Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

Beautifully written, it described the destruction of Lviv’s Jews from the point of view of a child, which Nakonechny had been at the time. His childhood friends and neighbors, who were Jewish, perished in the Holocaust. He wrote with great sympathy for the victims. At the same time, he denied Ukrainian participation in these murders and excoriated “Ukrainophobes,” such as the historian Eliyahu Yones, who thought otherwise. Nakonechny himself had been arrested as a member of an OUN youth group in 1949, at the age of seventeen, and he spent the next six years in the gulag. In his memoir he defended the innocence of OUN, even denying its antisemitism. It is a strange, but captivating book.93

      Photographs and Films

Before the outbreak of the Second World War amateur photographers in Germany owned seven million cameras, and when the war broke out many German soldiers brought their cameras with them. It has been estimated that they took several million pictures in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.94 Like many soldiers, they were interested in atrocity photos; often, they made multiple copies to share, sell, or trade. In addition, official film crews, attached to particular military units or working for the propaganda ministry, made stills and movies of what they saw. One result of this is that historians have access to many photos and films that document the anti-Jewish violence of the summer of 1941, including on Ukrainian territories. Major repositories of photos and films related to the Holocaust are the Yad Vashem Archives (YVA) and the USHMM. A famous series of photos documenting the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941 is held by the Wiener Library in London. The prominent Philadelphia journalist David Lee Preston is a collector of materials, including photos, relating to Lviv during the Holocaust. Preston’s mother survived the war in the sewers of Lviv;95 and he has been very generous in allowing me to peruse and use his collection. A former master’s student of mine, Arianna Selecky, discovered previously unknown footage of the Lviv pogrom in 2008 at the UCRDC in Toronto; it was taken by a photographer attached to the First Alpine Division (1. Gebirgs-Division). The original celluloid film has disappeared, but a digital copy is available at USHMM.96

Although these films and photos are of historical importance, they have to be used carefully and respectfully. As Georgii Shepelev has noted: “Practically speaking, every photograph is not only a document but the photographer’s choice of subject, point of view, and often—staging.” And: “taking a photograph often turns out to be an act of demonstrating domination.”97 This is very much the case with pogrom photos. The prurient interests of some photographers come through clearly in images of sexual assault and forced nakedness, especially during the Lviv pogrom. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “one might well argue that pedagogy demands that the worst be shown, one might also worry about the violation inherent in such displays: these women are doomed in perpetuity to be displayed in the most humiliating, demeaning, dehumanizing position.”98 In my opinion, the act of photographing sexual violence constituted participation in the violence. This view resonates with the testimony of one of the victims of the violence, Róża Wagner: The Germans “walked around with the faces of rulers and photographed the tormented naked women: ‘This will be in Der Stürmer’; they were happy that their compatriots would have the opportunity to look at the feats of their husbands and sons.”99 So in using these photographs—and this applies to photographs also of humiliation, physical assault, and murder—we must be cognizant of the tainted circumstances of their production and of the perspective that they convey to the viewer.

      The photographs discussed above are useful for establishing and interpreting the role of OUN militiamen in the anti-Jewish violence of 1941. It is important to note that all these photographs were taken by the Germans, not by members of OUN themselves; later, when relations between OUN and the Germans became strained, there were no German photographers to record atrocities committed by the nationalists. This may well be one of the reasons why I have been unable to find photographs of OUN’s activities in 1943-44 of direct utility to this study. Hundreds of photos of UPA are available for viewing online, but almost all of them are posed individual and mostly collective portraits, souvenirs for comrades-in-arms. There are also photographs of Polish victims of UPA, but I know of no photographic evidence of any Jewish actions undertaken by UPA.

      Periodical Press

      I have consulted many newspapers and periodicals of the 1930s and 1940s: OUN publications from the entire period, the legal Ukrainian press under Nazi occupation, and postwar periodicals from displaced persons’ camps in Germany and the POW camp in Rimini (where soldiers of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien were interned). Much of this research was conducted in the Stefanyk library in Lviv and at Oseredok in Winnipeg. Many Ukrainian periodicals are available online at libraria.ua.

      Most useful for this study was the OUN press. The party organ Rozbudova natsii came out legally in Prague in 1928-34 and was smuggled into Ukrainian territories in Poland and Romania. It was a venue for open debate and fresh ideas, within, of course, the limits of nationalist discourse. Though it provides many insights into the evolution of OUN thinking, it represented the émigré leadership more than the activists and militants in Galicia and Volhynia. I think one gets a better feel for the latter reading the OUN popular press that came out of Galicia. Nove Selo was a weekly newspaper that came out in Lviv in 1930-39; aimed at the peasantry, it contained much practical advice related to agriculture but also carried articles of a more ideological nature. OUN also briefly managed to publish a fortnightly newspaper aimed at workers. Homin baseinu, intended for workers in the Boryslav oil basin, came out in Drohobych (P Drohobycz) in 1937 and was renamed Homin kraiu in December of that year; it lasted until the beginning of June 1938. The workers’ paper featured many articles aimed against communism and the Soviet Union. Analysis of the Soviet Union was the specialty of the monthly Het’ z bol’shevyzmom edited by Ivan Mitrynga. Only three issues of the journal came out, but it shows how seriously the Mitrynga group followed events in Soviet Ukraine and in the Soviet Union as a whole; Het’ z bol’shevyzmom published academic Sovietology from a nationalist perspective. In 1942-46 OUN-B published an illegal, underground periodical, Ideia i chyn. It contained ideological articles, nationalist propaganda, and news.

The legal Ukrainian-language press that came out during the German occupation of Ukraine was often at least loosely affiliated with nationalist circles and sometimes, especially at the beginning of the occupation, served essentially as OUN organs. We have already seen an example of the latter from the Donbas in the previous chapter.100 Volyn’, which came out in Rivne (P Równe) under the editorship of Ulas Samchuk, and Ukrains’ke Slovo, which came out in Kyiv under the editorship of Ivan Rohach, were both initially under the control of the Melnyk faction of OUN. But in February 1942 much stricter German censorship was introduced and leading nationalists in the press were repressed. Samchuk was arrested and Rohach executed; Olena Teliha, a major Ukrainian poet who contributed to both newspapers, was also executed.101 Krakivs’ki visti, which appeared under the auspices of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubijovyč, was a cut above the other legal papers culturally and intellectually; it was loosely affiliated with the Melnyk faction as well and, like all the occupation papers, published antisemitic propaganda in abundance.102 The Banderites initially controlled a weekly newspaper in Zboriv (P Zborów), Ternopil oblast, Zborivs’ki visti, which published for the first time the text of the declaration of 30 June 1941 proclaiming the renewal of Ukrainian statehood.

      I examined numerous Ukrainian newspapers and periodicals published in displaced