Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

although in fact they were a pro-Soviet formation.22 The general thrust of his study is exemplified in its concluding sentence: “Full responsibility for these crimes falls on the Nazis, but if the attitude of the Ukrainian national movement and a great part of the Ukrainian population toward the Jews had been different, the number of survivors might well have been much larger.”23

A book that is somewhat transitional in the historiography is Eliyahu Yones’ study of “the Jews of Lviv in the years of the Second World War and the catastrophe of European Jewry, 1939-1944.” It is transitional in the sense that it made limited use of newly opened Soviet archival materials that had been copied by Yad Vashem, but the text primarily relied on testimonies and memoirs, particularly Hebrew-language testimonies collected also by Yad Vashem. The text was originally presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1993, at which time Yones was already advanced in years. He had been born in 1915 in Vilnius, but during the war he found himself in a labor camp in Lviv, hence his interest in the Holocaust in that city. His book was published in Hebrew as well as in German, English, Polish, and Russian translations. I primarily used the Russian-language version.24 Although the primary focus of the book was Lviv, it also contained a great deal of material on the experience of Jews in other localities in Galicia. Yones devoted considerable attention to the persecution of Jews by the Bandera faction of OUN. His knowledge of OUN was incomplete; for example, he made the common error of conflating the militia and the police.25 But the issue of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust was very much on his mind, and his study provided much information on the topic.

      Thus in this early stage of the historiography of Ukrainian nationalism and the Holocaust, the relevant studies were produced by Jewish scholars who were intimately familiar, from personal experience, with the terrain, languages, and societies of the regions where OUN and UPA had been active. They also relied extensively on the accounts of Jews who survived the mass murder. Where they all came up short, in terms of the project undertaken by this book, is that, although keenly interested in OUN and UPA, they did not have access to the kind of sources that would have given them more insight into the workings of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. They needed more definite and more extensive information, which would only become accessible after the collapse of communism. As to studies of the Holocaust in North American and European scholarship, the historiographical protocols established by Hilberg effectively prevented any focus on the role of OUN and UPA. If Western studies strayed into occupied Eastern Europe, they relied on German sources, neglected eyewitness testimony, and concentrated exclusively on the actions of Germans.

      Histories of OUN and UPA Written prior to the Opening of Soviet Archives

      The most detailed and solidly researched history of the pre-World-War-II OUN to appear in the period 1945-90 was written by Petro Mirchuk and published in 1968. Mirchuk had been a member of OUN since secondary school and was being entrusted with important assignments in the OUN propaganda apparatus by his early twenties (the mid-1930s). Like many in the nationalist underground, he was no stranger to Polish prisons. When war broke out in September 1939, he was in jail, but was released with all the other prisoners when the Polish forces in Lviv capitulated to the Germans. The insider knowledge he acquired in the movement contributed to a well-informed book. In addition, while writing his history, Mirchuk was able to consult a large number of original OUN documents as well as the interwar press, and his book reproduced many important texts of the era. He wrote from a thoroughly nationalist perspective.

Though rich in information, his book had its biases. One was that it sanitized OUN’s record regarding its statements and actions against Jews in the 1930s as well as its relations with Nazi Germany. Mirchuk achieved this sanitization by avoiding these themes entirely. His omissions undoubtedly reflected OUN’s postwar sensitivity about accusations of collaboration with the Nazis, especially with regard to participating in the Holocaust. But to be fair to Mirchuk, he had had a different experience with these issues than did most other OUN members. He only spent one month on Ukrainian ethnic territory during the entire war, namely mid-August to mid-September 1941. Then, at a low ebb of German-OUN relations, he was arrested by the Germans and spent the rest of the war in prisons and concentrations camps, mainly Auschwitz. He was only released when the Americans liberated the concentration camp at Ebensee on 6 May 1945.26 Thus Mirchuk was not present to participate in the anti-Jewish violence of July 1941 and the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1943-44, and he had no love for the Germans. Another notable bias was that Mirchuk was a Bandera loyalist. When OUN split in 1940, he sided with Stepan Bandera against Andrii Melnyk; and when the Bandera faction split again after World War II, he remained with Bandera. His book, thus, presented the history of OUN from a partisan perspective. His depiction of the succession struggle after the assassination of OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets in 1938 was constructed so as to make the Bandera group’s split from the emigré leadership seem reasonable and necessary. He also blamed Melnyk and his allies for turning OUN policy around and “betting on the German Hitlerite card.” Until Melnyk assumed leadership, according to Mirchuk, there were “some contacts” with Wehrmacht circles, who like OUN wanted a revision of the Versailles settlement, but OUN had had reservations about Hitlerite ideology and politics, which viewed Eastern Europe as a territory for colonization.27

Nowhere near as well researched, but even more partisan was Polikarp Herasymenko’s short book on “the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Second World War.” Herasymenko was neither a historian nor politically active for long; instead he was a metallurgist who made a good career in the United Kingdom and the United States after 1948. Born in Odessa, he fled Soviet Ukraine to avoid arrest in 1921, living mainly in Prague until the end of World War II. He was a member of the Melnyk faction of OUN during the war years and for a short time thereafter.28 Herasymenko’s history was first published as a mimeographed text in 1947 and went through several editions over the following years. The work made use of the interwar and wartime periodical press as well as documents of both the united OUN and the Melnyk faction. But overall, it was marred by one-sidedness. A major target of its criticism was the Bandera faction. Herasymenko attributed its split from the rest of OUN to foreign intrigue. Fearful of the power of OUN, both the Germans and the Soviets had engineered the rift, preying on the Bandera group’s “political blindness, ambition, primitiveness, moral indifference.”29 He condemned the rebellion they led: “provoked by the enemy, they pushed the masses on the path of a negative, in every respect unprepared, and therefore needlessly bloody ‘insurgency.’“30 Herasymenko quoted many OUN documents critical of Nazi Germany and made no mention of pro-German attitudes or cooperation with Nazi Germany on the part of OUN. He made an exception, of course, for the Banderites, who, he wrote, were both ignorant of Germany’s plans for Ukraine and ready to help the Germans by supplying them with hundreds of interpreters. The many interpreters from the Melnyk faction working for the Germans were passed over in silence. There was also no mention at all of the Melnykites’ support for the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The Ukrainian police in German service, with whom both factions of OUN were deeply involved, were almost completely absent from Herasymenko’s account; there was a single passing mention in a wartime document calling upon Ukrainians in all stations of life to remember that they were members of the “Ukrainian Nation, once free, glorious, and powerful, but today enslaved and marked by blood and ruin.”31 Jews and the Holocaust were completely missing from Herasymenko’s book.

Another veteran of the movement who wrote about OUN during World War II was Lev Shankovsky. Shankovsky had, as an adolescent, served in the armed forces fighting for an independent