Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

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