Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

surveying the state of the historiography before the 1990s, it should become apparent that it was very difficult at that time to arrive at a clear understanding of the behavior of OUN and UPA during the Holocaust. The Jewish scholars who came from the Western Ukrainian territories were aware of the nationalists’ violence against the Jewish population, but they had too little knowledge of the nationalist movement to flesh out what had happened. They could not rely on the histories written by nationalist veterans, since the latter completely denied any responsibility for the persecution and murder of the Jewish population. Nor was Armstrong’s scholarly study any help in this regard. Mainstream Holocaust history, as exemplified by Hilberg, did not have the conceptual framework and an inclusive enough source base to even consider investigating the role of OUN and UPA. Publications emanating from or inspired by the communist bloc were discounted by Western scholars; and in addition, the best informed of them, Szcześniak and Szota’s Droga do nikąd, was very difficult to obtain.78

      The Collapse of Communism in Europe

A decisive turn in the historiography resulted from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. The opening of the Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Soviet archives made available to scholars a vast amount of fresh material to understand the Holocaust in the east of Europe, including the activities of Ukrainian nationalists.79 Moreover, the political restraints on research were removed. Scholars in the postcommunist sphere could now write whatever they wished, free from censorship and communist party control. Polish scholars no longer had to refrain from writing about the fate of Poles in territories that were once in the Soviet Union but now formed parts of independent Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.80 Even Ukrainian nationalists had been worried about writing their own history as long as Ukraine was communist, since revealing too much could lead to reprisals against nationalists and their families still residing in Soviet Ukraine.81 Now those fears were gone. The result of these new sources and new freedoms was the blossoming of a diverse historiography on the question of the Ukrainian nationalists and the Jews during the Holocaust.

The first to professionally mine the new sources were two German scholars, Thomas Sandkühler and Dieter Pohl, who each produced a German-sized monograph on the Holocaust in Galicia, in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Both followed the practice of what was then mainstream Holocaust historiography: they paid relatively little attention to victims and their testimony and relied heavily on documents emanating from German structures. Pohl argued that the attitudes of the autochthonous, non-Jewish population were relatively unimportant in determining the general course and final outcome of the mass murder in Galicia: essentially the German occupation authorities made the decisions and executed them themselves. Whether resisting or aiding the Germans in the murder, the actions of what Pohl called “the Christian population” were of secondary importance in influencing events.82 Pohl characterized the Bandera faction of OUN as antisemitic for much of the war, particularly in the spring and summer of 1941 and again in 1944, as the Soviets closed in, stating also that in 1942-43 OUN distanced itself from the Germans’ murder of the Jews.83 (During the latter period Ukrainian opinion in general had cooled towards the Germans and their “final solution.”)84 Pohl was not able to link OUN directly to any concrete war crimes. His treatment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in relation to the Holocaust reached no clear conclusion.85 In my own review of Pohl’s book, I characterized it as follows: “This is an ambitious and pioneering work. It is not a synthesis based on a corpus of pre-existing monographs; instead, it attempts a comprehensive portrayal of the Holocaust in Galicia largely on the basis of primary sources. It opens the field for further, in-depth monographic research of specific problems and incidents.”86

It was in this period too that Jeffrey Burds began to lecture and write about OUN and UPA in an entirely new vein. Although the texts he published then did not directly concern the Holocaust but rather focused on the immediate postwar period,87 they demonstrated that sources in the newly opened post-Soviet archives could provide a much deeper knowledge of the nationalists’ actions than other historians had ever imagined. Also, his revelations about the ruthlessness of OUN and UPA helped break the spell of the nationalists’ own historiography.

Directly related to wartime OUN’s Jewish politics was a documentary publication by Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk: the full text, or rather texts, of the July 1941 autobiography of nationalist leader Yaroslav Stetsko, mentioned above in connection with Michael Hanusiak and to be discussed in some detail below.88 In their introduction to the autobiography Berkhoff and Carynnyk surveyed some of OUN’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, which they found to be written in “vicious language” and to be encouraging “a deadly antisemitism.”89

      Martin Dean’s Collaboration in the Holocaust investigated the actions of local police in certain regions of Belarus and Ukraine during the Nazi occupation. Although a very valuable study, it exemplified a trend that was still strong in the 1990s: Dean studied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe without knowledge of the relevant East European languages. Dean was trained in history (his first book was on Austrian policy during the late-eighteenth century wars with revolutionary France) and was then employed in the war crimes unit in Scotland Yard. He moved from there to the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, where he has continued to write and compile impressive works on Holocaust history. Collaboration in the Holocaust was based on archival sources and eyewitness testimonies. It outlined the influence of OUN on the local Ukrainian police in German service and the role of those policemen later in UPA. But his work focused on areas outside the center of OUN and UPA activity, which was Galicia and Volhynia.

With the weakening and then total collapse of the Soviet system, OUN and UPA came under reexamination in Ukraine. After decades of condemnation of the nationalist organizations, calls for rehabilitation emerged in the public discourse, particularly in the Lviv newspaper Za vil’nu Ukrainu.90 Already in March 1990, the foremost proponent of reform in Soviet Ukraine, Rukh (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy—People’s Movement of Ukraine), raised the issue of the nationalists’ political rehabilitation.91 Before long, the government began to turn to Ukraine’s scholarly establishment to advise on the issue. On 12 June 1991 the head of the commission on defense and state security of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasyl Durdynets, wrote to the Ukrainian academy of sciences with the request to find someone to prepare a background paper on OUN, UPA, and the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The task was entrusted to Viktor Koval, a historian in his mid-seventies specializing in the Second World War. Koval had studied in his native Kyiv and worked there in the academy’s Institute of the History of Ukraine. The text he speedily produced, by 1 July, argued that “OUN and UPA conducted a national-liberation struggle for the construction of a sovereign and democratic Ukraine, in which people of all nationalities would enjoy the same political and social rights.” Durdynets, who had long been an official in the Communist Party of Ukraine, repudiated the report and demanded that the academy withdraw it and replace it with another. The academy complied immediately, formally withdrawing Koval’s report on 3 July.92 But the OUN-UPA issue would not go away for the Ukrainian public,