Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

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