Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

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.