Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

has also worked on OUN-UPA and the Holocaust. What had occurred as a result of Gross’s intervention was that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe had begun to be treated as a part of East European history. One could no longer just parachute intellectually into an East European locality and follow what the Germans did there—one had to have deeper contextual knowledge. In 1992 Christopher Browning published his pathbreaking study of Holocaust perpetrators, Ordinary Men. It followed a German reserve police battalion as it murdered its way through Poland but did not cite any sources in Polish. No scholar in the West in the 1990s thought this unusual. But when, at the end of the 1990s, Omer Bartov decided to write a history of interethnic relations and the Holocaust in the small Galician town of Buchach, the demands of scholarship were different. The immersion in the languages and cultures and physical space of Galicia required a large investment of time. In the end, it took this prolific author two decades to write his microhistory, Anatomy of a Genocide.

The third revolutionary feature of Gross’s book was that it reintegrated victims’ testimony into mainstream Holocaust scholarship, after decades of marginalization. His particular views on survivors’ testimony will be discussed in the next chapter, on sources, but the overall point is that he demonstrated the crucial importance of moving beyond what perpetrators had to say and listening also to the victims. Christopher Browning exemplifies the change of attitude. When he wrote Ordinary Men back in the early 1990s, he did not use any testimonies or other first-person documents other than those of the perpetrators, except to establish chronology.127 But in the twenty-first century he has become an advocate of reintegrating victim narratives into Holocaust studies. In a lecture he delivered at the USC Shoah Foundation in March 2018, he said:

Using survivor testimony has difficulties....It is problematic evidence. But all historical evidence is problematic in one way or another. Anybody who relies on uncomplicated evidence isn’t going to be able to write history. But the issue is not do we use it, but how do we use it. To not use survivor memories is to lose whole areas of the Holocaust that we have no other set of evidence for.128

The present monograph comes out of the post-Neighbors consensus: it examines non-German perpetrators, it proceeds from immersion in regional history and culture, and it makes copious use of testimonies and related ego documents. This is now becoming, at least in the West, the main stream of scholarship on the Holocaust in Ukraine and is represented by many, and diverse, practitioners, including Tarik Cyril Amar, Omer Bartov, Delphine Bechtel, Franziska Bruder, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Simon Geissbühler, Taras Kurylo, Jared McBride, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,129 Per Anders Rudling, and Kai Struve. Scholars sharing the same consensus have also been studying the Holocaust on territories adjacent to Ukraine, notably Diana Dumitru, Jan Grabowski, and Vladimir Solonari. A few other traits of this scholarly trend need to be mentioned. One is that it is in constant dialogue with Western scholarship on the Holocaust as well as with the historiography on twentieth-century Ukraine—in Western academia, the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Ukraine itself. The main languages of its publications are English and German, but many of its texts have been translated into Ukrainian as well as Polish and Russian. The representatives of this historiographical tendency are critical of both the nationalists and their interpretation of the past.

      Close to the group described above are other Western historians who have made important contributions to the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Wendy Lower has written on German perpetrators, co-edited a collective monograph on the Shoah in Ukraine as well as edited an English translation of one of the few diaries of a Jewish victim of the Holocaust in Galicia; she has also written on the bloody summer of 1941 in Ukraine. Vladimir Melamed, originally from Lviv and the author of a Russian-language history of Lviv’s Jewish community, has written an original study of Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust based on the oral histories collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. Frank Golczewski has published a number of important studies that relate to OUN and to the Holocaust in Ukraine.

      In the past few decades Polish historiography on OUN and UPA has been extensive and has been mainly concerned, of course, with the nationalists’ slaughter of the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. One of the most important Polish historians working in this area is Grzegorz Motyka. His major study Ukraińska partyzantka (The Ukrainian Partisan Movement) contains a chapter on UPA and the Holocaust, but like Dieter Pohl a decade earlier he was unable to arrive at clear conclusions.

Contemporary Polish historiography remains divided over the scholarly contributions of Jan Gross. Neighbors has had, and continues to have, a controversial reception in Poland. Some prominent Polish historians and intellectuals reject Gross’s work,130 but mostly in consideration of what it says or implies about Polish society. Worth singling out is Bogdan Musial’s “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen,” an informative study of the violence—Soviet, Nazi, and Ukrainian nationalist—in the summer of 1941. It originally appeared in August 2000 and was less antagonistic to Gross’s scholarship than Musial’s later texts and those of other Polish historians in his camp (such as Marek Jan Chodakiewicz). But “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen” has been criticized by Western scholars for exaggerating the role of Jews in the Soviet apparatus in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine in 1939-41 and thus implying a certain justification for the pogroms that broke out in the wake of the German invasion.131

      The Rehabilitation of OUN and UPA in Ukraine

      An even more important division has been created by the recrudescence of a pro-OUN historiography, this time in Ukraine rather than in the diaspora. It is a historiography that takes little notice of Western scholarship, except occasionally as an irritant. It also neglects or rejects the use of contemporary testimony by persons of non-Ukrainian ethnicity, particularly Poles and Jews. It does not conceal its political purpose, the exposition of a heroic national myth. Although it is not without genuine achievements, from the point of view of historical scholarship it is a historiographical silo.

As mentioned earlier, in the 1990s, as a response to calls to rehabilitate OUN-UPA as well as to protests of Red Army veterans and others against such rehabilitation, the Ukrainian parliament looked to Ukraine’s historians to investigate the historical role of the nationalists and to provide information on which a decision could be based. In 1997 a working group was set up, headed by Stanislav Kulchytsky. In the mid-1980s Kulchytsky had been part of a Soviet Ukrainian commission to refute allegations that there had been a manmade famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Later, when Ukraine became independent, and especially when President Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10) made the famine, the “Holodomor,” a central component of his historical and identity politics, Kulchytsky changed his views and became the chief historian of the famine and a strong proponent of the idea that the Holodomor was a genocide.132

The working group produced two key texts in 2000-05 that were meant to clarify the history of OUN and UPA and provide expert guidance on the evaluation of the nationalists.133 The first of these texts, Problema OUN-UPA, was produced in 2000 and intended as a preliminary outline of the issues.134 A not unsimilar document was produced in 2005, which bore the subtitle “expert conclusion” (fakhovyi vysnovok) but actually made no overt recommendations.135 In addition to these more programmatic documents, the working group published a collective monograph on the history of OUN and UPA.136 Much of the text of the two shorter, programmatic publications was drawn word for word from the collective monograph. The collective monograph in turn was drawn from more extensive studies by working-group