Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

OUN Documents

There is a great variety of OUN and UPA documentation. Wartime OUN and UPA had well developed administrative structures that generated masses of documents. Some have been preserved by OUN members in the diaspora and have ended up in published collections as well as in archives, libraries, and museums across North America and Europe. But the richest trove is in archives in Ukraine, comprised primarily of documentation captured by the Soviets. Occasionally, too, OUN-UPA archives buried in containers for more than half a century have been unearthed.46

The most official of the OUN documents are the resolutions of the organization’s congresses and conferences as well as various programmatic documents. But aside from these, there are many other kinds of documents, including:47

 drafts of programmatic documents;

 transcripts of meetings;

 orders and instructions to units of UPA and OUN’s security service (SB OUN);

 field reports from units of UPA and SB OUN;

 SB OUN interrogation records;

 materials from OUN-UPA training courses;

 memoranda of both factions of OUN to various German offices;

 proclamations and announcements to the population.

In using OUN-UPA documents, an important factor to consider is to whom a particular document is addressed. Leader Stepan Bandera himself stated: “One program should be addressed to the members and sympathizers of nationalism, and the second for external factors. The first should be the main credo for members and sympathizers. The second program should exist for external consumption. It can change according to the circumstances and external situation.”48 Particularly with regard to documents aimed for external audiences, it is necessary to consider the time and context in which documents emerged. There were moments when OUN was close to the Germans, other moments when they were enemies, yet other moments when OUN hoped to court the Western allies. In 1941 OUN was optimistic that the Germans would be victorious, but this ceased to be the case by 1943. Earlier, OUN competed ideologically with the Germans; later it did so with the Soviets. After it became clear that Germany would lose the war and that OUN’s participation in the mass murder of Jews would blemish its reputation with the Western allies, OUN-B undertook to revise the historical record. On 27 October 1943, the OUN leadership in Ukraine issued an order to compile

c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out executions, urged the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confirm with their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.

d. Material that would clearly confirm that Poles had initiated and taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms....49

The order was sent “in strictest confidence” to “the oblast, circle, and county leaders” of OUN.

Also, we know that not every order was written down, and sometimes we have to interpret the course and meanings of actions without documentation from OUN-UPA itself.

Yet in spite of efforts to dissemble and to doctor history, OUN produced written documents that testify to antisemitism, the pursuit of ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Jews.

Other Documentation

The USHMM has the stenographer’s minutes of denaturalization hearings conducted by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s of persons accused of having served as Ukrainian policemen under the Nazi occupation.50 Useful in these documents is the witness testimony. Among those who testified are former Ukrainian policemen, their relatives, and Jewish survivors. They provide information that helps us better understand not only the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in German service, but also the Ukrainian National Militia connected with OUN-B.

The Eastern Bureau of the Polish underground government reported on the situation in Galicia (“Eastern Little Poland” in its terminology) and Volhynia in 1943-44.51

Documentation of armed forces and governments other than those of the Germans and the Soviets who were active on Ukrainian territory during World War II has not been consulted for this study. But other scholars have made use of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak documentation; where relevant I cite it from their work.

Memoirs, Testimonies, Diaries
Jewish Testimony

Before his demise in Majdanek death camp, the Jewish historian Ignacy Schiper stated: “What we know about murdered peoples is only what their murderers vaingloriously cared to say about them. Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of the war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders.”52 The defeat of Nazi Germany prevented the scenario that Schiper feared, but the decades-long hegemony of Nazi documentaton in Holocaust research in the West has occluded for too long the input of the targeted victims. The memoirs, testimonies, and diaries of Jews who experienced the Holocaust comprise a huge and informative body of source material that needs to be taken into consideration by historians. As is the case for all the other sources discussed so far, the understanding and use of these particular sources require an awareness of their specific biases and limitations.

Jan Gross, as already explained, has been a champion of testimony, and his book Neighbors sparked a growing interest in the use of testimony in Holocaust studies in the West and in postcommunist Europe. In Neighbors he made a bold and controversial statement on the subject:

...I suggest that we should modify our approach to sources for this period. When considering survivors’ testimonies, we would be well advised to change the starting premise in appraisal of their evidentiary contribution from a priori critical to in principle affirmative. By accepting what we read in a particular account as fact until we find persuasive arguments to the contrary, we would avoid more mistakes than we are likely to commit by adopting the opposite approach, which calls for cautious skepticism toward any testimony until an independent confirmation of its content has been found.53 The greater the catastrophe, the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss....54

Clearly this passage was carefully formulated, and so it has to be as carefully read. I am not sure that critics have been doing that. Gross was writing about historical likelihood, not proof. I therefore would disagree with the way Christopher R. Browning has criticized it. He wrote that in cases in which “there is only a handful of survivors, this [Gross’s approach] is a tempting proposition. But however tempting, this default position still strikes me as too low an evidentiary threshold.”55 My own view is identical with that of Omer Bartov: “From the point of view of the historian, the single most important benefit of using testimonies is that they bring into history events that would otherwise remain completely unknown, since they are missing from more conventional documentation found in archives and mostly written by the perpetrators or organizers of genocide. Hence personal accounts can at times save events from oblivion.”56 In this book I will, as far as possible, triangulate sources, so that testimonies do not stand alone.

One persistent problem of victim narrative is how pervaded it is by trauma. Jewish testimony on the Holocaust expresses a traumatic subjectivity, reflecting deeply disturbing personal experience. The “subjectivity or emotionality” of eyewitness testimony has been one of the factors leading to the preference for putatively objective archival documents.57 The main concern about horror and anger influencing survivor accounts seems to be the possibility that they might embellish or exaggerate. In my view, these same possibilities affect all sources, and I cannot agree with the proposition that what a murderer had to say is automatically more reliable than what a victim said. In this study I will frequently cite victim testimony and will leave it to the reader to judge whether it makes sense or not.

Another problem with victim accounts is that they express perspectives from a limited field of vision. Raul Hilberg and his successors in Holocaust studies preferred to work with German sources, among other reasons because the Germans had an overall, bird’s-eye view of the operations that constituted their plan to kill all Jews. Such a viewpoint lent authority to the German documentation. Survivor testimony, by contrast, was fragmented into individual personal experiences in numerous localities. Moreover, victims occupied a particular perspectival niche in the Holocaust. As Shmuel Spector put it: “...testimonies, their proximity to the events notwithstanding, are grounded in subjective perceptions; regardless of how much the witnesses strain to adhere to the truth, their field of vision remains, by necessity, narrow and restricted. Confined in the ghettoes and isolated from the society at large, Jews were in no position to obtain information about the outside world in general and the backrooms of the decision makers in particular.”58 In an earlier publication I analyzed a testimony taken shortly after the war by comparing what it said about events in the Lviv pogrom to photographic evidence of these same events. I did not find any contradiction between the testimony and the pictures and films. The testimony, I concluded, accurately described what the woman who wrote it experienced. I did note, however, that she was unable to learn much about the pogromists who attacked her.59 Similarly, Alexander Prusin, writing of witnesses in Soviet war crimes trials, recorded that “only a few were able to identify the defendants or the units that carried out the murders.”60

One result of this lack of knowledge about specific perpetrators was a tendency in testimony and memoirs to generalize. In the cases Prusin examined, a number of witnesses “identified the perpetrators merely as ‘Germans,’ or ‘the Gestapo.’“61 Many of the testimonies describing events in Ukrainian-inhabited territories refer to the perpetrators simply as “Ukrainians.” Part of the task of this study is to sort out the actions of a particular group of perpetrators, OUN and its armed forces, from that of the general population of Ukrainians. Frank Golczewski, who wrote an important study of collaboration in the Holocaust on the territory of Ukraine, has emphasized the need for scholars to avoid generalization: “Who were these Ukrainians? If we here, as if it were something so apparently obvious, write about the behavior of an entire ethnic group, then it is from the outset problematic.”62 But for some survivors, such distinctions have been difficult to make, and there is concern on the part of some Holocaust scholars that testimony “may be affected by antipathy toward members of other groups.”63 As a result of traumatic experience, some survivors even have a physical aversion to the German, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian language. The cognitive psychologist Robert Kraft explained this phenomenon as follows:

These responses are not the result of thoughtful resentment. They arise from implicit connections in core memory between the survivors’ specific memories of trauma and the language of their tormentors. Prolonged trauma splits the self-concept, creating two separate selves, each supported by different memories that remain irreconcilable. When events in the world bring together these two sets of memories—Holocaust and post-Holocaust—this connection threatens the survivor’s current self-concept, creating a powerful emotional response.64

There is also the issue of accuracy. In another publication I compared three testimonies about the same incident, the mass execution of Jews in Tovste (P Tłuste), north of Zalishchyky in Ternopil oblast. These were two testimonies from Jewish survivors a few years after the war and an interview I had taken myself in 2008 with a Ukrainian eyewitness. Numerous details were remembered differently—the number of Jews that were shot at one time, whether they stood on a plank or walked directly into the pit, the total number of victims, and so on. But all agreed on the main points: at least a thousand Jews were marched in groups through the town to the cemetery and shot there by the Germans.65 I think that this is what we may expect of testimonies and memoirs—that they record the main points but cannot be relied upon for exact detail. Working with testimonies and memoirs, and not just Jewish ones or those related to the Holocaust, I have found that not infrequently specific dates and even years are incorrect.

For this study, I have relied most of all on three sets of Jewish survivor testimonies, each with its own virtues: the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH), videotaped testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation, and published memoirs.

The Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH) has two fonds of relevance. Fond (Zespół) 301 has about seventy-two hundred testimonies in Polish, Yiddish, and other languages from Jews who survived the Holocaust on Polish or formerly Polish territory. Most of the testimonies I will be citing from this collection were taken within a few years of the end of the war, and this temporal proximity to the events described is one of the major strengths of this set of sources. The testimonies are short, averaging about ten pages.66 A noteworthy feature of them is that most were recorded by staff from the Central Jewish Historical Commission,67 who summarized what the survivors said and put their accounts into narrative form, sometimes endowing them with a genuine literary appeal. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has published a guide to these testimonies, with a most helpful geographical index.68 There is also another fond, 302, which comprises just over three hundred and thirty longer, essentially book-length memoirs.

The testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (abbreviated as Shoah Foundation in footnotes) are quite different. If there is a certain distance between the survivor and his or her testimony in the AŻIH collection, this disappears in the Shoah Foundations testimonies, which take the form of videos of the survivors themselves telling their stories in their own words. These personally narrated accounts often make a powerful impact on viewers. This is a vast collection of over fifty thousand survivor testimonies that are generously indexed: one can search by name and place, of course, but also by keywords (e.g., Ukrainians, UPA). The testimonies are in many languages and come from all over the globe. Each Shoah Foundation interview has been divided into numbered segments, which I refer to in the notes. Almost all these interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1999, which has its disadvantages but also a certain advantage.

The advantage is that the 1990s was when the former Soviet Union was just opening up, and many survivors were telling their stories for the first time. Recording their experiences would simply not have been possible earlier. The disadvantage, of course, is the distance in time from the Holocaust, a half century or more. As we know, these old memories could have been influenced by subsequent experience, books written by other survivors, and by films about the Holocaust. Certainly these kinds of problems plagued German memory in the same period.69 Moreover, videotaping Holocaust testimony was intimately connected with television and film. Thus another major collection that began collecting earlier than the Shoah Foundation, namely the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, was inspired by the television miniseries The Holocaust, which was aired in 1978, a year before the inception of what became the Fortunoff Archive. And the sponsor of the Shoah Foundation was Steven Spielberg, the director of the blockbuster film Schindler’s List. Annette Wieviorka found this “troubling”: “Two fictional films dealing with the genocide, viewed by dozens, even hundreds, of millions throughout the world, were also at the origin of the two most important testimony archives.”70

My own experience has been that these later testimonies are generally as reliable as the early testimonies collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission. When I have had the opportunity to compare testimony from the same person over several decades, I have found much more consistency than discrepancy.71 Browning, when he began using testimonies for his project on the Starachowice slave labor camp, was surprised to discover that over time testimonies revealed “a firm core of shared memory” and that his expectations for greater change “were not realized.”72 Shmuel Spector has argued that later testimonies can be superior to their earlier versions: “A comparison of the different versions of the testimony given by the same witness, who related his or her story at different stages of evidence collection, reveals that the testimony given soon after the events it pertained to is not always the most reliable one. The main reason for this is that at that time some of the witnesses had not yet recovered from the horrors they had lived through; only later...they managed to leave them behind and their testimony became more objective and orderly.”73

Kraft, the cognitive psychologist who studied the videotaped testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive, stated that “those survivors who returned to the [Fortunoff] archive a second time—in most cases, eight years after their first extended recall—gave testimony that was remarkably consistent in structure and content with the earlier testimony.”74 He explained this consistency from the perspective of his discipline:

In the study of Holocaust testimony, the most pervasive finding about memory for atrocity is its extraordinary persistence. Specific memories can remain vivid and powerful for more than fifty years, causing people to cry suddenly, to break down uncontrollably, to become angry. Core memories can remain unchanged over very long periods of time, and memories can intrude forcefully into the consciousness of the individual....One consensus among cognitive theorists is that “memory is always dual.” That is, the present self is aware of the past self experiencing the world....With survivors of atrocity, however, the subjective experience of memory is not always dual. Sometimes, when describing a scene, survivors may be drawn into core memory, losing contact with narrative memory and becoming immersed in visualizing the events of the past....When a person is fully visualizing, or ‘back there,’ as the survivors often say, the past self becomes the present self.

The third body of testimonies used in this study consists of Jewish memoirs produced independently of AŻIH and the Shoah Foundation. I systematically examined the memoir collection in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I was able to also supplement with additional items. I found that these memoirs, emanating from different people in different countries for over half a century, told the same basic story. There are also many testimonies contained in the memorial, yizkor books, many of which are also cited in the pages that follow.

Survivors’ testimonies are somewhat unusual, since most Jews who remained on Ukrainian territory during World War II did not survive. We are fortunate that a few diaries of persons who perished in the Holocaust have been preserved and published.75

Ukrainian historians with a nationalist perspective discount or deny the evidential value of Jewish, and also Polish, testimonies about OUN and UPA. This is not surprising, but it is necessary to note that these same historians give great weight to Ukrainian testimonies about the manmade famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, which took about four million lives in Ukraine. In fact, until the last days of communism and the opening of the archives, oral testimony was the only source that documented that terrible event. And even today, testimony remains a crucial source in understanding the famine. There exists then within Ukrainian studies a double stan-dard with regard to testimony for which there is no intellectual justification.