Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

in this press was quite depressing. The Ukrainians who had followed the Germans out of Ukraine before the Red Army’s advance saw their world collapsing. Not only had the Soviets returned to Ukraine and so many conscious Ukrainians become displaced to the West, but there was plenty of other bad news: communists coming to power throughout Eastern Europe, the suppression of the Greek Catholic church, the famine of 1946, the resettlement of the Ukrainian population in Poland, and the suppression of UPA in Poland and repression of its adherents. The Ukrainians in the camps were overwhelmed by their own memories of suffering and struggle and the bleak prospects for the future. The Ukrainians positioned themselves now as virulently anti-German, their initial flirtation with the Germans being presented as an honest error. And they remained anti-Soviet.

      I was curious if the immediately postwar Ukrainian press continued to publish antisemitic articles and discovered that overt antisemitic statements had almost disappeared, even though many of the same journalists continued to work in the new environment. Although occasionally concerned with Polish-Ukrainian relations, Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the issue of the Holocaust and Ukrainian participation in it were hardly mentioned at all. What was developing, however, was a defense of Ukrainian behavior with regard to the Jews, although, as I’ve said, the issue was rarely treated at all.

There may well be more, but I found only two articles that confronted the stance of Ukrainians in the Holocaust. One was written in 1947 by Volodymyr Yaniv, an OUN activist who had been arrested several times by the Polish authorities. He published an article in defense of “the good name of the Ukrainian people,” which was a response to generalizations about Ukrainians made by Eugen Kogon in his seminal work on the Nazi concentration camp system.103 Yaniv did not deny that some Ukrainians took part in the Holocaust, but he said that certain things had to be taken into account: What was the extent of these Ukrainians’ guilt? “Were they the initiators, or only the executors,” and were they not acting under “bestial duress”? Kogon had also accused Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles of antisemitism, “thus more or less all the nations on whose lands the mass liquidations of Jews occurred; this then is proof of an action coordinated from above rather than an expression of the genuine feelings of the above-mentioned nations. The ‘antisemitism’ of these nations was only a result of the pressure of the occupier.” Yaniv considered participation in the Holocaust the responsibility of “criminal individuals” and omitted mention of any group that bore political responsibility. Yaniv blamed the robbery of Jews during their transit to the Lviv ghetto on “the Lviv rabble (motlokh)—in equal measure Ukrainian and Polish.” One cannot, he admonished, generalize about the behavior of entire nations from such incidents. “It is well known: the rabble. The law of the mob.”104

The other article, which also appeared in 1947 but in a different newspaper, was anonymous and simply entitled “Ukrainians and Jews.” It reported that a Yiddish periodical, Ibergang, in discussing children rescued during the Holocaust had mentioned the efforts of the Greek Catholic metropolitan of Halych and archbishop of Lviv, Andrei Sheptytsky.105 The article mentioned Sheptytsky’s letter to Himmler condemning the murder of defenseless and innocent people. It concluded: “These facts most obviously contradict the malicious and baseless inventions of the enemies of Ukrainians about ‘antisemitism’ and ‘pogromism’ of the Ukrainian people.”106

      Thus just a few years after the war we see expressions of the kind of argumentation that would be used in subsequent years to defend the record of OUN and UPA during the war. The Germans forced people to participate in anti-Jewish actions (which was indeed sometimes the case). The major offenders were not the Ukrainian educated elite but the lower classes, the rabble. Collaboration in the Holocaust was a matter of individual responsibility and guilt, and Ukrainians cannot be held collectively responsible for what happened. What is important about this formulation is that it excludes from consideration any intermediate actors between individuals and the national community as a whole, such as the occupation press, the local Ukrainian civil adminstration, OUN, UPA, and police and military units in German service. Also, Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s condemnation of the Holocaust and rescue of Jewish children are understood to exonerate Ukrainians as a whole from charges of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust.

Before leaving this general survey of the source base for understanding the connection between OUN-UPA and the Holocaust, I should explicitly state the obvious: I have not identified all the possible sources that a resourceful and imaginative historian can unearth. Some of the recent historiography has been quite impressive in bringing new and new types of documentation to light.107

      Disputed Sources

      Critics and defenders of OUN have argued over the authenticity and meaning of some sources, and in what follows I will look at three major controversies that have arisen.

      Yaroslav Stetsko’s Autobiography of July 1941

      As we will describe in more detail later,108 one of the most prominent leaders of OUN-B, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared the renewal of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv on 30 June 1941. OUN-B was hoping to present the Germans with a fait accompli, but they miscalculated, and over the course of July a number of OUN-B leaders were arrested. Stetsko was arrested by the Security Police on 9 July and taken to Berlin; there on 12 July or within a day or two thereafter he wrote an autobiography in two languages, Ukrainian and German. A passage in the Ukrainian version reads:

      I consider Marxism to be a product of the Jewish mind, which, however, has been applied in practice in the Muscovite prison of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic people with the assistance of Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s greatest enemies and bearers of corruptive Bolshevik international ideas.

Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.109

      The corresponding passage in the German version is:

      Marxism is indeed to be considered as a creation of the Jewish brain, but its practical realization (also with Jewish help) was and is in the Muscovite prison of peoples, brought about by the Muscovite people. Moscow and Jewry are the greatest enemies of Ukraine and the carriers of disintegrative Bolshevik international Ideas.

The main enemy of Ukraine is not Jewry, but Moscow, which has subjugated Ukraine; Muscovite imperialism is not to be confused with the disintegrative assistance of the Jews. Nevertheless the role of the Jews is not to be underestimated. I am of the opinion that in the struggle against Jewry in Ukraine German methods are to be employed.110

These passages were first published in the KGB-produced book Lest We Forget “authored” by Michael Hanusiak, and Western scholars were reluctant to rely on them.111 But after the archives were opened in the 1990s, Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk published the full texts of Stetsko’s autobiography with extensive commentary in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. In a subsequent issue of that journal, Taras Hunczak cast doubt on the autobiography’s authenticity.112 Hunczak was a professor at Rutgers Newark who had made some solid contributions to the study of modern Ukrainian history, mainly of an editorial and compilatory nature. As a child