Ukrainian collaborationism with the Axis powers

Background

At the onset of World War II, both the Soviet and the German aims were practically identical. Stalin and Hitler pursued the policy of territorial demands on their immediate neighbour, Poland. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, revived Russian expansionist drive going back to the Seven Years' War, upheld by the tsarist negotiations of 1915-16. Hitler pursued his own policy of Lebensraum in the East. 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 Communist banner. The Soviet 'liberators' collectivized their farms and sent one million tons of grain to Germany in a virtual replay of the causes of the most recent famine known as Holodomor, which Polish Ukrainians have never seen. In the territories of Poland invaded by Nazi Germany, the size of Ukrainian minority became negligible, gathered mostly around UCC (УЦК) formed in Kraków.

Less than two years later, 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. Ukrainians who chose to resist and fight German occupation forces joined the Red Army or the irregulars. However, especially in the District of Galicia assigned to General Government, there was little to no loyalty towards the Soviet Union; the region had only been part of the U.S.S.R since its seizure by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Although the Ukrainian SSR did give the people a degree of national and cultural autonomy, it came at a heavy price. In 1933 millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the infamous orchestrated famine, the Holodomor, and in 1937 several thousand members of intelligentsia were exiled, sentenced to Gulag labor camps or executed. The negative impact of Soviet policies helped gain support for the German cause, and in some regions the nationalist minority initially viewed Germany as an ally in the struggle to free Ukraine from Stalinist oppression and achieve independence again.

Under occupation

Those Ukrainians who collaborated 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 the west of Ukraine were among the most enthusiastic, hoping that their efforts would enable them to reestablish an independent state later on. For example, on the eve of Barbarossa as many as four thousand 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 were simultaneously encouraging loyalty to the new regime, in 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.”

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. 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 much data from early occupation is missing.

Despite initially acting warmly to the idea of an independent Ukraine, the Nazi administration had other ideas, in particular the Lebensraum programme and the total 'Aryanisation' of the population. They preferred to play Slavic nations out one against the other. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages, trying to exterminate Polish populations or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory. 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; while 27% of the leadership of OUN B and UPA were arrested at one time, they were released relatively soon or allowed to escape.

Holocaust

The German Operation Barbarossa of 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. 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). By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 Ukrainians and only 15,000 Germans at a ratio of 1 to 16.

The atrocities against the Jewish population 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, was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre, and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan, Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr. 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."

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

While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given choice of enlisting for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet POW camps, due to ongoing close relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung. 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. Another 1,000 of them defected during field operations. 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. Ukrainian natives were offered choice unavailable to Russian soldiers dying of starvation and exposure in the POW camps for the Red Army. The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted, and always overlooked by Volksdeutsche. Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.

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."

Auxiliary police

109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 201-st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaftant-battalions participated in anti-partisan operations in Ukraine and Belarus. In February and March 1943, the 50th Ukrainian Schutzmannschaftant-battalion participated in the large anti-guerrilla action «Operation Winterzauber» (Winter magic) in Belarus, cooperating with several Latvian and the 2nd Lithuanian battalion. Schuma-battalions burned down villages suspected of supporting Soviet partisans. On March 22, 1943, all the inhabitants of the village of Khatyn in Belarus were burnt alive by the Nazis in what became known as the Khatyn massacre, with participation of the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion.

Ukrainian volunteers in the German armed forces

SS Division "Galizien"

On 28 April 1943 the German Governor of District Galicia, [[Otto Wächter], and the local Ukrainian administration officially declared the creation of the SS Division Galicia]. Volunteers signed for service as of 3 June 1943 numbered 80 thousand. On 27 July 1944 the Galizien division was formed into the Waffen-SS as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (gal. Nr. 1).

The prevailing belief is that these men eagerly volunteered to take part in a patriotic war against the Soviets, not because of any support for Nazi Germany. Also, at least some of them were victims of compulsory conscription, since Germany had now suffered defeats and lost manpower on the eastern front. Sol Litman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center state that there are many proven and documented incidents of atrocities and massacres committed by the Waffen-SS Galizien against minorities, particularly Jews during World War II. However other authors, including Michael Melnyk, and Michael O. Logusz, maintain that members of the division served almost entirely on the front lines against the Red Army and defend the unit against the accusations made by Litman and others. Official SS records show that the 4,5,6 and 7 SS-Freiwilligen regiments were under Ordnungspolizei command at the time of the accusations. (See 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)#Accusations of war atrocities).

Ukraine propaganda news

Ukrainian units in the German work organization

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 army were disbanded at the end of the war.

Heads of local Ukrainian administration and public figures under the German occupation