Collaboration in German-occupied Ukraine

Stalin and Hitler pursued the policy of territorial demands on their immediate neighbour, Poland.[1] The Soviet invasion of Poland brought together Ukrainians of the Soviet Ukraine and the Ukrainians of what was then Eastern Poland (Kresy), under the single Soviet banner. In the territories of Poland invaded by Nazi Germany, the size of Ukrainian minority became negligible and was gathered mostly around UCC (УЦК), formed in Kraków.[2]

Distrikts Galizien Spring 1943. Celebrations dedicated to the creation of the SS Division Galicia.

Less than two years later, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The invasion, known as Operation Barbarossa, began on June 22, 1941, and by September, the occupied territory was divided between two brand new German administrative units, the District of Galicia of the Nazi General Government and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine stretching all the way to Donbas by 1943.[1] Ukrainians who chose to resist and fight German occupation forces joined the Red Army or the irregulars. However, in the newly-annexed portions of western Ukraine there was little to no loyalty towards the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had seized Ukraine during the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. From 1931 to 1933, millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the Holodomor, which was arguably a deliberate attempt at extermination orchestrated by the Soviet government,[3] and from 1937 to 38, thousand members of intelligentsia were exiled, sentenced to gulags or executed.

Reinhard Heydrich noted in a report dated July 9, 1941 that "a fundamental difference between the former Polish and Russian [soviet] territories. In the former Polish region, the soviet regime was seen as enemy rule.... Hence the German troops were greeted by Polish as well as the White Ruthenian population [meaning Ukrainian and Belarussian] for the most part at least as liberators or with friendly neutrality.... The situation in the current occupied White Ruthenian areas of the [pre-1939] USSR has a completely different basis."[4] Actions of German field commanders also indicate a general hostility towards the German in the opening stages of the war, and an order dated August 8, 1941 saw all men between the ages of 18 and 45 rounded up to prevent sabotage.[4]

Those Ukrainians who did collaborate with the German occupiers did so in various ways including participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, and serving as concentration camp guards. Nationalists in western Ukraine were among the most enthusiastic and hoped that their efforts would enable them to re-establish an independent state later on. For example, on the eve of Operation' Barbarossa, as many as 4000 Ukrainians, operating under Wehrmacht orders, sought to cause disruption behind Soviet lines. After the capture of Lviv, a highly-contentious and strategically-important city with a significant Ukrainian minority, OUN leaders proclaimed a new Ukrainian State on June 30, 1941 and simultaneously encouraged loyalty to the new regime in the hope that they would be supported by the Germans. Already in 1939, during the German-Polish War, the OUN had been "a faithful German auxiliary".[5]

Professor Ivan Katchanovski writes that during the war, the leadership of OUN B and UPA was heavily engaged in Nazi collaboration. He wrote that at least 23% of its leaders in Ukraine were in the auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, as well as in other police formations, and 18% took part in training in Nazi Germany's military and intelligence schools in Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland, 11% served the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions, 8% in local administration during the Nazi occupation and 1% in the SS Galicia Division. According to Katchanovski, the percentage of Nazi collaborators among the OUN-B and UPA leadership is likely higher than those numbers since data from early occupation are often missing.[6]

Despite initially acting warmly to the idea of an independent Ukraine, the Nazi administration had other ideas, particularly the Lebensraum programme and the total 'Aryanisation' of the population. It preferred to play the Slavic nations against one another. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages to try to exterminate Polish populations or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory.[5] When OUN help was no longer needed, its leaders were imprisoned, and many members were summarily executed. The arrests were only temporary, however, according to professor Katchanovski since 27% of the leadership of OUN B and UPA were arrested at least once, they were released relatively soon or allowed to escape.[7]

According to Timothy Snyder, "something that is never said, because it's inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian Communists collaborated with the Germans, than did Ukrainian nationalists." Snyder also points out that very many of those who collaborated with the German occupation also collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s.[8]

Operation Barbarossa in 1941 brought together native Ukrainians of the Soviet Ukraine and the prewar territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union as well. To the north-east, they fell under the German administrative control of Reichskommissariat Ukraine and, to the south-west, under the Nazi General Government. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) volunteered to assist the Wehrmacht.[1] In total, the Germans enlisted 250,000 native Ukrainians for duty in five separate formations including the Nationalist Military Detachments (VVN), the Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN), the Galician Division of the Waffen SS, the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UVV) and the Ukrainian National Army (Ukrainische Nationalarmee, UNA).[1][9] By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 Ukrainians and only 15,000 Germans, a ratio of 1 to 16.[10]

Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ukraine: the map

The atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, formed on 20 August 1941,[11] was used in the roundup of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre,[12][13] and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan,[14] Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr.[15] On 1 September 1941, Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote: "The element that settled our cities (Jews)... must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved."[16]

Reinforced by religious prejudice, anti-Semitism had turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[17] The NKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police while they retreated eastward were blamed on Jews. The Antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultranationalist Ukrainian People's Militia, which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[17] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd, which had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square, 24 hours to act as they wished against Polish Jews, who were forced to clean the dead bodies and to dance and then were killed by beating with axes, pipes etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany. During Lviv pogroms, 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, led by the Ukrainian People's Militia.[17][18][19] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[20]

While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given a choice to enlist for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps because of ongoing close relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung.[21] In total, over 5,000 native Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army signed up for training with the SS at a special Trawniki training camp to assist with the Final Solution.[22] Another 1,000 of them defected during field operations.[22] Trawniki men took major part in the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews during Operation Reinhard. They served at all extermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see the Stroop Report) and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising among other ghetto insurgencies.[23] The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted and so were always overseen by Volksdeutsche.[24] Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.[25][26]

In May 2006, the Ukrainian newspaper Ukraine Christian News commented, "Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine".[27]

• Collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II
• History of the Jews in Ukraine

• Gilbert Martin (1987). The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (Reprint ed.). Owl Books. ISBN 978-0-8050-0348-2.
• Gilbert Martin (1986). The Holocaust: The Jewish tragedy (Unknown Binding ed.). Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-216305-7.
• Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe, by John A. Armstrong in The Journal of Modern History > Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp. 396–410
• Mordecai Paldiel (1993). The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House in association with the ADL. ISBN 0-88125-376-6.
• Mordecai Paldiel and Elie Wiesel (2007). The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-06-115112-5.