Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

On the next page of the same issue appeared a proclamation to Ukrainian youth issued by OUN:

The Jews forced us to call our dearest people enemies. They forced us to love alien Moscow and not our native Ukraine. In our country those who married Jewesses, and thereby contributed to the degeneration of the Ukrainian nation, were held in esteem. Jewboys were called Ukrainian musicians—all those Buses, Goldsteins, Davids, Oistrakhs. They gave them prizes, titled them Stalin laureates, but the truly talented Ukrainian youth was trampled and then withered on the vine. The institutes and schools swarmed with Jews because they had money....In the Komsomol and Pioneers the Jewish-Muscovite politicians tried to raise janissaries, champions of Red Moscow, haters of the Ukrainian people....Ukraine for Ukrainians!54

And on the next page was yet another OUN proclamation, this one addressed to teachers:

They forced us to poison the minds of children with Jewish internationalism....Jews wrote the grammar of the Ukrainian language....In the theaters and cinema they showed us performances and films directed by Jews, in which the best sons of the Ukrainian land were reviled and ridiculed....Schools for Ukrainians! Down with lying Jewish-communist education. In a Ukrainian school—Ukrainian children....Let us welcome the German army, the most cultured army in the world, which is driving from our lands the Jewish-communist scum. Let us help the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera build a great Independent Ukrainian State. Ukraine for Ukrainians!55

OUN members in the civil administration also promoted antisemitism. OUN member Anton Yastremsky was raion head in Olhynka, Donetsk oblast. On 17 September 1942 he issued an order to introduce the OUN greeting “Glory to Ukraine” in his raion. This was intended to restore polite and respectful behavior after years of “hostile Jewish-Bolshevik” interpersonal relations, of “Bolshevik-Jewish barbarity.”56 The OUN-controlled city administration of Mariupol in Donetsk oblast ordered that civil servants take Ukrainian language courses since “as a consequence of Muscovite-Jewish rule in Ukraine our people lost their language, customs, and so on.”57

The works on the history of OUN and UPA produced by veterans of the movement, such as those by Mirchuk, Herasymenko, and Shankovsky, but also by others (e.g., Mykola Lebed, Borys Lewytzkyj58), were marked by partisan perspectives. Their writings not only defended the positions of OUN but of their particular faction of OUN. They emphasized OUN’s persecution at the hands of the German occupiers but downplayed the extent to which OUN collaborated with Germany. All of them avoided disclosure about the extent to which OUN and UPA were involved in ethnic cleansing, including participation in the Holocaust. Already in 1946, a prominent Ukrainian émigré from eastern Ukraine, Ivan Bahriany, accurately diagnosed the problem with the self-presentation of the emigrés associated with OUN: the nationalist camp, he wrote, was trying to repudiate its heritage of xenophobia, antisemitism, voluntarism, leaderism [vozhdyzm], and antidemocratism, but “not by overcoming these things, but by assuring us that they had not existed.”59

In addition to the veterans’ writings, a scholarly study of OUN and UPA appeared already in 1955 and went through three editions, the last appearing in 1990. John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism relied primarily on three kinds of sources: German documentation, the wartime Ukrainian press, and interviews. The interviews were conducted almost exclusively with prominent Ukrainian activists and politicians, and not just from the OUN camp. He had great sympathy for these men, although he was not uncritical in his admiration.60 He did not interview Polish or Jewish survivors of OUN-UPA violence nor consult their testimonies and memoirs. The only book on the Holocaust listed in the bibliography of the 1990 edition is Hilberg’s classic, in which, as we have seen, there was no room for a discussion of OUN. No works in Polish were cited. The result was a study that had very little to say about OUN operations against Poles and Jews.61 The ethnic cleansing of the Poles was given cursory treatment, based entirely on German sources, on a few pages.62 The question of OUN involvement in the pogroms of 1941 was discussed in one paragraph.63 Like most scholars at that time, Armstrong did not understand the distinction between the militias organized by OUN and the later Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. He did, however, make mention of some anti-Jewish rhetoric employed by OUN.64

Armstrong wrote a rather sympathetic narrative of the nationalists, emphasizing their valor in fighting against two such powerful enemies as the Germans and the Soviets. He did not go far enough to please all the nationalist veterans, who felt, particularly, that he underestimated their success outside Western Ukrainian lands. Yevhen Stakhiv, a leading figure in the OUN-B expeditionary movement in the south and one of the major proponents of the UHVR, made this objection,65 as did Shankovsky in his history of the expeditionary groups. In fact, Shankovsky decided to write his history in the first place as a corrective to Armstrong’s narrative.66

Another noteworthy study of Ukrainian nationalism from this period was Alexander J. Motyl’s The Turn to the Right. It only covered the story up through the founding of OUN in 1929, so it was more of a prehistory than a history in relation to the theme of my own book. But it was important for its exploration of the ideological sources of Ukrainian nationalism and its interpretation of where Ukrainian nationalism stood in relation to the fascist movements emerging in Europe at that time. Turn to the Right was based on wide-ranging consultation of contemporary Ukrainian-language press and brochures as well as scholarly works on Ukrainian history and on right-wing and fascist ideology outside Ukraine. Its appearance in 1980, at a time when academic Ukrainian studies were just taking off in North America, meant that it gained considerable attention. Although later in life Motyl became an apologist for OUN, this first work was quite balanced.

Polish scholars contributed well informed works on OUN in wartime. In 1972 Ryszard Torzecki wrote a monograph on the Ukrainian policy of the Third Reich which, of course, devoted considerable attention to Ukrainian nationalism. Antoni Szcześniak and Wiesław Szota’s Droga do nikąd (The Road to Nowhere) of 1973, which covered OUN and UPA from the 1920s into the postwar period, had an interesting, and rather sad, history. It was primarily based on Szcześniak’s doctoral dissertation, but Szota wrote the introductory section on the interwar period. The text tried to work within the constraints of what could be said and what could not be said when Poland was a communist country within the Soviet orbit.67 The reason this was tricky is that parts of what used to be Poland were now in the Ukrainian SSR, and the text had to avoid any suggestion that these territories were in some sense Polish. Thus, the events of 1939 were presented from a Soviet perspective: the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was glossed over and the population of western Ukraine was depicted as fervently desiring to be joined with Soviet Ukraine. But try as they did, the authors were unable to construct a narrative of OUN and UPA that the Soviets found acceptable. After the direct intervention of the Soviet embassy, the book was withdrawn from circulation as “harmful for current party propaganda”; the Soviets feared that “the book can be used propagandistically by the Ukrainian emigration in its fight against the Soviet system.” The authors suffered for their mistakes, being pushed to the margins of the Polish scholarly establishment.68 (Not many years later I heard that Szota committed suicide, but I cannot confirm this.) Aside from its ideological contortions, which of course included a less than even-handed and objective treatment of OUN and UPA, the work had value. It made use of abundant materials in Polish archives, materials that at that time Western scholars had no access to. The Ukrainian journalist and memoirist Ivan Kedryn Rudnytsky characterized the volume thus: “Although the tendency of this book is bad because—as the authors themselves declare in the introduction—they examined the problem ‘through the prism of Marxism-Leninism,’ nonetheless in it was gathered a mass of factual documentary-informational material—more than can be found in all the nationalist literature.”69 Kedryn did not explicitly mention it, but Szcześniak and Szota were very well aware of how Poles and Jews suffered at the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists and wrote about these matters in some detail.

As is clear from the case of Droga do nikąd, the Soviets had many sensitivities around the history of OUN and UPA, and it is not surprising that no real scholarship on the nationalists appeared in the Soviet Union. Aside from other considerations, the Soviets did not want to disturb the myth of a united Soviet people in struggle against the fascist occupiers by writing about collaboration with the Germans and about a powerful anti-Soviet movement. The Soviets cloaked OUN and UPA under the term “Ukrainian-German fascists” and were silent about their influence on the Ukrainian population during the war. And in addition, the Soviet authorities did not permit scholarship on the Holocaust. In fact, the subject of the Holocaust made them uncomfortable.70 It singled out the suffering of the Jews instead of the whole Soviet people, and this particular narrative of suffering could feed into Jewish nationalism, i.e., Zionism. In the postwar period Soviet anti-Zionism could be quite shrill and antisemitic.

But there was an exception to the Soviet reticence on our topic. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets published tracts on Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust and other war crimes. Several were published under the name Valerii Styrkul in the 1980s, after the airing of the influential television miniseries, Holocaust (NBC, 1978), which heightened American interest in Nazi atrocities.71 Styrkul concentrated on the Waffen-SS Division Galizien rather than on OUN. But the earliest and most influential of these tracts was Lest We Forget, signed by the Ukrainian-American communist Michael Hanusiak (first edition 1973).72 Lest We Forget did publish documentary evidence of OUN antisemitism, notably extracts from the autobiography of OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko from July 1941, in which Stetsko endorsed German methods of annihilating Jews.73 The book also contained documents and testimony on crimes committed by both OUN and Ukrainian police units in German service with OUN connections. However, these documents were unverifiable by scholars, since the archives they were housed in were closed to researchers. And the presentation was so heavy-handed and one-sided that scholars treated his revelations with scepticism or outright rejection.74

In fact, the brochure Lest We Forget was the product of a KGB operation. The head of the Ukrainian KGB, Vitalii Fedorchuk, wrote about it to the first secretary of the Ukrainian party, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, in a memorandum dated 27 December 1973. It is worth quoting in extenso:

Earlier the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR reported that in order to incite enmity between Ukrainian nationalists and Zionists in the USA the brochure Lest We Forget was published in English; the publication exposes, on the basis of documents, the participation of OUNites during the Second World War in the mass destruction of the peaceful population, including in so-called “Jewish actions”....

As “author” and publisher of the brochure figured one of the leaders of the progressive Ukrainian organizations, the League of American Ukrainians.75 In recent years he has visited Ukraine and can thus explain how he obtained the materials utilized in the brochure.

In order to popularize the brochure, the “author,” at our recommendation, engaged one of the progressive Jewish activists of New York in the capacity of “copublisher.”76 The joint action of progressive Ukrainian and Jewish organizations in the USA against the OUNites as war criminals has had a certain political effect....

Since the demand for the brochure has exceeded the number printed, the Ukrainian and Jewish progressive organizations are preparing a second edition....

Given the interest in the brochure shown in the USA and Canada, measures are being taken by us to collect additional materials on the participation of nationalists in the eradication of the Jewish population for publication abroad.77

As the letter indicates, propaganda publications of this sort were intended for export and were published in the English language.

After surveying the state of the historiography before the 1990s, it should become apparent that it was very difficult at that time to arrive at a clear understanding of the behavior of OUN and UPA during the Holocaust. The Jewish scholars who came from the Western Ukrainian territories were aware of the nationalists’ violence against the Jewish population, but they had too little knowledge of the nationalist movement to flesh out what had happened. They could not rely on the histories written by nationalist veterans, since the latter completely denied any responsibility for the persecution and murder of the Jewish population. Nor was Armstrong’s scholarly study any help in this regard. Mainstream Holocaust history, as exemplified by Hilberg, did not have the conceptual framework and an inclusive enough source base to even consider investigating the role of OUN and UPA. Publications emanating from or inspired by the communist bloc were discounted by Western scholars; and in addition, the best informed of them, Szcześniak and Szota’s Droga do nikąd, was very difficult to obtain.78

The Collapse of Communism in Europe

A decisive turn in the historiography resulted from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. The opening of the Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Soviet archives made available to scholars a vast amount of fresh material to understand the Holocaust in the east of Europe, including the activities of Ukrainian nationalists.79 Moreover, the political restraints on research were removed. Scholars in the postcommunist sphere could now write whatever they wished, free from censorship and communist party control. Polish scholars no longer had to refrain from writing about the fate of Poles in territories that were once in the Soviet Union but now formed parts of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.80 Even Ukrainian nationalists had been worried about writing their own history as long as Ukraine was communist, since revealing too much could lead to reprisals against nationalists and their families still residing in Soviet Ukraine.81 Now those fears were gone. The result of these new sources and new freedoms was the blossoming of a diverse historiography on the question of the Ukrainian nationalists and the Jews during the Holocaust.

The first to professionally mine the new sources were two German scholars, Thomas Sandkühler and Dieter Pohl, who each produced a German-sized monograph on the Holocaust in Galicia, in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Both followed the practice of what was then mainstream Holocaust historiography: they paid relatively little attention to victims and their testimony and relied heavily on documents emanating from German structures. Pohl argued that the attitudes of the autochthonous, non-Jewish population were relatively unimportant in determining the general course and final outcome of the mass murder in Galicia: essentially the German occupation authorities made the decisions and executed them themselves. Whether resisting or aiding the Germans in the murder, the actions of what Pohl called “the Christian population” were of secondary importance in influencing events.82 Pohl characterized the Bandera faction of OUN as antisemitic for much of the war, particularly in the spring and summer of 1941 and again in 1944, as the Soviets closed in, stating also that in 1942-43 OUN distanced itself from the Germans’ murder of the Jews.83 (During the latter period Ukrainian opinion in general had cooled towards the Germans and their “final solution.”)84 Pohl was not able to link OUN directly to any concrete war crimes. His treatment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in relation to the Holocaust reached no clear conclusion.85 In my own review of Pohl’s book, I characterized it as follows: “This is an ambitious and pioneering work. It is not a synthesis based on a corpus of pre-existing monographs; instead, it attempts a comprehensive portrayal of the Holocaust in Galicia largely on the basis of primary sources. It opens the field for further, in-depth monographic research of specific problems and incidents.”86

It was in this period too that Jeffrey Burds began to lecture and write about OUN and UPA in an entirely new vein. Although the texts he published then did not directly concern the Holocaust but rather focused on the immediate postwar period,87 they demonstrated that sources in the newly opened post-Soviet archives could provide a much deeper knowledge of the nationalists’ actions than other historians had ever imagined. Also, his revelations about the ruthlessness of OUN and UPA helped break the spell of the nationalists’ own historiography.

Directly related to wartime OUN’s Jewish politics was a documentary publication by Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk: the full text, or rather texts, of the July 1941 autobiography of nationalist leader Yaroslav Stetsko, mentioned above in connection with Michael Hanusiak and to be discussed in some detail below.88 In their introduction to the autobiography Berkhoff and Carynnyk surveyed some of OUN’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, which they found to be written in “vicious language” and to be encouraging “a deadly antisemitism.”89

Martin Dean’s Collaboration in the Holocaust investigated the actions of local police in certain regions of Belarus and Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. Although a very valuable study, it exemplified a trend that was still strong in the 1990s: Dean studied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without knowledge of the relevant East European languages. Dean was trained in history (his first book was on Austrian policy during the late-eighteenth century wars with revolutionary France) and was then employed in the war crimes unit in Scotland Yard. He moved from there to the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, where he has continued to write and compile impressive works on Holocaust history. Collaboration in the Holocaust was based on archival sources and eyewitness testimonies. It outlined the influence of OUN on the local Ukrainian police in German service and the role of those policemen later in UPA. But his work focused on areas outside the center of OUN and UPA activity, which was Galicia and Volhynia.

With the weakening and then total collapse of the Soviet system, OUN and UPA came under reexamination in Ukraine. After decades of condemnation of the nationalist organizations, calls for rehabilitation emerged in the public discourse, particularly in the Lviv newspaper Za vil’nu Ukrainu.90 Already in March 1990, the foremost proponent of reform in Soviet Ukraine, Rukh (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy—People’s Movement of Ukraine), raised the issue of the nationalists’ political rehabilitation.91 Before long, the government began to turn to Ukraine’s scholarly establishment to advise on the issue. On 12 June 1991 the head of the commission on defense and state security of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasyl Durdynets, wrote to the Ukrainian academy of sciences with the request to find someone to prepare a background paper on OUN, UPA, and the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The task was entrusted to Viktor Koval, a historian in his mid-seventies specializing in the Second World War. Koval had studied in his native Kyiv and worked there in the academy’s Institute of the History of Ukraine. The text he speedily produced, by 1 July, argued that “OUN and UPA conducted a national-liberation struggle for the construction of a sovereign and democratic Ukraine, in which people of all nationalities would enjoy the same political and social rights.” Durdynets, who had long been an official in the Communist Party of Ukraine, repudiated the report and demanded that the academy withdraw it and replace it with another. The academy complied immediately, formally withdrawing Koval’s report on 3 July.92 But the OUN-UPA issue would not go away for the Ukrainian public, government, or academia. In particular, veterans’ groups—Red Army veterans and UPA veterans—were confronting one another, especially on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of UPA celebrated in 1992. In 1993 the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) again decided that there was a need to investigate the legacy of OUN-UPA, but the efforts of a parliamentary committee proved insufficient to the task. Finally, in 1997 a working group of historians, under the leadership of Stanislav Kulchytsky, was charged with unearthing the true history of OUN-UPA and evaluating its heritage. The task proved more complicated than anyone expected, and the commission made no concrete progress until the early 2000s.

A few studies related to our topic did appear in Ukraine in the 1990s. Yakov Khonigsman’s short book on the Catastrophe of Lviv Jewry, which came out in 1993, built on earlier studies, especially on the works of Philip Friedman and Tatiana Berenstein (the latter unavailable to me), as well as on a modest selection of documentation from Lviv archives. It made little use of memoirs and testimonies. In fact, in the foreword to the book, Bogdan Semenov stated that the volume “is not written from the words of eyewitnesses, where in the main the element of subjectivity or emotionality figures,” but “according to the materials of archival documents.”93 Khonigsman avoided the topic of any OUN involvement in the events he described. Later, in 1998, Khonigsman published a book that looked at the Holocaust across Western Ukraine, encompassing the Ukrainian historical regions of Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia, but primarily concentrating on Galicia. This book made more use of survivor testimonies and was more deeply researched in archives, principally in the Lviv archives, but also in those of Kyiv and elsewhere. In this book Khonigsman pointed out how antisemitic OUN was.94 Like many other historians before him, he did not differentiate the militia established by OUN from the Ukrainian auxiliary police established later by the Germans; hence he ascribed crimes of the militia to the auxiliary police.95 Khonigsman had nothing to say about UPA and the Jews.

More interesting was a book on “the behavior of the local population of Eastern Galicia in the years of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’“—Zhanna Kovba’s Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla (Humaneness in the Abyss of Hell) published in 1998 by the Judaica Institute in Kyiv. Kovba conducted extensive archival research, consulting in particular the records of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in the State Archive of Lviv Oblast (DALO) and OUN documents in the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO). She consulted Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian memoirs and also interviewed many people from throughout Galicia who had lived through the events of World War II. It was a book with an openly declared agenda: to destroy “the two fundamental deceitful myths which impede objective perception of the relations among peoples in these difficult times: that Ukrainians were almost the instigators of German crimes against the Jews...; that Jews were guilty of annihilating Ukrainians under Soviet rule.”96 And although Kovba had a tendency to make generalizations and prefer evidence that showed both Ukrainians and Jews in a favorable light,97 she also included information that went against the grain of her overall interpretation. She was unwilling to hazard an evaluation of OUN’s stance and actions during the Jewish tragedy because she found the evidence too contradictory; more research was required in order to make sense of things.98 What comes through most clearly in Kovba’s book is the mixed feelings of the 1990s: with the collapse of communism, both Jewish suffering and Ukrainian suffering were being articulated, and it was difficult to afford recognition to and reconcile them both.99

The emergence of a cult of OUN and UPA in Ukraine provoked a reaction from a maverick within the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, Viktor Polishchuk. Polishchuk had been born into an Orthodox family in Volhynia, but in 1940, during the first period of Soviet rule in the region, he and his mother and siblings were deported to Kazakhstan. (His father had been arrested by the Soviets in 1939 and was never seen again.) They were allowed to return to Ukraine after the Soviet reconquest in 1944, but to Dnipro oblast rather than Volhynia. In 1946 the family moved to Poland (Polishchuk’s mother was Polish). Polishchuk studied law there and worked as a lawyer and a prosecutor; but after he openly declared his Ukrainian nationality in 1956 he was fired from the prosecutor’s office and endured other instances of discrimination. In 1981 he emigrated to Canada, where, being very particular about proper Ukrainian usage, he worked as an editor in Ukrainian-language media. Based in Toronto and well informed through the circumstances of his employment about Ukrainian diaspora life, he came into contact with nationalist circles; he had not been acquainted with nationalists in Ukraine or Poland. Although he had no personal experience of what OUN-UPA had done in Volhynia during the war, he knew from friends and relatives that the nationalists had slaughtered many of its former Polish inhabitants, including members of his own extended family.100

A follower of the debates in Ukraine after the fall of communism, he was upset by prominent political and cultural figures calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA and blamed the Ukrainian diaspora for reintroducing nationalism to Ukraine.101 This is what provoked him to write Hirka pravda (Bitter Truth), published at his own cost in 1995. (The book appeared in Polish in the same year and later in an English translation.) The text was an indictment of OUN and UPA for the mass murder of the Polish inhabitants of Volhynia. At this time, by his own admission, Polishchuk did not have enough material to write about UPA’s murder of Jews and others.102 Later on he found plenty of relevant documentation,103 but his documentary publications remained focused primarily on the murder of Poles.104 His 1995 text did not yet use archival material, although he hoped that soon such material would become available.105 Later Polishchuk did gain access to the relevant archival documents and cited and reproduced them in his publications. But the 1995 text was based entirely on published sources as well as some personal communications.

Polishchuk’s book was not well received by Western, Ukrainian, or Polish historians, even though Polishchuk wrote from an anti-Soviet perspective and was careful to make a distinction between Ukrainians as such and OUN.106 The prolific Canadian historian of modern Ukraine David Marples categorized the book as differing little from the Soviet perspective “in terms of the one-sidedness of the outline.”107 Volodymyr Serhiichuk, a pro-nationalist Ukrainian scholar best known for numerous documentary compilations on modern Ukrainian history, devoted a short book to a refutation of Polishchuk’s Hirka pravda.108 Polishchuk himself he called a “supposed Ukrainian” (nibyto ukrainets’). Yurii Shapoval, one of the first Ukrainian historians to work with NKVD documents, rejected Polishchuk’s work as anti-Ukrainian.109 The dean of Lviv’s Ukrainian historians, the late Yaroslav Isaievych, labeled Polishchuk “a ‘professional’ of anti-Ukrainian hysteria.”110 Polish specialists in modern Ukrainian history were of a similar opinion. Ryszard Torzecki called him a former prosecutor for the NKVD (which he was not) and felt that he “was not worth talking about.”111 His views were also criticized by Rafał Wnuk, although not as vehemently: “W. Poliszczuk holds a special place among the non-scientists. As a Ukrainian political scientist who deals, so to speak, ‘scientifically’ with the problem of Ukrainian nationalism, he is sometimes seen as a credible person.”112 Both Shapoval and Torzecki equated Polishchuk with a much less credible writer, the propagandist Edward Prus.113

In my opinion, this was not a fair equation. There are one-sided authors, and there are unbalanced authors. Prus, unfortunately, belonged to the latter category. In communist Poland he specialized in propaganda against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and Ukrainian nationalists and continued in the same vein after communism’s collapse; in both eras he was closely associated with the Polish nationalist right. Prus had been born in and survived the war in Galicia. As a teenager he joined in the defence of Poles threatened by UPA and later fought UPA in the “destruction battalions” (istrebitel’nye batal’ony).114 He later emigrated to Poland, earned a doctorate at the University of Warsaw, held various academic posts—none of any prominence, and wrote prolifically.