Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

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