Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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