Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

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

Aside from investigation and trial records, another large collection of Soviet documentation relevant to our study are the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR. Established in 1942, its purpose was “to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this field, to reveal the names of war criminals, and to publish official reports on their findings.”35

There were two tendencies in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission that affected how OUN and UPA were represented in its documentation. First, the Commission was interested in ascribing as much destruction and murder to the Germans as possible, with the aim of receiving large reparations. Second, the Commission avoided disturbing the image of a united Soviet people that resisted the fascist onslaught. Both of these factors led to downplaying the role of local, non-German accomplices. For example, the Commission compiled a list of persons responsible for war crimes committed in Lviv. Of the 69 persons on the list, only 3 were non-Germans,36 although we know that the Ukrainian National Militia and later the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were deeply involved in mass murder in the city. However, the Commission’s investigations at the local, i.e., raion, levels were more open to information about local collaborators in Nazi crimes. But when summaries of these reports were drafted at the oblast level, the activities of non-German accomplices were often edited out. The higher the level of summary, the lower the profile of non-German perpetrators.

Moreover, the Commission’s work was, as Solonari noted, “very uneven: in some districts it worked thoroughly, in others less so. Sometimes it could rely on relatively qualified personnel, but quite often barely literate party activists performed the entire task.”37 An example of the unreliability that Solonari describes appeared in the Commission’s investigation of a horrendous pogrom in Hrymailiv (P Grzymałów), north of Husiatyn in Ternopil oblast, in which many young Ukrainian men of the town participated. Relying on local witnesses, the Commission stated that SS officer Daniel Nerling participated in the pogrom, which occurred on 5 July 1941.38 However, as we know from Nerling’s trial in Lübeck in 1969, he did not arrive in Hrymailiv until late October 1941.39

On the more positive side, as Solonari also noted, the Commission would sometimes “collect handwritten accounts of the survivors or eyewitnesses and attach them to their minutes or would transcribe verbal testimony that contained vivid descriptions of the killing operations.”40 As we have seen, one of the eyewitness accounts in a Commission report led to the reopening of the trial of the policeman Ostrovsky in 1981.

One aspect of testimonies recorded by the Extraordinary Commission and similar bodies was always marred by outright falsification, namely testimony that concerned crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets themselves. A disturbing case of this involved the historian Friedman. In 1946 he testified to both the Extraordinary Commission and the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War that the Germans had rounded up Jews when they took Lviv on 30 June 1941, shot them in prisons, disguised their nationality, and blamed the episode on the NKVD. Here are his exact words: “The destruction of the Jews in the city of Lviv began from the first day of the arrival of the Germans, that is, on 30 June 1941. Moreover, at the very beginning the Germans conducted this destruction as a provocation. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Germans led a portion of the Jewish population to the prisons and shot them there....At the same time they pursued a second aim: to present this as an example of the ‘bestial crimes’ of the NKVD, which before its departure from Lviv was allegedly shooting political prisoners.”41 In his subsequent published scholarly work Friedman did not repeat the falsehood of a German provocation and correctly indicated that the corpses in the prisons were victims of the Soviets.42 Similarly, the Soviets recorded testimony of a captured German Wehrmacht officer, Erwin Bingle, that blamed the Soviet mass murders at Vinnytsia from 1936-38 on the German SS and Ukrainian police.43 Again, the murdered political prisoners were presented as murdered Jews. Bingle called the “frame-up” “baseless and utterly ridiculous.”44 Of course, the Soviets were unwilling to wash their bloody laundry in public but quite willing to add their own murders to the Germans’ account, so they induced testimony that served their purposes. This was part of a general policy, the most notorious incident of which was blaming the Germans for the mass murder of Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940 at Katyń.

I found of particular value to my research a set of documents that were sent to the highest echelons of the Soviet Ukrainian communist party in the years 1943-44, as the Soviets entered and reconquered Western Ukrainian territory. These documents had various provenances, but what united them was that they contained information considered worthy of the notice of the top Soviet Ukrainian leadership. Many of these documents concerned OUN and UPA. Like the interrogation documents, these materials were also aimed at trying to understand what was happening. Of course, reports and analyses understood events through a Soviet ideological prism, but materials in this collection also included captured OUN and UPA documents, copies of the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, and even the fascinating diary of a young man drafted into UPA.45

Information on UPA can also be found in the reports of the Soviet partisans who encountered them.