Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

      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