Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

accompanied by bloody public spectacles, as in the pogroms unleashed in Lviv and Zolochiv in early July 1941; sometimes the OUN militias murdered selected Jews and their families more discreetly, and sometimes they just murdered all the Jews in a village.

      Second, OUN recruited for and infiltrated the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Galicia and the stationary Schutzmannschaften in Volhynia. These police units provided the indispensable manpower for the Holocaust. They rounded up Jews for deportation to the death camp at Bełżec or for execution by shooting; although most of the actual killing was done by the Germans, the Ukrainian policemen also killed in certain circumstances. These liquidation actions took place primarily from early 1942 through the middle of 1943.

      Third, early in 1943 thousands of these Ukrainian policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency. Possessed of some military training and familiarity with both weapons and killing, they took leadership positions in UPA. As soon as the former policemen joined them, UPA launched a massive ethnic cleansing project, at first in Volhynia and later in Galicia. Although it was primarily directed against Poles, there were other non-Ukrainian victims, including Jews. In the winter of 1943-44, as the Red Army moved westward, UPA lured surviving Jews out of their hiding places in the forests, temporarily placed them in labor camps, and then murdered them.

      In each of these three phases of anti-Jewish violence, the responsibility of OUN was different. In the first phase, the militias, and the OUN leadership which established them, were primarily responsible for rounding up Jews for the Germans, although the militias did some killing themselves. Altogether the militias were accomplices in the murder of thousands of Jews and shooters in the murder of many hundreds. In the second phase, OUN cannot be held responsible for all that Ukrainian policemen did in Galicia and Volhynia, since police structures were primarily under German control and by no means were all the policemen nationalists, at least initially. OUN's responsibility here lay in its strategy of deliberately infiltrating the police, which drew its members and sympathizers into the eye of the genocidal storm. For the most part, Ukrainian policemen rounded Jews up for others to kill, but sometimes they themselves killed Jews. Altogether the death toll from police roundups was in the hundreds of thousands. In the third phase, OUN's responsibility was direct. Here, the organization was killing Jews primarily on its own initiative, as part of a far-reaching ethnic cleansing project; it was not only finding the Jews for murder, but its forces were perpetrating the killings themselves. The Jewish victims of OUN in this phase probably numbered in the thousands.

      I have structured the book as follows. After this brief introduction, there are several chapters that provide context. The first is a rather extensive examination of the historiography. One factor contributing to the controversy surrounding the role of OUN and UPA in the murder of Jews stems from the peculiar way the historiography developed. For almost half a century after World War II, neither Holocaust scholars nor historians of the nationalists researched the topic. In this scholarly vacuum, accusations and denials were as if weightless, unanchored by evidence. Since about 1990, however, more and more information has come to light and many more scholars have examined the issues. But also since then, there has been a polarization of views over the issue of nationalist collaboration in the Holocaust, determined more by politics, specifically in the form of memory politics, than by contradictory evidence. The second chapter concerns sources. Here I outline the evidentiary record as we know it today and also discuss the particular problems the various kinds of source materials present.

      After these two chapters, which present the epistemological context, I turn to the historical context for our problem. In the third chapter I look at OUN before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, with special attention to three issues: why it emerged and proved attractive to Ukrainian youth in Galicia, its relationship to fascism, and the place and nature of antisemitism in its ideology. In chapter four I turn to the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina), in 1939-41. Some scholars argue that this historical interlude is crucial to understanding how the destruction of the Jews played out in these territories; I present my own understanding of how it affected perceptions and outcomes during the Holocaust.

      The final three chapters are devoted to the phases of OUN's participation in the Holocaust: the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941; the police's role in the systematic destruction of Jews in Galicia, Volhynia, and—to a lesser extent—elsewhere on Ukrainian lands in 1942-43, with special reference, of course, to the connections between the police and OUN; and, finally, UPA's murder of Jews in 1943 and 1944. The book ends with the presentation of the conclusions I have come to.

      This book is not a study of how “Ukrainians” behaved during the Holocaust. It does not generalize about an entire national community but concentrates on a particular political movement. Al-though at the time this study is being written, powerful forces in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora aim to identify the entire Ukrainian nation with the heritage of OUN and UPA, this is at the very least an intellectual error, especially in relation to the war period itself. Also, this is not a study of the whole range of collaboration of Ukrainians with the German wartime authorities. That is a much larger and much more complicated topic. Nor is this even a study of those Ukrainians who actively participated in the Holocaust. For example, the notorious “Ukrainian guards” of German camps, perhaps more properly known as Trawniki men after the camp at which they were trained, do not figure in this book. For the most part these were captured Red Army soldiers rather than ideological allies of the Nazis, and their work in German death and labor camps had no relation to OUN structures.

      Geography

There is no consensus regarding the proper geographical nomenclature for borderland territories and localities, in which much of the events recounted in this study took place. For example, in this book I will frequently refer to “Galicia,” a region that produced a very specific Ukrainian political and intellectual culture. Andrzej Zięba argues, however, that historians should abandon this term unless it is in relation to the Austrian crownland that existed from 1772 to 1918 or to the Distrikt Galizien established by the Germans that existed from August 1941 to July 1944. In his view, historians should use only the official state nomenclature of the Second Polish Republic; in the case of what I call Galicia, he would refer rather to the palatinates (województwa, voyvodships) of Lwów, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. For certain studies, this is, I think, not only justified, but is a good practical choice.1 But for this study, the regional specificity of what I call Galicia is important. It is the region where OUN emerged and achieved its greatest influence, and although UPA was active first in another region, Volhynia, its leadership was to a large degree of Galician origin. So by using this term, I mean to call attention to the regional specificity. Zięba also points out that Ukrainian historians, even when they use the term “Galicia,” are really referring to Eastern Galicia, that is, the eastern part of the Austrian crownland, in which Ukrainians formed a majority of the population.2 “Eastern Galicia” was also a geographical concept that demanded much attention from the diplomats who were working out the post-World-War-I settlements from 1918 through 1923. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, who had used the term Eastern Galicia and Galicia in her earlier work, has lately been arguing that historians should designate what I call Galicia by its transliterated Ukrainian equivalent, Halychyna.3 But as a linguistic conservative by inclination, I will retain the usage Galicia, which appears in my earlier publications and which is common practice in English-language studies of Ukraine. Today Galicia, as I am using it, comprises roughly the oblasts of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, and Ternopil in Ukraine.

Just north of Galicia is a region I will refer to as Volhynia, although it does not encompass all of the territory to which that name has referred historically. Some scholars now employ the distinction Western Volhynia to refer to what I will be calling Volhynia. For this study, I mean the parts of historical Volhynia that were incorporated into Poland from 1921 to 1939. In 1941, under German occupation, Galicia became Distrikt Galizien within the General Government while Volhynia was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.4