Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany
Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany took place during the occupation of Poland and the Ukrainian SSR, USSR, by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.[1]
By September 1941, the German-occupied territory of Ukraine was divided between two new German administrative units, the District of Galicia of the Nazi General Government and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Some Ukrainians chose to resist and fight the German occupation forces and either joined the Red Army or the irregular partisan units conducting guerrilla warfare against the Germans. Most Ukrainians, especially in western Ukraine, had little to no loyalty toward the Soviet Union, which had been repressively occupying eastern Ukraine in the interwar years and had overseen a famine in the early 1930s called the Holodomor that killed millions of Ukrainians. Some who worked with or for the Nazis against the Allied forces[2][3] Ukrainian nationalists hoped that enthusiastic collaboration would enable them to re-establish an independent state. Many were involved in a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust in Ukraine and the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.[4]
Ukrainians, including ethnic minorities like Russians, Tatars and others,[5] who collaborated with the Nazi Germany did so in various ways including participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, or as guards in the concentration camps.
Background
Stalin and Hitler both demanded territory from their immediate neighbour, Poland.[6] The Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 brought together Ukrainians of the USSR and Ukrainians of what was then Eastern Poland (Kresy), under a single Soviet banner. In the territories of Poland invaded by Nazi Germany, the size of the Ukrainian minority became negligible and was gathered mostly around UCC (УЦК ), formed in Kraków.[7]
Less than two years later, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The German Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941. Operation Barbarossa brought together native Ukrainians of the USSR and the prewar territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. By September the occupied territory was divided between two new German administrative units: to the southwest, the District of Galicia of the Nazi General Government, and the northeast, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which stretched all the way to Donbas by 1943.[6]
Reinhard Heydrich noted in a report dated July 9, 1941 "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 the Polish as well as the White Ruthenian population [meaning Ukrainian and Belarusian] 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."[8]
Ukrainian nationalist partisan leader Taras Bulba-Borovets gathered a force of 3,000 in summer 1941 to help the Wehrmacht fight the Red Army. In September 1942, Borovets entered into negotiations with the Soviet partisans of Dmitry Medvedev. They tried to attract him to the struggle against the Germans but could not reach an agreement. Borovets refused to obey the Soviet command structure and feared German retaliation against Ukrainian civilians. Still, until the spring of 1943 neutrality was maintained between the Borovets detachments and the Soviet partisans.[9] Parallel to the negotiations with the Soviets, Borovets continued to try to reach an agreement with the Germans. In November 1942, he met with Obersturmbannführer Puts, the head of the security service of Volhynia and Podolia general district.
In November 1943, during negotiations with the Germans, Borovets was arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.[10] In the autumn of 1944, the Nazis, looking for Ukrainian support in a war they were by then losing, freed Borovets.[11] He was forced to change his nom de guerre to Kononenko and under this name he led the formation of a Ukrainian special forces detachment of around 50 men under the Waffen-SS. This detachment was to be dropped in the rear of the Red Army for guerrilla warfare. Those plans never came to fruition.
At the end of the war Hitler's Ukrainian nationalist allies demanded transfers away from the Eastern Front so that they could surrender to Allies rather than Soviet forces. Borovets' detachment surrendered to the Allies on May 10, 1945, and was interned in Rimini Italy.[12][6] Because of the fluid nature of these allegiances, historian Alfred Rieber has emphasized that labels such as "collaborators" and "resistance" have been rendered useless in describing the actual loyalty of these groups.[6] 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.
Occupation
Nationalists in western Ukraine 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 4,000 Ukrainians, operating under
Despite an initial warm reaction to the idea of an independent Ukraine (see
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.[14]
Holocaust
The elimination of
During this period, on 1 September 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in an article titled Zavoiovuimo misto" (Let's Conquer the City):
“All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated. We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganization of Europe.”,[22][23][24] "The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocable be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people".[25]
Reinforced by religious prejudice, antisemitism 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.
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.
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".[36]
Collaborating organizations, political movements, individuals and military volunteers
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
Auxiliary police
The 109th, 114th, 115th, 116th, 117th,
According to Paul R. Magocsi, "Ukrainian auxiliary police and militia, or simply "Ukrainians" (a generic term that in fact included persons of non-Ukrainian as well as Ukrainian national background) participated in the overall process as policemen and camp guards".[42]
Ukrainian volunteers in the German armed forces
- Nachtigall Battalion
- Roland Battalion
- Freiwilligen-Stamm-Division 3 and 4 (Russians and Ukrainians)[citation needed]
SS Division Galicia
On 28 April 1943, the German Governor of the
Sol Litman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center states that there are many proven and documented incidents of atrocities and massacres committed by the unit against Poles and Jews during World War II.[45] Official SS records show that the 4, 5, 6 and 7 SS-Freiwilligen regiments were under Ordnungspolizei command during the accusations.[44][46] See 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of SS, the 1st Galician: Atrocities and war crimes.
Ukrainian National Committee
In March 1945, the Ukrainian National Committee was set up after a series of negotiations with the Germans. The Committee represented and had command over all Ukrainian units fighting for the Third Reich, such as the Ukrainian National Army. However, it was too late, and the committee and the army were disbanded at the end of the war.
Ukrainian Central Committee
Pavlo Shandruk became the head of the National Committee, while Volodymyr Kubijovyč, the head of the Ukrainian Central Committee , became his deputy. The Central Committee was the officially recognized Ukrainian community and quasi-political organization under the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
- Ukrainian National Government of the Ukrainian State, led by OUN-B. Suppressed by the Nazis shortly after its establishment.
Heads of local Ukrainian administration and public figures under the German occupation
- Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. He held the post from September 21 to October 25.[47]
- Volodymyr Bahaziy (Kiev mayor, 1941–1942,[48]
- Leontii Forostivsky (Kiev mayor, 1942–1943)[49]
- Fedir Bohatyrchuk (head of the Ukrainian Red Cross, 1941–1942)
- Oleksii Kramarenko (Kharkov mayor, 1941–1942, executed by Germans in 1943)
- Oleksander Semenenko (Kharkov mayor, 1942–1943)
- Paul Kozakevich (Kharkov mayor, 1943)
- Aleksandr Sevastianov (Vinnytsia mayor, 1941 – ?)
See also
- Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
- History of the Jews in Ukraine
- List of Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations
References
- ISBN 978-1-61249-679-5.
- JSTOR 40179315.
Both occupying regimes [Poland and the USSR] imposed their own language and government... For the majority of Ukrainians in the east, Soviet rule was even more repressive
- ^ Paul H. Rosenberg (28 March 2014). "Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America's Dirty Little Ukraine Secret (An interview with Russ Bellant)". The Nation.
- ^ Torvey, Colin. "Means, Ends, and Perpetrators: Connections Between the Holocaust and the Genocide of Ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Galicia".
- ^ "Historian Timothy Snyder: Babi Yar A Tragedy For All Ukrainians". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 2016-09-29. Retrieved 2023-05-02.
However, from the very beginning, and that is true, some local residents, Ukrainians -- not only ethnic Ukrainians but also Russians, Tatars, and others -- collaborated. Some people from each ethnic group collaborated.
- ^ S2CID 159755578. Slavica Publishers.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-2913-4.
- ^ Thurston, Robert (1996). Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941.
- ^ Dziobak, V. V. (2002). Тарас Бульба-Боровець і його військові підрозділи в українському русі Опору (1941—1944) [Taras Bulba-Borovets and his military units in the Ukrainian Resistance movement (1941—1944)] (in Ukrainian). Kiev: Institute of History of Ukraine. pp. 111–119.
- ^ Dziobak 2002, p. 108.
- ^ Dziobak 2002, p. 172.
- ^ Dziobak 2002, pp. 176–177.
- ^ a b John A. Armstrong, Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), p. 409.
- ^ Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake, Eurozine (7 July 2017)
- ISBN 978-0-7591-2259-8.
- ^ Spector, Shmuel (1990). "Extracts from the Babi Yar article". In Israel Gutman (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, Sifriat Hapoalim, Macmillan Publishing Company. Archived from the original on 30 December 2012.
The implementation of the decision to kill all the Jews of Kiev was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a. The unit consisted of SD men (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) and Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; Sipo); the third company of the Special Duties Waffen-SS battalion; and a platoon of the No. 9 police battalion. The unit was reinforced by police battalions Nos. 45 and 305 and by units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police.
- ^ Kac, Daniel (1983). "Perl Tine Reports". Fun ash aroysgerufn (Summoned from the Ashes) (in Yiddish). Warsaw, Poland: Czytelnik. pp. 135–158.
- ^ "Kołki". Yad Vachem.
- ^ Ganuz, I.; Peri, J. (28 May 2006). "The Generations of Stepan: The History of Stepan and Its Jewish Population". jewishgen.org. Retrieved 25 May 2016.
- ^ "Stepan". Faina Petryakova Science Center for Judaica and Jewish Art.
- ^ "The Holocaust Timeline: 1941 - July 25 Pogrom in Lvov/June 30 Germany occupies Lvov; 4,000 Jews killed by July 3/June 30 Einsatzkommando 4a and local Ukrainians kill 300 Jews in Lutsk/September 19 Zhitomir Ghetto liquidated; 10,000 killed". yadvashem.org. Archived from the original on 15 July 2018. Retrieved 26 May 2016.
- ISBN 9781137388391.
- ISBN 9781618115478.
- Spector, Shmuel. The Jews of Volynia and their reaction to extermination. Yad Vashem. p. 160.
- ^ Basic Historical Narrative of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. Kyiv Ukraine. 2018. p. 114.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ISBN 9780300206289.
- Gilbert, Martin (1985). The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy. RosettaBooks LLC. p. 199. ISBN 9780795337192.
- Gilbert, Martin (1985). The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy. RosettaBooks LLC. p. 199.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-101-02230-6.
- ISBN 0-9831091-1-7.
- ^ Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1975), The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Bantam Books Inc., New York, p. 171.
- ^ The Holocaust Chronicle, A History in Words and Pictures, Edited by David J. Hogan, Publications International Ltd, Lincolnwood, Illinois, p.592
- ^ Markus Eikel (2013). "The local administration under German occupation in central and eastern Ukraine, 1941–1944". The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives (PDF). Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 110–122 in PDF.
Ukraine differs from other parts of the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, whereas the local administrators have formed the Hilfsverwaltung in support of extermination policies in 1941 and 1942, and in providing assistance for the deportations to camps in Germany, mainly in 1942 and 1943.
- ^ ISBN 1-929631-60-X– via Google Books.
- ISBN 0-253-34293-7.
- ISBN 978-0-9868374-0-1.
- ISBN 978-0-19-511931-2. Archived from the originalon January 6, 2012.
- ^ "Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide, Chapter 4 – cont". JewishGen, Inc. February 13, 2008. Retrieved May 7, 2016.
- ^ Holocaust Victims Honored in Babi Yar (Ukraine Christian News, May 3, 2006) Accessed January 14, 2006.
- ^ Motyka, Grzegorz (February 2001). "Dywizja SS 'Galizien'" [SS Division 'Galicia']. Pamięć I Sprawiedliwość (in Polish). 1. Biuletyn IPN. Archived from the original on 3 January 2003.
- ISBN 978-1-137-38840-7.
- ^ Gerlach, C. "Kalkulierte Morde" Hamburger Edition, Hamburg, 1999.
- ^ State Memorial Complex "Khatyn" official web-page https://khatyn.by/en/genocide/expeditions/ - The destruction of the village of Khatyn is a tragic and vivid example. The village was annihilated by the thugs from the 118th Police Battalion, which was stationed in a small town of Pleschinitsy, and by the thugs from the SS battalion "Dirlewanger", which was stationed in Logoisk.
- ISBN 978-985-6372-62-2
- ISBN 978-0-8020-7820-9.
- ^ K.G. Klietmann Die Waffen SS; eine Dokumentation Osnabruck Der Freiwillige, 1965 p.194
- ^ ISBN 3-7648-0942-6page 313
- ISBN 1-55164-219-0.
- ISBN 3-7648-2471-9p.52.
- ISBN 978-1-13953-673-8.
- ISBN 978-1-351-86258-5.
- ISBN 978-0-674-02078-8.
Further reading
- Armstrong, J. A. (1968). Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe. The Journal of Modern History, 40(3), pp. 396–410.
- Dean, M. (31 December 1999). Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-22056-3.
- 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.
- Goldenshteyn, M. (12 December 2021). So They Remember: A Jewish Family's Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine. Oxford University Press.
- Lower, W. (19 September 2005). Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. The University of North Carolina Press.
- Mordecai Paldiel (1993). The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House in association with the ISBN 0-88125-376-6. [1]
- Mordecai Paldiel and ISBN 978-0-06-115112-5.
- Дзьобак, Володимир (1995). "Тарас Боровець і "Поліська Січ"". З архівів ВУЧК-ГПУ-НКВД-КГБ. 1/2(2/3). Archived from the original on March 11, 2012. LCC JN6635.A55 I679
- Steinhart, E. C. (9 February 2015). The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine. Cambridge University Press.
- Zabarko, B., ed. (30 November 2004). Holocaust in the Ukraine. Vallentine Mitchell.