Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

or would transcribe verbal testimony that contained vivid descriptions of the killing operations.”40 As we have seen, one of the eyewitness accounts in a Commission report led to the reopening of the trial of the policeman Ostrovsky in 1981.

One aspect of testimonies recorded by the Extraordinary Commission and similar bodies was always marred by outright falsification, namely testimony that concerned crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets themselves. A disturbing case of this involved the historian Friedman. In 1946 he testified to both the Extraordinary Commission and the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War that the Germans had rounded up Jews when they took Lviv on 30 June 1941, shot them in prisons, disguised their nationality, and blamed the episode on the NKVD. Here are his exact words: “The destruction of the Jews in the city of Lviv began from the first day of the arrival of the Germans, that is, on 30 June 1941. Moreover, at the very beginning the Germans conducted this destruction as a provocation. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Germans led a portion of the Jewish population to the prisons and shot them there....At the same time they pursued a second aim: to present this as an example of the ‘bestial crimes’ of the NKVD, which before its departure from Lviv was allegedly shooting political prisoners.”41 In his subsequent published scholarly work Friedman did not repeat the falsehood of a German provocation and correctly indicated that the corpses in the prisons were victims of the Soviets.42 Similarly, the Soviets recorded testimony of a captured German Wehrmacht officer, Erwin Bingle, that blamed the Soviet mass murders at Vinnytsia from 1936-38 on the German SS and Ukrainian police.43 Again, the murdered political prisoners were presented as murdered Jews. Bingle called the “frame-up” “baseless and utterly ridiculous.”44 Of course, the Soviets were unwilling to wash their bloody laundry in public but quite willing to add their own murders to the Germans’ account, so they induced testimony that served their purposes. This was part of a general policy, the most notorious incident of which was blaming the Germans for the mass murder of Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940 at Katyń.

I found of particular value to my research a set of documents that were sent to the highest echelons of the Soviet Ukrainian communist party in the years 1943-44, as the Soviets entered and reconquered Western Ukrainian territory. These documents had various provenances, but what united them was that they contained information considered worthy of the notice of the top Soviet Ukrainian leadership. Many of these documents concerned OUN and UPA. Like the interrogation documents, these materials were also aimed at trying to understand what was happening. Of course, reports and analyses understood events through a Soviet ideological prism, but materials in this collection also included captured OUN and UPA documents, copies of the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, and even the fascinating diary of a young man drafted into UPA.45

      Information on UPA can also be found in the reports of the Soviet partisans who encountered them.

      OUN Documents

There is a great variety of OUN and UPA documentation. Wartime OUN and UPA had well developed administrative structures that generated masses of documents. Some have been preserved by OUN members in the diaspora and have ended up in published collections as well as in archives, libraries, and museums across North America and Europe. But the richest trove is in archives in Ukraine, comprised primarily of documentation captured by the Soviets. Occasionally, too, OUN-UPA archives buried in containers for more than half a century have been unearthed.46

The most official of the OUN documents are the resolutions of the organization’s congresses and conferences as well as various programmatic documents. But aside from these, there are many other kinds of documents, including:47

       drafts of programmatic documents;

       transcripts of meetings;

       orders and instructions to units of UPA and OUN’s security service (SB OUN);

       field reports from units of UPA and SB OUN;

       SB OUN interrogation records;

       materials from OUN-UPA training courses;

       memoranda of both factions of OUN to various German offices;

       proclamations and announcements to the population.

In using OUN-UPA documents, an important factor to consider is to whom a particular document is addressed. Leader Stepan Bandera himself stated: “One program should be addressed to the members and sympathizers of nationalism, and the second for external factors. The first should be the main credo for members and sympathizers. The second program should exist for external consumption. It can change according to the circumstances and external situation.”48 Particularly with regard to documents aimed for external audiences, it is necessary to consider the time and context in which documents emerged. There were moments when OUN was close to the Germans, other moments when they were enemies, yet other moments when OUN hoped to court the Western allies. In 1941 OUN was optimistic that the Germans would be victorious, but this ceased to be the case by 1943. Earlier, OUN competed ideologically with the Germans; later it did so with the Soviets. After it became clear that Germany would lose the war and that OUN’s participation in the mass murder of Jews would blemish its reputation with the Western allies, OUN-B undertook to revise the historical record. On 27 October 1943, the OUN leadership in Ukraine issued an order to compile

      c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out executions, urged the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confirm with their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.

d. Material that would clearly confirm that Poles had initiated and taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms....49

      The order was sent “in strictest confidence” to “the oblast, circle, and county leaders” of OUN.

      Also, we know that not every order was written down, and sometimes we have to interpret the course and meanings of actions without documentation from OUN-UPA itself.

      Yet in spite of efforts to dissemble and to doctor history, OUN produced written documents that testify to antisemitism, the pursuit of ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Jews.

      Other Documentation

The USHMM has the stenographer’s minutes of denaturalization hearings conducted by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s of persons accused of having served as Ukrainian policemen under the Nazi occupation.50 Useful in these documents is the witness testimony. Among those who testified are former Ukrainian policemen, their relatives, and Jewish survivors. They provide information that helps us better understand not only the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in German service, but also the Ukrainian National Militia connected with OUN-B.

The Eastern Bureau of the Polish underground government reported on the situation in Galicia (“Eastern Little Poland” in its terminology) and Volhynia in 1943-44.51

      Documentation of armed forces and governments other than those