The Ukraine Connection

Part 1 - The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

This is the first part of a new series on Ukraine’s historical association with Nazism. It is important to understand the history to be able to make sense of developments in the present. The story begins with the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists.

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The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929 with a view to claiming the ethnically mixed regions of East Galicia and Volhynia, then part of Poland, and turning them into regions of an independent, ethnically homogenous Ukraine (Breitman & Goda, 2010, p. 73). In 1934, the OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki. Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed were sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime, their death sentences having been commuted, but they escaped in 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and housed OUN leaders in Krakow. A split occurred in the OUN over political strategy. The older wing of the OUN, under Andrei Melnik (OUN/M), favoured collaboration with the Nazis as means to achieving an independent fascist Ukraine in the future; the Bandera wing (OUN/B) called for immediate Ukrainian independence.   

In February 1941, the Ukrainian Legion was formed by the Abwehr (Nazi military intelligence). Around 350 OUN-B recruits were trained by the Abwehr, and the Legion was placed under the command of OUN-B’s Roman Shukhevych and divided into the Nachtigall (Nightingale) and Roland battalions. With the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Nightingale entered Eastern Galicia with the Wehrmacht and used “bats, axes, sickles, and sticks with razor blades” to kill every Jew they encountered (Bechtel, 2013, p. 2). According to historian Yehuda Bauer, “many thousands” of Jews were killed (cited in Breitman & Goda, 2010, p. 75). 

On reaching the city of Lwów (now Lviv) on June 30, 1941, Bandera’s deputy Jaroslav Stetsko proclaimed a sovereign and united Ukrainian state in the name of OUN/B, with himself as Prime Minister and Mykola Lebed, who had trained with the Gestapo, as security minister. Unwilling to accept Ukrainian independence, the Nazis arrested Bandera and Stetsko, holding them initially under house arrest in Berlin before transferring them to relatively comfortable confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Even while under house arrest, Stetsko praised “the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine” (cited in Breitman & Goda, 2010, p. 75). The Babi Yar massacre of September 29-30, 1941, saw the execution of ca. 34,000 Jews by German soldiers assisted by local police (Rogoża, 2021). Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis, with help from their Ukrainian collaborators, killed 1.5 million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs (Elmer, 2023). 

The Nazis ordered that Bandera loyalists be arrested and killed, and administrative control in western Ukraine was handed to OUN/M, whose recruits came to serve as  auxiliary policemen for the Nazis. Lebed assumed control of OUN/B, now forced underground, and led its secret police, the Sluzhba Bezpeky (SB), which murdered tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians (Loftus, 2011, p. 28). In October 1942, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed, and was dominated by OUN/B; it consisted of approximately 70,000 guerillas (Abramovici, 2014, p. 116).

The German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 emboldened OUN/B, which saw the possibility of the Nazi-Soviet struggle culminating in mutual exhaustion. In April 1943, Lebed proposed ethnically cleansing Poles from disputed territory, so that Poland could not reclaim it, as after 1918 (Breitman & Goda, 2010, p. 76). An ethnic cleansing campaign was unleashed on July 11, 1943, which saw some 10,000 Poles killed in a single day across 80 locations. Moshe Maltz, a Ukrainian Jew, wrote in his diary of the indiscriminate gunning down of entire village populations, adding: “They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day […] you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug” (Maltz, 1993, p. 107).

In need of manpower following the defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazis formed SS-Galizien, a Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS, which at its peak had 14,000 recruits, including many who had served in the Nightingale battalion (Lazare, 2015). Eyewitness accounts of SS Galizien documented by historian Julian Hendy recall villages being fire-bombed and civilians and partisan fighters alike being shot, hanged, and tortured for resisting the Nazis, regardless of their ethnicity (cited in Goodman, 2000). Among its many war crimes, SS-Galizien murdered around 1,000 Polish inhabitants of the village of Huta Pieniacka on February 28, 1944. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (2001), the SS division shot civilians rounded up at a church and locked other civilians in barns which they then set on fire. Those who tried to flee were also killed, and bodies were thrown into mass graves. 

In July 1944, shortly before the Red Army reconquered eastern Galicia, Ukrainian nationalists formed the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR), an underground government dominated by the Bandera faction, intended to unite all factions. Shukhevych served as secretary general, Lebed as general secretary of the Foreign Representation (ZP UHVR). The fascist priest Ivan Hrinioch, whom the Nazis had awarded the Iron Cross for his work in Nightingale, also served on the council (Rossoliński-Liebe, 2014, p. 320). With the military situation deteriorating for the Nazis, SS Operation SUNFLOWER was launched to coordinate Nazi and OUN efforts during the German retreat. However, some Ukrainian elements fired on the retreating Germans, allowing Stetsko to claim later that the UPA had fought the Nazis (Anderson & Anderson, 1986, p. 25). As Ukraine was returned to Soviet control in September/October 1944, Bandera and Stetsko were released from Sachsenhausen, but they refused to cooperate with the Nazis and fled, resurfacing in Munich in 1946. 

After the end of World War II, OUN groups led by Bandera, Stetsko, Lebed, Hrinioch, and Stefan Lenkovsky went through the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany and Austria, torturing and murdering those who knew too much about their collaboration with the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, and communists (Dorril, 2002, p. 235). In the Mittenwald camp, bodies were burned in the same ovens used to bake bread for the residents (a Nazi technique), with the knowledge of US military intelligence. According to a 1973 KGB report, the OUN killed over 30,000 Soviets between 1945 and 1950, including 8,000 soldiers, militia members, and security personnel (Lazare, 2015). OUN guerillas fought in large numbers (the UPA now numbered 30-40,000) in western Ukraine, but sustained large losses from the Soviet/Polish Operation Vistula in 1947. Roman Shukhevych, the supreme commander of the UPA, was killed in March 1950, and the last major UPA unit was destroyed in November 1953, leaving just isolated pockets of resistance (Dorril, 2002, pp. 243, 247). 

References

Abramovici, P. (2014). The World Anti-Communist League: Origins, structures and activities. In: L. Dongen, S. Roulin, & G. Scott-Smith (Eds.), Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War, pp. 113-129. Palgrave Macmillan.

Anderson, S., & Anderson, J.L. (1986). Inside the League. Dodd, Mead, & Company.

Bechtel, D. (2013). The 1941 pogroms as represented in western Ukrainian historiography and memorial culture. In: The Holocaust in Ukraine. New sources and perspectives. Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Breitman, R. & Goda, N.J.W. (2010). Hitler's shadow: Nazi war criminals, U.S. intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives.

Dorril, S. (2002). MI6: Inside the covert world of Her Majesty's secret intelligence service. Simon and Schuster.

Elmer, S. (2023, April 25). Washington’s puppet: The rise and fall of Volodmyr Zelenskyy. Architects for Social Housing. https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2023/04/25/washingtons-puppet-the-rise-and-fall-of-volodmyr-zelenskyy/

Goodman, G. (2000, June 12). An unshown film. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2000/jun/12/freedomofinformation.uk

Institute of National Remembrance. (2001). Investigation into the crime committed at the village of Huta Pieniacka. https://web.archive.org/web/20140301051417/http:/ipn.gov.pl/en/commission/selected-investigations/investigation-into-the-crime-committed-at-the-village-of-hut

Lazare, D. (2015, September 24). Who was Stepan Bandera? Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2015/09/stepan-bandera-nationalist-euromaidan-right-sector/

Loftus, J. (2011). America’s Nazi secret. Trine Day.

Maltz, M. (1993). Years of horrors – glimpse of hope: The diary of a family in hiding. Shengold.

Rogoża, J. (2021, October 22). Ukraine’s disputes over the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2021-10-22/ukraines-disputes-over-80th-anniversary-babi-yar-massacre

Rossoliński-Liebe, G. (2014). Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. ibidem Press.

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Featured image: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 with Roman Shukhevych (sitting, second from left), 1942. Source: Wikipedia.