Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

Furthermore, I have sometimes been able to corroborate information from the Soviet interrogations by comparing them with other, non-Soviet sources. I have also not run across any patently evident falsehoods in the interrogations. Diana Dumitru too accepts the general reliability of Soviet Moldavian interrogations from the same period based on her own triangulation with other sources.28 Vladimir Solonari, who worked with Soviet interrogations and trials from Moldavia and Bukovina, pointed to “plausible details of local life and death, such as the pillows that a killer brought from the killing site, a particular phrase that a Jew said before the execution of himself and his family, or what a perpetrator retorted to his neighbor when the latter rebuked him for his cruelty. It is highly unlikely that investigators would invent those details....”29 Alexander Prusin, who examined interrogations and trials from Ukraine and the Baltic area, concurred: “While the testimonies...do not give exact dates or numbers of victims, they provide relatively accurate descriptions of the Holocaust in various localities. These descriptions are corroborated by archival documents and modern studies. Hence, there is no reason why the interrogation and trial records—if combined with other available materials—should not be used as historical sources relating to the sites and instances of genocide.”30 Another analyst of these same records, Tanja Penter, essentially agreed. In spite of problems which she carefully identified, “trial records represent an extremely valuable resource for the study of Nazi occupation and crimes in occupied Soviet territories. They contain detailed descriptions of the Holocaust in different local settings, towns and villages, and of life in ghettos and camps.”31

      The general validity of the information in Soviet interrogations was also accepted by the historical working group in Ukraine that provided the ammunition to rehabilitate OUN and UPA in the 1990s and early 2000s. Anatolii Kentii in particular used them for his work on OUN and UPA. Large extracts of these interrogations have also been published by the pro-UPA documentary series Litopys UPA.

Much of what has been said about interrogations also applies to Soviet trial records, but there are a few additional nuances. The records of trials, or simply of military tribunals, from the mid-1940s indicate to me that Soviet authorities in this era proceeded from some rough notions of justice—the courts and tribunals do not strike me as totally arbitrary. I was surprised, for instance, to discover in my research that accused war criminals, even members of OUN and UPA, were not convicted of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence. There had to be eyewitness testimony or other evidence to convict. Thus, if an OUN militia executed a group of Jews in the summer of 1941, a participant in that execution could state that he was present at the execution but did not shoot; if none of his comrades betrayed him, he was likely to be convicted not of murder but of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization. A conviction of murder could result in execution, but participating in an anti-Soviet organization generally brought a sentence of ten years in a labor camp. Also, after the end of the Great Terror, i.e., from 1938 onwards, Soviet judicial proceedings became more professional and less arbitrary.32

The other point to make about trials is that the records of the 1940s tend to be fairly brief. But sometimes cases were reopened later with an eye towards a deeper investigation of instances of mass murder, and these reopened cases produced quite voluminous files. An example is the case of Yakiv Ostrovsky a former Ukrainian policeman (Schutzmann) in Volhynia who deserted German service to join UPA. In July 1944 he turned himself into the NKVD and was interrogated by a famous Soviet partisan leader, Aleksandr Saburov. Over the course of his interrogation, Ostrovsky freely admitted to killing people as a policeman, but “not many—twenty-five to thirty people.” Yet when sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in 1945, he was convicted not of murder, but of treason (as a policeman working for the Germans) and of membership in a counterrevolutionary organization (UPA). The case, however, was reopened in 1981. I suspect this happened in the context of growing global interest in the Holocaust and the Soviets’ realization at that time of the propaganda value of linking Ukrainian nationalism to the murder of Jews.33 In any case, new evidence came to light that allowed Ostrovsky’s case to be reopened. It turned out that there had been an eyewitness after all to Ostrovsky killing Jews in an extermination action of 1942. The testimony had been recorded in July 1944, actually a day before Ostrovsky had turned himself in to the NKVD. But this testimony had been given not to the NKVD, but instead to the Extraordinary State Commission, the procedures and documents of which will be discussed immediately below. The lack of communication between the two Soviet investigative units meant that the relevant eyewitness testimony had not been considered at Ostrovsky’s original trial. The eyewitness was a non-Jew who had been forced to bury the victims of the execution action, some of whom were still alive as he buried them. He had named Ostrovsky as one of the shooters. Ostrovsky was put on trial again in 1982, and much more evidence was brought to bear; this time Ostrovsky was convicted of murder and executed in the following year.34

Aside from investigation and trial records, another large collection of Soviet documentation relevant to our study are the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR. Established in 1942, its purpose was “to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this field, to reveal the names of war criminals, and to publish official reports on their findings.”35

There were two tendencies in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission that affected how OUN and UPA were represented in its documentation. First, the Commission was interested in ascribing as much destruction and murder to the Germans as possible, with the aim of receiving large reparations. Second, the Commission avoided disturbing the image of a united Soviet people that resisted the fascist onslaught. Both of these factors led to downplaying the role of local, non-German accomplices. For example, the Commission compiled a list of persons responsible for war crimes committed in Lviv. Of the 69 persons on the list, only 3 were non-Germans,36 although we know that the Ukrainian National Militia and later the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were deeply involved in mass murder in the city. However, the Commission’s investigations at the local, i.e., raion, levels were more open to information about local collaborators in Nazi crimes. But when summaries of these reports were drafted at the oblast level, the activities of non-German accomplices were often edited out. The higher the level of summary, the lower the profile of non-German perpetrators.

Moreover, the Commission’s work was, as Solonari noted, “very uneven: in some districts it worked thoroughly, in others less so. Sometimes it could rely on relatively qualified personnel, but quite often barely literate party activists performed the entire task.”37 An example of the unreliability that Solonari describes appeared in the Commission’s investigation of a horrendous pogrom in Hrymailiv (P Grzymałów), north of Husiatyn in Ternopil oblast, in which many young Ukrainian men of the town participated. Relying on local witnesses, the Commission stated that SS officer Daniel Nerling participated in the pogrom, which occurred on 5 July 1941.38 However, as we know from Nerling’s trial in Lübeck in 1969, he did not arrive in Hrymailiv until late October 1941.39

On the more positive side, as Solonari also noted, the Commission would sometimes “collect handwritten accounts of the survivors