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De-mythologizing Ukraine under Nazi
occupation
DAN LITTLE DECEMBER 27, 2021
Ukraine was quickly and violently occupied by the Nazi military in 1941 in
the onset of Hitler's Barbarossa plan for defeat of the Soviet Union, and the
most intense and extensive period of the campaign to exterminate the Jews
of Europe quickly ensued. Massacres of the Jewish populations of villages,
towns, and cities throughout the Ukraine occurred within weeks and
months, from Miropol (link) to Kiev and Babi Yar. The Ukrainian people
suffered enormously during the years of fighting from 1941 to 1944. But it
is also clear from history that Ukrainian people participated in Nazi
atrocities and war goals in numerous ways. Since the 1990s there have been
major efforts by Nationalist parties in Ukraine to sanitize its World War IIhistory, and to provide a mythical and heroic narrative for nationalist
Ukrainian military organizations and units including the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
(OUN was a far-right, pro-fascist organization. The UPA was created in
1942 as the paramilitary arm of the OUN-B (the radical wing of OUN led
by Stepan Bandera).)
Anna Wylegala is one of the historians who has made a serious effort to
come to grips with the politics of memory in Ukraine since the 1990s. Her
co-edited volume (Wylegala and Glowacka-Grajper, The Burden of the Past:
History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine), provides an
important contribution to a better and more honest rendering of Ukraine's
history during 1941-44. As the editors make clear in their introduction,
Ukraine's history during World War II has been subject to two different
kinds of lies and myth-making efforts: the Soviet effort to paint Ukraine as
thoroughly pro-Nazi and fascist from 1941 to 1944, and the post-Soviet
Ukrainian nationalist effort to paint Ukrainian militia and military
formations as purely nationalist and defensive. And the memory of these
events in different regions of Ukraine became indistinct following the end of
the war: "After the war, the memory of some of these atrocities became
hidden or even forbidden during the communist era, which itself has also
generated a new set of tragic memories" (Wylegala and Glowacka-Graijper,
p. 2). Further, the ultra-nationalist parties that have gained dominance in
Ukraine, including Svoboda, have a very distinctive interest in securing their
view of the facts in the public memory. What is difficult to reconstruct is the
historical truth of the matter.
“The situation in Ukraine during World War II was undeniably complex. As
Snyder emphasizes frequently, it was subject to "double occupation",eventually triple occupation, under Stalin, Hitler, and Stalin again. It had
been devastated by the effects of forced collectivization, mass starvation, and
mass deportations by the Stalinist regime only a few years earlier. And --
again paraphrasing Snyder -- it was subject to "state smashing", with almost
no functioning institutions of state by the time of the Nazi invasion. Serhii
Plokhy notes the strategic alliance that was possible between the Nazis and
the OUN nationalists in The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. "Many
in Ukraine welcomed the German advance in the summer of 1941, hoping
for the end of the terror unleashed by the Soviet occupation authorities in
the years leading up to the war. This was true not only for the recently
occupied regions of western Ukraine but also for central and eastern
Ukraine, where the population never forgave the regime for the horrors of
the famine and collectivization" (264). So there was an existing basis of
potential support among Ukrainians for the invading Nazi forces, along the
lines of the wisdom, "the enemy of our enemy is our friend". And OUN-B,
soon after its split from the smaller and more moderate faction of OUN,
quickly formed common cause with the Germans: “In February 1941, they
[Bandera’s faction] made a deal with the leaders of German military
intelligence (Abwehr) to form two battalions of special operations forces
from their supporters. One battalion, Nachtigall, was among the first
German troops to enter Lviv on June 29. The next day it took part in the
proclamation of Ukrainian independence by members of the Bandera
faction of the OUN. This spelled the end of German cooperation with
Bandera’s followers” (Plokhy, 264).
So it is true -- the history of Ukraine in 1940-44 is complicated. And yet it
is crucial to confront the realities of Ukrainian actions during the war
honestly. Honestly confronting its history, as Vasily Grossman insisted, is the
only possible foundation for a nation's creating a better future for itself.Here are a few important contributions from several historians who have
attempted to do exactly this.
Timothy Snyder was one of the earliest English-speaking historians to
examine Ukrainian complicity in atrocities in 1943 in his 2003 "The Causes
of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943" (link). This article was one of
the earliest expressions of the line of argument that Snyder developed later
in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
‘The ethnic cleansing carried out by the OUN-B against Poles in 1943 was a
deliberate strategy aimed at securing an ethnically pure post-war Ukraine:
Yet by April 1943, after three and a half years of war, the Ukrainian nationalist
Mykola Lebed' proposed ‘to cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish
population’. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains ka Povstans'ka Armiia,
UPA) then cleansed the Polish population from Volhynia. Ukrainian partisans
killed about fifty thousand Volhynian Poles and forced tens of thousands more to
flee in 1943. (202)
The OUN-B, true as ever to its radicalism, interpreted the party programme in a
more decisive fashion than OUN-M, and followed a more ruthless strategy. It
meant to pre-empt the return of Polish statehood by expelling the Poles from west
Ukraine before the war was over. (213)
Snyder describes the rapid process through which OUN-B formed the
paramilitary UPA in March 1943 and initiated violent ethnic cleansing
almost immediately. It is interesting to note that Plokhy expresses an
agnostic position on the violence that occurred in Volhynia in 1943:
“Ukrainian and Polish historians still argue over whether the OUN
leadership sanctioned Ukrainian attacks on Polish villages and, if so, onwhat level. There is no doubt, however, that most victims of the ethnic
cleansing were Poles. Estimates of Ukrainians killed as a result of Polish
actions in Galicia and Volhynia vary between 15,000 and 30,000, whereas
the estimates for Polish victims are between 60,000 and 90,000 -- two to
three times as high” (276). Plokhy's book was published in 2015 -- twelve
years later than Snyder's article. So his agnostic stance about the role of
OUN is puzzling; does he disagree with Snyder's reasoning and historical
scholarship?
John-Paul Himka provides additional historical detail concerning the
murderous ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews conducted by the UPA /
OUN during 1943 in "Former Ukrainian Policemen in the Ukrainian
National Insurgency: Continuing the Holocaust outside German Service"
(link). Himka demonstrates that a significant portion of the paramilitary
forces involved in these actions were Ukrainian policemen who had deserted
en masse from German police units within the preceding months, and had
already had extensive training and experience in annihilating villages. UPA
and its political leadership in OUN-B pursued strategies of murderous
ethnic cleansing against Poles and Jews using these and other paramilitary
forces. Himka reports testimony from a Ukrainian prisoner: "In addition to
continuing to murder Poles while ostensibly tolerating national minorities,
OUN and UPA remained largely antisemitic. Responding to Soviet
interrogators, Ukrainian prisoner Volodymyr Porendovsky stated that in
1941-1942, OUN openly preached a racist ideology, called for the
annihilation of the Jews, and took part in their murder" (144).
Himka provides extensive evidence of the killings of Jews and Poles by UPA
forces in the forests of Volhynia. Here is testimony from a Jewish survivor
from the forests of Volhynia: "Vera Shchetinkova recalled how she hid withabout eighty-five other Jews in the general vicinity ofSarny, a raion capital in
Rivne oblast, in mid-January 1944. The Banderites discovered their bunkers
and decided to destroy all the Jews who lived in them. In her view, the
Banderites wanted no witnesses left when the Soviets came" (145). And
another account of witness testimony: "Many Jews found refuge in the
houses abandoned by the Poles, while others hid in the nearby forest. Jasphy
estimated that there were several hundred Jewish refugees in the vicinity in
the fall of 1943. They made contact with the Banderites, who said that they
would not kill Jews, so the surviving Jews of the area went to work for them.
“This lasted until early January 1944. On the 4th of the month, she learned
that all the Jews living near the former Polish houses had been killed by the
Ukrainians (she in the meantime had moved to another part of the forest).
She and a few others hid in the hay in a barn. The next day, some
Ukrainians came searching for them with pitchforks, but missed them by a
meter, She stayed in that barn for eight days. In her opinion, the Banderites
had deliberately gathered the Jews together to kill them" (145).
Here is a very interesting piece of historiographic reasoning by Himka to
rebut the Ukrainian nationalist claim that it was the Germans who
committed these acts of murder against the Jews in the forest:
However, overriding Friedman's doubts and Shankousky's defensive explanation
are at least two key arguments: the testimonies generally refer to a time after the
summer of 1943, when the German offensive was said to have occurred; and
more testimonies of the liquidation of the labor camps and the luring of Jews
from hiding have come to light, indicating a pattern of activity. We do not have
testimonies, on the other hand, from Jews who survived the UPA labor camps
and witnessed no attempt at liquidation; nor do we have any survivortestimonies indicating that the Germans liquidated UPA camps in the crucial
period of winter 1943-1944. (150)
Here is Himka's assessment of the survivor testimony evidence:
"Considering the context, the number of testimonies that are extant is
impressive and indicates that these systematic murders of Jews must have
been a widespread feature of the Holocaust in Volhynia. I see no reason to
doubt the essential story that these testimonies tell" (149). Himka
acknowledges that there is a wide range of uncertainty concerning the
number of Jewish victims of these campaigns, ranging from a few thousand
to a few tens of thousands. But the intentions and willingness of UPA-M
were clear: to continue a campaign of mass murder against Jews and Poles
even after the Germans had lost their military foothold in Ukraine.
Swedish historian Per Anders Rudling addresses a different part of Ukraine's
troubled history: the collaboration of Ukrainian military and paramilitary
forces with the Nazi occupiers of Ukraine. In particular, Rudling focuses on
the military goals and activities of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galizien unit.
Rudling elucidates the historical realities that are concealed by current
attempts by nationalist politicians in Ukraine to sanitize the Waffen-SS
Galician. His account, “They Defended Ukraine’: The 14.Waffen-
Grenadier-Division der SS(Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited", is published in The
Journal of Slavic Military Studies (link). (Here is a short account of Rudling's
findings about new efforts at mythologizing the Waffen-SS in Ukraine and
Estonia, posted in Defending History; link.) Nationalists have tried to
represent the Waffen-SS Galician as a Ukrainian self-defense force. However,
Rudling demonstrates in great detail that it was fully incorporated into (and
loyally committed to) Nazi war aims and plans. (Snyder also refers briefly to
the formation of a Galician Waffen-SS division (link; 214).) Rudling goesinto substantial detail about the history and behavior of this unit. He
documents several crucial and historically well established facts: The
Ukrainian Waffen-SS division was recruited specifically in support of Hitler
and his war goals agains the USSR; the unit actively conveyed Nazi ideology,
ethnic cleansing, and anti-Semitism through training of its soldiers and
officers; and the Ukrainian Waffen-SS committed mass killings and
atrocities against Ukrainian Jews and Poles.
‘The organizers of the Waffen-SS Galizien emphasized the importance of the unit
for Hitler’s New Europe and a Nazi victory: All call-ups to Ukrainians for the
Division have been geared towards their planned deployment, not for Ukraine or
Ukrainian culture, but rather as the contribution of the Ukrainian ethnic group
in the battle to defend against Bolshevism and for a new Europe.’ (338-339)
Rudling makes it clear that the effort to romanticize the Ukrainian Waffen-
SS as a purely nationalist military organization devoted to securing the
independence of Ukraine is simply unsupportable, Here is just one well-
documented atrocity committed by the Ukrainian Waffen-SS: the massacre
of Poles and Jews at the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka, near Lviv:
A 2003 investigation by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance into the
massacre concluded that:
"the crime was committed by the 4th battalion of the 14th division on February
28. On that day, early in the morning, soldiers of this division, dressed in white,
masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery.
SS-men of the 14th Division of the SS “Galizien” entered the village, shooting
the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, mostly women and children,
were divided and locked in barns that were set on fire. Those who tried to runaway were killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head
Commission described the morbid details of the act. The crime was committed
against women, children, and newborn babies.”
In 2005, the Institute of History at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences arrived
at the same conclusion—that the 4th SS Police regiment indeed killed the
civilian inhabitants in Huta Pieniacka. (347)
In addition to the atrocities committed by the Waffen-SS Galizien troops,
Rudling provides evidence showing that UPA bands participated in the
murders that took place during those two days of wanton killing:
‘The participants from the UPA bands, who at that time had arrived in the
village . . . together with the commander of the Volhynian band also surrounded
the village and did that, what the Germans did, that is burned houses and
various buildings, and drove the residents into the Roman Catholic Church.
Those who tried to hide were shot on the spot, and shots were fired at those
running. After that, as the ring that encircled the village was dissolved and the
operation came to an end, the residents were being convoyed to the barn and the
houses, locked up, and burned. There were four or five barns, filled with the
residents of Huta Pieniacka, about 700-750 people, all of whom were burned.
‘The above mentioned pogrom continued from eight in the morning until two or
three in the afternoon. (351-352)
Rudling provides documentation of other atrocities committed by the
Waffen-SS Galician in eastern Poland, including the burning of villages and
murder of all inhabitants. And he documents the engagement of the division
in Slovakia, conducting similar "pacification" campaigns against Slovak
nationalist activism, including repression of the Slovak National Uprising.Rudling summarizes his findings and recommendations in these terms:
While not claiming to provide a full and complete account of the unit’ history,
this essay sets out some of the problems associated with the partial rehabilitation
of the unit. Issues such as the unit’ institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism,
its commitment to Adolf Hitler and the victory of Nazi Germany, and the
involvement of officers, soldiers, and affiliated police regiments in atrocities call
for more research and further inquiry into the unit’ past. The problem it raises
are not only historical, but also political and ethical. (368)
Here again it is interesting to consider Plokhy's treatment of the Waffen-SS
Galician division of Ukrainians in ‘The Gates of Europe: A History of
Ukraine. Here too he takes a less critical view than one might expect (as was
noted above with respect to the responsibility of OUN-B for murderous
Polish ethnic cleansing). Plokhy does not emphasize the Nazi ideology of the
division or the atrocities in which it was involved. “Backed by mainstream
Ukrainian politicians and presented to Ukrainian youth as an alternative to
going to the forest to join the Bandera insurgents or staying under
imminent Soviet occupation, enrollment in the division seemed a lesser evil
to parents who sent their sons to join its ranks. Most would soon have
reason to regret their choice. Trained and commanded by German officers,
the division got its baptism by fire in July 1944 near the Galician town of
Brody” (279). This interpretation seems to line up more closely with the
"rehabilitationist” line than the "face the dark facts of history" line.
In light of the real and documented history of the Waffen-SS Galician
division, its loyalty to the war aims and person of Adolph Hitler, and its
involvement in multiple atrocities against civilians in Ukraine, Poland, and
Slovakia, the "rehabilitation" of the organization is roughly as repellent asthe rehabilitation of the Nazi Party itself. These were not "freedom fighters";
they were willing auxiliaries within Hitler's unrestrained campaigns of
murder and extinction. This history needs to be remembered in its painful
details.
None of these sources have shed light on another form of Ukrainian
responsibility during the Holocaust, the role of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police
to carry out the transport, confinement, and murder of Jews. Gabriel Finder
and Alexander Prusin address this question in "Collaboration in Eastern
Galicia: The Ukrainian police and the Holocaust" (link). Finder and Prusin
look at the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) as the "institutional epicentre
of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis in this region in the destruction of the
Jews" (95). They believe that the readiness of Ukrainians to enter the UAP
and to serve as facilitators of mass murder of Jews derived from the
nationalist ideology demanding ethnic purity in Ukraine, and (like Jan
Gross) an economic impulse to take advantage of the sacking of Jewish
property and lives, on the other hand. "An intended consequence of this
partnership was the eradication of the region's Jews, in which the Ukrainian
police actively took part" (96). "When Germans expelled Jews from their
apartments and shops in Lwéw in conjunction with the Ukrainian auxiliary
police, Ukrainians as well Germans moved into them" (97).
Here is the description of UAP roles in the execution of mass killings of Jews
in Ukraine, as described by Finder and Prusin:
From its inception, the Ukrainian police played an integral part in the German
destruction of the Jews in eastern Galicia, especially in ghetto clearances
(Aktionen). They would form a cordon around ghettos on the threshold of mass
deportations to discourage and impede escape. They apprehended and herdedJews to the edge of town for mass executions or to the tracks of railway stations,
which they guarded while Jews were being killed or loaded into trains. During
these operations they did not recoil from acts of violence, including killing. On a
number of occasions Ukrainian policemen often implored their German
superiors to allow them to kill Jews during Aktionen. Their role in the
destruction of east Galician Jewry was not, however, limited to Aktionen. They
maintained surveillance in Jewish neighbourhoods. They demanded their share
of spoils from defenceless Jews. They kidnapped Jews off the streets for shipment to
labour camps, which they helped guard. They pursued Jews in hiding, including
those hidden by fellow Ukrainians. They combed the surroundings of labour
camps for Jewish escapees from the camps. They joined raids into the forests in
pursuit of Jewish partisans. They frequently killed Jews on their own initiative.
(106-107)
Several fundamental facts about Ukraine's World War II history today seem
undeniable. (1) There was substantial collaboration between Ukrainian
nationalist parties in 1941 and the Nazi occupation, and Ukrainian
nationalists regarded the Red Army as being as much of a threat to
Ukrainian interests as the Nazi armies. (2) The OUN was committed to
violent ethnic cleansing and anti-Semitism throughout its history. This
included the explicit intention of expelling the Polish population from the
region. (3) The formation of the Waffen-SS Galizische division represented a
full engagement between volunteer Ukrainian forces and Nazi military and
genocidal aims. (4) Ukrainian nationalist parties -- the OUN -- were
strongly engaged in the goal of driving Poles out of western Ukraine, and in
1943 OUN-B forces engaged in a merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing in
Volhynia to that end. These efforts included organized attempts to kill the
surviving Jews taking refuge in the forests of Volhynia. (5) The "triple
occupation” of Ukraine created surprising configurations and alliances, andas Snyder documents, many Ukrainian police and administrators who had
served the Soviet system prior to the German invasion, also served the
German military administration.
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