Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

in Ukraine in 1919113 and an account of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during World War II intended as a response to Judge Jules Deschênes’ Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada.114 So it is not unusual that he would take up the issue of the Stetsko memoirs and conclude that they were forgeries.

      I will examine Hunczak’s major arguments and then offer some additional considerations. First, he wondered why the memoirs were found in Ukraine rather than in Germany; he raised the question in order to buttress his final conclusion, which was that the autobiography “was written in the offices of KGB functionaries.” At present, there is no precise answer to Hunczak’s question. But there is a general answer: the Soviets took German records that interested them. Thus records of the RSHA are in Moscow and the records of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg are in Kyiv; the Soviets also took records of the secret police and intelligence units. The best informed specialist on Soviet archives, Patricia Grimsted, explained:

The seizure of Nazi records was specifically ordered by Allied Control Commission laws and paralleled similar seizures by the Western Allies. The only difference was that the Western Allies worked together with seized Nazi records, while Soviet authorities refused to cooperate....[B]y the 1960s, the Western Allies had agreed to return to West Germany almost all the Nazi records they had seized (with the exception of some military and intelligence files), following analysis and microfilming. Soviet authorities, by contrast, never even made known which Nazi records they had retrieved.115

      His second argument was that Lest We Forget was untrustworthy and outright deceitful. This was an accurate assessment, but it does not follow logically that therefore everything in the book was manufactured. Hunczak was able to show that “Hanusiak” deliberately distorted and misrepresented sources, but not that he used fake evidence. For example, he analyzed a photograph of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky that Hanusiak claimed was a picture of the churchman receiving a swastika during a military exercise in 1939; in fact, Hunczak had found the original of the photo in the Lviv archives and determined that Sheptytsky was receiving a scout (Plast) badge at a scouting camp in 1930. Thus the photo was real, but the meaning the KGB wanted viewers to derive from it was not. As the saying goes, even the devil can quote scripture.

The third argument he brought to bear was linguistic. He maintained that the spelling of the adjective pidpol’nyi was “a transparent Russian variation of the Ukrainian pidpillia.” But if he had checked the spelling used by Lviv’s major newspaper, Dilo, in the 1930s, he would have found the supposed “transparent Russian variant” pidpol’nyi employed frequently.116 Hunczak’s major linguistic argument was that the spelling in the autobiography uses an h (г) “where an individual from western Ukraine, particularly in 1941, would have used the letter g” (ґ). An example he cites is “propahanda instead of propaganda.” But the legal newspaper under the German occupation, L’vivs’ki visti, used the spelling propahanda in 1941, and Stetsko himself used the spelling propahanda.117 The linguistic arguments, in sum, fail.118

In Hunczak’s opinion, “the ultimate fraud” was a statement in the autobiography that Stetsko edited the journal Ideia i chyn in 1939-40. Again, Hunczak made an error, confusing the Ideia i chyn of 1942-46, in which Stetsko indeed had no role, with a periodical that bore the same title, but came out earlier and was in fact edited by Stetsko.119 Thus none of Hunczak’s proofs of fabrication hold up.

      On the other hand, there are solid arguments in favor of the authenticity of the autobiography. For one thing, we know of no other example of the KGB seeding secret archives with false documents. We certainly know of Soviet falsifications, but not of falsifications that they secreted in archives that were basically closed to researchers. Moreover, the autobiography is an oddly preserved document. There is no full text of the German version; instead, there is a draft of the first page and then a fair copy of the rest of the pages, but some text missing in between. And there are also some discrepancies between the German and Ukrainian texts; for example, the German version notes that Stetsko was born in a priest’s family, but the Ukrainian version omits that information. Would the KGB have put together such a sloppy document? These odd features smack of the irregularity of a genuine archival document.

Moreover, there was nothing unusual in the substance of the anti-Jewish passage of the document. As Berkhoff and Carynnyk pointed out when they published it,120 and as we will see for ourselves in the next chapter, what Stetsko had to say in his autobiography of July 1941 was very similar to what other OUN leaders were saying at the same time and what Stetsko himself had been saying about Jews in previous years. In fact, the autobiography uses verbal formulations quite characteristic of Stetsko, as we can see by comparing it to an antisemitic article he published in 1939 in a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper in Canada, “Zhydivstvo i my” (Jewry and Us). The short article of 1939 uses the same vocabulary as the two paragraphs on Jews in the autobiography of 1941. (See Table 1.)

      Table 1

“Жидівство і ми” 1939	Життєпис 1941
Москва є головним ворогом	головним ворогом—Москву
закріплювач (грали ролю закріплювача ворожого стану посідання)	закріповувати (помагають Москві закріпо[ву]вати Україну)
виключення всякої асиміляції	виключаючи її асиміляції
московський азіят	московсько-азіятський народ

In conclusion, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the 1941 Stetsko autobiography.121

      The Book of Facts

In 2008 the SBU released with great fanfare a document, The Book of Facts,122 that it said exonerated OUN, and specifically its battalion Nachtigall, from participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the summer of 1941. As presented at that time, the Book of Facts was “essentially a chronicle of the activities of OUN during March-September 1941.”123 The relevant passage on the pogroms is interesting and short enough to present in full:

      4-7 July 1941

      Representatives of Gestapo units, who came to Lviv in great number, by various paths approached Ukrainian circles that the Ukrainians should organize a three-day pogrom of the Jews. “Instead of organizing demonstrative funerals for political prisoners murdered by the Bolsheviks,” they said, “it is better to execute a major revenge action against the Jews. Neither German police nor military authorities will interfere in this.”

      The leading personnel of OUN, when they learned of this, informed all members that this