has political "clout" in Ottawa, it certainly is not the Ukrainians. Anyone who is the least knowledgeable about federal politics knows the relative weight of the lobbying powers of the Jewish and Ukrainian communities. The Canadian government meets with representatives of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and communicates with the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC). The existence of the Canadian Parliamentarians' Group for Soviet Jewry and the establishment of the Deschenes Commission speak for themselves. Mr. Littman should brief the head office in Vienna more thoroughly.

Another example illustrates the unreliable character of Mr. WiesenthaI's testimony and accusations. Last year Professor Taras Hunczak gave a lecture in Montreal on the topic of wartime collaboration, and then had an interview with the Gazette on the same subject. The article provoked a full-scale debate on the pages of the Gazette, and Mr. Wiesenthal was one of the participants. He wrote, "The one million [sic] Ukrainians living in Canada can easily keep their distance from the few dozens [sic] or hundreds of persons who committed crimes against innocent people." 14 Such disregard for precision when dealing with the grave accusation of war crimes is striking. The letter does have a redeeming quality - Mr. Wiesenthal' s distinction between political and criminal collaboration: "The political collaboration of the Ukrainians with the Nazis is on another level and cannot be mixed with collaboration in crimes which lead to murder and mass murder of innocent people." If only Mr. Wiesenthal would remember this distinction and apply it when making statements about Ukrainians.

One last point about Mr. Wiesenthal. In 1979 the Soviets attacked him for Zionist propaganda. The article appeared in the Kiev newspaper Radianska Ukraina, but it is well known that decisions to publish attacks of that nature are not made locally, but in the centre of Soviet power. 15 Mr. Wiesenthal is accused of nothing less than collaboration with the Nazis. As proof, it is alleged that in 1941, forty Jewish intellectuals were arrested in Lviv, and among them was Mr. Wiesenthal; thirty-nine perished and only Mr. Wiesenthal was allowed to live. The conclusion was obvious: Mr. Wiesenthal bought his life with service to the Nazis. This author does not know if anyone has ever seriously invoked this "testimony" against Mr. Wiesenthal; it may be a partial or a complete fabrication by the Soviet authorities. But the point is that if Mr. Wiesenthal, his followers, and other Nazi hunters are so eager to use Soviet information and sources then perhaps they could look into this allegation.

We have seen how the Canadian media have misled the public with biased reporting on the question of the alleged war criminals residing in Canada. One would expect that readers of Ukrainian Canadian newspapers would be better served. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Ukrainian newspapers do not provide their readers with the necessary information to form a meaningful opinion. News analysis is also inadequate if not completely lacking. In this respect, the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is much superior to the Ukrainian newspapers. Ukrainian editors, journalists, and the Ukrainian community as a whole should take the CJN as a model of ethnic journalism and learn from it. All of the news in the CJN is pertinent to the Jewish community, and all of the news that is pertinent to that community is reported by the CJN. The material is up to date and the events are analyzed from a Jewish perspective.

In a recent lecture in Montreal, Lucy S. Dawidowicz elaborated the idea that Jews, especially educated Jews, often see themselves from a non-Jewish or even an anti-Jewish perspective. She attributed this phenomenon to the fact that much of the literature dealing with Jews, even when it is written by Jews themselves, is composed in that vein. Whether that observation is applicable to North American Jewry today, it is difficult to say; but if, mutatis mutandis, it was applied to Ukrainians outside Ukraine, it would prove quite useful.

Because the Ukrainian press is so inadequate and the Ukrainian Canadian community so passive, they have both contributed - by sins of omission rather than commission - to the emerging image of the "Ukrainian Nazi collaborator" in Canada. The attitude of the Ukrainian Canadian community - from its leaders in the UCC down to individual members - is roughly this: the outrageous allegations against Ukrainians are so ridiculous that they discredit themselves and the best thing to do is to ignore them and they will soon be forgotten. This attitude has proven damaging to our reputation. We can no longer afford to ignore such racist slurs as that of Larry Zo1£, who accuses Canadians of Eastern European background of harbouring "quasifascist nationalism," even when he tries to pass this off as satire. 16 The Ukrainian Canadian community did not effectively handle the Communist disinformation distributed in Winnipeg in the form of a pamphlet entitled "Winnipeg's Nazi Suspects." That piece of despicable hate literature, claimed to be the work of a group of Jewish, Ukrainian, and native-born Canadians, was obviously meant to foment strife between the Ukrainian and Jewish communities. On the back cover of the pamphlet there was even a passage in Hebrew so that Ukrainians would not fail to blame Jews for the propaganda. The obvious thing for Ukrainians to do was to have the UCC contact the Canadian Jewish Congress, issue a joint condemnation of this hate literature, and then turn the matter over to the police for investigation and prosecution; but they did not. Why not?

A word should also be said about the overzealous Nazi-hunters in Canada who do no honour to their ethnic community and whose tactics are unworthy of the cause they claim to serve. The strong-arm tactics advocated by Edward Greenspan are not only surprising coming from a lawyer but seem to contravene the very basis of our judicial system. In February 1984, Mr. Greenspan advocated that "pictures of the war criminals should be published in a book listing all the allegations against them and widely distributed to bookstores, libraries and homes of their neighbours." 17 Still more recently, Greenspan maintained that the "ex-Nazis among us should not have a moment's peace." 18 Milton Harris, president of the CJC, was rightfully indignant at such tactics; what is surprising, however, is that Mr. Harris seems to be concerned primarily with the threat of libel suits and not with the moral aspect of such a witch-hunt.

Many Ukrainians outside Ukraine feel that they are becoming scapegoats in the renewed hunt for Nazi war criminals. The danger is very real. Ukrainians are easy targets: they are economically weak, they have little political clout (Mr. Wiesenthal's opinion to the contrary notwithstanding), and their access to the media is limited. While most other ethnic groups can get some help and backing from the country of their origin, Ukrainians cannot count on Ukraine or the government in Kiev to speak in their defence or in the defence of Ukraine itself, for that matter. In fact, the expressed intention of the Soviet leaders in Moscow and their collaborators in Kiev is to undermine, defame, and ultimately destroy Ukrainians outside Ukraine. It is these Soviet authorities, who have themselves shown so little zeal in bringing the real war criminals to justice (the notorious Erich Koch lives comfortably in prison in Poland), who are now most eager to provide Western Jewish Nazi-hunters with lists of names. This collaboration is most disturbing and cannot but be suspected and questioned by Ukrainians.

It is time for Ukrainian Canadians to stand up in defence of their rights, of their reputation, and of their image. They must react to the distortions in the media and establish a better documentation base. Most important, they must establish a meaningful dialogue with the Jewish community. Had the lines of communication between the two communities been kept open, many of the present difficulties could have been avoided. An excellent forum for Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue is the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, since its raison d'etre is to promote harmonious relations between Jews and Christians (in this case Ukrainians) and to eliminate animosity among Canadian ethno-cultural communities.

Much has been said about the visible minorities in Canada. Ukrainian Canadians are an invisible minority, but there is no reason for them to remain an inaudible minority as well. They must speak up, shed whatever vestiges they still have of the fears and inferiority complexes imposed on them by history. They must adjust to the North American way of life and take advantage of all the opportunities available to them.

The image of the Ukrainian community is closely linked to the public perception formed by the media. Ukrainian Canadians must develop contacts with the media, on the level of the individual citizen and on the level of an organized community. They must undertake affirmative action. They need individual activists and organized groups to lobby by all possible means with the media and with the government.

However, every dark cloud has a silver lining, and the recent attack on Ukrainians is no exception. The allegations, accusations, and slurs may prove to be a blessing in disguise. Ukrainians outside Ukraine have not had a rallying issue since the freeing of Valentyn Moroz from Soviet prison. The fiftieth anniversary of the great artificial famine in Ukraine aroused the community, but its impact was by no means as great as that of commemorations of the Holocaust •by the Jewish community. Now the Ukrainian community has a new issue which, it is hoped, will leave some permanent marks on its maturation as an ethnocultural group within Canada.

______________

Notes:

1 Besides monitoring and interacting with the media, the IADC provides background information on current issues of interest to the Ukrainian community. To this end the IADC has put out a quarterly bulletin (two issues have appeared to date), and has established a dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community through the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews.

2 Commons Debates (Ottawa), 7 February 1985, 2113.

3 See Appendix B for the commission of inquiry's terms of reference. (Ed.)

4 Ministry of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, news release, 7 February 1985.

5 David Matas, Bringing Nazi War Criminals in Canada to Justice (Toronto, 1985), 98.

6 "Alleged War Criminals Believed in Winnipeg," Winnipeg Free Press, 8 February 1985.

7 "Nazi Hunter Wiesenthal Says Ottawa Ignored His Twenty-Eight Suspects," Toronto Star, 10 February 1985.

8 After having surrendered on 8 May 1945 to the British near Radstadt, Austria, as "Surrendered Enemy Personnel" (SEP), the 1st Ukrainian Division was interned in a SEP camp near Rimini, Italy. There the soldiers were subjected to screening by the British and Soviet authorities; both cleared the division of any war crimes. In spring 1947 the process of transferring the division to the United Kingdom began. The Ukrainian Canadian Committee and its affiliated organizations made efforts to encourage the Canadian government to allow individual members of the division to immigrate to Canada. On 31 May 1950 the federal cabinet sanctioned their immigration after carefully ascertaining that no war criminals were among those wishing to come to Canada. However, the Canadian Jewish Congress claimed to have evidence of the division's involvement in war crimes. The cabinet then asked the British Foreign Office and the RCMP for further clarification of the division's history and membership. By 25 September 1950, convinced of the correctness of its previous decision, the cabinet reaffirmed that former division members would be allowed to immigrate to Canada. Thus, after many screenings and much vetting of the division's history and membership, former division members came to Canada legally. For a detailed history of the division's immigration to Canada, see Myron Momryk, "Ukrainian Displaced Persons and the Canadian Government, 1946-1952" (unpublished paper). See also Gordon B. Panchuk, Heroes of Their Day (Toronto, 1983). Documents relating to the division, its screening, and immigration to Canada can be found in part 3 of this volume.

9 A telegram was sent by the IADC to the CBC requesting an explanation of this attitude, but no answer was received. A follow-up letter also went unanswered.

10 Bulletin of Information (Vienna), no. 25 (31 January 1985): 1.

11 Don MacPherson, "Anti-Semitic MPs Might Have Hurt Nazi-Hunt: Activist," The Gazette (Montreal), 12 February 1985.

12 "Ukrainian Community Incensed over War-Criminal Allegations," The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 14 February 1985; "Veterans Deny War Crime Allegations," Edmonton Journal, 14 February 1985; "Ukrainian Community Leaders Fear Effects of Nazi Reports," The Globe and Mail, 15 February 1985; "Ukrainian-Canadians 'Disturbed' by Nazi Accusations, Chief Says," The Gazette, 16 February 1985.

13 "Canada Shelters Ex-Nazis, Wiesenthal Says," The Suburban (Montreal), 31 October 1979.

14 The Gazette, 9 May 1984; emphasis added.

15 Radianska Ukraina (Kiev), 20 November 1979.

16 See the critique of Larry Zolf's book, Survival of the Fattest, in the IADC Bulletin (Montreal), 2, no. 1 (1985): 11-12.

17 "Greenspan Attacks Inaction on War Crimes," The Jewish Times (Toronto), 10-23 February 1984.

18 Canadian Jewish News (Toronto), 21 February 1985.  

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Co-operation between the U.S. Office of Special Investigations and the Soviet Secret Police
by Paul Zumbakis

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, scholar and author, discusses the burden borne by an inquisitor or prosecutor. Eco cautions the reader against zealous prosecutors, who, he maintains, may be more dangerous to society than alleged criminals: "If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds." His warning is most appropriate today, since in the United States the "sheep" are beginning to mistrust the "shepherds." In the Department of Justice, and particularly in the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the sheep and the very system may become victims of the zealous shepherds.

The dangers posed by overzealous prosecutors were apparent to the Founding Fathers when they drafted the U.S. Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. They realized that nothing is more dangerous than the abuse of governmental power by the misuse of the rule of law. To ensure that future generations of Americans would not become the victims of their government, the Founding Fathers included safeguards for individual rights.

After observing both the operation of the OSI and the lack of congressional and administrative supervision for several years, I am convinced that individual rights and the right to a fair trial are not being respected by the OSI. One of the most striking illustrations of this problem is the OSI's use of Soviet, that is, KGB "evidence" in the cases of alleged Nazi war criminals and collaborators. Of the seventeen deportation cases pending today in the United States, thirteen rely almost solely on Soviet evidence. There are twelve denaturalization cases, and all twelve rely on Soviet evidence.

The relationship between the OSI and the KGB must be assessed within the framework of several historical, political, and moral issues. Only then is it possible to appreciate the danger of co-operation with the KGB and the damage that can result from such co-operation.

Because the goals and behaviour of the Gestapo were immoral, one reason for the creation of the OSI was to investigate and bring to justice American citizens who collaborated with the Gestapo. It should, however, be remembered that the Soviet security police, which were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Soviet citizens, also worked closely with the Gestapo in 1939-41, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in effect. Therefore, co-operation with the Soviet security forces (known today as the KGB) is an immoral act, especially in light of the war crimes committed during World War II.

It is also important to realize that political cases in the Soviet Union are under the exclusive control of the KGB, not the courts or the judicial system. Trials against dissidents are considered political or state security cases; for example, the KGB initiated the proceedings against Victor Krasin, a Jewish dissident, and negotiated the judgment, the sentence, and the parole. 1 The Soviet Union views OSI cases as political or security cases, 2 and these are also under KGB supervision. Thus OSI collaboration with the Soviet judicial system is, in effect, co-operation with the KGB. This relationship should not be condoned by civilized countries.

FACT AND FICTION

How does the OSI explain its use of Soviet documentation? Whenever lawyers complain - to the American Bar Association, to the president of the United States, to Congress, or to the press - that the OSI is dealing with the KGB, the OSI responds it is dealing with lithe Soviet system of justice." It insists that it is dealing with Soviet procurators and with the courts, and the KGB is never mentioned. It claims that it is dealing with the judiciary. However, in the Liudas Kairys case, tried in Chicago two years ago, it was established from the first day that the KGB led the investigations in the Soviet Union; 3 this is part of the court record. Moreover, OSI experts have established that all the archives and all the material in the archives belong to and are controlled by the KGB. The witnesses that the Soviets produce for depositions are in the complete and sole protection and custody of the KGB, which decides who is to be a witness. They brief the witnesses and control their testimonies, from beginning to end. After nearly six years of OSI investigations, however, the KGB has not produced a single witness or document for the defence. Everything produced for the OSI supports the prosecution. For the OSI to maintain that it is dealing with the Soviet court system is a travesty: the Soviets themselves, in a major article in Izvestiia, wrote about the KGB's leading and initiatory role in OSI cases. 4

Whenever the OSI is criticized by Congress, attorneys, or the press, it claims it operates under U.S. federal rules of civil procedure. But what are civil procedures in the United States are criminal procedures in the Soviet Union. This difference is an important one, for under Soviet criminal procedures, all witnesses and those who might bear witness are under the complete "protection" of the KGB. Some witnesses have testified many times, their testimony changing according to which "notorious Nazi" is being tried. In contrast to North America, in the Soviet Union it is impossible to obtain the records of previous testimony, for the KGB decides which records will be accessible to lawyers.

Perhaps the most important flaw in the way in which depositions are taken in the Soviet Union is that American lawyers do not have the right to engage in proper cross-examination. Although the OSI has repeatedly declared that American lawyers have this right, they have been unable to ask the simplest questions in so-called discovery depositions. A wide range of questions may be asked under U. S. rules, but none that may embarrass witnesses who are lying or that aim at refreshing the memory of witnesses with respect to previous testimony. Lawyers are also not allowed to question how long the KGB has coached witnesses. The person judging whether a particular question is allowed is not a U.S. judge but a KGB procurator. Yet the OSI has had the audacity to tell the press and Congress that it has followed federal procedures during cross-examination!

CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE OSI AND THE KGB

What are the dangers of collaboration with the KGB? First, by allowing the KGB to co-operate openly with the American government, the KGB is allowed to compare itself with the CIA. Even though there is a world of difference between them, by publicizing that it is doing the work of the OSI, the KGB becomes legitimate in the eyes of the Western world.

The second major danger of co-operation with the KGB is that it gives the Soviet Union an opportunity to rewrite history. From the cases before the U.S. courts, it is clear that the KGB determines which defendants will be tried in the United States. It appears that the KGB sends documents from the Soviet Embassy to the OSI, and the OSI then follows up on the basis of this evidence. With the selection of documents and witnesses solely in the hands of the KGB, history can be adjusted to the Soviet Union's point of view.

EVIDENCE OF DAMAGE

Damage has been done in several areas. First, dissidents and "refuseniks" in the Soviet Union are demoralized. When the OSI sends people to the USSR, uses the Soviet court system, and openly co-operates with the KGB, the message it sends to dissidents is that the United States respects the system that convicted them. This is a victory for the KGB. Moreover, dissidents in the Gulag are not divided by religion or nationality. Not only are they united, but they are also dismayed to see the Soviet Union split North American communities by pitting Jews against Ukrainians and Christians against Jews; this only weakens concern for dissident opposition to the Soviet system.

Second, by fanning outrage against Nazi atrocities and appearing to provide damning evidence against the perpetrators, the Soviet Union can deflect attention from its own miserable historical record. It no longer need be held to account for the years of terror during Stalin's rule. Similarly, with the Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Estonian communities in the West under attack, the story of what the Soviets did to these peoples in the past is less likely to be believed or even heard.

The future is not without hope, however. Three courts in the United States have found that KGB-produced evidence is unacceptable in U.S. courts. For example, in a recent appellate court decision, the following points were made:

The prosecution of the case resulted from an unusual cooperative effort of the Office of Special Investigations and Soviet authorities. The court next spoke to the difficulties of Soviet involvement: "The Soviet authorities are outside of the jurisdiction of the United States judicial system. Consequently, it is impossible to provide the usual safeguards of trustworthiness of evidence having its source in the Soviet Union. This becomes a matter of concern for two reasons. First, the Soviet authorities have a strong motive to ensure that the government succeeds in this case. Second, the Soviet criminal and judicial system is structured to tailor evidence and produce results which will further the important political ends of the Soviet state at the expense, if need be, of justice in a particular case. 11

The motive the court alluded to in the above passage is the desire of the current Soviet government to discredit emigres who fled Eastern Europe in the face of the impending Soviet advance toward the end of the Second World War. 5

If co-operation with the KGB is immoral, then it damages everyone - Christians, Jews, Americans, and Canadians. It becomes a cancer in the judicial system. In the words of my colleague, Mr. David Matas, "If we bend the law for a particular purpose, we establish a dangerous precedent. We weaken our moral position and dilute the impact of the moral point we wish to make that what the Nazi war criminals did was wrong." 6

It remains to be seen whether Canada will be more careful than the United States has been. Now we have a cancer - you have only a cold.

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Notes:

1 Victor Krasin, "How I Was Broken by the KGB," New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1984.

2 U.S. v. Kungys, 571 F. Supp 1104 (D.C. J.J., 1983).

3 See, for instance, the deposition of Irwin Weil, U.S. v. Kairys, NO. 80 C 4302 (N.D. I.L. 4 June 1981).

4 Izvestiia, 25 February 1983.

5 Laipenieks v. I.N.S., 750 F 2d 1427, 9th Cir. 1985.

6 David Matas, Bringing Nazi War Criminals in Canada to Justice (Toronto, 1985).  

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Nazi War Criminals: The Role of Soviet Disinformation
by Roman Kupchinsky

In 1973 a lengthy diatribe against the Ukrainian emigration by the then head of the Writers' Union of Ukraine, Leonid Novychenko, appeared in the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta. In it Novychenko mentioned an article about Soviet youth that had been published in an emigre journal. After denouncing the article, Novychenko got to the essence of his attack: the writer for the emigre publication was a Ukrainian Nazi who, during World War II, had edited a pro-German, anti-Semitic, fascist paper. Although he alleged that I was the author of the article, I cannot recall editing such a newspaper in 1943 - one year before I was born.

When I mentioned the problem to a Soviet representative, the Soviets checked their records and deleted the obvious misinformation. However, a new entry was then placed into the file - that I was a war criminal in Vietnam - and this charge began appearing in the Soviet media. If, sometime in the future, the United States ever comes to rely upon Soviet evidence to try American "war criminals" of the Vietnam War, I shall no doubt figure on some list given by the Vietnamese government to the Justice Department, and thirty Vietnamese "witnesses" will come forward to identify me as a murderer of women and children in some hamlet.

There are numerous designations one can use when talking about such incidents. One is misinformation based upon error. Another is disinformation, which is the premeditated use of false data in order to compromise or discredit a person or nation. A third is repetition of a false statement. Some of these distortions are unavoidable (about 75 per cent are due to lack of knowledge); others are due to repetition of a false statement that appears in a journalist's file on a given topic and is then used as background material for an article. A small percentage is pure disinformation, provided by someone with the intention of discrediting an opponent.

There has been a long and concerted campaign on the part of the KGB to sow disinformation in the West about Ukrainian emigres and their alleged role in war crimes in order to discredit not only the nationalist, anti-Soviet Ukrainian community but also the organizations for which the alleged war criminals work, and in particular the agencies involved in providing information to closed societies: Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Canada International, and Voice of America. By supposedly proving that former war criminals staff these organizations, the Soviets discredit the organizations in the eyes of the West and in the eyes of their listening audiences inside the USSR and Eastern Europe.

The disinformation department of the KGB, Section "D," was formally organized in 1959, when the KGB was reorganized. The major target of the section was not emigre groups but the countries of the NATO alliance; its aim was to create discord among the partners. In 1969 the Fifth Directorate of the KGB was formed, whose mission was to combat internal and external anti-Soviet groups. The purpose of the Directorate's Eighth Section was to undermine emigre groups. In Ukraine the Institute for the Study of Foreign Countries was formed in Kiev, as a KGB institution, to study Ukrainian emigre communities. Members of this institute who come to Canada on scholarly exchanges are directly involved in disinformation against Ukrainian Canadians.

Section "D" became active immediately after its formation. In December 1959, anti-Semitic slogans appeared on the walls of Jewish synagogues in Cologne, West Germany. Soon afterwards, similar slogans appeared in other German cities and then in other countries -- England, France, the United States, and Australia. In Germany alone, police counted 833 anti-Semitic incidents within a period of three weeks. Letters denouncing the rebirth of nazism and fascism in West Germany, written by reputable authors, were published in numerous newspapers. Questions were raised about the United States' relationship with a Germany that still had fascist elements. It is important to note that no anti-Semitic slogans appeared in any East German cities. Germans in the People's Democracy were blameless in this respect; the only "bad" Germans were living in West Germany.

After three weeks, the campaign ended. Not one anti-Semitic slogan appeared. The West German police arrested two men, both members of a pro-Nazi group in West Germany. It turned out that both were members of the East German secret police, sent to West Germany with the express purpose of instigating an anti-Semitic campaign in order to discredit the Federal Republic. A few years afterward, a Soviet KGB officer defected to the West and told how he had been involved in the planning of this campaign.

The mechanics of such a campaign are relatively simple; the results, while not earth-shattering, are impressive. The only role the secret police have to play is to instigate. The world does not lack those who are all too willing to carry out anti-Semitic campaigns. All they need is an excuse and a push. This is exactly what happened in Germany in 1959 and early 1960. Almost all the letters to the editor were genuine. People were outraged by the campaign and rightfully protested in the press. A handful of the letters were insertions, to give a political line to the protest - an anti-NATO analysis, if you will.

Several factors are instrumental in the creation of these campaigns and of an image that is used to promote a given political line. For example, when Andrei Sheptytsky, metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, died in 1944, his funeral was attended by the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, who laid a wreath on the tomb. In 1944 the Soviet government was trying to win the loyalties of the Western Ukrainian population, and this concession was needed. However, by 1946-7, when the forced liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was in progress, Sheptytsky was portrayed as a Nazi henchman and all Uniates as "war criminals and collaborators." Although Sheptytsky had, in fact, sent letters to the pope and to Himmler protesting the liquidation of Jews in Ukraine and had personally helped save Jews, the Soviet propaganda machine began an enormous campaign to discredit him. The reason was simple: it was not in the interests of the USSR to portray a Ukrainian patriot (which Sheptytsky most definitely was) as an anti-Nazi. The political line was that all Ukrainian nationalists were pro-Nazi, the metropolitan included. The other factor in this disinformation campaign was to show in some way that the Ukrainian Catholic (Uniate) Church was collaborationist - which it was not - and to help Justify the liquidation of the church in 1946. However, the ultimate target of the campaign were Ukrainians who did not want to be under Soviet rule.

It should be clear that the Soviet motivation for these operations was not to promote peace and justice. The demand to bring war criminals to trial, while noble in itself, plays a minimal role in the disinformation game. For example, in the mid-1970s, when Simon Wiesenthal made statements in defence of Soviet political prisoners and dissenters, the Soviet press began a vicious campaign of disinformation about him. The campaign was launched primarily in the Soviet Ukrainian press in order to set Ukrainians against Jews - a tactic the Soviet regime has employed numerous times. In the anti-Wiesenthal campaign of the 1970s the following statement appeared in the Soviet press:

According to the people who met with Wiesenthal during the war, he had secret contacts with the Nazis. After the war, this idea was confirmed by members of the European resistance. Wiesenthal worked for Canaris (the head of German military intelligence), gathered espionage information in Western Ukraine, and later was an agent for the Hitlerites in the Jewish ghettos where people were being prepared for the death camps like Auschwitz. After the war, Wiesenthal came into contact directly with American intelligence and his main mission was to prepare German agents for U.S. intelligence. 1

In this case, the disinformation was for internal Soviet consumption. The presentation of Simon Wiesenthal as an espionage agent was inserted to reinforce the Soviet stereotype of the Jew as an agent, an outsider, someone not to be trusted. Interestingly enough, it was done in a book whose entire purpose was to combat what the Soviets saw as an increasingly dangerous problem - the beginnings of a rapprochement between Jews and Ukrainians in the West.

There is sufficient evidence to show that any dialogue between Ukrainian emigres and the Jewish diaspora and Israel is considered a dangerous development by the Soviet government. The best method to combat this is to raise the spectre of Ukrainian anti-Semitism within the Jewish community in order to subvert any contacts. When a Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue began in America in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviets began to interfere in several ways.

First, KGB agents in New York (embassy officials and residents) were given a list of questions and topics to discuss with their contacts in the Ukrainian community. This list consisted mainly of questions dealing with Ukrainian-Jewish relations and the names of the people trying to promote a dialogue. The next step was the circulation of an anonymous leaflet within the Ukrainian community that accused Ukrainian leaders of "having sold out to the Jews." The leaflet was printed in Kiev, brought over by diplomatic pouch, and mailed from different Western countries to Ukrainians in the West. It consisted of anti-Semitic and pro-nationalist slogans and contained anti-Semitic cartoons. As far as Soviet disinformation goes, it was a weak effort when one considers that, a few years ago, the KGB produced an issue of Newsweek and distributed it on a mass scale in Third World countries.

The KGB is playing a role in the matter of war criminals - not the major role by any means, and people should not become paranoid about it. Nonetheless, it is playing a role and its participation is evident from some of the available evidence. In one case, the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa mailed a list of alleged war criminals to a reporter from the McGill University newspaper, the McGill Daily. To my knowledge, the list has not been released, but according to a press report, Mr. Alan Shefman, national director of the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith, said: "There are people listed who are not war criminals, but whom the Soviets just don't like." It would be surprising if this type of list was sent only to the McGill Daily.

In Winnipeg and other cities a photocopied brochure has been circulated that attacks Ukrainians who served in the Galician Division. It was circulated during the showings of a film produced in Canada on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. On the last page of the leaflet is a paragraph in Hebrew - the implication being that Jews produced the leaflet.

At the same time, several misleading articles have appeared in the American and Canadian press about the Galician Division. For example, the Christian Science Monitor recently published an article by Dimitri Simes which deals with the broadcasting policy of Radio Liberty, the U. S. -government-funded radio station broadcasting to the USSR. 2 Simes stated that the Ukrainian desk of Radio Liberty broadcast a program favourable to the division and added: "The SS Division Galitchina [sic] whose Ukrainian volunteers fought for Hitler in France, among other places .... " The program Simes referred to was aired on 12 February 1984 and quoted a German diplomat, Hans von Herwarth, who had very impressive anti-Nazi credentials and was involved in the anti-Hitler conspiracy of 1944.

In quoting from Herwarth, the broadcast stated: "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army urged enlisting in the Halychyna Division for clearly ulterior motives, that is, an order that as many Ukrainians as possible should possess modern weapons." This statement is quite different from what Mr. Simes included in his article. Moreover, the Galician Division never saw action in France. Yet Mr. Simes, an emigre from the USSR (this is not mentioned in the description of Simes in the Christian Science Monitor), can publish such nonsense and the Monitor does not bother to check the facts. What one sees here is even more dangerous than simple disinformation. It is a multi-faceted attack legitimized by a respectable newspaper.

One line of attack is against the Galician Division, the other is alleged Ukrainian anti-Semitism. According to Mr. Simes, the Ukrainian desk broadcast a program that said, "Jewish pogroms in Ukraine during the Civil War, however unfortunate, should be understood in the context of Jewish support for the Reds. " This remark totally distorts what was actually broadcast. On 13 January 1984, a program mentioned the pogrom in Proskuriv. It noted that often after terrorism by the Bolshevik Cheka, in which "important posts were occupied by Communists who were Jews ... the population generalized the circumstances and identified Bolshevism with the Jews, which was a huge mistake." A different section of the broadcast dealt with an incident in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. The program recounted a scene in which a rabbi spoke for Jews: "Regretfully, among the Jewish population, especially the young, there were 'apostates' who went along with the Bolsheviks. But there were also among young Ukrainians people who were on the side of the Bolsheviks. So we should not hold the Jews responsible for the transgressions and political fanaticism of a certain part of the Red youth." The passage notes that "the whole crowd shouted approval" of the rabbi's statement.

A third line of attack in Mr. Simes's article is directed at Radio Liberty. The numerous instances of misinformation, distortions, and omissions, when put together, leave the impression that Radio Liberty is staffed by former Nazis, Ukrainian anti-Semites, and fanatical right-wingers, cold warriors bent upon declaring war on the USSR.

It must be re-emphasized that Soviet disinformation is not behind every bush and is rarely a deciding factor in a given situation. But it can influence people's thinking, especially on such an emotional issue as war criminals, when Western prosecutors are all too ready to accept Soviet evidence provided by KGB investigators. If KGB evidence has been rejected in the trials of dissenters like Mykola Rudenko, Anatolii Shcharansky, and others, why has such evidence been accepted in the cases of alleged war criminals?

Evidently, many people are ready to hear what they want to hear and the KGB is more than ready to provide them with material. This serves the purposes of the Soviet government very well. It is amazing to read in Soviet books that "the Soviet Union provided the U.S. in the past six years with materials about 140 war criminals," or "competent employees of the Committee for State Security (KGB) of the USSR said in an interview how many examples there are of factual evidence gathered by us and given to jurists of other countries in order to uncover war criminals." These passages were written by official Soviet representatives. They are confirmed by government officials. In the New York Times (23 September 1984), the head of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S. Justice Department said that most of the information upon which OSI cases are built comes exclusively from Soviet authorities.

Yet contradictions do exist. In his book Quiet Neighbors, Allan A. Ryan Jr., the former head of the OSI, wrote: "The Soviets have never attempted to tell OSI who [sic] to investigate." Soviet sources say the opposite. Ryan's book mentions a Ukrainian named Vasyl Yachenko, living in the United States, who supplied the Immigration and Naturalization Service with a list of seventy-three names of alleged Ukrainian Nazis living in the United States. According to Ryan, Yachenko told the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that he obtained these names from documents in Soviet archives and in interviews with editors of Soviet Ukrainian newspapers. Ryan says that Yachenko is a pseudonym used in order to protect the source's privacy and admits that some Ukrainians felt that Yachenko was a Soviet sympathizer! Yet Ryan never met with Yachenko, and no steps were taken to see how he got this list and how a private citizen could get access to such Soviet sources. 3

As for the Soviets never attempting to tell the OSI whom to investigate, let us take the case of Karl Linnas, an Estonian who allegedly was a supervisor at a concentration camp in Estonia. The Soviet government began demanding his extradition in 1961. I do not want to judge whether Linnas was innocent or guilty - but there is no need to say that the Soviets never intervened when in fact they initiated the investigation.

Although disinformation plays a role in such cases, not all the evidence provided by the Soviet Union is false. A good part of the initial evidence provided to the OSI would have been accurate in order for the KGB to establish some credibility. The real Soviet aim is to have the emigre communities defend a genuine war criminal and thus discredit themselves in the eyes of American and Canadian society.

This is precisely what is happening today. Confusion exists; evidence is mixed; and emotions are beginning to take over. Ukrainians are set upon Jews; Jews begin to suspect every Ukrainian of being an anti-Semite. Ukrainians begin raising the cry of Jewish Bolsheviks, and so on.

Ukrainians above all should be interested in having Ukrainian war criminals prosecuted. Looking at Gestapo records, one sees that the Germans used their Ukrainian collaborators against the Ukrainian underground that was fighting the Germans. They were also used in actions against Jews. Both crimes are not to be forgiven. But because the Ukrainian underground, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), fought on two fronts - against the Nazis and against the Soviets - it became a target for Soviet disinformation and covert action. The Soviets have never released the names of the Ukrainians who worked with the Gestapo and were used to combat the UPA. They are living very quietly and very happily in the Soviet Union today.

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Notes:

1 L.V. Hamolsky, Tryzub i "zirka" Davyda (Dnipropetrovske, 1975), 152. See also Lev A. Korneev, Klassovaia suchasnost sionizma (Kiev, 1982). Korneev states that "were it not for the Zionist-Nazi alliance, the number of victims, including Jews, in the Second World War would of course have been less." In a review of Korneev's book, Howard Spier commented that Korneev's "message is that Jews are at least partly responsible for the slaughter of Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet nationalities by the Nazis - a vicious charge indeed in Soviet conditions." See Soviet Jewish Affairs (London) 14, no. 2 (1984): 74-8.

2 Dimitri Simes, "The Destruction of Liberty," Christian Science Monitor, 13 February 1985.

3 Allan A. Ryan Jr., Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (New York, 1984), 103-4. Mr. Yachenko is thought to be Michael Hanusiak, editor of the pro-Soviet New York newspaper Ukrainski visti (Ukrainian News). Mr. Hanusiak is the author of Lest We Forget (Toronto, 1976), a book about alleged Nazi war criminals published by the Communist Party of Canada's Progress Books.