Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust
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