Read the book: «Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust»
ibidem-Press, Stuttgart
For Chrystia
who stood beside me
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Historiography
2. Sources
3. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
4. The First Soviets, 1939–41
5. Anti-Jewish Violence in the Summer of 1941
6. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Police in German Service
7. The Fate of Jews in the Ukrainian Nationalist Insurgency
8. Conclusions
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
I have received support for the research that went into this book from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Pinchas and Mark Wisen Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Killam Fund, University of Alberta; Support for the Advancement of Scholarship, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta. I am very grateful for their generosity.
It has been a pleasure working with ibidem-Verlag, particularly with Jana Dävers, Valerie Lange, and Andreas Umland. I appreciate their guidance and respect for an author’s vision of a book.
I have many people to thank. Although I am responsible for all the views put forward in this volume, I have had a great deal of help along the way. Persons who need to be singled out for their contribution to the appearance of this study are Vadim Altskan, Tarik Cyril Amar, Omer Bartov, Andriy Bolianovsky, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Martin Dean, Sofia Dyak, Ernest Gyidel, Wendy Lower, Jared McBride, Oleksandr Melnyk, Ada Ogonowska, Dieter Pohl, Antony Polonsky, David Lee Preston, Per Anders Rudling, Roman Solchanyk, Wiesław Tokarczuk, and Larry Warwaruk. The following scholars worked at one point or another as research assistants for this book: Eduard Baidaus, Natalka Cmoc, Eva Himka, Rylan Kafara, Taras Kurylo, Mariya Melentyeva, Michal Mlynarz, Oksana Mykhed, Iaroslav Pankovskyi, and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. Those who read and helped me rework chapters were Raisa Ostapenko, Alan Rutkowski, the East Europeanist Circle at the University of Alberta led by Heather Coleman, and participants in the Danyliw Seminar in 2018. I wish I had the words I need to express the depth of my gratitude.
Abbreviations
AŻIH Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego
BA-MA Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, Freiburg
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
DALO Derzhavnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koi oblasti
DAIFO Derzhavnyi arkhiv Ivano-Frankivs’koi oblasti
DARO Derzhavnyi arkhiv Rivnens’koi oblasti
DAZhO Derzhavnyi arkhiv Zhytomyrs’koi oblasti
EM Ereignismeldungen UdSSR des Chefs der Sicherheits-polizei und SD (title varies)
f. folio
HDA SBU Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy
KGB Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti
KPZU Komunistychna partiia Zakhidn’oi Ukrainy
NANU Natsional’na Akademia nauk Ukrainy
NKGB Narodnyi komissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti
NKVD Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del
NTSh Naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka
op. opys
OUN Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
OUN-B Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera faction)
OUN-M Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Melnyk faction)
P Polish
PUN Provid ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv
r.g. record group
Ro Romanian
RSHA Reichssicherheitshauptamt
SB OUN Sluzhba Bezpeky Orhanizatsii ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv
SBU Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy
SD Sicherheitsdienst
spr. sprava
TsDAHO Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads’kykh ob ”iednan’ Ukrainy
TsDAVO Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy
TsDIAL Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrainy, m. L’viv
TsGAOR Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, vysshikh organov gosudarstvennoi vlasti i organov gosudarstvennogo upravleniia SSSR
UCRDC Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre
UHVR Ukrains’ka holovna vyzvol’na rada (Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council)
UNDO Ukrains’ke natsional’ne demokratychne ob”iednannia (Ukrainian National Democratic Union)
UPA Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army)
USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
UVO Ukrains’ka viis’kova orhanizatsiia (Ukrainian Military Organization)
V verso
YIUN Yahad-in Unum Testimony
YVA Yad Vashem Archives
Introduction
The Theme and Plan of the Book
This study concerns the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia, UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population in Ukraine under German occupation, 1941-44. There were three major phases in which the nationalists contributed to the mass murder. (Since I do not use the definite article before OUN and UPA, readers would be advised to pronounce these terms as acronyms: o-OON, oo-PA.)
First, militias organized by OUN were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The militias arrested Jews in order to subject them to forced labor, humiliation, and murder; thousands of those arrested were executed by German units, mainly Einsatzgruppe C and Waffen-SS Division “Wiking.” The Ukrainian nationalist militias assembled the Jews for the Germans’ violence, since they could identify Jews more easily than the invaders and knew the localities, including Jewish neighborhoods in the cities. Sometimes the violence was accompanied by bloody public spectacles, as in the pogroms unleashed in Lviv and Zolochiv in early July 1941; sometimes the OUN militias murdered selected Jews and their families more discreetly, and sometimes they just murdered all the Jews in a village.
Second, OUN recruited for and infiltrated the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Galicia and the stationary Schutzmannschaften in Volhynia. These police units provided the indispensable manpower for the Holocaust. They rounded up Jews for deportation to the death camp at Bełżec or for execution by shooting; although most of the actual killing was done by the Germans, the Ukrainian policemen also killed in certain circumstances. These liquidation actions took place primarily from early 1942 through the middle of 1943.
Third, early in 1943 thousands of these Ukrainian policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency. Possessed of some military training and familiarity with both weapons and killing, they took leadership positions in UPA. As soon as the former policemen joined them, UPA launched a massive ethnic cleansing project, at first in Volhynia and later in Galicia. Although it was primarily directed against Poles, there were other non-Ukrainian victims, including Jews. In the winter of 1943-44, as the Red Army moved westward, UPA lured surviving Jews out of their hiding places in the forests, temporarily placed them in labor camps, and then murdered them.
In each of these three phases of anti-Jewish violence, the responsibility of OUN was different. In the first phase, the militias, and the OUN leadership which established them, were primarily responsible for rounding up Jews for the Germans, although the militias did some killing themselves. Altogether the militias were accomplices in the murder of thousands of Jews and shooters in the murder of many hundreds. In the second phase, OUN cannot be held responsible for all that Ukrainian policemen did in Galicia and Volhynia, since police structures were primarily under German control and by no means were all the policemen nationalists, at least initially. OUN's responsibility here lay in its strategy of deliberately infiltrating the police, which drew its members and sympathizers into the eye of the genocidal storm. For the most part, Ukrainian policemen rounded Jews up for others to kill, but sometimes they themselves killed Jews. Altogether the death toll from police roundups was in the hundreds of thousands. In the third phase, OUN's responsibility was direct. Here, the organization was killing Jews primarily on its own initiative, as part of a far-reaching ethnic cleansing project; it was not only finding the Jews for murder, but its forces were perpetrating the killings themselves. The Jewish victims of OUN in this phase probably numbered in the thousands.
I have structured the book as follows. After this brief introduction, there are several chapters that provide context. The first is a rather extensive examination of the historiography. One factor contributing to the controversy surrounding the role of OUN and UPA in the murder of Jews stems from the peculiar way the historiography developed. For almost half a century after World War II, neither Holocaust scholars nor historians of the nationalists researched the topic. In this scholarly vacuum, accusations and denials were as if weightless, unanchored by evidence. Since about 1990, however, more and more information has come to light and many more scholars have examined the issues. But also since then, there has been a polarization of views over the issue of nationalist collaboration in the Holocaust, determined more by politics, specifically in the form of memory politics, than by contradictory evidence. The second chapter concerns sources. Here I outline the evidentiary record as we know it today and also discuss the particular problems the various kinds of source materials present.
After these two chapters, which present the epistemological context, I turn to the historical context for our problem. In the third chapter I look at OUN before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, with special attention to three issues: why it emerged and proved attractive to Ukrainian youth in Galicia, its relationship to fascism, and the place and nature of antisemitism in its ideology. In chapter four I turn to the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina), in 1939-41. Some scholars argue that this historical interlude is crucial to understanding how the destruction of the Jews played out in these territories; I present my own understanding of how it affected perceptions and outcomes during the Holocaust.
The final three chapters are devoted to the phases of OUN's participation in the Holocaust: the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941; the police's role in the systematic destruction of Jews in Galicia, Volhynia, and—to a lesser extent—elsewhere on Ukrainian lands in 1942-43, with special reference, of course, to the connections between the police and OUN; and, finally, UPA's murder of Jews in 1943 and 1944. The book ends with the presentation of the conclusions I have come to.
This book is not a study of how “Ukrainians” behaved during the Holocaust. It does not generalize about an entire national community but concentrates on a particular political movement. Al-though at the time this study is being written, powerful forces in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora aim to identify the entire Ukrainian nation with the heritage of OUN and UPA, this is at the very least an intellectual error, especially in relation to the war period itself. Also, this is not a study of the whole range of collaboration of Ukrainians with the German wartime authorities. That is a much larger and much more complicated topic. Nor is this even a study of those Ukrainians who actively participated in the Holocaust. For example, the notorious “Ukrainian guards” of German camps, perhaps more properly known as Trawniki men after the camp at which they were trained, do not figure in this book. For the most part these were captured Red Army soldiers rather than ideological allies of the Nazis, and their work in German death and labor camps had no relation to OUN structures.
Geography
There is no consensus regarding the proper geographical nomenclature for borderland territories and localities, in which much of the events recounted in this study took place. For example, in this book I will frequently refer to “Galicia,” a region that produced a very specific Ukrainian political and intellectual culture. Andrzej Zięba argues, however, that historians should abandon this term unless it is in relation to the Austrian crownland that existed from 1772 to 1918 or to the Distrikt Galizien established by the Germans that existed from August 1941 to July 1944. In his view, historians should use only the official state nomenclature of the Second Polish Republic; in the case of what I call Galicia, he would refer rather to the palatinates (województwa, voyvodships) of Lwów, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. For certain studies, this is, I think, not only justified, but is a good practical choice.1 But for this study, the regional specificity of what I call Galicia is important. It is the region where OUN emerged and achieved its greatest influence, and although UPA was active first in another region, Volhynia, its leadership was to a large degree of Galician origin. So by using this term, I mean to call attention to the regional specificity. Zięba also points out that Ukrainian historians, even when they use the term “Galicia,” are really referring to Eastern Galicia, that is, the eastern part of the Austrian crownland, in which Ukrainians formed a majority of the population.2 “Eastern Galicia” was also a geographical concept that demanded much attention from the diplomats who were working out the post-World-War-I settlements from 1918 through 1923. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who had used the term Eastern Galicia and Galicia in her earlier work, has lately been arguing that historians should designate what I call Galicia by its transliterated Ukrainian equivalent, Halychyna.3 But as a linguistic conservative by inclination, I will retain the usage Galicia, which appears in my earlier publications and which is common practice in English-language studies of Ukraine. Today Galicia, as I am using it, comprises roughly the oblasts of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, and Ternopil in Ukraine.
Just north of Galicia is a region I will refer to as Volhynia, although it does not encompass all of the territory to which that name has referred historically. Some scholars now employ the distinction Western Volhynia to refer to what I will be calling Volhynia. For this study, I mean the parts of historical Volhynia that were incorporated into Poland from 1921 to 1939. In 1941, under German occupation, Galicia became Distrikt Galizien within the General Government while Volhynia was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.4 Volhynia had comprised the Volhynia palatinate in interwar Poland, which had its capital in Łuck, and comprises today Rivne oblast, a small part of Ternopil oblast, and Volhynia oblast (with its capital in Lutsk) in Ukraine. Galicia and Volhynia together comprised “Western Ukraine,” a term used by the Soviet administration in 1939-41.
There are a few other territories I will refer to. When I write of Bukovina, I mean what is more accurately referred to as Northern Bukovina, that is, the territory which Soviet Ukraine annexed from Romania in 1940 and which today comprises most of Chernivtsi oblast in independent Ukraine. By Transcarpathia, I mean the region which since 1945 has been Transcarpathia oblast, first in Soviet Ukraine and then in independent Ukraine.
It is always difficult to make choices about place names. In the period with which this book is concerned, borders and administrations shifted. What started out as the southeastern palatinates of the Second Polish Republic came under Soviet rule in September 1939, then passed to German rule from summer 1941 until summer 1944, and then returned under Soviet rule. Thus Lwów became Lviv, then Lemberg, and then Lviv again. Some scholars use the Polish names for all localities that existed in interwar Poland. I considered this same practice, but did not adopt it. My concern was that readers should be able to find the localities I mention on modern-day maps and geographic applications. Thus I use the Ukrainian name for all places within the boundaries of today's Ukraine. It would be cumbersome, even for a specialist, to find a present-day locality with only its Polish name. I had thought of using the names as they are found in Google Maps, but resigned from this idea after realizing that there were problems with consistency in that application. So I am rendering place names from Ukrainian, with modified Library of Congress transliteration (soft signs omitted; use of Y in place of I for the initial letter when followed by a vowel, so Yabloniv instead of Iabloniv). I think this method will most easily allow readers to search place names on the Internet and ascertain their location. Upon first mention in the text of localities that were in Poland between the wars, I will give the place name in Polish in parentheses. Localities that are in today's Poland rather than in Ukraine, such as Przemyśl, will only appear in their Polish forms. I will also provide the Romanian name for localities in Bukovina, which belonged to Romania between the wars. In some cases, the Polish or Romanian names are identical with the Ukrainian names. Cities and places that are well known in English by names that would violate the practices set out here, such as Warsaw (instead of Warszawa) and Babi Yar (instead of Babyn Yar), will be referred to by these common names. I think that the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, is now becoming better known by its Ukrainian name, even though Kiev had once been more common. Many place names in Ukraine have changed since World War II. I will use both the modern and historical names as seems best for the context.
In sum, my choice of place name usage has not been guided by any considerations of historical correctness but rather by what I think will make geographic orientation easier for the reader.
Technical and Terminological Matters
In transliterating bibliographical data from the Cyrillic and Yiddish alphabets, I am using the Library of Congress systems without diacriticals. For Ukrainian and Russian names in the text, I am using the modified Library of Congress system devised by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian studies; its main features are the elimination of soft and hard signs, the simplification of certain last-name endings to -sky, and the use of “Y” instead of “I” to transliterate the initial letters of certain names (e.g., Yuliian instead of Iuliian).
In this study I am using the term “nationalists” as shorthand for members and sympathizers of OUN and UPA. I do not mean to include all those who championed Ukrainian cultural and political independence. When I am using the word “nationalist” in a wider sense, I will signal that I am doing so.
I will be referring to folios of testimonies from the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (AŻIH). Many individual testimonies are comprised of both a handwritten and typed copy, each with its separate pagination. I will be citing the folio numbers of the typed copies.
All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
1 This procedure is used, for example, by Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence.
2 Zięba, “Ukraińcy, Polacy i niemiecka zagłada Żydów,” xxvi-xxvii.
3 Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Ukrainian Bishop, American Church, xvi.
4 There is an excellent study of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine: Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair.
1. Historiography
It is a standard practice among historians to include in their monographs a survey of the existing historiography. Normally this does not constitute an entire chapter, but just a few pages. In this monograph, however, I consider it necessary to spend more time on the intellectual history of our problem, Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust. The topic has been a controversial one, and it needs to be placed in its complicated contexts. The historiography has emerged from different sources: Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, primarily in Israel; Ukrainian nationalist emigrés in North America and Western Europe; scholars in communist Poland; Soviet propagandists; scholars at universities in the West, primarily in Germany and North America; and scholars and activists in independent Ukraine. It has been impacted by major historical developments: the Holocaust itself, the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe, and the fall of that communism.
Pioneer Historiography of the Holocaust in Western Ukraine
A central figure in the early development of the historiography of the entire Jewish catastrophe survived the war in Western Ukraine, in Lviv (P Lwów). This was Philip Friedman, who had already made a name for himself in the interwar period as a historian of the Jewish population of Galicia. His doctoral dissertation from the University of Vienna, which was published in 1929, concerned the emancipation of Galicia’s Jews in 1848-68.1 He was an impeccably professional historian, who began to gather information on the Holocaust during the Holocaust itself. He survived the mass murder by hiding outside the ghetto, i.e., on the Aryan side, but his wife and daughter both perished. After the war, Friedman played a major role in collecting survivor testimony for the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland and was later active in many of the early projects to gather sources for writing Holocaust history. He spent the last years of his life in the United States, mainly associated with Jewish scholarly institutions such as YIVO in New York and Yad Vashem in Israel, but he also lectured at Columbia University.2
Friedman wrote two short studies of particular relevance to this monograph. One was an account of the destruction of the Jews of his native Lviv; the first edition came out in 1945 and several expanded editions appeared later, the last in 1956.3 He also wrote a survey, very careful and balanced, of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during the period of German rule, focusing almost exclusively on Galicia and Volhynia. Friedman was attuned to the problem of OUN-UPA participation in the mass murder of the Jews in the latter regions, but he was unable to arrive at the clarity made possible by later developments and later research. He usually did not make a distinction, which we shall see is important, between the Ukrainian National Militia and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.4 He never realized the connection between the militia and the OUN, writing that the Ukrainian militia was “organized by the Germans in a hurry”5 and consisted “of local volunteers.”6 He wrote about the UPA murder of Jews, but felt uncertain as to what had happened and wanted to learn more about it.7 Like many historians of his era, he considered “authentic, official documents” to be the gold standard for Holocaust research;8 yet so few of such documents had been collected that he perforce relied heavily on testimonies and memoirs. Although Friedman was one of the first professional historians to engage with the Holocaust, his work was situated in the field of Jewish studies rather than within the scholarly discourse of modern European history.
The scholar who found study of the Holocaust at the margins of the historical discipline and, through the publication of his book The Destruction of the European Jews, pushed it almost to the center was Raul Hilberg. When Hilberg began to work on the murder of the Jews, he received some encouragement from his doctoral supervisor Franz Neumann, but there were also many nay-sayers. “During those days,” he wrote a few decades later, “the academic world was oblivious to the subject, and publishers found it unwelcome. In fact, I was advised much more often not to pursue this topic than to persist in it.”9 His work had a tremendous impact on the way that scholars who came after him researched and wrote about the Holocaust. He is one of those rare figures of whom it is no cliché to say that he shaped a field. Some of his ideas were resisted almost immediately. He, like Hannah Arendt, whose essays in the New Yorker on the Eichmann trial appeared at the same time as Hilberg’s Destruction (1961),10 emphasized the passivity of the Jews during their slaughter and indicted the Jewish councils (Judenräte) for collaborationism. Their views provoked new research and publication on Jewish resistance11 as well as a more nuanced investigation into the difficult situation of Jewish leaders in the Judenräte.12
Hilberg’s great achievement was a cog-by-cog analysis of the machinery of destruction. While Friedman had lamented a lack of the official documentary sources he so highly prized, Hilberg had plenty of them, all emanating from the Germans themselves. The influential 1961 edition of his book could not yet make use of German sources in Soviet archives, but the third edition of 2003 was able to incorporate some of that source material. Hilberg’s reliance almost exclusively on sources generated by the German perpetrators themselves established the methodology that dominated American and European scholarship on the Holocaust for decades thereafter. German sources became the main informants about what happened. The testimonies and memoirs of victims and eyewitnesses were relegated to the background if consulted at all. This produced a distorted picture. A one-sided source base was largely responsible for the exaggeration of Jewish passivity and for a one-sided emphasis on the complicity of the Judenräte. I believe it also resulted in an underestimation of help and rescue efforts on the part of non-Jews, to whom Hilberg also ascribed passivity.13 The documents the Germans had produced tended to emphasize the successes of their extermination program and public cooperation with it. Also, the German documents noted instances of Jewish resistance and non-Jewish aid to Jews only when they were or threatened to be effective. But in the concrete circumstances of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, neither resistance nor aid could be very effective, even if impulses and actions in these directions were more widespread than the German documents indicate. Both resistance and aid are much more evident in the documents and oral testimonies left by survivors.
Israeli scholars had objections to Hilberg’s approach right from the start. Friedman, who had served on Hilberg’s examining committee at Columbia, suggested to him that Yad Vashem in Jerusalem might co-publish his dissertation, but it refused: “Your book rests almost entirely on the authority of German sources and does not utilize primary sources in the languages of the occupied states, or in Yiddish and Hebrew....The Jewish historians here make reservations...in respect of your appraisal of the Jewish resistance (active and passive during the Nazi occupation).”14 Hilberg’s work would always have a larger impact on scholarship in North America and in Western Europe than in Israel, except for provoking Israeli scholars to polemicize with his views on the lack of Jewish resistance and the complicity of the Judenräte.
Concentrated too narrowly on the narrative of Germans and Jews, Hilberg paid little attention to the “microbiota” of the Holocaust, the other, smaller actors, neither Jews nor Germans, who played significant roles. Unlike Friedman, Hilberg was not curious about OUN or UPA and their role in the Holocaust. In fact, he only once mentioned OUN, which he defined simply as “a pro-German organization of Ukrainians.”15 Evidently, he did not even care to inquire what the letters OUN stood for, since it appears in the index only as OUN, not as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. So although Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews remains an indispensable orientation text for studying the Holocaust, it has blind spots; and these blind spots have long dogged Western historiography on the topic. Jewish historiography in Israel continued along a different path, more like Friedman’s.
A major contribution to the study of a territory where OUN and UPA were especially powerful was Shmuel Spector’s history of the Holocaust in Volhynia, eleven editions of which were published in English and Hebrew between 1982 and 1990. Spector himself was born in Volhynia in 1922, in Kostopil (P Kostopol), Rivne oblast. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, he fled to the Soviet interior. After the war he lived in Israel and worked at Yad Vashem. His book is interesting and very rich, with many details that make the wartime situation come alive. Spector possessed a deep knowledge of Volhynia’s Jewish communities as well as its geography and terrain. Readers of his text can actually feel how highly motivated he was to figure out what had transpired in his home region during his absence. He made use of some German documentation, particularly the Einsatzgruppen reports, but his main sources were Jewish survivor testimonies, primarily those collected by Yad Vashem and those published in memorial (yizkor) books. Since most of these testimonies were in Hebrew and Yiddish, his book is very useful to authors, such as me, who do not read Hebrew and have limited Yiddish. Spector’s foremost interest was in the Jewish communities themselves, and his perspective is naturally somewhat Judeocentric. He was not as interested in the Germans as Hilberg was. But he was interested in the Polish and, especially, Ukrainian populations and their relation to the Holocaust. He lamented that there were not enough studies of the Ukrainian nationalist movement,16 although he seems to have been unaware of John A. Armstrong’s influential monograph on the subject (to be discussed below). Nonetheless, Spector managed to piece together a decent sketch of the history of OUN and UPA.17 His book also frequently mentions UPA’s murder of Volhynian Jews.
There is a short but (considering the paucity of available sources) well executed study of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in Galicia during the war written by the Israeli scholar Aharon Weiss.18 Weiss had survived the war in Boryslav (P Borysław), where he was hidden by a Ukrainian woman whose son served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.19 Afterwards he emigrated to Israel and worked on Holocaust history at Yad Vashem. He understood in a general way that OUN was involved in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941 and mentioned explicitly the role of the “Ukrainian militia.”20 He was able to work with documents of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv but not able to connect OUN and the police.21 He noted that few Jews who had been hiding in the Volhynian forests managed to survive and linked this fact to the control of the forests by UPA units, but he was unable to be more specific. He misidentified the Babii partisans who saved Jews as connected with the Ukrainian nationalists, although in fact they were a pro-Soviet formation.22 The general thrust of his study is exemplified in its concluding sentence: “Full responsibility for these crimes falls on the Nazis, but if the attitude of the Ukrainian national movement and a great part of the Ukrainian population toward the Jews had been different, the number of survivors might well have been much larger.”23
A book that is somewhat transitional in the historiography is Eliyahu Yones’ study of “the Jews of Lviv in the years of the Second World War and the catastrophe of European Jewry, 1939-1944.” It is transitional in the sense that it made limited use of newly opened Soviet archival materials that had been copied by Yad Vashem, but the text primarily relied on testimonies and memoirs, particularly Hebrew-language testimonies collected also by Yad Vashem. The text was originally presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993, at which time Yones was already advanced in years. He had been born in 1915 in Vilnius, but during the war he found himself in a labor camp in Lviv, hence his interest in the Holocaust in that city. His book was published in Hebrew as well as in German, English, Polish, and Russian translations. I primarily used the Russian-language version.24 Although the primary focus of the book was Lviv, it also contained a great deal of material on the experience of Jews in other localities in Galicia. Yones devoted considerable attention to the persecution of Jews by the Bandera faction of OUN. His knowledge of OUN was incomplete; for example, he made the common error of conflating the militia and the police.25 But the issue of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust was very much on his mind, and his study provided much information on the topic.
Thus in this early stage of the historiography of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust, the relevant studies were produced by Jewish scholars who were intimately familiar, from personal experience, with the terrain, languages, and societies of the regions where OUN and UPA had been active. They also relied extensively on the accounts of Jews who survived the mass murder. Where they all came up short, in terms of the project undertaken by this book, is that, although keenly interested in OUN and UPA, they did not have access to the kind of sources that would have given them more insight into the workings of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. They needed more definite and more extensive information, which would only become accessible after the collapse of communism. As to studies of the Holocaust in North American and European scholarship, the historiographical protocols established by Hilberg effectively prevented any focus on the role of OUN and UPA. If Western studies strayed into occupied Eastern Europe, they relied on German sources, neglected eyewitness testimony, and concentrated exclusively on the actions of Germans.
Histories of OUN and UPA Written prior to the Opening of Soviet Archives
The most detailed and solidly researched history of the pre-World-War-II OUN to appear in the period 1945-90 was written by Petro Mirchuk and published in 1968. Mirchuk had been a member of OUN since secondary school and was being entrusted with important assignments in the OUN propaganda apparatus by his early twenties (the mid-1930s). Like many in the nationalist underground, he was no stranger to Polish prisons. When war broke out in September 1939, he was in jail, but was released with all the other prisoners when the Polish forces in Lviv capitulated to the Germans. The insider knowledge he acquired in the movement contributed to a well-informed book. In addition, while writing his history, Mirchuk was able to consult a large number of original OUN documents as well as the interwar press, and his book reproduced many important texts of the era. He wrote from a thoroughly nationalist perspective.
Though rich in information, his book had its biases. One was that it sanitized OUN’s record regarding its statements and actions against Jews in the 1930s as well as its relations with Nazi Germany. Mirchuk achieved this sanitization by avoiding these themes entirely. His omissions undoubtedly reflected OUN’s postwar sensitivity about accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, especially with regard to participating in the Holocaust. But to be fair to Mirchuk, he had had a different experience with these issues than did most other OUN members. He only spent one month on Ukrainian ethnic territory during the entire war, namely mid-August to mid-September 1941. Then, at a low ebb of German-OUN relations, he was arrested by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in prisons and concentrations camps, mainly Auschwitz. He was only released when the Americans liberated the concentration camp at Ebensee on 6 May 1945.26 Thus Mirchuk was not present to participate in the anti-Jewish violence of July 1941 and the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1943-44, and he had no love for the Germans. Another notable bias was that Mirchuk was a Bandera loyalist. When OUN split in 1940, he sided with Stepan Bandera against Andrii Melnyk; and when the Bandera faction split again after World War II, he remained with Bandera. His book, thus, presented the history of OUN from a partisan perspective. His depiction of the succession struggle after the assassination of OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in 1938 was constructed so as to make the Bandera group’s split from the emigré leadership seem reasonable and necessary. He also blamed Melnyk and his allies for turning OUN policy around and “betting on the German Hitlerite card.” Until Melnyk assumed leadership, according to Mirchuk, there were “some contacts” with Wehrmacht circles, who like OUN wanted a revision of the Versailles settlement, but OUN had had reservations about Hitlerite ideology and politics, which viewed Eastern Europe as a territory for colonization.27
Nowhere near as well researched, but even more partisan was Polikarp Herasymenko’s short book on “the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Second World War.” Herasymenko was neither a historian nor politically active for long; instead he was a metallurgist who made a good career in the United Kingdom and the United States after 1948. Born in Odessa, he fled Soviet Ukraine to avoid arrest in 1921, living mainly in Prague until the end of World War II. He was a member of the Melnyk faction of OUN during the war years and for a short time thereafter.28 Herasymenko’s history was first published as a mimeographed text in 1947 and went through several editions over the following years. The work made use of the interwar and wartime periodical press as well as documents of both the united OUN and the Melnyk faction. But overall, it was marred by one-sidedness. A major target of its criticism was the Bandera faction. Herasymenko attributed its split from the rest of OUN to foreign intrigue. Fearful of the power of OUN, both the Germans and the Soviets had engineered the rift, preying on the Bandera group’s “political blindness, ambition, primitiveness, moral indifference.”29 He condemned the rebellion they led: “provoked by the enemy, they pushed the masses on the path of a negative, in every respect unprepared, and therefore needlessly bloody ‘insurgency.’“30 Herasymenko quoted many OUN documents critical of Nazi Germany and made no mention of pro-German attitudes or cooperation with Nazi Germany on the part of OUN. He made an exception, of course, for the Banderites, who, he wrote, were both ignorant of Germany’s plans for Ukraine and ready to help the Germans by supplying them with hundreds of interpreters. The many interpreters from the Melnyk faction working for the Germans were passed over in silence. There was also no mention at all of the Melnykites’ support for the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The Ukrainian police in German service, with whom both factions of OUN were deeply involved, were almost completely absent from Herasymenko’s account; there was a single passing mention in a wartime document calling upon Ukrainians in all stations of life to remember that they were members of the “Ukrainian Nation, once free, glorious, and powerful, but today enslaved and marked by blood and ruin.”31 Jews and the Holocaust were completely missing from Herasymenko’s book.
Another veteran of the movement who wrote about OUN during World War II was Lev Shankovsky. Shankovsky had, as an adolescent, served in the armed forces fighting for an independent Ukraine during the revolutionary period that followed World War I. His military experience later proved useful both for his activity in OUN and UPA during World War II and for his postwar work as a military historian of Ukraine. He was associated with the Bandera wing of OUN during the war, but after the war he joined a faction that broke with Bandera, the UHVR group32 or so-called dviikari. Led by Mykola Lebed and Lev Rebet, the dviikari adopted a more democratic program than either the Banderites or Melnykites and benefited from generous funding by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.33 Shankovsky’s book on OUN-B’s expeditionary groups (pokhidni hrupy) in southern Ukraine34 and Romanian-occuped Transnistria created a picture of the past that fit well with the postwar ideology of the UHVR. Shankovsky had fine narrative skills and wrote with some verve, although his prose was not free of jargon. I will spend more time analyzing this work, since it presented a narrative that has been very influential in the postwar Ukrainian diaspora, especially among historians and other intellectuals. It also offered a full enough account to serve here as a prominent example of a more general trend in OUN and UPA historiography.
The expeditionary groups were small OUN units that fanned out from Kraków and then across Ukraine, following the German advance. They were instrumental in establishing local civil administrations and militias wherever they went. In his account of them, Shankovsky emphasized that they fought against two enemies, both the Soviets and the Germans. He also described fierce persecution of members of OUN, especially OUN-B (the Bandera faction), by the Germans. While writing at length about the conflict between OUN and the Germans, Shankovsky completely omitted to mention moments of cooperation.
The main point of Shankovsky’s book was to show that the more tolerant and democratic position adopted by the UHVR had its basis in the encounter between the Western Ukrainian nationalists and the population of Soviet Ukraine in its pre-1939 borders. His story is that the Western Ukrainian activists came into the rest of the Ukraine and discovered that the ideological baggage they had brought with them was unacceptable to the population there. The inhabitants of central, southern, and eastern Ukraine rejected the OUN’s Führerprinzip and its intended single-party rule and wanted a democratic parliamentary system instead. They did not like OUN’s voluntarism, amorality, exclusivity, and hunger for power, preferring ethical politics, toleration, and humaneness. They were not satisfied with the slogan of an independent Ukraine: they wanted to know the content of the envisaged state, its political structure and social policies. They were against imperialism and exploitation and wanted national minorities to have the rights of other citizens of the Ukrainian state. They did not accept OUN’s slogan of “Ukraine above all.” The Western Ukrainian activists, challenged by this encounter with the majority of Ukrainians, had to rethink their program, resulting in the more liberal OUN program of August 1943 and the establishment of the UHVR.35 Here is how Shankovsky put it in his conclusions:
...I set myself a clearly defined goal that my work was supposed to achieve. I wanted—as extensively as possible—to present the ideological and political evolution that the pro-independence OUN underwent as a result of the direct encounter of the mass of its membership with the Ukrainian mainland and Ukrainian population in the Central Eastern Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands. The epic tale of the expeditionary groups in central and eastern Ukraine, the discussion of ideas conducted by the members of the expeditionary groups with the Ukrainian people of the Central Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands, and the integration (usobornennia) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists through the mass entrance into it of Ukrainians from the Central Ukrainian Lands and the Eastern Ukrainian Lands were the reasons that much was thrown out from the political-programmatic decisions and directives of OUN, [the elimination of] which had been considered taboo in the conditions of Polish occupation. In particular, very decisively thrown out were all sorts of “isms” introduced onto Ukrainian soil from a foreign field: authoritarianism, elitism, totalitarianism, dogmatism, exclusivism, voluntaristic nationalism, and so on. Socioeconomic and political issues decisively took precedence over issues of worldview and philosophy; mysticism had to make way for a realistic strategy and tactics of liberation, and the despised leader system capitulated before democracy and parliamentarism, with its accompanying human freedoms.36
In addition to arguing for a fundamental shift in perspective within the OUN expeditionary groups as a result of the encounter with the east and south, Shankovsky also contended that under the impact of the encounter OUN began to shed its ethnocentrism and to develop a new openness to the national minority populations in Ukraine. He stated that the national minorities of southern Ukraine—“Russians, Greeks, Moldavians, and Tatars”37—warmed to the idea of an independent Ukraine, with equal rights for the minorities.38 “The broad masses of the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands most decisively rejected any possibility of an exterminatory or even discriminatory policy with regard to any national minority in Ukraine. Non-Ukrainians who live in Ukraine and are Ukrainian citizens should enjoy all the rights of Ukrainian citizens. It has to be recognized and emphasized that the leaders of the frontline expeditionary groups quickly oriented themselves in the situation and were able to conduct their propaganda in the direction of winning over non-Ukrainians for the Ukrainian liberation movement.”39 In Shankovsky’s narrative, OUN in the Donbas reached out to Russians as full-fledged Ukrainian citizens.40
As to OUN’s relations with the national minority with which this monograph is particularly concerned, i.e., the Jews, Shankovsky explained: “In this place we wish to underline that neither the Ukrainian population nor the members of the Ukrainian underground who came to the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands were in any way involved in anti-Jewish actions.”41 By contrast, Shankovsky wrote that the White Russian emigrés, who also came to Transnistria, were rabid antisemites who killed Jews on their own initiative, without prodding from the Romanian authorities.42 Shankovsky also noted that the Jews in Transnistria were pro-Bolshevik.43
The heroic tale of OUN’s transformation under the impact of this encounter could well contain some grains of truth, but to determine how many requires new and in-depth research. For the purposes of this monograph, though, it is necessary to point out some dubious claims, half-truths, and falsehoods in Shankovsky’s narrative.
To begin with, I wonder how true is the claim that the young workers of the Donbas and indeed the general population of the south were insisting on parliamentary democracy. Where would their knowledge of this political system have originated? Surely not from any personal experience, nor from anything they read in Soviet publications. And many years later, after parliamentary democracy was finally introduced in independent Ukraine, the Donbas stood out as the region of origin and the primary political base of the most authoritarian president and politicians in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history (President Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions). Thus I am skeptical of the assertion that a population molded by tsarism and Stalinism and later subject to Nazi occupation would have had a clear enough picture of representative democracy to summon it up as an ideal with which to challenge OUN. Much recent research in the history of Stalinism has shown that it was exceedingly difficult for Soviet citizens to think outside the communist box.44 This is borne out by some of the original slogans the Donbas workers came up with during the German occupation, such as “Ukrainian Soviet power without the Bolsheviks” and “Soviet Ukraine without the Bolsheviks and without the dictatorship of the Communist party.”45
And the picture of OUN being so open to non-Ukrainians, particularly Russians, is—at best—overdrawn. This is clear from a volume of documents published much later, in 2013, on OUN in the Donbas. The collection is decidedly pro-OUN; in fact, its editor conceived it as literature first and foremost for “radical youth and participants of Ukrainian paramilitary organizations.”46 The documents do show that some ethnic Russians participated in the nationalist movement, particularly a woman from Kramatorsk, Donetsk oblast, by the name of Serafima Petrovna Kutieva, who also figured in Shankovsky’s book.47 By Kutieva’s own account to her NKGB interrogator in 1944, at first her Russian nationality did cause her OUN recruiter a moment’s hesitation, but then she was accepted into the movement. It turned out that her Russian nationality worked out well for the OUN underground; her home could more effectively serve as a safe house for the movement. “...My apartment for them was above all suspicions since I am a Russian....”48 In the course of her recruitment she discovered that not all OUN members were open to Russian ethnicity. One of her former husbands was her first recruiter, and he described the goal of the nationalist movement as the establishment of “an independent Ukrainian state which would be run exclusively by Ukrainians.”49 She described a fellow OUN activist from Vinnytsia as “stridently chauvinistically...inclined.”50 OUN members in the civil administration in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk oblast, advocated the replacement of ethnic Russians by ethnic Ukrainians.51 OUN also promoted restrictions on the use of the Russian language in administration, the courts, signage, and education.52
The documentary collection also shows that OUN in the Donbas consistently propagated antisemitism while the Holocaust was proceeding. Several OUN proclamations are included as photoreproductions at the back of the book. The newspaper Ukrains’kyi Donbas, which was under OUN control, wrote in a front-page editorial on 18 December 1941:
Under the powerful blows of the victorious German and Allied armies the bonds with which for twenty-three years day and night the Jewish-Bolshevik henchmen bound the freedom-loving Ukrainian people have burst asunder....[As the German and Italian forces approached,] for fifteen whole days Jewish commissars, Asiatic barbarians...destroyed the national property built by the sweat and blood of the Ukrainian people....We must accept the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” as the fundamental principle in the work of a newly constructed state apparatus and take it as the starting point for orientation in solving all problems which every day of work on the construction of a new life brings.53
On the next page of the same issue appeared a proclamation to Ukrainian youth issued by OUN:
The Jews forced us to call our dearest people enemies. They forced us to love alien Moscow and not our native Ukraine. In our country those who married Jewesses, and thereby contributed to the degeneration of the Ukrainian nation, were held in esteem. Jewboys were called Ukrainian musicians—all those Buses, Goldsteins, Davids, Oistrakhs. They gave them prizes, titled them Stalin laureates, but the truly talented Ukrainian youth was trampled and then withered on the vine. The institutes and schools swarmed with Jews because they had money....In the Komsomol and Pioneers the Jewish-Muscovite politicians tried to raise janissaries, champions of Red Moscow, haters of the Ukrainian people....Ukraine for Ukrainians!54
And on the next page was yet another OUN proclamation, this one addressed to teachers:
They forced us to poison the minds of children with Jewish internationalism....Jews wrote the grammar of the Ukrainian language....In the theaters and cinema they showed us performances and films directed by Jews, in which the best sons of the Ukrainian land were reviled and ridiculed....Schools for Ukrainians! Down with lying Jewish-communist education. In a Ukrainian school—Ukrainian children....Let us welcome the German army, the most cultured army in the world, which is driving from our lands the Jewish-communist scum. Let us help the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera build a great Independent Ukrainian State. Ukraine for Ukrainians!55
OUN members in the civil administration also promoted antisemitism. OUN member Anton Yastremsky was raion head in Olhynka, Donetsk oblast. On 17 September 1942 he issued an order to introduce the OUN greeting “Glory to Ukraine” in his raion. This was intended to restore polite and respectful behavior after years of “hostile Jewish-Bolshevik” interpersonal relations, of “Bolshevik-Jewish barbarity.”56 The OUN-controlled city administration of Mariupol in Donetsk oblast ordered that civil servants take Ukrainian language courses since “as a consequence of Muscovite-Jewish rule in Ukraine our people lost their language, customs, and so on.”57
The works on the history of OUN and UPA produced by veterans of the movement, such as those by Mirchuk, Herasymenko, and Shankovsky, but also by others (e.g., Mykola Lebed, Borys Lewytzkyj58), were marked by partisan perspectives. Their writings not only defended the positions of OUN but of their particular faction of OUN. They emphasized OUN’s persecution at the hands of the German occupiers but downplayed the extent to which OUN collaborated with Germany. All of them avoided disclosure about the extent to which OUN and UPA were involved in ethnic cleansing, including participation in the Holocaust. Already in 1946, a prominent Ukrainian émigré from eastern Ukraine, Ivan Bahriany, accurately diagnosed the problem with the self-presentation of the emigrés associated with OUN: the nationalist camp, he wrote, was trying to repudiate its heritage of xenophobia, antisemitism, voluntarism, leaderism [vozhdyzm], and antidemocratism, but “not by overcoming these things, but by assuring us that they had not existed.”59
In addition to the veterans’ writings, a scholarly study of OUN and UPA appeared already in 1955 and went through three editions, the last appearing in 1990. John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism relied primarily on three kinds of sources: German documentation, the wartime Ukrainian press, and interviews. The interviews were conducted almost exclusively with prominent Ukrainian activists and politicians, and not just from the OUN camp. He had great sympathy for these men, although he was not uncritical in his admiration.60 He did not interview Polish or Jewish survivors of OUN-UPA violence nor consult their testimonies and memoirs. The only book on the Holocaust listed in the bibliography of the 1990 edition is Hilberg’s classic, in which, as we have seen, there was no room for a discussion of OUN. No works in Polish were cited. The result was a study that had very little to say about OUN operations against Poles and Jews.61 The ethnic cleansing of the Poles was given cursory treatment, based entirely on German sources, on a few pages.62 The question of OUN involvement in the pogroms of 1941 was discussed in one paragraph.63 Like most scholars at that time, Armstrong did not understand the distinction between the militias organized by OUN and the later Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. He did, however, make mention of some anti-Jewish rhetoric employed by OUN.64
Armstrong wrote a rather sympathetic narrative of the nationalists, emphasizing their valor in fighting against two such powerful enemies as the Germans and the Soviets. He did not go far enough to please all the nationalist veterans, who felt, particularly, that he underestimated their success outside Western Ukrainian lands. Yevhen Stakhiv, a leading figure in the OUN-B expeditionary movement in the south and one of the major proponents of the UHVR, made this objection,65 as did Shankovsky in his history of the expeditionary groups. In fact, Shankovsky decided to write his history in the first place as a corrective to Armstrong’s narrative.66
Another noteworthy study of Ukrainian nationalism from this period was Alexander J. Motyl’s The Turn to the Right. It only covered the story up through the founding of OUN in 1929, so it was more of a prehistory than a history in relation to the theme of my own book. But it was important for its exploration of the ideological sources of Ukrainian nationalism and its interpretation of where Ukrainian nationalism stood in relation to the fascist movements emerging in Europe at that time. Turn to the Right was based on wide-ranging consultation of contemporary Ukrainian-language press and brochures as well as scholarly works on Ukrainian history and on right-wing and fascist ideology outside Ukraine. Its appearance in 1980, at a time when academic Ukrainian studies were just taking off in North America, meant that it gained considerable attention. Although later in life Motyl became an apologist for OUN, this first work was quite balanced.
Polish scholars contributed well informed works on OUN in wartime. In 1972 Ryszard Torzecki wrote a monograph on the Ukrainian policy of the Third Reich which, of course, devoted considerable attention to Ukrainian nationalism. Antoni Szcześniak and Wiesław Szota’s Droga do nikąd (The Road to Nowhere) of 1973, which covered OUN and UPA from the 1920s into the postwar period, had an interesting, and rather sad, history. It was primarily based on Szcześniak’s doctoral dissertation, but Szota wrote the introductory section on the interwar period. The text tried to work within the constraints of what could be said and what could not be said when Poland was a communist country within the Soviet orbit.67 The reason this was tricky is that parts of what used to be Poland were now in the Ukrainian SSR, and the text had to avoid any suggestion that these territories were in some sense Polish. Thus, the events of 1939 were presented from a Soviet perspective: the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was glossed over and the population of western Ukraine was depicted as fervently desiring to be joined with Soviet Ukraine. But try as they did, the authors were unable to construct a narrative of OUN and UPA that the Soviets found acceptable. After the direct intervention of the Soviet embassy, the book was withdrawn from circulation as “harmful for current party propaganda”; the Soviets feared that “the book can be used propagandistically by the Ukrainian emigration in its fight against the Soviet system.” The authors suffered for their mistakes, being pushed to the margins of the Polish scholarly establishment.68 (Not many years later I heard that Szota committed suicide, but I cannot confirm this.) Aside from its ideological contortions, which of course included a less than even-handed and objective treatment of OUN and UPA, the work had value. It made use of abundant materials in Polish archives, materials that at that time Western scholars had no access to. The Ukrainian journalist and memoirist Ivan Kedryn Rudnytsky characterized the volume thus: “Although the tendency of this book is bad because—as the authors themselves declare in the introduction—they examined the problem ‘through the prism of Marxism-Leninism,’ nonetheless in it was gathered a mass of factual documentary-informational material—more than can be found in all the nationalist literature.”69 Kedryn did not explicitly mention it, but Szcześniak and Szota were very well aware of how Poles and Jews suffered at the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists and wrote about these matters in some detail.
As is clear from the case of Droga do nikąd, the Soviets had many sensitivities around the history of OUN and UPA, and it is not surprising that no real scholarship on the nationalists appeared in the Soviet Union. Aside from other considerations, the Soviets did not want to disturb the myth of a united Soviet people in struggle against the fascist occupiers by writing about collaboration with the Germans and about a powerful anti-Soviet movement. The Soviets cloaked OUN and UPA under the term “Ukrainian-German fascists” and were silent about their influence on the Ukrainian population during the war. And in addition, the Soviet authorities did not permit scholarship on the Holocaust. In fact, the subject of the Holocaust made them uncomfortable.70 It singled out the suffering of the Jews instead of the whole Soviet people, and this particular narrative of suffering could feed into Jewish nationalism, i.e., Zionism. In the postwar period Soviet anti-Zionism could be quite shrill and antisemitic.
But there was an exception to the Soviet reticence on our topic. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets published tracts on Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust and other war crimes. Several were published under the name Valerii Styrkul in the 1980s, after the airing of the influential television miniseries, Holocaust (NBC, 1978), which heightened American interest in Nazi atrocities.71 Styrkul concentrated on the Waffen-SS Division Galizien rather than on OUN. But the earliest and most influential of these tracts was Lest We Forget, signed by the Ukrainian-American communist Michael Hanusiak (first edition 1973).72 Lest We Forget did publish documentary evidence of OUN antisemitism, notably extracts from the autobiography of OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko from July 1941, in which Stetsko endorsed German methods of annihilating Jews.73 The book also contained documents and testimony on crimes committed by both OUN and Ukrainian police units in German service with OUN connections. However, these documents were unverifiable by scholars, since the archives they were housed in were closed to researchers. And the presentation was so heavy-handed and one-sided that scholars treated his revelations with scepticism or outright rejection.74
In fact, the brochure Lest We Forget was the product of a KGB operation. The head of the Ukrainian KGB, Vitalii Fedorchuk, wrote about it to the first secretary of the Ukrainian party, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, in a memorandum dated 27 December 1973. It is worth quoting in extenso:
Earlier the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR reported that in order to incite enmity between Ukrainian nationalists and Zionists in the USA the brochure Lest We Forget was published in English; the publication exposes, on the basis of documents, the participation of OUNites during the Second World War in the mass destruction of the peaceful population, including in so-called “Jewish actions”....
As “author” and publisher of the brochure figured one of the leaders of the progressive Ukrainian organizations, the League of American Ukrainians.75 In recent years he has visited Ukraine and can thus explain how he obtained the materials utilized in the brochure.
In order to popularize the brochure, the “author,” at our recommendation, engaged one of the progressive Jewish activists of New York in the capacity of “copublisher.”76 The joint action of progressive Ukrainian and Jewish organizations in the USA against the OUNites as war criminals has had a certain political effect....
Since the demand for the brochure has exceeded the number printed, the Ukrainian and Jewish progressive organizations are preparing a second edition....
Given the interest in the brochure shown in the USA and Canada, measures are being taken by us to collect additional materials on the participation of nationalists in the eradication of the Jewish population for publication abroad.77
As the letter indicates, propaganda publications of this sort were intended for export and were published in the English language.
After surveying the state of the historiography before the 1990s, it should become apparent that it was very difficult at that time to arrive at a clear understanding of the behavior of OUN and UPA during the Holocaust. The Jewish scholars who came from the Western Ukrainian territories were aware of the nationalists’ violence against the Jewish population, but they had too little knowledge of the nationalist movement to flesh out what had happened. They could not rely on the histories written by nationalist veterans, since the latter completely denied any responsibility for the persecution and murder of the Jewish population. Nor was Armstrong’s scholarly study any help in this regard. Mainstream Holocaust history, as exemplified by Hilberg, did not have the conceptual framework and an inclusive enough source base to even consider investigating the role of OUN and UPA. Publications emanating from or inspired by the communist bloc were discounted by Western scholars; and in addition, the best informed of them, Szcześniak and Szota’s Droga do nikąd, was very difficult to obtain.78
The Collapse of Communism in Europe
A decisive turn in the historiography resulted from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. The opening of the Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Soviet archives made available to scholars a vast amount of fresh material to understand the Holocaust in the east of Europe, including the activities of Ukrainian nationalists.79 Moreover, the political restraints on research were removed. Scholars in the postcommunist sphere could now write whatever they wished, free from censorship and communist party control. Polish scholars no longer had to refrain from writing about the fate of Poles in territories that were once in the Soviet Union but now formed parts of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.80 Even Ukrainian nationalists had been worried about writing their own history as long as Ukraine was communist, since revealing too much could lead to reprisals against nationalists and their families still residing in Soviet Ukraine.81 Now those fears were gone. The result of these new sources and new freedoms was the blossoming of a diverse historiography on the question of the Ukrainian nationalists and the Jews during the Holocaust.
The first to professionally mine the new sources were two German scholars, Thomas Sandkühler and Dieter Pohl, who each produced a German-sized monograph on the Holocaust in Galicia, in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Both followed the practice of what was then mainstream Holocaust historiography: they paid relatively little attention to victims and their testimony and relied heavily on documents emanating from German structures. Pohl argued that the attitudes of the autochthonous, non-Jewish population were relatively unimportant in determining the general course and final outcome of the mass murder in Galicia: essentially the German occupation authorities made the decisions and executed them themselves. Whether resisting or aiding the Germans in the murder, the actions of what Pohl called “the Christian population” were of secondary importance in influencing events.82 Pohl characterized the Bandera faction of OUN as antisemitic for much of the war, particularly in the spring and summer of 1941 and again in 1944, as the Soviets closed in, stating also that in 1942-43 OUN distanced itself from the Germans’ murder of the Jews.83 (During the latter period Ukrainian opinion in general had cooled towards the Germans and their “final solution.”)84 Pohl was not able to link OUN directly to any concrete war crimes. His treatment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in relation to the Holocaust reached no clear conclusion.85 In my own review of Pohl’s book, I characterized it as follows: “This is an ambitious and pioneering work. It is not a synthesis based on a corpus of pre-existing monographs; instead, it attempts a comprehensive portrayal of the Holocaust in Galicia largely on the basis of primary sources. It opens the field for further, in-depth monographic research of specific problems and incidents.”86
It was in this period too that Jeffrey Burds began to lecture and write about OUN and UPA in an entirely new vein. Although the texts he published then did not directly concern the Holocaust but rather focused on the immediate postwar period,87 they demonstrated that sources in the newly opened post-Soviet archives could provide a much deeper knowledge of the nationalists’ actions than other historians had ever imagined. Also, his revelations about the ruthlessness of OUN and UPA helped break the spell of the nationalists’ own historiography.
Directly related to wartime OUN’s Jewish politics was a documentary publication by Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk: the full text, or rather texts, of the July 1941 autobiography of nationalist leader Yaroslav Stetsko, mentioned above in connection with Michael Hanusiak and to be discussed in some detail below.88 In their introduction to the autobiography Berkhoff and Carynnyk surveyed some of OUN’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, which they found to be written in “vicious language” and to be encouraging “a deadly antisemitism.”89
Martin Dean’s Collaboration in the Holocaust investigated the actions of local police in certain regions of Belarus and Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. Although a very valuable study, it exemplified a trend that was still strong in the 1990s: Dean studied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without knowledge of the relevant East European languages. Dean was trained in history (his first book was on Austrian policy during the late-eighteenth century wars with revolutionary France) and was then employed in the war crimes unit in Scotland Yard. He moved from there to the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, where he has continued to write and compile impressive works on Holocaust history. Collaboration in the Holocaust was based on archival sources and eyewitness testimonies. It outlined the influence of OUN on the local Ukrainian police in German service and the role of those policemen later in UPA. But his work focused on areas outside the center of OUN and UPA activity, which was Galicia and Volhynia.
With the weakening and then total collapse of the Soviet system, OUN and UPA came under reexamination in Ukraine. After decades of condemnation of the nationalist organizations, calls for rehabilitation emerged in the public discourse, particularly in the Lviv newspaper Za vil’nu Ukrainu.90 Already in March 1990, the foremost proponent of reform in Soviet Ukraine, Rukh (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy—People’s Movement of Ukraine), raised the issue of the nationalists’ political rehabilitation.91 Before long, the government began to turn to Ukraine’s scholarly establishment to advise on the issue. On 12 June 1991 the head of the commission on defense and state security of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasyl Durdynets, wrote to the Ukrainian academy of sciences with the request to find someone to prepare a background paper on OUN, UPA, and the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The task was entrusted to Viktor Koval, a historian in his mid-seventies specializing in the Second World War. Koval had studied in his native Kyiv and worked there in the academy’s Institute of the History of Ukraine. The text he speedily produced, by 1 July, argued that “OUN and UPA conducted a national-liberation struggle for the construction of a sovereign and democratic Ukraine, in which people of all nationalities would enjoy the same political and social rights.” Durdynets, who had long been an official in the Communist Party of Ukraine, repudiated the report and demanded that the academy withdraw it and replace it with another. The academy complied immediately, formally withdrawing Koval’s report on 3 July.92 But the OUN-UPA issue would not go away for the Ukrainian public, government, or academia. In particular, veterans’ groups—Red Army veterans and UPA veterans—were confronting one another, especially on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of UPA celebrated in 1992. In 1993 the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) again decided that there was a need to investigate the legacy of OUN-UPA, but the efforts of a parliamentary committee proved insufficient to the task. Finally, in 1997 a working group of historians, under the leadership of Stanislav Kulchytsky, was charged with unearthing the true history of OUN-UPA and evaluating its heritage. The task proved more complicated than anyone expected, and the commission made no concrete progress until the early 2000s.
A few studies related to our topic did appear in Ukraine in the 1990s. Yakov Khonigsman’s short book on the Catastrophe of Lviv Jewry, which came out in 1993, built on earlier studies, especially on the works of Philip Friedman and Tatiana Berenstein (the latter unavailable to me), as well as on a modest selection of documentation from Lviv archives. It made little use of memoirs and testimonies. In fact, in the foreword to the book, Bogdan Semenov stated that the volume “is not written from the words of eyewitnesses, where in the main the element of subjectivity or emotionality figures,” but “according to the materials of archival documents.”93 Khonigsman avoided the topic of any OUN involvement in the events he described. Later, in 1998, Khonigsman published a book that looked at the Holocaust across Western Ukraine, encompassing the Ukrainian historical regions of Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia, but primarily concentrating on Galicia. This book made more use of survivor testimonies and was more deeply researched in archives, principally in the Lviv archives, but also in those of Kyiv and elsewhere. In this book Khonigsman pointed out how antisemitic OUN was.94 Like many other historians before him, he did not differentiate the militia established by OUN from the Ukrainian auxiliary police established later by the Germans; hence he ascribed crimes of the militia to the auxiliary police.95 Khonigsman had nothing to say about UPA and the Jews.
More interesting was a book on “the behavior of the local population of Eastern Galicia in the years of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’“—Zhanna Kovba’s Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla (Humaneness in the Abyss of Hell) published in 1998 by the Judaica Institute in Kyiv. Kovba conducted extensive archival research, consulting in particular the records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in the State Archive of Lviv Oblast (DALO) and OUN documents in the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO). She consulted Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian memoirs and also interviewed many people from throughout Galicia who had lived through the events of World War II. It was a book with an openly declared agenda: to destroy “the two fundamental deceitful myths which impede objective perception of the relations among peoples in these difficult times: that Ukrainians were almost the instigators of German crimes against the Jews...; that Jews were guilty of annihilating Ukrainians under Soviet rule.”96 And although Kovba had a tendency to make generalizations and prefer evidence that showed both Ukrainians and Jews in a favorable light,97 she also included information that went against the grain of her overall interpretation. She was unwilling to hazard an evaluation of OUN’s stance and actions during the Jewish tragedy because she found the evidence too contradictory; more research was required in order to make sense of things.98 What comes through most clearly in Kovba’s book is the mixed feelings of the 1990s: with the collapse of communism, both Jewish suffering and Ukrainian suffering were being articulated, and it was difficult to afford recognition to and reconcile them both.99
The emergence of a cult of OUN and UPA in Ukraine provoked a reaction from a maverick within the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, Viktor Polishchuk. Polishchuk had been born into an Orthodox family in Volhynia, but in 1940, during the first period of Soviet rule in the region, he and his mother and siblings were deported to Kazakhstan. (His father had been arrested by the Soviets in 1939 and was never seen again.) They were allowed to return to Ukraine after the Soviet reconquest in 1944, but to Dnipro oblast rather than Volhynia. In 1946 the family moved to Poland (Polishchuk’s mother was Polish). Polishchuk studied law there and worked as a lawyer and a prosecutor; but after he openly declared his Ukrainian nationality in 1956 he was fired from the prosecutor’s office and endured other instances of discrimination. In 1981 he emigrated to Canada, where, being very particular about proper Ukrainian usage, he worked as an editor in Ukrainian-language media. Based in Toronto and well informed through the circumstances of his employment about Ukrainian diaspora life, he came into contact with nationalist circles; he had not been acquainted with nationalists in Ukraine or Poland. Although he had no personal experience of what OUN-UPA had done in Volhynia during the war, he knew from friends and relatives that the nationalists had slaughtered many of its former Polish inhabitants, including members of his own extended family.100
A follower of the debates in Ukraine after the fall of communism, he was upset by prominent political and cultural figures calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA and blamed the Ukrainian diaspora for reintroducing nationalism to Ukraine.101 This is what provoked him to write Hirka pravda (Bitter Truth), published at his own cost in 1995. (The book appeared in Polish in the same year and later in an English translation.) The text was an indictment of OUN and UPA for the mass murder of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia. At this time, by his own admission, Polishchuk did not have enough material to write about UPA’s murder of Jews and others.102 Later on he found plenty of relevant documentation,103 but his documentary publications remained focused primarily on the murder of Poles.104 His 1995 text did not yet use archival material, although he hoped that soon such material would become available.105 Later Polishchuk did gain access to the relevant archival documents and cited and reproduced them in his publications. But the 1995 text was based entirely on published sources as well as some personal communications.
Polishchuk’s book was not well received by Western, Ukrainian, or Polish historians, even though Polishchuk wrote from an anti-Soviet perspective and was careful to make a distinction between Ukrainians as such and OUN.106 The prolific Canadian historian of modern Ukraine David Marples categorized the book as differing little from the Soviet perspective “in terms of the one-sidedness of the outline.”107 Volodymyr Serhiichuk, a pro-nationalist Ukrainian scholar best known for numerous documentary compilations on modern Ukrainian history, devoted a short book to a refutation of Polishchuk’s Hirka pravda.108 Polishchuk himself he called a “supposed Ukrainian” (nibyto ukrainets’). Yurii Shapoval, one of the first Ukrainian historians to work with NKVD documents, rejected Polishchuk’s work as anti-Ukrainian.109 The dean of Lviv’s Ukrainian historians, the late Yaroslav Isaievych, labeled Polishchuk “a ‘professional’ of anti-Ukrainian hysteria.”110 Polish specialists in modern Ukrainian history were of a similar opinion. Ryszard Torzecki called him a former prosecutor for the NKVD (which he was not) and felt that he “was not worth talking about.”111 His views were also criticized by Rafał Wnuk, although not as vehemently: “W. Poliszczuk holds a special place among the non-scientists. As a Ukrainian political scientist who deals, so to speak, ‘scientifically’ with the problem of Ukrainian nationalism, he is sometimes seen as a credible person.”112 Both Shapoval and Torzecki equated Polishchuk with a much less credible writer, the propagandist Edward Prus.113
In my opinion, this was not a fair equation. There are one-sided authors, and there are unbalanced authors. Prus, unfortunately, belonged to the latter category. In communist Poland he specialized in propaganda against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and Ukrainian nationalists and continued in the same vein after communism’s collapse; in both eras he was closely associated with the Polish nationalist right. Prus had been born in and survived the war in Galicia. As a teenager he joined in the defence of Poles threatened by UPA and later fought UPA in the “destruction battalions” (istrebitel’nye batal’ony).114 He later emigrated to Poland, earned a doctorate at the University of Warsaw, held various academic posts—none of any prominence, and wrote prolifically.
The book most relevant to the concerns of this monograph is Prus’s Holocaust po banderowsku (Holocaust Banderite-Style), published in 1995. Among much else, the book included an account of a meeting Prus claimed he had in London with Karl Popper, whom he described as “undoubtedly one of the most outstanding Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.” According to Prus, Popper called him, i.e., Prus, “the most outstanding expert in this area [the history of UPA] in Poland, and not only in Poland.” Also, Popper supposedly expressed amazement that the president of Ukraine at that time, Leonid Kravchuk, had not condemned the murders perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles. “And he warned the Jews that they should stop playing together with Ukrainian nationalists at the expense of the Poles, because this fraternization with criminals under the flag of totalitarianism is a blind alley, a road to nowhere.”115 To me, this account sounds like a fantasy or at least a hearty embellishment. (Popper passed away shortly before Holocaust po banderowsku was published.)
I think there was also a strong dose of fantasy in the “evidence” he brought to bear. Much of what he had to say was based on personal communications in his possession and was therefore unverifiable. Sometimes he gave proper citations for material he quoted, but in other cases he offered no citations whatsoever. For example, Holocaust po banderowsku contained a long quotation very relevant to the theme of this study attributed to Mykhailo Stepaniak, a member of the central OUN leadership captured by the Soviets; the quotation concerned the Third Extraordinary Assembly of OUN (August 1943).116 Prus offered no citation, although presumably the text would have been taken from the record of one of Stepaniak’s interrogations. I have not, however, been able to find the passage Prus quoted in the archival record of Stepaniak’s interrogation of 25 August 1944117 nor in published versions of his interrogations.118 Moreover, the quoted passage refers to the presence of Ivan Mitrynga at the congress, which seems highly unlikely, given that Mitrynga had broken with the Banderites in September 1941 and had joined forces with their rival Taras Bulba-Borovets. I suspect that the passage was the product of a vivid imagination rather than an excerpt from a genuinely existing document.
Moreover, he wrote in a style that had more in common with biblical prophecy than with historical scholarship. Referring to Stella Krenzbach, an alleged Jewish veteran of UPA to whom is attributed a memoir praising the Ukrainian nationalists,119 Prus stated that she acted “undoubtedly from a whisper from Satan, because Satan directed the hand of the genocidaire of Polish and Jewish children,” and that she was guilty of “blaspheming against Yahweh.”120 He also speculated that the apocalypse predicted by St. John the Revelator was not a once and final confrontation between good and evil but would be arriving in installments, one of which was the era of UPA. It was a time “of three clearly apocalyptic figures, as Hitler, Stalin, and [UPA commander Roman] Shukhevych-’Chuprynka,’ and of three hells let loose in the cause of and with the active permission of those who supported them: Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Ukrainian chauvinists.”121 In sum, Prus’s texts are untrustworthy and will not be cited in the narrative that follows. To equate Polishchuk with him is, I feel, a serious error.
A Conceptual Turn: Jan Gross’s Neighbors
The publication of Jan Gross’s short but explosive book Neighbors in 2000-01122 transformed the historiography of the Holocaust as it transpired in Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine. The book described vividly, graphically how Poles in Jedwabne murdered the town’s Jewish inhabitants in July 1941. It generated immense commentary and controversy, but the primary matters of contention (the number of victims and the presence or absence of Germans) have little bearing on how it affected historiography. There were three aspects of Neighbors that were revolutionary, even if they were not without some antecedents. The first was the focus on non-German participation in the extermination of the Jewish population. One might say that this turned the spotlight on the “microbiota” of the world war and the Holocaust, that is, on non-state actors following their own agendas, which sometimes involved the murder of Jews. In particular, Gross directed attention to the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union but before the German leadership made the decision to kill all of European Jewry. One result of Gross’s work was that in the early twenty-first century a large literature on the pogroms and related anti-Jewish violence in Western Ukraine appeared.123 Particularly noteworthy was Kai Struve’s detailed historical account of the violence across Galicia, which brought many new sources to bear and revealed the important role of German actors in the pogroms, especially the soldiers of Waffen-SS Wiking.124 The interest in the pogroms also led to renewed research on one of their contextual factors, the mass murder of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD, which occurred at different sites in western areas of Ukraine between the launch of the German invasion and the evacuation of Soviet forces.125
The second way in which Gross’s little volume was revolutionary was that it placed the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe firmly within East European studies. Gross was an East Europeanist. Until Neighbors he was best known for two studies of Polish territories under German and Soviet occupation. He knew the languages, historical context, social relations, and culture of Poland before he embarked on his studies of the Holocaust and postwar antisemitism. He had earned his doctorate at Yale in 1975, and his book on Polish society under German occupation appeared four years later. He had behind him a quarter century of publications on Polish sociology and modern history before he published Neighbors. He had not dealt with the Holocaust in his earlier work, and when he finally came to that theme he brought a wealth of training and scholarly experience to it. Until Neighbors, East European studies and Holocaust studies had been on separate tracks. Friedman and Spector were Holocaust specialists; they came from Eastern Europe and so knew the languages and cultures, but their scholarly interests did not extend beyond Jewish history. Armstrong was an East Europeanist, but he avoided dealing with the Holocaust. Hilberg wrote his great work without much knowledge of Eastern Europe and sometimes operated with stereotypes.126 After Neighbors a number of persons trained in East European studies undertook work on the Holocaust. Aside from myself, examples include Kai Struve, who wrote an excellent study of peasant and nation in late nineteenth-century Galicia before he turned to an examination of the pogroms of 1941, and Per Anders Rudling, whose doctoral dissertation concerned the development of Belarusian nationalism but who has also worked on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust. What had occurred as a result of Gross’s intervention was that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe had begun to be treated as a part of East European history. One could no longer just parachute intellectually into an East European locality and follow what the Germans did there—one had to have deeper contextual knowledge. In 1992 Christopher Browning published his pathbreaking study of Holocaust perpetrators, Ordinary Men. It followed a German reserve police battalion as it murdered its way through Poland but did not cite any sources in Polish. No scholar in the West in the 1990s thought this unusual. But when, at the end of the 1990s, Omer Bartov decided to write a history of interethnic relations and the Holocaust in the small Galician town of Buchach, the demands of scholarship were different. The immersion in the languages and cultures and physical space of Galicia required a large investment of time. In the end, it took this prolific author two decades to write his microhistory, Anatomy of a Genocide.
The third revolutionary feature of Gross’s book was that it reintegrated victims’ testimony into mainstream Holocaust scholarship, after decades of marginalization. His particular views on survivors’ testimony will be discussed in the next chapter, on sources, but the overall point is that he demonstrated the crucial importance of moving beyond what perpetrators had to say and listening also to the victims. Christopher Browning exemplifies the change of attitude. When he wrote Ordinary Men back in the early 1990s, he did not use any testimonies or other first-person documents other than those of the perpetrators, except to establish chronology.127 But in the twenty-first century he has become an advocate of reintegrating victim narratives into Holocaust studies. In a lecture he delivered at the USC Shoah Foundation in March 2018, he said:
Using survivor testimony has difficulties....It is problematic evidence. But all historical evidence is problematic in one way or another. Anybody who relies on uncomplicated evidence isn’t going to be able to write history. But the issue is not do we use it, but how do we use it. To not use survivor memories is to lose whole areas of the Holocaust that we have no other set of evidence for.128
The present monograph comes out of the post-Neighbors consensus: it examines non-German perpetrators, it proceeds from immersion in regional history and culture, and it makes copious use of testimonies and related ego documents. This is now becoming, at least in the West, the main stream of scholarship on the Holocaust in Ukraine and is represented by many, and diverse, practitioners, including Tarik Cyril Amar, Omer Bartov, Delphine Bechtel, Franziska Bruder, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Simon Geissbühler, Taras Kurylo, Jared McBride, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,129 Per Anders Rudling, and Kai Struve. Scholars sharing the same consensus have also been studying the Holocaust on territories adjacent to Ukraine, notably Diana Dumitru, Jan Grabowski, and Vladimir Solonari. A few other traits of this scholarly trend need to be mentioned. One is that it is in constant dialogue with Western scholarship on the Holocaust as well as with the historiography on twentieth-century Ukraine—in Western academia, the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Ukraine itself. The main languages of its publications are English and German, but many of its texts have been translated into Ukrainian as well as Polish and Russian. The representatives of this historiographical tendency are critical of both the nationalists and their interpretation of the past.
Close to the group described above are other Western historians who have made important contributions to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Wendy Lower has written on German perpetrators, co-edited a collective monograph on the Shoah in Ukraine as well as edited an English translation of one of the few diaries of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Galicia; she has also written on the bloody summer of 1941 in Ukraine. Vladimir Melamed, originally from Lviv and the author of a Russian-language history of Lviv’s Jewish community, has written an original study of Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust based on the oral histories collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. Frank Golczewski has published a number of important studies that relate to OUN and to the Holocaust in Ukraine.
In the past few decades Polish historiography on OUN and UPA has been extensive and has been mainly concerned, of course, with the nationalists’ slaughter of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. One of the most important Polish historians working in this area is Grzegorz Motyka. His major study Ukraińska partyzantka (The Ukrainian Partisan Movement) contains a chapter on UPA and the Holocaust, but like Dieter Pohl a decade earlier he was unable to arrive at clear conclusions.
Contemporary Polish historiography remains divided over the scholarly contributions of Jan Gross. Neighbors has had, and continues to have, a controversial reception in Poland. Some prominent Polish historians and intellectuals reject Gross’s work,130 but mostly in consideration of what it says or implies about Polish society. Worth singling out is Bogdan Musial’s “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen,” an informative study of the violence—Soviet, Nazi, and Ukrainian nationalist—in the summer of 1941. It originally appeared in August 2000 and was less antagonistic to Gross’s scholarship than Musial’s later texts and those of other Polish historians in his camp (such as Marek Jan Chodakiewicz). But “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen” has been criticized by Western scholars for exaggerating the role of Jews in the Soviet apparatus in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine in 1939-41 and thus implying a certain justification for the pogroms that broke out in the wake of the German invasion.131
The Rehabilitation of OUN and UPA in Ukraine
An even more important division has been created by the recrudescence of a pro-OUN historiography, this time in Ukraine rather than in the diaspora. It is a historiography that takes little notice of Western scholarship, except occasionally as an irritant. It also neglects or rejects the use of contemporary testimony by persons of non-Ukrainian ethnicity, particularly Poles and Jews. It does not conceal its political purpose, the exposition of a heroic national myth. Although it is not without genuine achievements, from the point of view of historical scholarship it is a historiographical silo.
As mentioned earlier, in the 1990s, as a response to calls to rehabilitate OUN-UPA as well as to protests of Red Army veterans and others against such rehabilitation, the Ukrainian parliament looked to Ukraine’s historians to investigate the historical role of the nationalists and to provide information on which a decision could be based. In 1997 a working group was set up, headed by Stanislav Kulchytsky. In the mid-1980s Kulchytsky had been part of a Soviet Ukrainian commission to refute allegations that there had been a manmade famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Later, when Ukraine became independent, and especially when President Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10) made the famine, the “Holodomor,” a central component of his historical and identity politics, Kulchytsky changed his views and became the chief historian of the famine and a strong proponent of the idea that the Holodomor was a genocide.132
The working group produced two key texts in 2000-05 that were meant to clarify the history of OUN and UPA and provide expert guidance on the evaluation of the nationalists.133 The first of these texts, Problema OUN-UPA, was produced in 2000 and intended as a preliminary outline of the issues.134 A not unsimilar document was produced in 2005, which bore the subtitle “expert conclusion” (fakhovyi vysnovok) but actually made no overt recommendations.135 In addition to these more programmatic documents, the working group published a collective monograph on the history of OUN and UPA.136 Much of the text of the two shorter, programmatic publications was drawn word for word from the collective monograph. The collective monograph in turn was drawn from more extensive studies by working-group members that preceded the collective monograph. Particularly useful for this book were the substantive treatments of OUN and UPA by Anatolii Kentii and Ivan Patryliak. Although the oeuvre of members of the working group tended to have a generally positive attitude toward the nationalists and played down their dark sides, it harvested much rich material from post-Soviet Ukrainian archives.
The working group did not explicitly call for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA, but that was clearly the direction in which their endeavors pointed. They were academics drafted to provide historical answers to a political question that has divided Ukrainian public discourse ever since it became possible to freely discuss the nationalist heritage. Their work had nothing at all to say about antisemitism as a component of OUN ideology or about OUN-UPA participation in the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust itself is scarcely mentioned in their texts, although these texts all focus on World War II and on Ukraine, where a million and a half Jewish people were murdered. This omission can partly be explained by the working group’s overall tendency to whitewash the nationalists’ record. For example, it treated UPA’s mass murder of the Polish population as a tragedy rather than a crime. It saw both Poles and Ukrainian nationalists as culpable in the violence, denying that the mass murder had anything to do with a nationalist ethnic cleansing project.137
But perhaps at least equally important was another factor, namely the terms of the political debate into which the historians were asked to intervene. The “expert conclusion” divided the parties privy to the dispute into “adherents to and opponents of the nationalists, veterans of OUN and the CPSU, of UPA and the Soviet army.”138 European norms, including European concerns about the Holocaust, were absent from the context. The working group was responding to the critique of the nationalists developed by the Soviets, who were not concerned with the Holocaust at all, nor with antisemitism, nor even—considering Stalinism’s own record—with mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The working group was simply not thinking in a wider context. Most of the members of the working group were themselves products of the Soviet educational system and socialization. Kulchytsky and Kentii, perhaps the most influential individuals within the group, were both born in 1937. Four other historians who contributed to the collective monograph were born between 1955 and 1967, and thus were products of the Soviet higher educational system (Volodymyr Dziobak, Ihor Iliushyn, Heorhii Kasianov, Oleksandr Lysenko). The only member whose formative period was post-Soviet was Patryliak, who was born in 1976. Thus, the questions with which the working group wrestled were mainly those previosuly posed within Soviet discourse. As a result, issues of treason to the motherland and collaboration with the enemy were much more important for them at that time than whether OUN and UPA participated in the destruction of Ukraine’s Jewish population.
Political developments in Ukraine affirmed the working group’s attitude to OUN and UPA. The Orange Revolution of November 2004 brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency of Ukraine. He bestowed the honorific title “Heroes of Ukraine” upon both Roman Shukhevych, the commander of UPA, and Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most important faction of OUN. As he was leaving office in 2010, Yushchenko urged Ukrainians to name streets and public places after the heroes of OUN-UPA.139 His successor as president, Viktor Yanukovych, rolled back the cult of OUN, but it returned with new energy after the Euromaidan in 2014.140
The working group was based in the Institute of the History of Ukraine in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. Another, younger group of historians, based in the academy’s Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Lviv, embraced OUN and UPA even more forthrightly. The leader of the Lviv group was Volodymyr Viatrovych, who was just twenty-five when he founded the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in 2002. Viatrovych remained director of the Center until 2008 when he was appointed head of the archive section of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, established by President Yushchenko. Shortly thereafter Viatrovych was also appointed head of the SBU archives. He became even more influential after the Euromaidan and headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory from 2014 to 2019. He consistently promoted the cult of OUN and UPA, downplaying their wartime crimes.141 He and his associate Ruslan Zabily, who directs the pro-OUN Lontsky prison museum in Lviv,142 have excellent connections with the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. They have spoken a number of times at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; both of these institutes have partnerships with the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement.143
Of the publications of the Lviv group, the most relevant to our topic is Viatrovych’s book on OUN’s attitude toward Jews, which came out in 2006.144 It sought to exonerate OUN and UPA from accusations of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust, but it had serious flaws as a scholarly monograph. It handled sources in a one-sided manner, rejecting the authenticity or relevance of those that confirmed OUN’s hostility to Jews while accepting as valid a fabricated memoir by an alleged Jewish member of UPA.145 The latter was the only alleged Jewish survivor testimony that the book cited. It cited no sources or scholarly literature in German or English, nor did it take into account contextual or comparative factors that would have helped illuminate the issues. Also, it was apparent that Viatrovych could not recognize antisemitism when it appeared in OUN texts.146 Viatrovych’s book did, however, contribute to initiating a larger discussion about OUN and the Jews, and it published as an appendix two OUN texts on the subject.
Other historians working within a generally nationalist paradigm were more careful scholars than Viatrovych. In particular, Andrii Bolianovsky, also based in Lviv, published a number of useful, well researched articles on Galicia under German occupation and—most important—two detailed monographs on Ukrainian military and police units in German service.147 Moreover, other Lviv-based historians have written quite critically of OUN, including Marta Havryshko, who has published on the situation of women in UPA, and the prominent historians, essayists, and bloggers Yaroslav Hrytsak148 and Vasyl Rasevych.149 Oleksandr Zaitsev, at this writing head of the history department at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, has done particularly valuable work on OUN prior to 1941, including a detailed survey of integral nationalist ideology150 and the publication of a text by a leading member of OUN advocating the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.151
At present, some of the best researched and frankest discussion of OUN and Holocaust perpetration is being conducted in Ukraine by scholars younger than all the other Ukrainian scholars mentioned so far. An outstanding figure is Yuri Radchenko of Kharkiv, who knows all the languages necessary for Holocaust research, not only Slavic and Western languages but Hebrew and Yiddish as well. He has researched the Holocaust in Kharkiv and the Donbas and the memory politics surrounding the nationalists and their collaboration in the Holocaust, and he has broken new ground by working on the Melnyk wing of OUN in relation to the Holocaust.152 Other younger, up-and-coming scholars are doing exciting work too, though much of what they have discovered has so far been presented only in unpublished papers. Andrii Usach started his scholarly career in the pro-OUN Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in Lviv, but left that organization and now is assembling the most intimate portraits yet of Ukrainian Holocaust perpetrators.153 Roman Shliakhtych of Kryvyi Rih has also been working on local perpetrators, particularly Ukrainian policemen in German service.154 These excellent young historians—and I am sure there are more of whom I am unaware—are certain to redefine the contours of Ukrainian historiography on OUN and UPA and their relation to the Holocaust. But it is not just young historians who are making breakthroughs. Two older historians from Ternopil, Oleh Klymenko and Serhii Tkachov, have done tremendous work in the archives of their city, producing two detailed monographs on the Ukrainian police in the Ternopil and Kremenets regions; both monographs treat both police involvement in the Holocaust and OUN involvement with the police in an open and balanced manner.
Finally, it is necessary to mention that the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA attracted criticism from political circles in Ukraine that took a more positive view of Russia and the Soviet past, notably the former Party of Regions. One of that party’s deputies to the Ukrainian parliament, Vadym Kolesnichenko, proposed a law in May 2013 to ban the glorification and rehabilitation of the nationalists, whom he identified as fascists and Nazis.155 Kolesnichenko and his “International Antifascist Front” contributed nothing to the scholarship on OUN and UPA, but in 2012 and 2013 they published Russian and Ukrainian translations of articles written by Western historians John-Paul Himka (i.e., this author), Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, and Timothy Snyder. None of these scholars had agreed to have their articles published by Kolesnichenko and had in fact specifically declined to be published by him.156 This was a clear case of the political instrumentalization of critical scholarship on the Ukrainian nationalists.
Russian propaganda has also instrumentalized the scholarship of what I have termed the post-Neighbors consensus. Even before, but particularly since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, seized Crimea, and began a hybrid war in the eastern Donbas, the Russian state under Putin has tried to link contemporary Ukrainian aspirations for independence from Russian tutelage with fascism. Yet serious scholarly monographs relevant to our theme have appeared in Russia within the framework of Russian historical politics, notably Aleksandr Diukov’s study of OUN’s attitude to Jews, its “second-rank enemy,”157 and Aleksei Bakanov’s more nuanced study of the national question in OUN ideology.158
1 Friedman, Die galizischen Juden.
2 Aleksiun, “Invisible Web.” Aleksiun, “Philip Friedman.”
3 I have used the second, expanded edition of 1947 (Friedman, Zagłada) as well as the English translation of the 1956 Hebrew version (Friedman, “Destruction”).
4 He noted correctly at one point that the Ukrainian militia was disbanded “and in its place was organized the Ukrainian auxiliary police under German direction,” but otherwise used the terms militia and auxiliary police interchangeably. Quotation from Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.
5 Friedman, Zagłada, 7.
6 Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.
7 “In letters exchanged with fellow Jewish historians, Friedman expressed particular interest in exploring the attitudes of the Ukrainian leadership and military organisations, especially The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, UPA) and their collaboration in the mass murder of the Jews.” Aleksiun, “Invisible Web,” 158. Aleksiun specifically cites a letter of Friedman to Szymon Datner, 30 April 1958.
8 Ibid., 152.
9 Hilberg, Destruction, xiii (quotation from the preface to the revised edition, written in 1984). “Neumann said yes [to Hilberg’s proposal to write a dissertation on “The Destruction of the European Jews”], but he knew that at this moment I was separating myself from the mainstream of academic research to tread in territory that had been avoided by the academic world and the public alike. What he said to me in three words was, ‘It’s your funeral.’“ Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 66.
10 They formed the basis for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
11 For example, Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance, and Krakowski, War of the Doomed.
12 Trunk, Judenrat.
13 “In fact the behavior of the population during the killing operations was characterized by a tendency toward passivity. This inertness was the product of conflicting emotions and opposing restraints. The Slavs had no particular liking for their Jewish neighbors, and they felt no overpowering urge to help the Jews in their hour of need. In so far as there were such inclinations, they were effectively curbed by fear of reprisals from the Germans.” Hilberg, Destruction, 316.
14 Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 110.
15 Hilberg, Destruction, 312 n. 79.
16 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 4-5.
17 Ibid., 233-38.
18 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations.” I should disclose that in 1983 I thought quite differently and accused Weiss of a “nationalist view of history.” “Roundtable,” 493.
19 His very moving story is captured in an excellent documentary by Sarah Farhat and Olha Onyshko, Three Stories of Galicia (2010).
20 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” 413.
21 Weiss presented his paper at the conference on Ukrainian-Jewish relations held at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, from 17 to 20 October 1983. It is not recorded in the proceedings of that conference (Potichnyj and Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations), but I recall a dramatic moment when Weiss was challenged by a man who claimed to have served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and denied that the police had been involved in anti-Jewish actions during the war. Weiss countered by reading aloud from authentic police documents in the Ukrainian language that recorded how many Jews policemen had killed during an action.
22 See below, 431.
23 Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” 418.
24 Yones, Evrei L’vova. Other translations I consulted: Yones, Smoke in the Sand; Yones, Die Strasse nach Lemberg; Yones, Die Juden in Lemberg. In some earlier writings, I mistakenly stated that Yones first wrote and published his book in the 1950s.
25 He also mistakenly identified Taras Bulba-Borovets as an OUN leader. Yones, Evrei L’vova, 383 n. 6.
26 Mirchuk, In the German Mills of Death.
27 Mirchuk, Narys, 582-83.
28 Kovaliv, “Herasymenko.” I am grateful to Marco Carynnyk for first informing me that the pseudonymous H. Polikarpenko under whose name the history appeared was actually P. Herasymenko.
29 Herasymenko, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv, 43; see also 40-44, 50-51.
30 Ibid., 8.
31 Ibid., 131.
32 The UHVR or Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council is discussed below, 375-76. Shankovsky was a founding member.
33 Yurkevich, “Ukrainian Nationalists and DP Politics.” Rudling, “‘Not Quite Klaus Barbie.’“
34 By southern Ukraine Shankovsky meant the Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Stalino (now Donetsk), Voroshylovhrad (now Luhansk), and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in their wartime boundaries as well as Crimea. Shankovs’kyi, Pokhidni hrupy, 27.
35 This narrative permeates the book, but this particular summary is based on ibid., 21-22. On workers wanting free and fair elections and democracy and on their opposition to the leader principle, see 107. On the August 1943 program, see below, 368-70, 377.
36 Shankovs’kyi, Pokhidni hrupy, 317-18.
37 Ibid., 19.
38 Ibid., 20, 56.
39 Ibid., 110.
40 Ibid., 163-64, 175.
41 Ibid., 66 n. 27.
42 Ibid., 237, 249.
43 Ibid., 249.
44 A well known example of this subjectivist scholarship is Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul.”
45 Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 281.
46 Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 3-4.
47 Shankovs’kyi, Pokhidni hrupy, 169, 172.
48 Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 226. In addition, she continued, her husband enjoyed the trust of the German authorities.
49 Ibid., 218, 231.
50 Ibid., 221.
51 Ibid., 247.
52 Ibid., 265, 270-71, 273, 275-77, 291, 293.
53 “Ukraintsi do pratsi!” Reproduced in Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 342. Ukrains’kyi Donbas came out in Horlivka in Donetsk oblast.
54 “Ukrains’ka molod’!” Reproduced in Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 343.
55 “Uchyteli ukraintsi!” Reproduced in Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 344. A similar proclamation appeared in Ukrains’kyi Donbas on 18 January 1942: “Do napolehlyvoi pratsi!” Reproduced in Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 346.
56 Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 273-74; photoreproduction of first page of the order, 339. Olhynka is no longer a raion capital.
57 Ibid., 268. For other indications of anti-Jewish sentiment among OUN members in the Donbas see 135, 215. On truth and legend about OUN in the Donbas, see also Radchenko, “‘Two Policemen Came.’“
58 Lewytzkyj, “Natsional’nyi rukh pid chas Druhoi svitovoi viiny,” is an interview, but to my knowledge it is the only attempt to sketch the history of the Mitrynga faction of OUN during World War II.
59 Bahrianyi, “Natsional’na ideia i ‘natsionalizm,’“ in Bahrianyi, Publitsystyka, 63.
60 Armstrong, “Heroes and Human.”
61 As I wrote in 2010: “In the mid-1980s the Solidarity underground in Poland wanted to publish texts about Ukrainian nationalism and requested through an intermediary, the late Janusz Radziejowski, that I convey to them copies of Armstrong’s book as well as Alex Motyl’s Turn to the Right. After reading them in Polish translation, Janusz wrote to me in 1988 that for all the scholarly value of these books, he was very disappointed that they took no cognizance of the tremendous tragedy of the Jews.” Himka, “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 87. Radziejowski’s criticism was unfair in relation to Motyl’s book, which only encompassed the period through 1929. For more on Armstrong’s position, see Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 175 n. 22.
62 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 110-12.
63 Ibid., 54, 56 (a map appears on p. 55). See below, 225-303.
64 Ibid., 79 n. 28, 118.
65 Dobrovol’s’kyi, OUN na Donechchyni, 294 (reprint of excerpts from Stakhiv’s memoir of 1956).
66 Shankovs’kyi, Pokhidni hrupy, 85-86, 94, 101-02, 147.
67 “...The authors have been guided, and this needs to be strongly emphasized, by Marxist-Leninist criteria in the national question and in the evaluation of social problems.” Szcześniak and Szota. Droga do nikąd, 6.
68 Nowak, “‘Droga do nikąd.” This is a review of a reprint of Droga do nikąd in 2013.
69 Kedryn Rudnyts’kyi, Zhytiia—podii—liudy, 356.
70 Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.” Amar, “Disturbed Silence.”
71 On developments in America, see the classic study by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life.
72 There is an obituary of Hanusiak in the communist newspaper People’s World: “Michael Hanusiak.”
73 To be discussed below, 105-10.
74 “Hanusiak’s publication is utterly tendentious, and I refer to it with great caution.” Weiss, “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” 420 n. 36. Weiss’s article cited here was originally delivered as a paper at a conference on Ukrainian-Jewish relations in 1983. At the same conference, during the roundtable discussion, I am recorded as having said: “...no matter how one claims that one is careful about this source, Hanushchak [sic] being a Ukrainian communist front, cannot be believed and one shouldn’t even mention it in a text.” “Round-Table Discussion [first edition],” 494. For the second edition of the conference proceedings I was permitted to clean up the language of my intervention and phrased the same thought somewhat differently, saying that Hanusiak was “a Ukrainian-American Communist with a political axe to grind; he is not a source to be cited in a scholarly text.” “Round-Table Discussion [second edition],” 494. Somehow Taras Hunczak managed to misread this entirely: “I understand that when Aharon Weiss called Hanusiak’s work ‘utterly tendentious,’ John-Paul Himka came to Hanusiak’s defense.” Hunczak, “Problems of Historiography,” 136.
75 The organization was originally founded as the United Ukrainian Toilers Organization in 1924 and renamed the Union of Ukrainian Toilers in 1938 and the League of American Ukrainians in 1940. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, 184, 196.
76 This was Sam Pevzner, a writer who contributed to such communist publications as The Daily Worker and Jewish Life. He had been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a communist propagandist in 1958.
77 HDA SBU, fond 16, op. 4, spr. 2, tom 2, ff. 275-76.
78 Szcześniak and Szota’s book came out while I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Our library had a publication exchange with Poland and received a copy of the book before it was removed from circulation.
79 The kinds of sources made available by the momentous changes of 1989-91 will be described in the next chapter.
80 The fact that “today” (the mid-1980s) Volhynia “lies outside the Polish territory poses delicate political problems for Polish authors.” Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 4.
81 Mirchuk, Narys, 9. Herasymenko, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv, 4. Shankovs’kyi, Pokhidni hrupy, 184, 198, 266, 291, 302 nn. 100-01, 329. Shtul’, V im”ia pravdy, 7.
82 Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 316.
83 Ibid., 40, 48-49, 375, 382.
84 Ibid., 316-17.
85 Ibid., 374-75.
86 Himka, Review of Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung, 99.
87 Burds, “AGENTURA.” Burds, Early Cold War. Burds, “Gender and Policing.”
88 See 42, 105-10.
89 Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 152-56; quotations 156.
90 Marples, Heroes and Villains, 79-165.
91 Kul’chyts’kyi, Orhanizatsiia ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv i Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia. Fakhovyi vysnovok, 40.
92 Koval’, “Za shcho i z kym borolysia OUN-UPA.” Quotation, 92. Koval’s original report is reprinted in this article, 95-116. An entire section of Koval’s report, “What Did UPA Fight for?” (112-14), is simply a long extract from the OUN program of August 1943.
93 Khonigsman, Katastrofa l’vovskogo evreistva, 2.
94 Khonigsman, Katastrofa evreistva Zapadnoi Ukrainy, 76, 122.
95 Ibid., 113, 125.
96 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 203.
97 For example, Kovba sometimes suggested that the Poles, not the Ukrainians, were the real antisemites (e.g., 116). In her opinion, while the Polish and Jewish press printed tendentious accounts of the pogroms of 1917-20, Ukrainian publications offered “objective information” (29-30). She stated (29) that the “educated, tolerant Greek Catholic clergy was in its large majority free of antisemitic superstitions,” but see the attempt in 1930 to prove the reality of the blood libel by the young Basilian monk Irynei Nazarko, “Piznaimo zhydiv!” (After World War II Nazarko became an influential church historian in the Ukrainian diaspora.)
98 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 224, 228-29.
99 I have explored this theme also in “Debates in Ukraine,” 354, 356.
100 Polishchuk, Hirka pravda, 30-39, 215-16.
101 Ibid., 20-22, 25-26, 57, 245, 437-38.
102 Ibid., 10.
103 Kulińska, “Dowody zbrodni.”
104 Polishchuk, Integralny nacjonalizm ukraiński, vols. 3-5 (these volumes bear an additional title: Nacjonalizm ukraiński w dokumentach).
105 Polishchuk, Hirka pravda, 12, 26.
106 E.g., ibid., 22. His insistence on the innocence of the local Volhynian population and the guilt of the Galician nationalists led him to state categorically, and unfortunately incorrectly, that the local population of Volhynia took no part in the mass murder of the Jews, only the auxiliary police set up by OUN. Ibid., 342.
107 Marples, Heroes and Villains, 208. I also had been dismissive of Polishchuk’s publications until I began my own research on the role of OUN and UPA in the Holocaust; before then I had absorbed the negative opinions of colleagues in Ukrainian studies and had only consulted his works superficially. I changed my thinking about Polishchuk when I read him carefully and with an open mind.
108 Serhiichuk, Nasha krov—na svoii zemli, 4.
109 Shapoval, “Chy podolano ‘volyns’kyi syndrom’?”
110 Isaievych, “1943 rik.”
111 Torzecki, “Mav ia do dila z endets’kym murom.”
112 Wnuk, “Recent Polish Historiography,” 10.
113 Polishchuk in fact criticized Prus more than once in his publications. For example, he wrote that Prus was wrong to seek the reasons for Ukrainian nationalist atrocities “in genetic or cultural factors of the Ukrainian people.” Polishchuk, Integralny nacjonalizm ukraiński, 2:486.
114 The destruction battalions were militias that the Soviets organized to fight the nationalist insurgency after the reconquest of Western Ukraine. Many of the fighters were recruited from the Polish minority. On the battalions, see Statiev, Soviet Counterinsurgency, 209-29. Although these units are usually referred to as destruction battalions in the English-language literature, a more literal translation from the Russian would be exterminatory battalions.
115 Prus, Holocaust po banderowsku, 186-87.
116 Ibid., 156.
117 HDA SBU, fond 13, spr. 372, vol. 1, ff. 21-59.
118 “Vytiah z protokolu dopytu chlena tsentral’noho provodu OUN M. Stepaniaka,” Pol’shcha ta Ukraina u trydsiatykh-sorokovykh rokakh XX stolittlia, 220-72, 442-44.
119 As we will see below, 112-15, Stella Krenzbach and her memoir were Ukrainian nationalist fabrications.
120 Prus, Holocaust po banderowsku, 164.
121 Ibid., 189.
122 The Polish version appeared first, in 2000, the English version a year later.
123 Boll, “Złoczów” (2002); Bechtel, “De Jedwabne à Zolotchiv” (2005); Carynnyk, “Zolochiv movchyt’” (2005); Struve, “Ritual und Gewalt” (2005); Pohl, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Western Ukraine” (2007); Himka, “Dostovirnist’ svidchennia” (2008); Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Deadly Communities” (2010); Kruglov “Pogromy v Vostochnoi Galitsii” (2010); Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941” (2011); Lower, “Pogroms” (2011); Struve, “Rites of Violence?” (2012); Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence’“ (2013); Rossoliński-Liebe, “Der Verlauf und die Täter” (2013); Struve, “Tremors in the Shatter-Zone of Empires” (2013); Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence (2018).
124 Struve, Deutsche Herrschaft (2015).
125 Himka, “Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder” (2013); Kiebuzinski and Motyl, The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre (2017); Struve, “Masovi vbyvstva v”iazniv.” Among earlier works on the same subject are Gross, Revolution from Abroad (1988), 144-86, and Romaniv and Fedushchak, Zakhidnoukrains’ka trahediia (2002).
126 “The Ukrainians had never been considered pro-Jewish. Ukraine had been the scene of intermittent pogroms and oppression for 300 years. On the other hand, these people had no stamina for the long-range systematic German destruction process. Short violence followed by confession and absolution was one thing, organized killing was quite another.” Hilberg, Destruction, 545. Aside from the essentialism here, Hilberg seemed unaware that some Ukrainians had proven quite capable of long-range systematic and organized killing—of the Polish population of Volhynia and Galicia.
127 Shortly after Ordinary Men was published, Browning visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where Israeli scholars questioned his neglect of survivor testimony. Browning’s arguments in defense of his approach are well laid out in Browning, Collected Memories, 40-42.
128 “Christopher Browning Talks.”
129 Rossoliński-Liebe has also himself written several surveys of the historiography: “Debating, Obfuscating and Disciplining the Holocaust”; “Die anti-jüdische Massengewalt”; and “Survivor Testimonies.”
130 See Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond; Forum on Jan Gross’s Neighbors; Michlic, “Coming to Terms with the ‘Dark Past’”; Törnquist-Plewa, “The Jedwabne Killings.” The government of the rightist, nationalist Law and Justice Party in Poland initiated libel proceedings against Gross in 2015 and attempted to strip him of his Order of Merit in 2016, but backed down in the face of protests. At issue was not Neighbors alone, but two other books by Gross, Fear and Golden Harvest.
131 Pohl, review of “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen,” and Rudling, “Bogdan Musial and the Question of Jewish Responsibility.”
132 There is a sympathetic account of Kulchytsky’s career and the evolution of his views on the Holodomor which does not mention his contribution to the rehabilitation of OUN: Klid, “Stanislav Kulchytsky.”
133 There is an excellent study of the working group within the context of a wider discussion of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of historical commissions to resolve conflicts based on historical memory: Myshlovska, “Establishing the ‘Irrefutable Facts.’“
134 Kul’chyts’kyi, Problem OUN-UPA.
135 Kul’chyts’kyi, Orhanizatsiia ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv i Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia. Fakhovyi vysnovok.
136 Kul’chyts’kyi, Orhanizatsiia ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv i Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia. Istorychni narysy.
137 “Thus, the struggle of OUN-UPA was not about the destruction of the Poles as an ethnic minority on the territory of Ukraine, but about the removal of the ‘Polish factor’ as a weapon in the hands of the enemies of the Ukrainian liberation movement,” i.e., the Germans and the Soviet partisans. Kentii in Kul’chyts’kyi, Problem OUN-UPA, 89-90.
138 Kul’chyts’kyi, Orhanizatsiia ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv i Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armiia. Fakhovyi vysnovok, 3.
139 Amar et al., Strasti za Banderoiu. Arel, Ukraine List, nos. 441 and 442.
140 On historical politics in independent Ukraine, see Kasianov, “History, Politics and Memory.”
141 See McBride, “How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past”; McBride, “Who’s Afraid of Ukrainian Nationalism?” 657-62; Himka, “Legislating Historical Truth.”
142 Himka, “The Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum.”
143 The partnerships are featured on the Center’s website, www.cdvr.org.ua (accessed 12 October 2018).
144 V”iatrovych, Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv.
145 This is discussed in the next chapter, 112-15.
146 Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv?”
147 Bolianovs’kyi, Dyviziia “Halychyna”; Bolianovs’kyi, Ukrains’ki viis’kovi formuvannia.
148 Hrytsak, Strasti za natsionalizmom.
149 E.g., Rasevych, “L’vivs’kyi pohrom”; Rasevych, “Vyverty propahandy.”
150 Zaitsev, Ukrains’kyi integral’nyi natsionalizm.
151 Zaitsev, “Defiliada v Moskvi ta Varshavi”; Zaitsev, “Voienna doktryna.”
152 He has also written his own account of the historiography. Radchenko, “Ukrainian Historiography.”
153 Usach, “Chy mozhemo pochuty holos.”
154 Shliakhtych, “Arkhivno-slidchi spravy politsaiv”; Shliakhtych, “Stvorennia ta funktsionuvannia”; Shliakhtych, “Uchast’ mistsevoi dopomizhnoi politsii.”
155 Kolesnichenko, “Reabilitatsiia ta heroizatsiia.”
156 “Kolesnichenko vydav zbirnyk.” Solod’ko, “Iak Kolesnichenko oskandalyvsia.” “Kolesnichenko znovu potsupyv chuzhu pratsiu.”
157 Diukov, Vtorostepennyi vrag (two editions).
158 Bakanov, “Ni katsapa.”
2. Sources
The Increased Availability of Primary Sources
When I began my work as a historian in the early 1970s, conducting research was very different from what it is now. I wrote all my notes by hand on half-sheets of paper and all my bibliographic data on three-by-five index cards. I could photocopy texts and documents if I was working in the West, but photocopiers were not available in the communist bloc, where my most substantial research was undertaken. Microfilm and microfiche seemed to be the wave of the future, though now they seem mainly to take up valuable storage space in libraries and other repositories. I mention all this to underline just how different the world of research has become for scholars today. Had I been able to write this book, say, in the 1980s, my discussion of sources would have advanced from archive to archive, pointing out the relevant material that could be found in each.1 But now the physical location of documents is not as determinative as it once was.
This is especially true for Holocaust studies. Much of the documentation most relevant to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine was first microfilmed and later scanned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, and by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It is particularly easy to work with the materials at USHMM. On a trip there in spring 2018, it took me just a few hours to put thirteen thick volumes of Soviet Ukrainian war crimes trials on a USB drive.
Digitization has made a great difference to the work of a modern scholar. While tackling this project, I had vast source collections at my beck and call, including all the inestimably valuable survivor testimonies collected in Poland immediately after the war (the AŻIH collection) and the documentation on the wartime activities of OUN and UPA in Volhynia collected by Viktor Polishchuk. Both fit easily on an external hard drive. Colleagues in the field have also usually been generous in sharing documents among themselves, giving us all the opportunity to develop rather large personal collections of documentary material. Furthermore, an abundance of sources is available on the Internet: vast electronic libraries of Ukrainian and Polish periodicals and books (such as a collection of publications from the Ukrainian diaspora, http://diasporiana.org.ua/) and specialized document collections (such as the electronic archive of the Ukrainian liberation movement, which comprised about 25,000 documents in autumn 2018, http://avr.org.ua/).
There are now also numerous printed collections of documents. In the mid-1950s Roman Ilnytzkyj, who was associated with the dviikari, published a collection of primarily German documents concerning relations between OUN and the Third Reich. While the title of his work promised that the compilation would encompass events from 1934 to 1945, the two volumes that appeared extended only into early 1942.2 As John A. Armstrong noted, the collection was “highly partisan.”3 Philip Friedman pointed out a telling selective omission in Ilnytzkyj’s collection. Ilnytzkyj cited a German police summary of a letter sent from the Bandera faction of OUN to the Gestapo in Lviv in October 1941. The part Ilnytzkyj cited indicated that the Banderites were breaking with the Germans, but omitted the phrase: “Long live greater independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, and Germans. Poles behind the San, Germans to Berlin, Jews to the gallows.”4 This was typical of other source collections that emanated from the dviikari: they simply omitted or modified embarrassing passages and documents. For example, a collection of official OUN documents published in 19555 included portions of a text from May 1941, “Borot’ba i diial’nist’ OUN pidchas viiny” (The Struggle and Activities of OUN during the War). As we will see below,6 this document contained explicit instructions for OUN militants and security agents to “liquidate” and “neutralize” Jews in certain positions and to incite Red Army soldiers to murder Jews and Russians. But in the dviikari collection, “the passages about minorities were purged, without ellipses to mark the cuts.”7 Another example: in 1960 the dviikari published a small volume of documents about the NKVD murders of summer 1941.8 Some of the documents were taken from the wartime newspaper Krakivs’ki visti. I carefully compared all the texts that were reprinted in the said volume with the originals published in the newspaper. Several of the original articles were vehemently antisemitic, but the offending passages were all eliminated or modified in the compilation of reprinted pieces.9 Similar problems have dogged the documentary publications of OUN veteran Volodymyr Kosyk,10 although the four volumes that came out in Lviv at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s do not omit or modify particular passages as they include photoreproductions of the German originals.
Another documentary and monographic series important for its sheer size is the Litopys UPA, which issued fifty volumes in its “main series” and another twenty-four (as of 2014) in its “new series.” The volumes of the new series, which are academically superior to their predecessors, are all available online in the electronic library of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU).11 The series was initiated following a resolution of a congress of UPA veterans in 1973 to publish source materials on the nationalist army, and the first volume appeared in 1977 under the editorship of two UPA veterans, Peter J. Potichnyj and Yevhen Shtendera. Potichnyj had joined UPA as a fifteen-year-old child soldier; he cooperated with the dviikari in emigration and made an illustrious career in Ukrainian studies (he was a professor of political science at McMaster University in Canada). As one might expect of a veterans’ publication, it tended to paint events with extra glory on its palette and was reticent or apologetic when it came to matters of ethnic cleansing and participation in the Holocaust. Litopys UPA has also been caught out omitting material that showed the nationalist army releasing German soldiers and murdering national minorities.12
On the whole, the best collections of OUN-UPA documents have been published in independent Ukraine since the mid-1990s, using material from archives that were not open under communism. Though they vary somewhat in quality, they are reliable on the whole. They might alter orthography or transcribe incorrectly, but they are freer of the ideological interference that sullied collections published by OUNites in the diaspora. Even collections put together by nationalists in Ukraine have not exhibited squeamishness about antisemitism, xenophobia, and ethnic cleansing. We saw an instance of this in the previous chapter, in the confrontation of Lev Shankovsky’s idealized history of OUN-B in the Donbas with a post-Soviet documentary collection on the same topic.13 Even Volodymyr Serhiichuk, whom we have already met as an UPA apologist polemicizing with Viktor Polishchuk,14 included in his documentary collection on OUN-UPA a report from 1943 that frankly recounted that UPA had burned down a Polish village of eighty-six households, murdering all its inhabitants, and that it had completely cleansed another region in Volhynia of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche).15 Among the best of the post-Soviet Ukrainian source collections are Ukrains’ke derzhavotvorennia edited by Orest Dziuban and a series on OUN during the years of World War II edited by Oleksandra Veselova and others. There is also a two-volume source collection published in Moscow on OUN and UPA during World War II containing documents from archives in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and elsewhere.16
In summary, today documents relevant for research on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust are not as profoundly bound up with repositories in specific locations as they once were. A document that is in an archive in Ukraine might also be in Washington or Jerusalem, or in a scholar’s personal collection of digitized literature and sources, or available on the Internet, or reprinted in a source publication. For this reason, this chapter on sources is not organized by particular repositories, as once was traditional in East European studies, but rather by types of sources. And for our study, in which cognizance of the individual perspectives of any given source is mandatory, this procedure makes the most sense.
Documents
German Documents
As already explained in the previous chapter, documents emanating from various offices and military units of the Third Reich have enjoyed primacy in Holocaust studies since the early 1960s. Though an undue reliance on them had a distorting influence on the field, they are nonetheless indispensable, since it was nationalist socialist Germany that initiated and bore most responsibility for the genocide of the Jewish people. Also, the Germans documented their murderous activities in great detail. They felt they were undertaking, to use a Hegelian phrase, a deed of world-historical significance. They employed euphemisms, such as “Final Solution,” “special handling,” and “resettlement,” but they wrote clearly enough about the plans and progress of their project to destroy what they considered to be “the Jewish race.” They left a huge legacy of frank documentation, probably the most voluminous and transparent record of any genocidal operation in world history.
Particularly valuable for our purposes are reports from the Eastern front. Immediately after the invasion of the USSR, Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, began to issue reports to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on their activities.17 The first report, which was dated 23 June 1941, bore the title Sammelmeldung “UdSSR,” no. 1; but no. 2, which had the same date, was renamed Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (EM). Altogether 195 EMs were prepared, the last of which was dated 27 February 1942. Another set of similar reports was also submitted to the RSHA by the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and the Security Service (SD) in the occupied Soviet territories. These Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten began to appear on 5 January 1942; fifty-five were submitted, the last of which was dated 23 May 1943.18 These reports, in addition to documenting the progress of the Holocaust across Ukraine, also provided copious information on the activities of the Bandera movement.
The records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv have been especially useful, since they document the participation of the Ukrainian police in the major actions that destroyed the city’s Jewish population. There is a related, but rather scanty set of records on the militia that existed prior to the formation of the auxiliary police force. Both sets of records are housed in the State Archives of Lviv Oblast in Lviv19 but are difficult to access there; in spring 2011, a research assistant for this monograph was denied access to both sets of records.20 Fortunately, the most important police records, selected by Dieter Pohl, were microfilmed by USHMM,21 and the militia records were microfilmed in their entirety by the United States Office of Special Investigations; thus, I have been able to study them.22
Kai Struve made excellent use of German military records to shed light on the anti-Jewish violence in Galicia in summer 1941. In this monograph I rely extensively on his research in these records, although I occasionally cite original documents. I also make occasional use of the records of German trials of Nazi war criminals, again relying more on Struve’s research.
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, German documentation tended to emphasize the successes of the Reich’s policies in the occupied Soviet Union and thus understated such irritating phenomena as Jewish resistance and non-Jewish aid to Jews, especially in survey reports like the EMs and Meldungen.
It is important to be aware that all the German documentation from the national socialist era reflects events through a highly racialized, ruthlessly imperialist prism. Many of the German documents incorporate the mindset of mass murderers and have to be used with care; the documents themselves exclude the perspectives of victims, but historians using them should keep those victims in mind.
Soviet Documents
The most important Soviet sources for this monograph are the interrogation and trials of members of OUN and UPA, housed in the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kyiv (HDA SBU).23 These are problematic sources and require some care in interpretation. The minutes of the interrogations do not record the actual words used by the accused. Instead, they record summaries of each interrogation, translated into “Bolshevik speak,” using phrases the nationalists themselves would never employ.24 These minutes, however, were signed by the accused, who thereby assented to the correctness of the information provided by the summary. More problematic, however, is that the Soviet interrogators often extracted information under duress, in particular through sleep deprivation and beatings, but also through even more vicious means. In his study of the Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, Alexander Statiev wrote:
A party inspector described how policemen connected electrical wires from a field telephone to the hands of an interrogated man and produced electric shocks by rotating the handle. Some interrogators burned suspects’ skin with cigarettes. In March 1945, two police officers arrested without a warrant a Ukrainian woman they suspected of connection with the resistance and then interrogated her by placing her barefoot on a heated stove, severely burning her feet. When questioned by party inspectors, the policemen admitted that “grilling arrested persons on a stove...is a mediaeval method that should not be employed.” The interrogators received 10-year jail terms, but torture remained among the major means of investigation until the end of Stalinism despite numerous directives ordering the police to observe the law.25
Thus these sources, i.e., the Soviet interrogation records—like the German documents discussed above and some of the films and photos to be discussed below—carry the moral taint of criminality, and in using them, I feel, we have to retain some cognizance of the circumstances surrounding their production.
But can they be relied upon at all? I think so. In the 1930s, as is well known, Stalinist interrogators extorted all manner of nonsense from their intimidated victims. In those days the secret police worked with the assumption that anyone who was arrested must be guilty and they felt it their duty to extract confessions by whatever means necessary.26 As a result, they forced people to confess to nonexistent conspiracies, to falsely admit to espionage for various foreign countries, and to name names of the confederates they worked with in these nefarious but fictitious antistate activities. How were the interrogations of the late-war and postwar period any different? As I read the situation, the fundamental difference between the 1930s and the period from 1943 into the 1950s is that in the former time truth did not matter at all, but in the latter time truth was of paramount importance.
The Soviets knew very little of what was going on in Western Ukraine during the German occupation. This became very clear to me when studying a volume on the Greek Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky as he was reflected in the documents of Soviet security organs.27 The volume contains detailed reports on the churchman from the period of the “first Soviets,” i.e., the period from September 1939 until the end of June 1941, when Lviv was under Soviet rule. And again, there are many informative documents from the period after the Soviets regained Lviv in late July 1943 until Sheptytsky’s death in early November 1944. But there is very little material on the period of the German occupation, i.e., the time period in between, and what there is from that period is full of inaccuracies. To me this signals a breakdown of the Soviet intelligence network in Western Ukraine. The Soviets were unable to follow events there. And no other documents I have encountered elsewhere indicate otherwise. Yet, as the Red partisans moved westward in spring 1943, they found themselves engaging in battle with Banderite forces (UPA), armed guerrillas who enjoyed more support than did the former from the local Ukrainian population. And once the Red Army reconquered Galicia and Volhynia, they faced the eruption of a dangerous insurgency led by UPA and the OUN underground. As a result, when SMERSH and other Soviet security and counterintelligence units were interrogating captured Ukrainian nationalists, they were not interested in fake conspiracies and false confederates: they wanted to understand exactly what they were coming up against. And overall, the interrogators had no incentive to fabricate information about the murder of Jews, since the particular suffering of the Jewish population was not of interest to their superiors.
Furthermore, I have sometimes been able to corroborate information from the Soviet interrogations by comparing them with other, non-Soviet sources. I have also not run across any patently evident falsehoods in the interrogations. Diana Dumitru too accepts the general reliability of Soviet Moldavian interrogations from the same period based on her own triangulation with other sources.28 Vladimir Solonari, who worked with Soviet interrogations and trials from Moldavia and Bukovina, pointed to “plausible details of local life and death, such as the pillows that a killer brought from the killing site, a particular phrase that a Jew said before the execution of himself and his family, or what a perpetrator retorted to his neighbor when the latter rebuked him for his cruelty. It is highly unlikely that investigators would invent those details....”29 Alexander Prusin, who examined interrogations and trials from Ukraine and the Baltic area, concurred: “While the testimonies...do not give exact dates or numbers of victims, they provide relatively accurate descriptions of the Holocaust in various localities. These descriptions are corroborated by archival documents and modern studies. Hence, there is no reason why the interrogation and trial records—if combined with other available materials—should not be used as historical sources relating to the sites and instances of genocide.”30 Another analyst of these same records, Tanja Penter, essentially agreed. In spite of problems which she carefully identified, “trial records represent an extremely valuable resource for the study of Nazi occupation and crimes in occupied Soviet territories. They contain detailed descriptions of the Holocaust in different local settings, towns and villages, and of life in ghettos and camps.”31
The general validity of the information in Soviet interrogations was also accepted by the historical working group in Ukraine that provided the ammunition to rehabilitate OUN and UPA in the 1990s and early 2000s. Anatolii Kentii in particular used them for his work on OUN and UPA. Large extracts of these interrogations have also been published by the pro-UPA documentary series Litopys UPA.
Much of what has been said about interrogations also applies to Soviet trial records, but there are a few additional nuances. The records of trials, or simply of military tribunals, from the mid-1940s indicate to me that Soviet authorities in this era proceeded from some rough notions of justice—the courts and tribunals do not strike me as totally arbitrary. I was surprised, for instance, to discover in my research that accused war criminals, even members of OUN and UPA, were not convicted of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence. There had to be eyewitness testimony or other evidence to convict. Thus, if an OUN militia executed a group of Jews in the summer of 1941, a participant in that execution could state that he was present at the execution but did not shoot; if none of his comrades betrayed him, he was likely to be convicted not of murder but of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization. A conviction of murder could result in execution, but participating in an anti-Soviet organization generally brought a sentence of ten years in a labor camp. Also, after the end of the Great Terror, i.e., from 1938 onwards, Soviet judicial proceedings became more professional and less arbitrary.32
The other point to make about trials is that the records of the 1940s tend to be fairly brief. But sometimes cases were reopened later with an eye towards a deeper investigation of instances of mass murder, and these reopened cases produced quite voluminous files. An example is the case of Yakiv Ostrovsky a former Ukrainian policeman (Schutzmann) in Volhynia who deserted German service to join UPA. In July 1944 he turned himself into the NKVD and was interrogated by a famous Soviet partisan leader, Aleksandr Saburov. Over the course of his interrogation, Ostrovsky freely admitted to killing people as a policeman, but “not many—twenty-five to thirty people.” Yet when sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in 1945, he was convicted not of murder, but of treason (as a policeman working for the Germans) and of membership in a counterrevolutionary organization (UPA). The case, however, was reopened in 1981. I suspect this happened in the context of growing global interest in the Holocaust and the Soviets’ realization at that time of the propaganda value of linking Ukrainian nationalism to the murder of Jews.33 In any case, new evidence came to light that allowed Ostrovsky’s case to be reopened. It turned out that there had been an eyewitness after all to Ostrovsky killing Jews in an extermination action of 1942. The testimony had been recorded in July 1944, actually a day before Ostrovsky had turned himself in to the NKVD. But this testimony had been given not to the NKVD, but instead to the Extraordinary State Commission, the procedures and documents of which will be discussed immediately below. The lack of communication between the two Soviet investigative units meant that the relevant eyewitness testimony had not been considered at Ostrovsky’s original trial. The eyewitness was a non-Jew who had been forced to bury the victims of the execution action, some of whom were still alive as he buried them. He had named Ostrovsky as one of the shooters. Ostrovsky was put on trial again in 1982, and much more evidence was brought to bear; this time Ostrovsky was convicted of murder and executed in the following year.34
Aside from investigation and trial records, another large collection of Soviet documentation relevant to our study are the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR. Established in 1942, its purpose was “to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this field, to reveal the names of war criminals, and to publish official reports on their findings.”35
There were two tendencies in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission that affected how OUN and UPA were represented in its documentation. First, the Commission was interested in ascribing as much destruction and murder to the Germans as possible, with the aim of receiving large reparations. Second, the Commission avoided disturbing the image of a united Soviet people that resisted the fascist onslaught. Both of these factors led to downplaying the role of local, non-German accomplices. For example, the Commission compiled a list of persons responsible for war crimes committed in Lviv. Of the 69 persons on the list, only 3 were non-Germans,36 although we know that the Ukrainian National Militia and later the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were deeply involved in mass murder in the city. However, the Commission’s investigations at the local, i.e., raion, levels were more open to information about local collaborators in Nazi crimes. But when summaries of these reports were drafted at the oblast level, the activities of non-German accomplices were often edited out. The higher the level of summary, the lower the profile of non-German perpetrators.
Moreover, the Commission’s work was, as Solonari noted, “very uneven: in some districts it worked thoroughly, in others less so. Sometimes it could rely on relatively qualified personnel, but quite often barely literate party activists performed the entire task.”37 An example of the unreliability that Solonari describes appeared in the Commission’s investigation of a horrendous pogrom in Hrymailiv (P Grzymałów), north of Husiatyn in Ternopil oblast, in which many young Ukrainian men of the town participated. Relying on local witnesses, the Commission stated that SS officer Daniel Nerling participated in the pogrom, which occurred on 5 July 1941.38 However, as we know from Nerling’s trial in Lübeck in 1969, he did not arrive in Hrymailiv until late October 1941.39
On the more positive side, as Solonari also noted, the Commission would sometimes “collect handwritten accounts of the survivors or eyewitnesses and attach them to their minutes or would transcribe verbal testimony that contained vivid descriptions of the killing operations.”40 As we have seen, one of the eyewitness accounts in a Commission report led to the reopening of the trial of the policeman Ostrovsky in 1981.
One aspect of testimonies recorded by the Extraordinary Commission and similar bodies was always marred by outright falsification, namely testimony that concerned crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets themselves. A disturbing case of this involved the historian Friedman. In 1946 he testified to both the Extraordinary Commission and the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War that the Germans had rounded up Jews when they took Lviv on 30 June 1941, shot them in prisons, disguised their nationality, and blamed the episode on the NKVD. Here are his exact words: “The destruction of the Jews in the city of Lviv began from the first day of the arrival of the Germans, that is, on 30 June 1941. Moreover, at the very beginning the Germans conducted this destruction as a provocation. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Germans led a portion of the Jewish population to the prisons and shot them there....At the same time they pursued a second aim: to present this as an example of the ‘bestial crimes’ of the NKVD, which before its departure from Lviv was allegedly shooting political prisoners.”41 In his subsequent published scholarly work Friedman did not repeat the falsehood of a German provocation and correctly indicated that the corpses in the prisons were victims of the Soviets.42 Similarly, the Soviets recorded testimony of a captured German Wehrmacht officer, Erwin Bingle, that blamed the Soviet mass murders at Vinnytsia from 1936-38 on the German SS and Ukrainian police.43 Again, the murdered political prisoners were presented as murdered Jews. Bingle called the “frame-up” “baseless and utterly ridiculous.”44 Of course, the Soviets were unwilling to wash their bloody laundry in public but quite willing to add their own murders to the Germans’ account, so they induced testimony that served their purposes. This was part of a general policy, the most notorious incident of which was blaming the Germans for the mass murder of Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940 at Katyń.
I found of particular value to my research a set of documents that were sent to the highest echelons of the Soviet Ukrainian communist party in the years 1943-44, as the Soviets entered and reconquered Western Ukrainian territory. These documents had various provenances, but what united them was that they contained information considered worthy of the notice of the top Soviet Ukrainian leadership. Many of these documents concerned OUN and UPA. Like the interrogation documents, these materials were also aimed at trying to understand what was happening. Of course, reports and analyses understood events through a Soviet ideological prism, but materials in this collection also included captured OUN and UPA documents, copies of the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, and even the fascinating diary of a young man drafted into UPA.45
Information on UPA can also be found in the reports of the Soviet partisans who encountered them.
OUN Documents
There is a great variety of OUN and UPA documentation. Wartime OUN and UPA had well developed administrative structures that generated masses of documents. Some have been preserved by OUN members in the diaspora and have ended up in published collections as well as in archives, libraries, and museums across North America and Europe. But the richest trove is in archives in Ukraine, comprised primarily of documentation captured by the Soviets. Occasionally, too, OUN-UPA archives buried in containers for more than half a century have been unearthed.46
The most official of the OUN documents are the resolutions of the organization’s congresses and conferences as well as various programmatic documents. But aside from these, there are many other kinds of documents, including:47
drafts of programmatic documents;
transcripts of meetings;
orders and instructions to units of UPA and OUN’s security service (SB OUN);
field reports from units of UPA and SB OUN;
SB OUN interrogation records;
materials from OUN-UPA training courses;
memoranda of both factions of OUN to various German offices;
proclamations and announcements to the population.
In using OUN-UPA documents, an important factor to consider is to whom a particular document is addressed. Leader Stepan Bandera himself stated: “One program should be addressed to the members and sympathizers of nationalism, and the second for external factors. The first should be the main credo for members and sympathizers. The second program should exist for external consumption. It can change according to the circumstances and external situation.”48 Particularly with regard to documents aimed for external audiences, it is necessary to consider the time and context in which documents emerged. There were moments when OUN was close to the Germans, other moments when they were enemies, yet other moments when OUN hoped to court the Western allies. In 1941 OUN was optimistic that the Germans would be victorious, but this ceased to be the case by 1943. Earlier, OUN competed ideologically with the Germans; later it did so with the Soviets. After it became clear that Germany would lose the war and that OUN’s participation in the mass murder of Jews would blemish its reputation with the Western allies, OUN-B undertook to revise the historical record. On 27 October 1943, the OUN leadership in Ukraine issued an order to compile
c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out executions, urged the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confirm with their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.
d. Material that would clearly confirm that Poles had initiated and taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms....49
The order was sent “in strictest confidence” to “the oblast, circle, and county leaders” of OUN.
Also, we know that not every order was written down, and sometimes we have to interpret the course and meanings of actions without documentation from OUN-UPA itself.
Yet in spite of efforts to dissemble and to doctor history, OUN produced written documents that testify to antisemitism, the pursuit of ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Jews.
Other Documentation
The USHMM has the stenographer’s minutes of denaturalization hearings conducted by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s of persons accused of having served as Ukrainian policemen under the Nazi occupation.50 Useful in these documents is the witness testimony. Among those who testified are former Ukrainian policemen, their relatives, and Jewish survivors. They provide information that helps us better understand not only the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in German service, but also the Ukrainian National Militia connected with OUN-B.
The Eastern Bureau of the Polish underground government reported on the situation in Galicia (“Eastern Little Poland” in its terminology) and Volhynia in 1943-44.51
Documentation of armed forces and governments other than those of the Germans and the Soviets who were active on Ukrainian territory during World War II has not been consulted for this study. But other scholars have made use of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak documentation; where relevant I cite it from their work.
Memoirs, Testimonies, Diaries
Jewish Testimony
Before his demise in Majdanek death camp, the Jewish historian Ignacy Schiper stated: “What we know about murdered peoples is only what their murderers vaingloriously cared to say about them. Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of the war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders.”52 The defeat of Nazi Germany prevented the scenario that Schiper feared, but the decades-long hegemony of Nazi documentaton in Holocaust research in the West has occluded for too long the input of the targeted victims. The memoirs, testimonies, and diaries of Jews who experienced the Holocaust comprise a huge and informative body of source material that needs to be taken into consideration by historians. As is the case for all the other sources discussed so far, the understanding and use of these particular sources require an awareness of their specific biases and limitations.
Jan Gross, as already explained, has been a champion of testimony, and his book Neighbors sparked a growing interest in the use of testimony in Holocaust studies in the West and in postcommunist Europe. In Neighbors he made a bold and controversial statement on the subject:
...I suggest that we should modify our approach to sources for this period. When considering survivors’ testimonies, we would be well advised to change the starting premise in appraisal of their evidentiary contribution from a priori critical to in principle affirmative. By accepting what we read in a particular account as fact until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary, we would avoid more mistakes than we are likely to commit by adopting the opposite approach, which calls for cautious skepticism toward any testimony until an independent confirmation of its content has been found.53 The greater the catastrophe, the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss....54
Clearly this passage was carefully formulated, and so it has to be as carefully read. I am not sure that critics have been doing that. Gross was writing about historical likelihood, not proof. I therefore would disagree with the way Christopher R. Browning has criticized it. He wrote that in cases in which “there is only a handful of survivors, this [Gross’s approach] is a tempting proposition. But however tempting, this default position still strikes me as too low an evidentiary threshold.”55 My own view is identical with that of Omer Bartov: “From the point of view of the historian, the single most important benefit of using testimonies is that they bring into history events that would otherwise remain completely unknown, since they are missing from more conventional documentation found in archives and mostly written by the perpetrators or organizers of genocide. Hence personal accounts can at times save events from oblivion.”56 In this book I will, as far as possible, triangulate sources, so that testimonies do not stand alone.
One persistent problem of victim narrative is how pervaded it is by trauma. Jewish testimony on the Holocaust expresses a traumatic subjectivity, reflecting deeply disturbing personal experience. The “subjectivity or emotionality” of eyewitness testimony has been one of the factors leading to the preference for putatively objective archival documents.57 The main concern about horror and anger influencing survivor accounts seems to be the possibility that they might embellish or exaggerate. In my view, these same possibilities affect all sources, and I cannot agree with the proposition that what a murderer had to say is automatically more reliable than what a victim said. In this study I will frequently cite victim testimony and will leave it to the reader to judge whether it makes sense or not.
Another problem with victim accounts is that they express perspectives from a limited field of vision. Raul Hilberg and his successors in Holocaust studies preferred to work with German sources, among other reasons because the Germans had an overall, bird’s-eye view of the operations that constituted their plan to kill all Jews. Such a viewpoint lent authority to the German documentation. Survivor testimony, by contrast, was fragmented into individual personal experiences in numerous localities. Moreover, victims occupied a particular perspectival niche in the Holocaust. As Shmuel Spector put it: “...testimonies, their proximity to the events notwithstanding, are grounded in subjective perceptions; regardless of how much the witnesses strain to adhere to the truth, their field of vision remains, by necessity, narrow and restricted. Confined in the ghettoes and isolated from the society at large, Jews were in no position to obtain information about the outside world in general and the backrooms of the decision makers in particular.”58 In an earlier publication I analyzed a testimony taken shortly after the war by comparing what it said about events in the Lviv pogrom to photographic evidence of these same events. I did not find any contradiction between the testimony and the pictures and films. The testimony, I concluded, accurately described what the woman who wrote it experienced. I did note, however, that she was unable to learn much about the pogromists who attacked her.59 Similarly, Alexander Prusin, writing of witnesses in Soviet war crimes trials, recorded that “only a few were able to identify the defendants or the units that carried out the murders.”60
One result of this lack of knowledge about specific perpetrators was a tendency in testimony and memoirs to generalize. In the cases Prusin examined, a number of witnesses “identified the perpetrators merely as ‘Germans,’ or ‘the Gestapo.’“61 Many of the testimonies describing events in Ukrainian-inhabited territories refer to the perpetrators simply as “Ukrainians.” Part of the task of this study is to sort out the actions of a particular group of perpetrators, OUN and its armed forces, from that of the general population of Ukrainians. Frank Golczewski, who wrote an important study of collaboration in the Holocaust on the territory of Ukraine, has emphasized the need for scholars to avoid generalization: “Who were these Ukrainians? If we here, as if it were something so apparently obvious, write about the behavior of an entire ethnic group, then it is from the outset problematic.”62 But for some survivors, such distinctions have been difficult to make, and there is concern on the part of some Holocaust scholars that testimony “may be affected by antipathy toward members of other groups.”63 As a result of traumatic experience, some survivors even have a physical aversion to the German, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian language. The cognitive psychologist Robert Kraft explained this phenomenon as follows:
These responses are not the result of thoughtful resentment. They arise from implicit connections in core memory between the survivors’ specific memories of trauma and the language of their tormentors. Prolonged trauma splits the self-concept, creating two separate selves, each supported by different memories that remain irreconcilable. When events in the world bring together these two sets of memories—Holocaust and post-Holocaust—this connection threatens the survivor’s current self-concept, creating a powerful emotional response.64
There is also the issue of accuracy. In another publication I compared three testimonies about the same incident, the mass execution of Jews in Tovste (P Tłuste), north of Zalishchyky in Ternopil oblast. These were two testimonies from Jewish survivors a few years after the war and an interview I had taken myself in 2008 with a Ukrainian eyewitness. Numerous details were remembered differently—the number of Jews that were shot at one time, whether they stood on a plank or walked directly into the pit, the total number of victims, and so on. But all agreed on the main points: at least a thousand Jews were marched in groups through the town to the cemetery and shot there by the Germans.65 I think that this is what we may expect of testimonies and memoirs—that they record the main points but cannot be relied upon for exact detail. Working with testimonies and memoirs, and not just Jewish ones or those related to the Holocaust, I have found that not infrequently specific dates and even years are incorrect.
For this study, I have relied most of all on three sets of Jewish survivor testimonies, each with its own virtues: the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH), videotaped testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation, and published memoirs.
The Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH) has two fonds of relevance. Fond (Zespół) 301 has about seventy-two hundred testimonies in Polish, Yiddish, and other languages from Jews who survived the Holocaust on Polish or formerly Polish territory. Most of the testimonies I will be citing from this collection were taken within a few years of the end of the war, and this temporal proximity to the events described is one of the major strengths of this set of sources. The testimonies are short, averaging about ten pages.66 A noteworthy feature of them is that most were recorded by staff from the Central Jewish Historical Commission,67 who summarized what the survivors said and put their accounts into narrative form, sometimes endowing them with a genuine literary appeal. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has published a guide to these testimonies, with a most helpful geographical index.68 There is also another fond, 302, which comprises just over three hundred and thirty longer, essentially book-length memoirs.
The testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (abbreviated as Shoah Foundation in footnotes) are quite different. If there is a certain distance between the survivor and his or her testimony in the AŻIH collection, this disappears in the Shoah Foundations testimonies, which take the form of videos of the survivors themselves telling their stories in their own words. These personally narrated accounts often make a powerful impact on viewers. This is a vast collection of over fifty thousand survivor testimonies that are generously indexed: one can search by name and place, of course, but also by keywords (e.g., Ukrainians, UPA). The testimonies are in many languages and come from all over the globe. Each Shoah Foundation interview has been divided into numbered segments, which I refer to in the notes. Almost all these interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1999, which has its disadvantages but also a certain advantage.
The advantage is that the 1990s was when the former Soviet Union was just opening up, and many survivors were telling their stories for the first time. Recording their experiences would simply not have been possible earlier. The disadvantage, of course, is the distance in time from the Holocaust, a half century or more. As we know, these old memories could have been influenced by subsequent experience, books written by other survivors, and by films about the Holocaust. Certainly these kinds of problems plagued German memory in the same period.69 Moreover, videotaping Holocaust testimony was intimately connected with television and film. Thus another major collection that began collecting earlier than the Shoah Foundation, namely the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, was inspired by the television miniseries The Holocaust, which was aired in 1978, a year before the inception of what became the Fortunoff Archive. And the sponsor of the Shoah Foundation was Steven Spielberg, the director of the blockbuster film Schindler’s List. Annette Wieviorka found this “troubling”: “Two fictional films dealing with the genocide, viewed by dozens, even hundreds, of millions throughout the world, were also at the origin of the two most important testimony archives.”70
My own experience has been that these later testimonies are generally as reliable as the early testimonies collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission. When I have had the opportunity to compare testimony from the same person over several decades, I have found much more consistency than discrepancy.71 Browning, when he began using testimonies for his project on the Starachowice slave labor camp, was surprised to discover that over time testimonies revealed “a firm core of shared memory” and that his expectations for greater change “were not realized.”72 Shmuel Spector has argued that later testimonies can be superior to their earlier versions: “A comparison of the different versions of the testimony given by the same witness, who related his or her story at different stages of evidence collection, reveals that the testimony given soon after the events it pertained to is not always the most reliable one. The main reason for this is that at that time some of the witnesses had not yet recovered from the horrors they had lived through; only later...they managed to leave them behind and their testimony became more objective and orderly.”73
Kraft, the cognitive psychologist who studied the videotaped testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive, stated that “those survivors who returned to the [Fortunoff] archive a second time—in most cases, eight years after their first extended recall—gave testimony that was remarkably consistent in structure and content with the earlier testimony.”74 He explained this consistency from the perspective of his discipline:
In the study of Holocaust testimony, the most pervasive finding about memory for atrocity is its extraordinary persistence. Specific memories can remain vivid and powerful for more than fifty years, causing people to cry suddenly, to break down uncontrollably, to become angry. Core memories can remain unchanged over very long periods of time, and memories can intrude forcefully into the consciousness of the individual....One consensus among cognitive theorists is that “memory is always dual.” That is, the present self is aware of the past self experiencing the world....With survivors of atrocity, however, the subjective experience of memory is not always dual. Sometimes, when describing a scene, survivors may be drawn into core memory, losing contact with narrative memory and becoming immersed in visualizing the events of the past....When a person is fully visualizing, or ‘back there,’ as the survivors often say, the past self becomes the present self.
The third body of testimonies used in this study consists of Jewish memoirs produced independently of AŻIH and the Shoah Foundation. I systematically examined the memoir collection in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I was able to also supplement with additional items. I found that these memoirs, emanating from different people in different countries for over half a century, told the same basic story. There are also many testimonies contained in the memorial, yizkor books, many of which are also cited in the pages that follow.
Survivors’ testimonies are somewhat unusual, since most Jews who remained on Ukrainian territory during World War II did not survive. We are fortunate that a few diaries of persons who perished in the Holocaust have been preserved and published.75
Ukrainian historians with a nationalist perspective discount or deny the evidential value of Jewish, and also Polish, testimonies about OUN and UPA. This is not surprising, but it is necessary to note that these same historians give great weight to Ukrainian testimonies about the manmade famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, which took about four million lives in Ukraine. In fact, until the last days of communism and the opening of the archives, oral testimony was the only source that documented that terrible event. And even today, testimony remains a crucial source in understanding the famine. There exists then within Ukrainian studies a double stan-dard with regard to testimony for which there is no intellectual justification.
Polish Accounts
Many Poles had been living in Galicia and Volhynia when war broke out in September 1939. The Soviets deported some of them, particularly persons associated with the former government and the economic elite, to the interior of the Soviet Union. Then, in 1943, UPA began to kill Polish civilians in mass operations, at first throughout Volhynia, then later in Galicia. Most of the Poles who survived in Ukraine after the war were resettled to Poland over the next few years by the Soviet authorities. During the ethnic cleansing campaign, Poles formed self-defense units that fought UPA, sometimes independently, but sometimes in cooperation with the Germans and the Soviets. During the Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, many ethnic Poles were recruited for the destruction battalions that were engaged against UPA. (As noted in the previous chapter, the propagandist Edward Prus had served in such a battalion.) Within the territory of People’s Poland, campaigns against UPA were also conducted, and in 1947 the Ukrainian population of southeastern Poland was resettled to the west, to the former German territories annexed to the new Polish state (the Vistula Operation, Akcja Wisła). Thus many Poles were witnesses to what transpired in Galicia and Volhynia during the war, and they have preserved many written records and produced a large number of testimonies referring to the eastern borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie). As one would expect, these records and testimonies are hostile to OUN-UPA, but they are not particularly Judeophilic either. They constitute an additional body of sources relevant to Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, I was not able personally to work in the largest repository of these Polish materials, namely the Eastern Archive (Archiwum Wschodnie) of the Karta Center in Warsaw, with branches in Poznań, Wrocław, and abroad. So I have had to confine myself to secondary literature which does make use of these materials (e.g., works by Bogdan Musiał and Timothy Snyder). But I have carefully gone through the two-volume collection of summarized testimonies compiled by Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko on “the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists on the Polish population of Volhynia 1939-45.”76 There are many references in it to the fate of the Jews. I also had the opportunity to read the wartime diary of Tadeusz Zaderecki, a Pole who had published a number of short, popular books on Judaism in the 1930s and who lived in Lviv during the war years.77 Zaderecki’s diary was edited by David Kahane and Aharon Weiss and published in a Hebrew translation in 1982, but I have used the Polish original at Yad Vashem.78 Yad Vashem also recently published an English translation.79 The diary is permeated with an anti-Ukrainian animus, but it remains an important source on the Holocaust in Lviv.
Ukrainian Accounts
I have made every effort to consult as many relevant accounts by Ukrainians as I could, but for the most part, Ukrainian memoirs avoid the topic of the Holocaust. Shmuel Spector wrote of them: “...quite a few of the Ukrainians who after the war fled to the countries of Western Europe had collaborated with the Nazis, including active participation in the murder of Jews, either as policemen or as officials of the Nazi administration. Their memoirs and articles written after the war ignore completely the Jewish issue. There are even individuals seeking to present the authors of these memoirs as those who had saved Jews or helped them in their predicament.”80 This is too all-encompassing a generalization, but it does represent the bulk of what the historian finds in Ukrainian memoirs.
The Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest in 1947, which resulted in the submission of 64 memoirs. Not all are extant, but of those that are, 25 concerned the World-War-II period; of these, 14 mentioned, at least briefly, the Holocaust. As I wrote in the abstract to my published analysis of them:
This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behaviour towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The majority of the 1947 memoirs nonetheless indicated horror at and disapproval of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Perhaps characteristically, the account expressing the strongest such feelings was written by an older man from outside Western Ukraine. Conversely, the most outright expression of lack of sympathy with the Jews came from a man twelve years younger and from Galicia.81
I have examined carefully many of the memoirs of World War II collected by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (UCRDC) in Toronto.82 This is an institution with a generally nationalist perspective, emphasizing Ukrainian victimhood and Ukrainian rescue efforts during the Holocaust and maintaining silence about Ukrainian perpetration.83 Among items to be found here are the memoirs of a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police; they are several hundred pages long and do not once mention the Holocaust.84 Still, the memoirs provide information and context that have been useful for this study.
In May and June 2009 my daughter Eva Himka conducted interviews for me with twenty elderly nationalists in Lviv. They denied any Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust at all, saying that Ukrainians uniformly sympathized with the Jews and only Germans and Poles killed Jews. The Ukrainian police were harmless and patriotic. UPA did not kill Jews and only fought a defensive war against the Poles. In their view, their own suffering, personal and national, at the hands of the Soviets was a more important story than what happened to the Jews. They still viewed Jews as communists and exploiters who inflicted the famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, on the Ukrainian people.85
A major project of gathering Ukrainian testimonies has been undertaken by Father Patrick Desbois and his institution Yahad-In Unum founded in 2004. His team has been crisscrossing Ukraine to videotape eyewitnesses to the murder of the Jews. In Galicia the eyewitnesses they contacted were sometimes nationalists, e.g., one was a member of the Melnyk faction in Lviv,86 another was a member of the Bandera group and had been his village’s liaison with OUN,87 and another was a member of the village administration set up by OUN (he ran the post office).88 But there were also testimonies from Galicia and Volhynia that described events from a more neutral perspective and sometimes mentioned Ukrainian participation in killings. Testimonies from the territory of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine are much more forthcoming about how the local population was drawn into the killing process. The USC Shoah Foundation also took some testimony from Ukrainian rescuers.89
Interesting texts that described the Holocaust in Lviv were written by Mariia Strutynska during and just after the war. One was the diary she began on 10 August 1941 and continued until 22 December 1949,90 and another was a novel that she wrote in 1947 that was set during the first Soviet occupation of Galicia in 1939-41 and the first days of the German occupation.91
Unique among the Ukrainian ego-documents on the Holocaust is Yevhen Nakonechny’s memoir of the “Shoah in Lviv.”92 Beautifully written, it described the destruction of Lviv’s Jews from the point of view of a child, which Nakonechny had been at the time. His childhood friends and neighbors, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust. He wrote with great sympathy for the victims. At the same time, he denied Ukrainian participation in these murders and excoriated “Ukrainophobes,” such as the historian Eliyahu Yones, who thought otherwise. Nakonechny himself had been arrested as a member of an OUN youth group in 1949, at the age of seventeen, and he spent the next six years in the gulag. In his memoir he defended the innocence of OUN, even denying its antisemitism. It is a strange, but captivating book.93
Photographs and Films
Before the outbreak of the Second World War amateur photographers in Germany owned seven million cameras, and when the war broke out many German soldiers brought their cameras with them. It has been estimated that they took several million pictures in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.94 Like many soldiers, they were interested in atrocity photos; often, they made multiple copies to share, sell, or trade. In addition, official film crews, attached to particular military units or working for the propaganda ministry, made stills and movies of what they saw. One result of this is that historians have access to many photos and films that document the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, including on Ukrainian territories. Major repositories of photos and films related to the Holocaust are the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) and the USHMM. A famous series of photos documenting the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941 is held by the Wiener Library in London. The prominent Philadelphia journalist David Lee Preston is a collector of materials, including photos, relating to Lviv during the Holocaust. Preston’s mother survived the war in the sewers of Lviv;95 and he has been very generous in allowing me to peruse and use his collection. A former master’s student of mine, Arianna Selecky, discovered previously unknown footage of the Lviv pogrom in 2008 at the UCRDC in Toronto; it was taken by a photographer attached to the First Alpine Division (1. Gebirgs-Division). The original celluloid film has disappeared, but a digital copy is available at USHMM.96
Although these films and photos are of historical importance, they have to be used carefully and respectfully. As Georgii Shepelev has noted: “Practically speaking, every photograph is not only a document but the photographer’s choice of subject, point of view, and often—staging.” And: “taking a photograph often turns out to be an act of demonstrating domination.”97 This is very much the case with pogrom photos. The prurient interests of some photographers come through clearly in images of sexual assault and forced nakedness, especially during the Lviv pogrom. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “one might well argue that pedagogy demands that the worst be shown, one might also worry about the violation inherent in such displays: these women are doomed in perpetuity to be displayed in the most humiliating, demeaning, dehumanizing position.”98 In my opinion, the act of photographing sexual violence constituted participation in the violence. This view resonates with the testimony of one of the victims of the violence, Róża Wagner: The Germans “walked around with the faces of rulers and photographed the tormented naked women: ‘This will be in Der Stürmer’; they were happy that their compatriots would have the opportunity to look at the feats of their husbands and sons.”99 So in using these photographs—and this applies to photographs also of humiliation, physical assault, and murder—we must be cognizant of the tainted circumstances of their production and of the perspective that they convey to the viewer.
The photographs discussed above are useful for establishing and interpreting the role of OUN militiamen in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941. It is important to note that all these photographs were taken by the Germans, not by members of OUN themselves; later, when relations between OUN and the Germans became strained, there were no German photographers to record atrocities committed by the nationalists. This may well be one of the reasons why I have been unable to find photographs of OUN’s activities in 1943-44 of direct utility to this study. Hundreds of photos of UPA are available for viewing online, but almost all of them are posed individual and mostly collective portraits, souvenirs for comrades-in-arms. There are also photographs of Polish victims of UPA, but I know of no photographic evidence of any Jewish actions undertaken by UPA.
Periodical Press
I have consulted many newspapers and periodicals of the 1930s and 1940s: OUN publications from the entire period, the legal Ukrainian press under Nazi occupation, and postwar periodicals from displaced persons’ camps in Germany and the POW camp in Rimini (where soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien were interned). Much of this research was conducted in the Stefanyk library in Lviv and at Oseredok in Winnipeg. Many Ukrainian periodicals are available online at libraria.ua.
Most useful for this study was the OUN press. The party organ Rozbudova natsii came out legally in Prague in 1928-34 and was smuggled into Ukrainian territories in Poland and Romania. It was a venue for open debate and fresh ideas, within, of course, the limits of nationalist discourse. Though it provides many insights into the evolution of OUN thinking, it represented the émigré leadership more than the activists and militants in Galicia and Volhynia. I think one gets a better feel for the latter reading the OUN popular press that came out of Galicia. Nove Selo was a weekly newspaper that came out in Lviv in 1930-39; aimed at the peasantry, it contained much practical advice related to agriculture but also carried articles of a more ideological nature. OUN also briefly managed to publish a fortnightly newspaper aimed at workers. Homin baseinu, intended for workers in the Boryslav oil basin, came out in Drohobych (P Drohobycz) in 1937 and was renamed Homin kraiu in December of that year; it lasted until the beginning of June 1938. The workers’ paper featured many articles aimed against communism and the Soviet Union. Analysis of the Soviet Union was the specialty of the monthly Het’ z bol’shevyzmom edited by Ivan Mitrynga. Only three issues of the journal came out, but it shows how seriously the Mitrynga group followed events in Soviet Ukraine and in the Soviet Union as a whole; Het’ z bol’shevyzmom published academic Sovietology from a nationalist perspective. In 1942-46 OUN-B published an illegal, underground periodical, Ideia i chyn. It contained ideological articles, nationalist propaganda, and news.
The legal Ukrainian-language press that came out during the German occupation of Ukraine was often at least loosely affiliated with nationalist circles and sometimes, especially at the beginning of the occupation, served essentially as OUN organs. We have already seen an example of the latter from the Donbas in the previous chapter.100 Volyn’, which came out in Rivne (P Równe) under the editorship of Ulas Samchuk, and Ukrains’ke Slovo, which came out in Kyiv under the editorship of Ivan Rohach, were both initially under the control of the Melnyk faction of OUN. But in February 1942 much stricter German censorship was introduced and leading nationalists in the press were repressed. Samchuk was arrested and Rohach executed; Olena Teliha, a major Ukrainian poet who contributed to both newspapers, was also executed.101 Krakivs’ki visti, which appeared under the auspices of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubijovyč, was a cut above the other legal papers culturally and intellectually; it was loosely affiliated with the Melnyk faction as well and, like all the occupation papers, published antisemitic propaganda in abundance.102 The Banderites initially controlled a weekly newspaper in Zboriv (P Zborów), Ternopil oblast, Zborivs’ki visti, which published for the first time the text of the declaration of 30 June 1941 proclaiming the renewal of Ukrainian statehood.
I examined numerous Ukrainian newspapers and periodicals published in displaced persons’ camps and the POW camp in Rimini (1945-49). The general tone in this press was quite depressing. The Ukrainians who had followed the Germans out of Ukraine before the Red Army’s advance saw their world collapsing. Not only had the Soviets returned to Ukraine and so many conscious Ukrainians become displaced to the West, but there was plenty of other bad news: communists coming to power throughout Eastern Europe, the suppression of the Greek Catholic church, the famine of 1946, the resettlement of the Ukrainian population in Poland, and the suppression of UPA in Poland and repression of its adherents. The Ukrainians in the camps were overwhelmed by their own memories of suffering and struggle and the bleak prospects for the future. The Ukrainians positioned themselves now as virulently anti-German, their initial flirtation with the Germans being presented as an honest error. And they remained anti-Soviet.
I was curious if the immediately postwar Ukrainian press continued to publish antisemitic articles and discovered that overt antisemitic statements had almost disappeared, even though many of the same journalists continued to work in the new environment. Although occasionally concerned with Polish-Ukrainian relations, Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the issue of the Holocaust and Ukrainian participation in it were hardly mentioned at all. What was developing, however, was a defense of Ukrainian behavior with regard to the Jews, although, as I’ve said, the issue was rarely treated at all.
There may well be more, but I found only two articles that confronted the stance of Ukrainians in the Holocaust. One was written in 1947 by Volodymyr Yaniv, an OUN activist who had been arrested several times by the Polish authorities. He published an article in defense of “the good name of the Ukrainian people,” which was a response to generalizations about Ukrainians made by Eugen Kogon in his seminal work on the Nazi concentration camp system.103 Yaniv did not deny that some Ukrainians took part in the Holocaust, but he said that certain things had to be taken into account: What was the extent of these Ukrainians’ guilt? “Were they the initiators, or only the executors,” and were they not acting under “bestial duress”? Kogon had also accused Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles of antisemitism, “thus more or less all the nations on whose lands the mass liquidations of Jews occurred; this then is proof of an action coordinated from above rather than an expression of the genuine feelings of the above-mentioned nations. The ‘antisemitism’ of these nations was only a result of the pressure of the occupier.” Yaniv considered participation in the Holocaust the responsibility of “criminal individuals” and omitted mention of any group that bore political responsibility. Yaniv blamed the robbery of Jews during their transit to the Lviv ghetto on “the Lviv rabble (motlokh)—in equal measure Ukrainian and Polish.” One cannot, he admonished, generalize about the behavior of entire nations from such incidents. “It is well known: the rabble. The law of the mob.”104
The other article, which also appeared in 1947 but in a different newspaper, was anonymous and simply entitled “Ukrainians and Jews.” It reported that a Yiddish periodical, Ibergang, in discussing children rescued during the Holocaust had mentioned the efforts of the Greek Catholic metropolitan of Halych and archbishop of Lviv, Andrei Sheptytsky.105 The article mentioned Sheptytsky’s letter to Himmler condemning the murder of defenseless and innocent people. It concluded: “These facts most obviously contradict the malicious and baseless inventions of the enemies of Ukrainians about ‘antisemitism’ and ‘pogromism’ of the Ukrainian people.”106
Thus just a few years after the war we see expressions of the kind of argumentation that would be used in subsequent years to defend the record of OUN and UPA during the war. The Germans forced people to participate in anti-Jewish actions (which was indeed sometimes the case). The major offenders were not the Ukrainian educated elite but the lower classes, the rabble. Collaboration in the Holocaust was a matter of individual responsibility and guilt, and Ukrainians cannot be held collectively responsible for what happened. What is important about this formulation is that it excludes from consideration any intermediate actors between individuals and the national community as a whole, such as the occupation press, the local Ukrainian civil adminstration, OUN, UPA, and police and military units in German service. Also, Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s condemnation of the Holocaust and rescue of Jewish children are understood to exonerate Ukrainians as a whole from charges of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust.
Before leaving this general survey of the source base for understanding the connection between OUN-UPA and the Holocaust, I should explicitly state the obvious: I have not identified all the possible sources that a resourceful and imaginative historian can unearth. Some of the recent historiography has been quite impressive in bringing new and new types of documentation to light.107
Disputed Sources
Critics and defenders of OUN have argued over the authenticity and meaning of some sources, and in what follows I will look at three major controversies that have arisen.
Yaroslav Stetsko’s Autobiography of July 1941
As we will describe in more detail later,108 one of the most prominent leaders of OUN-B, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared the renewal of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv on 30 June 1941. OUN-B was hoping to present the Germans with a fait accompli, but they miscalculated, and over the course of July a number of OUN-B leaders were arrested. Stetsko was arrested by the Security Police on 9 July and taken to Berlin; there on 12 July or within a day or two thereafter he wrote an autobiography in two languages, Ukrainian and German. A passage in the Ukrainian version reads:
I consider Marxism to be a product of the Jewish mind, which, however, has been applied in practice in the Muscovite prison of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic people with the assistance of Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s greatest enemies and bearers of corruptive Bolshevik international ideas.
Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.109
The corresponding passage in the German version is:
Marxism is indeed to be considered as a creation of the Jewish brain, but its practical realization (also with Jewish help) was and is in the Muscovite prison of peoples, brought about by the Muscovite people. Moscow and Jewry are the greatest enemies of Ukraine and the carriers of disintegrative Bolshevik international Ideas.
The main enemy of Ukraine is not Jewry, but Moscow, which has subjugated Ukraine; Muscovite imperialism is not to be confused with the disintegrative assistance of the Jews. Nevertheless the role of the Jews is not to be underestimated. I am of the opinion that in the struggle against Jewry in Ukraine German methods are to be employed.110
These passages were first published in the KGB-produced book Lest We Forget “authored” by Michael Hanusiak, and Western scholars were reluctant to rely on them.111 But after the archives were opened in the 1990s, Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk published the full texts of Stetsko’s autobiography with extensive commentary in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. In a subsequent issue of that journal, Taras Hunczak cast doubt on the autobiography’s authenticity.112 Hunczak was a professor at Rutgers Newark who had made some solid contributions to the study of modern Ukrainian history, mainly of an editorial and compilatory nature. As a child during World War II, he had served as a courier for OUN, and later in the emigration he was associated with the Lebed group, the dviikari. He was also a passionate defender of Ukrainians against accusations of antisemitism; for example, he wrote an article exonerating Symon Petliura of responsibility for the pogroms that raged in Ukraine in 1919113 and an account of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during World War II intended as a response to Judge Jules Deschênes’ Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada.114 So it is not unusual that he would take up the issue of the Stetsko memoirs and conclude that they were forgeries.
I will examine Hunczak’s major arguments and then offer some additional considerations. First, he wondered why the memoirs were found in Ukraine rather than in Germany; he raised the question in order to buttress his final conclusion, which was that the autobiography “was written in the offices of KGB functionaries.” At present, there is no precise answer to Hunczak’s question. But there is a general answer: the Soviets took German records that interested them. Thus records of the RSHA are in Moscow and the records of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg are in Kyiv; the Soviets also took records of the secret police and intelligence units. The best informed specialist on Soviet archives, Patricia Grimsted, explained:
The seizure of Nazi records was specifically ordered by Allied Control Commission laws and paralleled similar seizures by the Western Allies. The only difference was that the Western Allies worked together with seized Nazi records, while Soviet authorities refused to cooperate....[B]y the 1960s, the Western Allies had agreed to return to West Germany almost all the Nazi records they had seized (with the exception of some military and intelligence files), following analysis and microfilming. Soviet authorities, by contrast, never even made known which Nazi records they had retrieved.115
His second argument was that Lest We Forget was untrustworthy and outright deceitful. This was an accurate assessment, but it does not follow logically that therefore everything in the book was manufactured. Hunczak was able to show that “Hanusiak” deliberately distorted and misrepresented sources, but not that he used fake evidence. For example, he analyzed a photograph of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky that Hanusiak claimed was a picture of the churchman receiving a swastika during a military exercise in 1939; in fact, Hunczak had found the original of the photo in the Lviv archives and determined that Sheptytsky was receiving a scout (Plast) badge at a scouting camp in 1930. Thus the photo was real, but the meaning the KGB wanted viewers to derive from it was not. As the saying goes, even the devil can quote scripture.
The third argument he brought to bear was linguistic. He maintained that the spelling of the adjective pidpol’nyi was “a transparent Russian variation of the Ukrainian pidpillia.” But if he had checked the spelling used by Lviv’s major newspaper, Dilo, in the 1930s, he would have found the supposed “transparent Russian variant” pidpol’nyi employed frequently.116 Hunczak’s major linguistic argument was that the spelling in the autobiography uses an h (г) “where an individual from western Ukraine, particularly in 1941, would have used the letter g” (ґ). An example he cites is “propahanda instead of propaganda.” But the legal newspaper under the German occupation, L’vivs’ki visti, used the spelling propahanda in 1941, and Stetsko himself used the spelling propahanda.117 The linguistic arguments, in sum, fail.118
In Hunczak’s opinion, “the ultimate fraud” was a statement in the autobiography that Stetsko edited the journal Ideia i chyn in 1939-40. Again, Hunczak made an error, confusing the Ideia i chyn of 1942-46, in which Stetsko indeed had no role, with a periodical that bore the same title, but came out earlier and was in fact edited by Stetsko.119 Thus none of Hunczak’s proofs of fabrication hold up.
On the other hand, there are solid arguments in favor of the authenticity of the autobiography. For one thing, we know of no other example of the KGB seeding secret archives with false documents. We certainly know of Soviet falsifications, but not of falsifications that they secreted in archives that were basically closed to researchers. Moreover, the autobiography is an oddly preserved document. There is no full text of the German version; instead, there is a draft of the first page and then a fair copy of the rest of the pages, but some text missing in between. And there are also some discrepancies between the German and Ukrainian texts; for example, the German version notes that Stetsko was born in a priest’s family, but the Ukrainian version omits that information. Would the KGB have put together such a sloppy document? These odd features smack of the irregularity of a genuine archival document.
Moreover, there was nothing unusual in the substance of the anti-Jewish passage of the document. As Berkhoff and Carynnyk pointed out when they published it,120 and as we will see for ourselves in the next chapter, what Stetsko had to say in his autobiography of July 1941 was very similar to what other OUN leaders were saying at the same time and what Stetsko himself had been saying about Jews in previous years. In fact, the autobiography uses verbal formulations quite characteristic of Stetsko, as we can see by comparing it to an antisemitic article he published in 1939 in a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper in Canada, “Zhydivstvo i my” (Jewry and Us). The short article of 1939 uses the same vocabulary as the two paragraphs on Jews in the autobiography of 1941. (See Table 1.)
Table 1
| “Жидівство і ми” 1939 | Життєпис 1941 |
| Москва є головним ворогом | головним ворогом—Москву |
| закріплювач (грали ролю закріплювача ворожого стану посідання) | закріповувати (помагають Москві закріпо[ву]вати Україну) |
| виключення всякої асиміляції | виключаючи її асиміляції |
| московський азіят | московсько-азіятський народ |
In conclusion, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the 1941 Stetsko autobiography.121
The Book of Facts
In 2008 the SBU released with great fanfare a document, The Book of Facts,122 that it said exonerated OUN, and specifically its battalion Nachtigall, from participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the summer of 1941. As presented at that time, the Book of Facts was “essentially a chronicle of the activities of OUN during March-September 1941.”123 The relevant passage on the pogroms is interesting and short enough to present in full:
4-7 July 1941
Representatives of Gestapo units, who came to Lviv in great number, by various paths approached Ukrainian circles that the Ukrainians should organize a three-day pogrom of the Jews. “Instead of organizing demonstrative funerals for political prisoners murdered by the Bolsheviks,” they said, “it is better to execute a major revenge action against the Jews. Neither German police nor military authorities will interfere in this.”
The leading personnel of OUN, when they learned of this, informed all members that this was a German provocation in order to compromise the Ukrainians by pogroms, in order to provide a pretext for the German police to intervene and “restore order,” and—most important—to divert the attention and energy of the Ukrainians in general from political problems and the struggle for independent statehood towards the slippery road of anarchy, crimes, and plunder.
Already the Second Great Assembly of OUN expressed itself decisively against any Jewish pogroms,124 condemning such tendencies as the attempts of occupiers to divert attention of the popular masses from the root problems of the liberation struggle. Now, in the first days of the German occupation, these decisions were realized in practice, prohibiting participation in the pogroms of Jews and counteracting German provocations. Only thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities, in spite of the tremendous wave of indignation called forth by the Bolsheviks’ murder of 80 thousand Ukrainian political prisoners and in spite of the numerous provocations of the German Gestapo to incite Ukrainians to slaughter Jews.
After the publication of the text, both Marco Carynnyk and I raised questions about the status of the document. Both of us pointed out that it was no contemporary chronicle of 1941 but was in fact a chronological compilation put together some time after World War II was over.125 We did not claim that The Book of Facts was a falsification, but rather that its presentation as a chronicle proving that OUN did not participate in the pogroms of July 1941 was a deception. Since our initial articles, the entire text of The Book of Facts has become available, and a well-researched study confirms that the book was compiled after the war, namely by OUN-UPA in Poland (Zakerzonnia) in 1946-47.126
Thus The Book of Facts was prepared after the Germans lost the war and after the crimes of the Holocaust had come to public attention throughout the world as a result of the Nuremberg trials. It belongs in the same category as the postwar OUN publications of the diaspora: it proves nothing about 1941, only about the postwar self-presentation of OUN. A good indication of how factual The Book of Facts is its assertion that “thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities....”
Although patently unreliable, The Book of Facts served as a primary source for an exhibition on the Shoah in Lviv at the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv in 2013.127
The Stella Krenzbach Memoirs
In 1954 Ukrainian publications in Toronto and Buenos Aires published the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach (Krentsbakh), who had served as a nurse in UPA, both near the end of World War II and after the war, during the anti-Soviet insurgency. Her memoir said she was brought up in a small Galician town, in a family that spoke only perfect Hebrew among themselves, and her closest girlfriends were Ukrainian. She did not look like a typical Jewish girl of the region: in fact, she was a natural blond with cornflower blue eyes. Later she moved to Lviv to study. She hoped to go to medical school, but her application, along with the applications of thirty-eight Ukrainians, was rejected; she was the only Jewish girl not accepted. She studied philosophy instead, earning a doctorate. But that was in 1939, when war broke out.
Her experiences with the Bolsheviks were negative. She was arrested by the Soviet militia, who, she said, had orders to send all Jews to Siberia, but she managed to escape from them through a bathroom window. She claimed to be the only Jew who welcomed the Germans, since she thought they would build Ukraine. She was quickly disabused, obtained false papers with a Ukrainian last name, and worked in Ukrainian homes as a seamstress. She hated the passivity with which other Jews marched to their death. Having finished with the Jews, the Germans began to arrest the Ukrainians, shooting some, sending others to concentration camps. “But the Ukrainians were not meek, like the Jews: they repaid blood with blood, death with death.” She heard rumors about UPA in Volhynia and suspected that one of her friends had connections with them. Her friend arranged for her to join the insurgent army. She said not to worry about her Jewishness, since the soldiers of UPA “do not divide people by races but by whether they are honest or not.” She was given a six-month nursing course and served in an UPA hospital. Eventually the Bolsheviks decimated her unit, and the remainder fought their way into the American zone of Austria in the fall of 1946. From there she went to Israel.128
Only a few years passed before this beautiful tale was exposed as a fabrication. Friedman made an investigation into the memoir. When it was republished in Buenos Aires in 1957, a prominent Melnykite, Dmytro Andriievsky, filled in a bit more of Stella Krenzbach’s life story. In Israel, he wrote, she went to work as a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs.129 She first published her memoirs in the Washington Post, and a few weeks later she was murdered. Here is what Friedman discovered: “I checked the Washington Post of that period and did not find the memoirs. At my request, Dr. N.M. Gelber of Jerusalem made inquiry in the foreign ministry there; the reply was that the ministry had never had an employee by that name and that such a case of homicide was entirely unknown. Moreover, a careful analysis of the text of the ‘memoirs’ has led me to the conclusion that the entire story is a hoax.”130 One of the dviikari, Bohdan Kordiuk, also looked into the Stella Krenzbach question. His conclusion was very similar. He asked the UPA veterans he knew if they had known or heard of her; none had. In his opinion, “the tale of Dr. Stella Krenzbach has to be considered a mystification.”131
But decades passed, Ukraine became independent, connections with the Ukrainian diaspora intensified, and some Western Ukrainians were calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA. Not surprisingly, then, in 1993, a periodical connected with the Vasyl Stus Memorial Society in Lviv, Poklyk sumlinnia, reanimated Stella Krenzbach by republishing her memoir. The memoir fit perfectly with Zhanna Kovba’s goal to give the lie to stereotypes of antisemitic Ukrainians and communist Jews, and she accepted it as good coin.132 Volodymyr Viatrovych also cited her memoir in his 2006 book on OUN and the Jews to demonstrate the presence and acceptance of Jews in UPA.133 Then as the controversies around OUN and UPA heated up near the end of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, the Ukrainian-language Jewish poet Moishe Fishbein did a great deal to publicize the Krenzbach story. He gave a conference paper, frequently reprinted/reposted at the time, entitled “The Jewish Card in Russian Operations against Ukraine,” which used the Krenzbach memoir to counter Russian claims that UPA was antisemitic. He also put the Krenzbach memoirs on his website in Ukrainian and in English translation.134 Fishbein’s efforts took in many people.135
* *
*
The controversies over the legitimacy of sources reaffirm the need to treat sources with care. In our survey, we saw the limitations and problems with every kind of source we looked at. The German documents do not constitute, as earlier Holocaust scholars believed, the touchstone of truth; instead they are marred by deep biases. Soviet documents are formulated using an ideological vocabulary and, more important, sometimes tailored information to serve the needs of the state. Internal OUN documents are much more reliable than documents produced for external consumption. Moreover, the researcher has to be careful about deliberate misrepresentation and even falsifications by OUN. Crucially, official documents of every provenance need to be triangulated, whenever possible, with other evidence, primarily eyewitness testimony, but also when relevant with photographs, films, and the periodical press. Jewish testimony is often marked by trauma and Ukrainian testimony by evasion. All sources need to be treated with care. Some sources, moreover, have imbedded problems as products of criminal practices: German documents and photographs are components of the atrocities they report on, and Soviet interrogations have their origins in torture. Questions around sources are not simple, but it is hoped that this survey has armed the reader with sufficient understanding to make reasonable judgments about the utility and reliability of the various sources and about the historical processes which they reflect.
1 There is actually a wonderful finding aid prepared along these lines: Berkhoff, “Ukraine under Nazi Rule.”
2 Ilnytzkyj, Deutschland und die Ukraine 1934-1945.
3 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 39 n. 29.
4 Friedman, Philip. “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181, 196 n. 15. EM, no. 126, 27 October 1941; translation from Einsatzgruppen Reports, 210.
5 OUN v svitli postanov.
6 See below, 163, 165, 170-71, 225-26.
7 Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 177 n. 30.
8 Zlochyny komunistychnoi Moskvy.
9 Yevhen Stakhiv has related that in December 1941 he passed on a letter from the leader of one faction of OUN, Stepan Bandera, who was then imprisoned by the Gestapo in Berlin, to the underground head of OUN-B in the Homeland, Mykola Lebed, instructing OUN not to antagonize the Germans and to try to repair relations with Germany. About forty years later, Stakhiv reminded Lebed, who was then the leader of the dviikari, of Bandera’s instructions, but Lebed claimed not to remember them. Again about five years later Stakhiv raised the subject with Lebed, and this time he allegedly answered: “Yes, I remember. But I didn’t want you to tell people about it. It is not necessary for history to know the truth.” Stakhiv, Kriz’ tiurmy, 99-100. Although this story does seem to characterize the dviikari’s attitude to history, I lack faith in Stakhiv’s reliability as a memoirist. The incident has been accepted as genuine, however, by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” 106; Stepan Bandera, 41.
10 Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv,” 259.
11 http://resource.history.org.ua/cgi-bin/eiu/history.exe?&I21DBN=ELIB&P21DBN=ELIB&S21STN=1&S21REF=10&S21FMT=elib_all&C21COM=S&S21CNR=20&S21P01=0&S21P02=0&S21P03=ID=&S21STR=0013098, accessed 23 October 2018.
12 Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 287 and 428 n. 63.
13 See above, 31-38.
14 See above, 52.
15 Serhiichuk, OUN-UPA v roky viiny, 311-12.
16 Artizov, Ukrainskie natsionalisticheskie organizatsii.
17 There is a very interesting book on the RHSA: Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation.
18 Headland, Messages of Murder.
19 DALO, fond R12, op. 1.
20 For more context on this, see Himka, “Legislating Historical Truth.”
21 USHMM, Acc. 1995.A.1086, RG-31.001M.
22 I am grateful to David Alan Rich for sharing a copy of the militia files with me.
23 There are also regional SBU archives that I have not consulted, but the younger generation of Ukrainian historians (e.g., Marta Havryshko, Roman Shliakhtych, and Andrii Usach) has been making good use of them in their publications.
24 This problem is fleshed out more fully in Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.
25 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 247-48. We now have an excellent account of the methods used by the NKVD during the late 1930s in Soviet Ukraine based on NKVD interrogators’ own admissions of “violations of socialist legality”: Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. See also a wrenching study of Stalinist interrogations in postwar Poland that was able to explore the issue more from prisoners’ perspectives: Chodakiewicz, “The Dialectics of Pain.”
26 This comes out very clearly in Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial.
27 Bohunov, Mytropolyt Andrei Sheptyts’kyi.
28 Dumitru, “Analysis.”
29 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.
30 Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’” 18.
31 Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial,” 21. See also Penter, “Collaboration on Trial.”
32 Comments of Tanja Penter in Coleman, “Roundtable,” 235-37.
33 This is the same period in which the Soviets published the English-language tracts that appeared under the name Valerii Styrkul. See above, 42.
34 Himka, “‘Skazhite, mnogo liudei vy rasstreliali?’”
35 Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 118, 121.
36 YVA, r.g. M.52, file 245.1 (6412889), frames 86-88; originally from DALO, 3/1/278. Extraordinary Commission documents.
37 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.
38 The Commission’s investigation of Hrymailiv is found in GARF, fond 7021, opis 75, delo 94, ff. 1-4, 14-34v; USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 17.
39 Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Lfd. Nr. 698, Lübeck 2 Ks 1/67 (vol. 31 of the printed edition), 483.
40 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.
41 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 213. A photocopy of the complete testimony is online: https://training.ehri-project.eu/a10-1946-philip-friedman-recalls-pogrom-lviv (accessed 15 January 2019). Kovba gives a different archival location and says the testimony was to the Extraordinary Commission. But the online testimony, which seems to be an identical text, was to the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War. I assume the same testimony was used for both commissions. I want to thank Alexander Melnyk for first turning my attention to this and providing me with information on the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War.
42 Philip Friedman, “The Destruction of the Jews of Lwów,” 246. Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 183, 198 n. 24.
43 On the Vinnytsia mass murders, see Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror.”
44 Korzen, “The Extermination of Two Ukrainian Jewish Communities,” 311 (quote). Yad Vashem Studies, which published Bingle’s testimony in 1959, apparently accepted this as good coin. Unfortunately, the publication of the testimony did not specify to which Soviet body the testimony was given.
45 The title of the collection is “Selected Records from Former Archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine, 1919-1937; 1941-1962; and 1965.” USHMM RG-31.026 Acc. 2003.260; the documents are originally from TsDAHO. I would like to thank Vadim Altskan at USHMM for directing me to this collection.
46 For example, in 2017 an aluminum milk can full of well preserved OUN-UPA documents was found in the Yaniv woods near Lviv. The can had been buried in mid-1951. “Vidkopaly arkhiv UPA.” Even more recently, in autumn 2019, OUN-UPA documents from 1945-46 were found in woods near Rohatyn in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. Prystans’ka, “U lisakh Ivano-Frankivshchyny.”
47 The OUN periodical press is discussed below, 101-02.
48 Cited in Patryliak, Viis’kova diial’nist OUN (B), 322.
49 Translation by Marco Carynnyk. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 345 (translation), 346 (photoreproduction of the original document).
50 USHMM RG-06.029.
51 Adamczyk, Ziemie Wschodnie.
52 Cited in Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” 386.
53 Emphases in original.
54 Gross, Neighbors, 92.
55 Browning, Collected Memories, 43.
56 Bartov, “Wartime Lies,” 487; more generally on the importance of testimony as a source for the Holocaust, see 487-90 and 506-08.
57 See above, 49.
58 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1.
59 Himka, “Dostovirnist’ svidchennia.”
60 Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’” 20.
61 Ibid., 20.
62 Golczewski, “Die Kollaboration in der Ukraine,” 156.
63 Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence, 44. I have explored the problem of antipathy and ethnic stereotypes in survivor memory in Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust, and Himka, “How to Think about Difficult Things.”
64 Kraft, “Archival Memory,” 321.
65 Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust, 12-21.
66 This estimate is taken from Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence, 145 n. 2.
67 See Aleksiun, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission.”
68 Relacje z czasów Zagłady.
69 Welzer, ”Opa war kein Nazi.”
70 Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” 392.
71 For example, these two texts, in spite of the name change, are by the same person: Lejb Wieliczker, AŻIH 302/26; Wells, The Janowska Road. They provide substantially the same information. The same is true of Kurt Lewin’s memoir of 1946 and his testimony for the Shoah Foundation: Lewin, Przeżyłem; Shoah Foundation 25423 Kurt Lewin.
72 Browning, Collected Memories, 46-47.
73 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 2.
74 Kraft, “Archival Memory,” 316 n. 3.
75 Lower, The Diary of Samuel Golfard. I was not able to consult A. Klonicki-Klonymus, The Diary of Adam's Father (Jerusalem, 1973).
76 Siemaszko and Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo. I would like to thank Michal Mlynarz for his invaluable help with this.
77 Andrzej, “Tadeusz Zaderecki.” This article provides links to some of Zaderecki’s publications of the 1930s.
78 Zaderecki, “Gdy swastyka Lwowem władała.”
79 Tadeusz Zaderecki, Lwów under the Swastika: The Destruction of the Jewish Community through the Eyes of a Polish Writer (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018). I have been unable to consult this volume myself.
80 Spector, Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 2-3.
81 Himka, “Ukrainian Memories of the Holocaust,” 427.
82 The memoir section is called “Spomyny.”
83 See my analysis of a documentary put out by the Centre on Ukraine during World War II: Himka, “Victim Cinema.”
84 UCRDC, “Spomyny,” no. 33 (Ivan P”iatka). In 2014 the Lviv historian Andrii Bolianovsky brought to my attention that there is another memoir of a Ukrainian policeman in the UCRDC: B., “Ukrains’ka politsiia. Spomyn. Burlington, Ontario, 1988.” When I made a request to see it in 2018, I was informed that access was “still restricted.” Emails Andrii Bolianovsky to John-Paul Himka, 1 October 2014, UCRDC Office to John-Paul Himka, 28 May 2018. Subsequently Bolianovsky sent me photos of pages from the memoir, which he had clearly had access to.
85 Himka and Himka, “Absence and Presence,” 19-20.
86 Yahad-in Unum Testimony no. 737.
87 Ibid. no. 802.
88 Ibid. no. 827.
89 E.g., Shoah Foundation 36160 Dmitrii Omelianiuk; see also the film based on Ukrainian interviews for the Shoah Foundation: Spell Your Name (Nazvy svoie im”ia) (2006) directed by Sergei Bukovsky and presented by Steven Spielberg and Viktor Pinchuk.
90 Strutyns’ka, Daleke zblyz’ka, 145-246.
91 Strutyns’ka, Buria nad L’vovom.
92 Nakonechnyi, “Shoa” u L’vovi.
93 For a more extended analysis, see Himka, “Debates in Ukraine,” 353-56.
94 Shepelev, “Fotografii,” 431 n. 12.
The free sample has ended.
