Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists

Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust of Eastern Galician and Volhynian Jews

Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews for centuries. Although Ukrainians made up the majority of the population in these two regions, they were less present in cities such as Lviv than in villages and small towns. Before the Second World War, Jews made up in both regions about 10 percent of all inhabitants, Poles about 25 percent in eastern Galicia and 15 percent in Volhynia, and Ukrainians 60 percent in eastern Galicia and 70 percent in Volhynia. ² As a result of the first and second partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 and 1793, eastern Galicia was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire and Volhynia into the Russian Empire, that also held the south, central, and eastern Ukrainian territories and regarded them as parts of Russia. This geopolitical order changed only after the First World War. In November 1917, Ukrainians proclaimed a state in Kiev and in November 1918 in Lviv, but they did not succeed in keeping either of them. In 1921, eastern Galicia and Volhynia were officially incorporated into the Second Polish Republic, and almost all other Ukrainian territories constituted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. ³

During the interwar period, about 20 percent of all Ukrainians lived in the Second Polish Republic and 80 percent in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. The Second Polish Republic was a multiethnic state that discriminated against Ukrainians and other minorities and treated them as second-class citizens. ⁴ In order to keep up their fight for a Ukrainian state, Ukrainian veterans of the First World War founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO, Ukraїns’ka Viis’kova Orhanizatsiia) in 1920 in Prague, and the OUN in 1929 in Vienna. The latter in particular attracted many young Ukrainians from Poland. The OUN ideology combined radical nationalism with racism, antisemitism, fascism, cult of war and violence, anti-democracy, and anti-communism. It collaborated with the Germans and other fascist movements such as the Ustaša and the Italian Fascists, and attempted both to establish a Ukrainian state and to turn it into a fascist dictatorship. ⁵

After the beginning of the Second World War, eastern Galicia and Volhynia were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. At that time, several hundred OUN members left Ukraine and remained in the General Government, where they were trained by the Nazis and prepared a plan to establish a Ukrainian state. They intended to carry it out immediately after the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union. In 1940, the OUN split into the OUN-B (leader Stepan Bandera) and the OUN-M (leader Andrii Mel’nyk). The OUN-B was more radical than the OUN-M, and it found more support in the nationalist underground in western Ukraine. The leadership of the OUN-B decided to proclaim a state, although they did not have any close contact with the Nazi leadership and did not have official approval for the proclamation of statehood. ⁶ They hoped that Hitler would accept the state as he had accepted Slovakia in March 1939 and Croatia in April 1941. The Ukrainian state was proclaimed on 30 June 1941, eight days after the German attack on the Soviet Union, in Lviv by the OUN-B leading activist Iaroslav Stets’ko who represented Bandera. Hitler, who had different plans for Ukraine than Slovakia and Croatia, did not approve of this political step and arrested the leadership of the OUN-B. As a result, several leaders of the radical faction of the OUN-B, including Bandera and Stets’ko, and several hundred other OUN-B members were confined in German prison and concentration camps as special or ordinary political prisoners until the fall of 1944 and some even until the end of the Second World War. ⁷ The UPA resumed the collaboration with the Nazis in spring 1944, and the released leaders such as Bandera and Melnyk in fall 1944. ⁸

While a part of the OUN-B leaders remained confined in Germany, the Jewish population of eastern Galicia and Volhynia was annihilated by the German occupiers and different types of Ukrainian perpetrators including the Ukrainian nationalists as members of the OUN and the police. In early August 1941, the Germans included eastern Galicia in the General Government as Distrikt Galizien and Volhynia became a part of Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Distrik Galizien counted about 570,000 Jews and Volhynia about 250,000. ⁹ The annihilation of the Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia proceeded differently although it began in both regions with pogroms, which resulted in the death of between 13,000 and 35,000 Jews. The pogrom perpetrators were composed of German policemen and soldiers, OUN nationalists, and locals, mainly Ukrainian population. The spontaneous violent acts against Jews ceased a few weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In the following months, the Jews were exterminated by the Einsatzgruppe C, which by the end of 1941 killed about fifty thousand Jews in eastern Galicia and twenty thousand in Volhynia. At that time, the Jews in both regions were also forced to move to the ghettoes. ¹⁰

In the main part of the extermination, which in Volhynia was already finished by the end of 1942, about two hundred thousand Jews were shot in front of mass graves by the Germans, who were usually assisted by Ukrainian policemen. ¹¹ In eastern Galicia, about two hundred thousand Jews were deported to the annihilation camp Bełżec, one hundred fifty thousand were shot and eighty thousand were killed or died in the ghettos. The annihilation of the main part of the eastern Galician Jews finished in summer 1943. The shootings in eastern Galicia were conducted by the Germans, who were assisted by Ukrainian policemen. The liquidations of the ghettoes and deportations were organized by the Germans and carried out by German and Ukrainian policemen; the latter significantly outnumbered the German perpetrators. In both regions, Jewish police were also used to watch the ghettos and to assist the Germans and Ukrainians by the deportations. ¹² Among the Ukrainian policemen involved in the Holocaust were OUN members. The OUN sent its people to the police despite their conflict with the Nazi leadership and the arrests of their prominent members. ¹³ Other important groups of Ukrainian perpetrators were officials such as mayors of towns and villages. ¹⁴

About 10 percent, or eighty-two thousand Volhynian and eastern Galician Jews avoided the mass shootings and deportations while escaping from the ghettoes. These people tried to survive by hiding in forests and various hideouts in villages and cities, and others worked in slave labor camps. According to Dieter Pohl and Aharon Weiss, ten to fifteen thousand (2–3 percent) of the eastern Galician Jews actually survived the war. Shmuel Spector estimated the number of Volhynian survivors as thirty-five hundred (1.5 percent). ¹⁵ Thus, about sixty thousand of the Jews in hiding were killed by the Germans, Ukrainian police, local population, and the UPA, during the last stage of the Holocaust. The UPA was formed by the OUN-B in late 1942. It opposed the Soviet partisans and from early 1943 massacred Polish civilians en masse, killing in 1943 and 1944 from seventy to hundred thousand Poles and several hundred or even thousand Jews. In April 1943, as the mass violence against Poles escalated, five thousand Ukrainian policemen with experience in mass murder deserted and joined the UPA. ¹⁶

In spring and summer 1944, shortly before the Soviet Army returned to western Ukraine, several thousand Ukrainians, among them various types of Nazi collaborators, OUN members, and UPA partisans, left Ukraine together with the German occupiers. After the war, they stayed in West Germany, in camps for Displaced Persons, and in the late 1940s were resettled in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and USA. ¹⁷ The UPA opposed the Soviet authorities until the early 1950s. During a brutal conflict with Soviet authorities, the Ukrainian nationalists killed about twenty thousand Ukrainians who supported or were accused of supporting the Soviet authorities. The NKVD terror against people in western Ukraine was enormous. The Soviet forces, according to their own statistics, killed a total of 153,000 people, deported to the interior of the Soviet Union 203,000, and arrested 134,000. Only a part of them actually belonged to the UPA or actively supported the nationalist underground. ¹⁸

Ukrainian Nationalist Version of Events

As early as October 1943, leaders of the OUN and UPA issued orders to prepare documents that would indicate that the Germans persecuted and killed the Jews without any help from the Ukrainian police. ¹⁹ During the Holocaust, the OUN and UPA publications very rarely mentioned the annihilation of Jews. The few publications which mentioned the Shoah, pointed only to the Germans as perpetrators. The mass violence against the Polish civilians was partially ignored in the OUN and UPA propaganda and partially portrayed as a Polish–Ukrainian war or a Polish aggression. ²⁰ The killing and suffering of Ukrainians, on the other hand, was an important component of the official nationalist propaganda, during the war. Especially important were the Ukrainian nationalists who were killed or imprisoned by the Nazis. These individuals were portrayed as soldiers who had fallen for Ukraine or suffered for their country. ²¹

Immediately after the war, Ukrainian nationalists in exile published several short books and booklets about the war in western Ukraine, and also a number of brief memoirs in newspapers. One of such publications was authored by Mykola Lebed’, who from fall 1941 until May 1943 had been the leader of the OUN-B. Lebed’s book appeared in 1946 in Rome and was titled UPA: Ukrainian Insurgent Army: Its Genesis, Rise and Deeds in the Struggle of the Ukrainian Nation for an Independent United State. The former OUN-B leader portrayed the UPA as an army that bravely fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for an independent Ukrainian state. He did not mention in his book the vehement and racialist nationalism and antisemitism of the OUN, and characterized the ideology of the UPA as patriotism or love for its own country. Similarly, he did not mention the pogroms of 1941, the involvement of the OUN in mass violence against Jews as policemen, UPA’s mass killings of the Poles, and the killings of Jews in hiding by the Ukrainian police, UPA, and the local population. Describing Jewish doctors who stayed or were forced to stay with the Ukrainian insurgents, he stated that the UPA rescued them although he knew that some of them were killed by the Security Service (SB, Sluzhba Bezpeky) of the OUN-B, other OUN members, and UPA partisans. It is also possible that he personally issued orders to kill them, before he left Ukraine. To substantiate the argument that the OUN-B and UPA did not collaborate with the Nazis, Lebed’ described in detail most of the better-known Ukrainian nationalists who had been killed by the Germans, and published their photographs. ²²

Another intriguing early publication about the Second World War in Ukraine appeared in 1946 in Buenos Aires. Its author, Volodymyr Makar, used the pseudonym Marko Vira and called his book Seven Years of Liberating Struggle. Similar to Lebed’, Makar forgot to describe the various kinds of mass violence conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists; the racist, antisemitic, and other radical right elements of their ideology; and their collaboration with Nazi Germany. He victimized the Ukrainians even more than Lebed’. Before describing the Second World War, Makar strongly exaggerated the number of the Ukrainian victims of the Soviet policies while arguing that twenty million Ukrainians were starved to death and murdered by the Soviet regime. Describing the events after 22 June 1941 and the proclamation of the state on 30 June 1941, he did not mention the collaboration with Nazi Germany, but wrote about following the principle of independence. Describing the events of 30 June 1941, he described how the OUN-B established militia and attempted to establish a state but he did not write anything about the Lviv pogrom and the role the OUN-B militia played in this anti-Jewish act of violence. ²³

Next to heroism and the fight for independence, Makar made suffering a crucial component of his narrative. The Ukrainians are in his account portrayed as the sole and main victims of the Nazi terror in Ukraine. Every aspect of their suffering is exaggerated. Jews, on the other hand, are not mentioned at all. As a result, the reader gets the impression that the Ukrainians were the main victims of the Nazis in occupied Ukraine. Makar described, for example, how the Soviet POWs suffered in Ukraine because there were, according to him, many Ukrainians among them. Similarly, he explained in detail how the living conditions deteriorated during the German occupation and how the slave work affected the life of the Ukrainians. The fate of any other national group is not mentioned at all. Even when describing the mass shootings by the Germans, he argued that the sole victims were Ukrainians. ²⁴ The word “Jew” does not appear even once in the entire publication. ²⁵

This way of remembering and representing the German occupation of Ukraine has persevered among many communities of the Ukraine diaspora until today. During the last seven decades, no major changes can be seen in the nationalist narrative of understanding and presenting the Second World War and the Holocaust, although the narrative has adapted itself to the particular political situation of the day, such as the importance of nuclear power during the Cold War or the economic dependence of Russia after the Soviet Union disintegrated. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians in western Ukraine, in particular in eastern Galicia and Volhynia where the UPA had been active until the early 1950s, adapted this narrative and began to explain the Second World War in a very similar selective manner. ²⁶

A central element that appears in possibly all Ukrainian nationalist publications on the Second World War is the motif of Ukrainian nationalist prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Similarly to the killing of Ukrainian nationalists by the Germans, this fact has been used to argue that the Ukrainian nationalists opposed Nazis, did not collaborate with them, and were not fascists but fought for national independence and a free democratic state. Although Ukrainian nationalists stayed in the camps as special and ordinary political prisoners and although about 80 percent of them survived the camps because of this special treatment, they are presented as people who shared the fate of the Jews. These claims appear in both the memoirs of the former Ukrainian political prisoners of the German concentration camps and in various historic books and articles about the Second World War. The fact that Bandera’s two brothers Vasyl and Oleksandr died or were killed in Auschwitz was absolutely central for the nationalist narrative because it allowed to fortify the idea of sharing the fate of the Jews and using the most important symbol of Ukrainian nationalism. The question, if some of the Ukrainian nationalist prisoners participated in the pogroms in summer 1941, was on the other hand not discussed in these publications. ²⁷

Survivors and Their Testimonies

Holocaust victims and survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia left various accounts of mass violence, which they experienced during the Second World War. Because the Nazis did not record the complicity of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and because they did not understand that the OUN members infiltrated the Ukrainian police, the survivor testimonies are, next to the internal OUN documents, essential to comprehend the role the Ukrainian nationalists played in the Shoah in western Ukraine. The earliest victim documents included questionnaires collected by Jewish organizations and diaries written by individual victims. Some of them were written shortly after the violent events such as the pogroms in summer 1941, the liquidations of the ghettoes, or the mass killings in the woods. Unlike the Ukrainians, Jews perceived the anti-Jewish violence as very significant and described it at length. Some of the accounts provided also more and less detailed information about the perpetrators.

The earliest accounts of the anti-Jewish mass violence in Volhynia and eastern Galicia were collected in late 1941 and early 1942 by the staff of the clandestine Jewish archives of the Warsaw ghetto. This group of young people was headed by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. The reports collected by them are composed of three parts: the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine, the German invasion, and the return to Warsaw. Some of them describe the pogroms and contain information about their perpetrators. The four main groups of perpetrators in these accounts are the Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian militia, and local population, mainly Ukrainians. Some other details related to mass violence that appear in these accounts are the joy of the Ukrainians and Poles about the coming of the Germans, the presence of Ukrainian flags and other national symbols in public spaces, the massacres committed by the NKVD on the political prisoners, and the propagandistic abuse of the corpses of the NKVD victims by the Nazis and the OUN-B to incite the pogrom in Lviv. ²⁸

Diaries written during the war by Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia are more personal than the reports collected by the staff of the Ringelblum archives but they hold similar information concerning the anti-Jewish violence and their perpetrators. One of such diaries was written by Edmund Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lviv, who kept it from 1942 to 1944. He described the Lviv pogrom and the following events such the forced move to the ghetto. Kessler wrote about the perpetrators of the Lviv pogrom: “The orchestrators here were the Germans. It is they who decided when to begin the pogrom, when to stop it, how long to torture the victims; whether until they lose consciousness or to slaughter them. They act capriciously toward their Ukrainian subordinates, even beating them when they are slow or overzealous in carrying out orders.” ²⁹

Another diarist, Samuel Golfard, entered his observations from 25 January 1943 until 14 April 1943 while staying in the ghetto in Peremyshliany, a town close to Lviv. He recalled how during the pogroms in summer 1941 the local perpetrators burned the synagogue and threw the son of the Rebbe of Bełż into the flames. ³⁰ On 6 March 1943, Golfard wrote in his diary: “The participation of Ukrainians in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews is beyond any dispute. To this day they carry out, often ruthlessly, the beastly Hitlerian orders. During the German invasion they themselves initiated terrible massacres compared to which even the cruelty of the Germans pales. It is a fact that the Germans took pictures of Jews being hurled into the flames of burning houses. In Przemyślany the perpetrators of this were the Ukrainians. Had they been allowed, they would even today take apart the entire ghetto in their passion for plunder.” ³¹ In his dairy we did not find any entries about the killings of the Jews by the OUN and UPA, because Golfard did not know that there were Ukrainian nationalists in the Ukrainian police and was not familiar with the fate of the Jews who escaped from the ghetto or lived outside of the labor camp. He knew only two types of Ukrainian Holocaust perpetrators: the policemen and the peasants. The first group killed Jews by assisting the Germans in mass executions or tracking down Jews hiding in the villages, and the latter denounced the Jews, refused to help them, and robbed them. ³²

Even before the end of the Second World War, in August 1944, Jewish survivors founded in Lublin the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH) which collected almost eight thousand reports from Holocaust survivors; among them were a number of survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia. ³³ The members of the CŻKH used questionnaires to collect testimonies. One important point was to collect information about the anti-Jewish violence and the perpetrators. ³⁴ Thus, in the testimonies of the survivors from western Ukraine we find quite a lot of information about the eastern Galician and Volhynian perpetrators. In terms of the pogroms in summer 1941, the survivors interviewed by the CŻKH archivists identified next to Germans the Ukrainian militiamen with yellow-and-blue armbands, and the crowd that was composed of Ukrainians and to a small extent Poles. ³⁵ The survivors did not know that the militia was established by the OUN-B, but they perceived the OUN propaganda and noticed various forms of the OUN activities during the pogroms. ³⁶ These survivors who had hidden in the woods and in the countryside described at length how the Germans, OUN activists, UPA partisans, Ukrainian police, and peasants hunted down and killed Jews who hid in the woods alone, in small groups, or in camps of different sizes. Some of the Jews dug out bunkers and hoped to survive in them. Discovering a bunker or raiding a larger camp, the perpetrators could kill even more than a hundred people at once. ³⁷

Similar descriptions of events as in the testimonies can be found in post-war memoirs written by survivors from eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Kurt Lewin, the son of the Lviv rabbi Jechieskiel Lewin, survived the war with the help of Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church. Lewin wrote his memoirs in 1945–1946 in Italy and Israel. He was a good observer and provided a very detailed and partially analytical description of the Lviv pogrom. During this event of mass violence, he was one of the Jews forced to carry out the decomposing bodies of the NKVD victims from the basement of the Brygidki prison. He identified the perpetrators as German soldiers, Ukrainian militiamen, and local civilians, mainly Ukrainians. All of them mistreated and killed the Jews in various ways. ³⁸

Eliyahu Yones survived the war in Lviv and in the slave labor camp Kurowice in eastern Galicia. He wrote his memoirs in 1954. During the Lviv pogrom, Yones, like Lewin, was forced to work in the yard of the Brygidki prison. During this time there he witnessed similar scenes as Lewin, but he managed to escape after a while. ³⁹ In addition to the pogrom perpetrators, Yones described the extremely brutal behavior of the Ukrainian policemen in the Lviv ghetto, and the perpetrators in the slave labor camp Kurowice in which he stayed until August 1943. The staff of this camp consisted of Germans and Ukrainians. The Germans held the leading positions in the camp, and Ukrainian policemen worked there as guards and were sometimes mistreated and beaten by their German superiors. Both Germans and Ukrainians mistreated, beat, and killed Jews—the inmates of this slave labor camp—in various ways. ⁴⁰

Besides the CŻKH, testimonies, in the early stage, were collected by a number of other institutions and individuals including David Border, Jewish commissions in the Displaced Persons camps in West German, commissions of survivors in other European countries such as Hungary, Austria, and France, and also Yad Vashem. ⁴¹ During the 1980s and 1990s, several thousands of interviews with survivors in different countries were conducted by a number of institutions and research groups, of which the most prolific one was the Shoah Foundation Institute of Visual History and Education. These huge collections of recorded or videotaped interviews were deposited in the Yad Vashem archives, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at the Yale University, the archives of the Unstated States Holocaust and Memorial Museum, and the archives of Shoah Foundation Institute of Visual History and Education.

Among the survivors interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s were several persons from Volhynia and eastern Galicia. These survivors described the same and similar events of mass violence and named similar types of perpetrators as those survivors who had been interviewed by the CŻKH fifty to forty years before. Talking about the pogroms in 1941, the interviewees recalled that the perpetrators had been the Germans, Ukrainian militiamen with yellow-and-blue armbands, the crowd composed of Poles and Ukrainians, and remembered being beaten, mistreated, and murdered almost exactly like survivors who had been interviewed by the CŻKH and survivors who described their experiences of these events in their post-war memoirs. They did not know that the OUN helped the Germans organize the pogroms because the OUN did this in secret. However, they noticed that some perpetrators were Bandera supporters or that they proudly displayed the OUN red-and-black and the Ukrainian yellow-and-blue flags. ⁴² The descriptions of the attempts to survive in the woods collected in the 1980s and 1990s also very much resemble the accounts left by the survivors who had been interviewed by the CŻKH in the late 1940s. Jews interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s mentioned the OUN and UPA nationalists as perpetrators next to the Germans, mayors of towns and villages, and peasants, and described similar horrifying murder scenes and acts of tracking them down as did the Jews who had testified for the CŻKH in the 1940s. ⁴³

Historians and the Holocaust in Western Ukraine

Historians who after the Second World War investigated subjects such as the Second World War and the annihilation of the Jews in western Ukraine or the activities of Ukrainian nationalists during the war, could consult various kinds of documents and sources, with the exception of document collections in the Soviet archives. Documents in Soviet archives were accessible only to some Soviet historians who, however, because of the Soviet censorship and other cultural and political constraints could depict the past in only a very distorted narrative. Although mass violence was an important subject in the Soviet narrative of the Second World War, we find in Soviet historiographic publications about the Ukrainian nationalists no adequate depictions of their victims and nor to a huge extent the perpetrators. The victims, regardless of their identity, were depicted as Soviet people, and the perpetrators as enemies of the Soviet Union, in the case of Ukrainians as traitors to their own nation. Similarly, Soviet historians did not provide any analytical explanation of the types of mass violence in western Ukraine and were obliged to not mention the Soviet crimes. ⁴⁴

Nevertheless, the first short academic studies of the Holocaust in western Ukraine were published as early as 1945. Philip Friedman, a professional historian and the head of the CŻKH, published in 1945 in Łódź a brochure-like book of thirty-six pages titled “The destruction of the Lviv Jews.” He pointed out that the study was based on the author’s own observations and observations of other survivors, and clarified that he was able to review only very few German administrative documents and documents of the Jewish Council in the Lviv ghetto because this material was partially destroyed and partially not accessible. Describing the pogrom, Friedman mentioned as perpetrators the Germans, Ukrainian militiamen, Ukrainian nationalists, and local Poles and Ukrainians. He did not know about the connection between the Ukrainian militia and the Germans and erred about the date of arrival of the German and Ukrainian military troops in Lviv but his description of the mass violence during the pogrom, although short, corresponds with the current state of knowledge about this event. Also, his descriptions and analyses of various other forms of mass violence after the pogrom and the perpetrators correspond with our current knowledge about Holocaust in Lviv. In general, Friedman’s book is a short and analytical explanation of the annihilation of Jews in Lviv. ⁴⁵

Although Friedman’s publications must have been indispensable for historians who studied the Holocaust and Second World War in Lviv or western Ukraine, ten years after Friedman’s first publication, John Armstrong published a monograph about Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War, without taking any notice of Friedman’s scholarship. ⁴⁶ Armstrong was a professional historian, trained at US universities. His publications on Ukrainian nationalism have been regarded as authoritative and reliable, and his monograph became a standard work on the OUN. It shaped the understanding of the OUN and the Holocaust among many other historians. Armstrong’s book was written from the perspective of the Cold War, and he appears to have been a militant anticommunist. After his death in 2010, the Memorial Committee of the University of Wisconsin–Madison published a resolution in which we read that Armstrong was a “fierce opponent of Soviet regimes” who were “at odds with the liberal students and campus protests of the 1960s and 1970s,” who erected a “bomb shelter . . . in his home,” which he “kept fully stocked and proudly displayed to their frequent dinner guests” and who taught his three daughters “how to shoot.” ⁴⁷

Although Armstrong’s study of Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War and Freidman’s study of the Holocaust in Lviv were thematically closely related, they could not have been more different. Armstrong investigated the OUN in depth and provided an interesting, most comprehensive, and critical analysis of the ideology of this movement, which he understood as “integral nationalism.” However, we do find almost no information about OUN’s and UPA’s involvement in the genocide of the Jews and other atrocities committed by this movement during the war, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Poles in Volhynia in 1943 and in eastern Galicia in 1944. While investigating the subject, Armstrong did not take any interest in the experiences recorded by the Jewish survivors. In addition to not consulting Friedman’s publication, he did not work with the testimonies collected by the CŻKH, which were stored in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and must have been accessible to him, or other collections of testimonies or published and unpublished diaries. Instead he used and relied on German archival documents, Ukrainian nationalist publications, and also on information obtained by the veterans of the OUN and UPA whom he invterviewed himself. As a result, he depicted the OUN as a radical nationalist movement and presented some aspects of its collaboration with the Nazis, but in terms of mass violence and Holocaust he essentially repeated what Lebed’ and other veterans of the movement had written about this subject. As a consequence, a reader of Armstrong’s book gets the impression that the OUN was not involved in the annihilation of Jews in eastern Galicia and Volhynia and did not conduct any other atrocities against civilians. The Jews are mentioned in his monograph eleven times. Two of them are very brief and casual references to their annihilation, and one to the Jewish doctors in the UPA. The pogroms in summer 1941 are not mentioned at all, although Armstrong explained and described the proclamation of the state on 30 June 1941 in Lviv and other events that happened at the same time and in the same place as the Lviv pogrom. Similarly, he did not write anything about the killing of the Jews by the UPA. ⁴⁸

During the entire Cold War and even after 1990, Armstrong’s study has been regarded as a standard monograph on the subject of Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War. In 1993, the leading German expert on Ukrainian history Frank Golczewski published a volume with fourteen articles covering all epochs of Ukrainian history. The article about Ukraine during the Second World War was written by him. Golczewski, a careful and critical historian, made at the beginning the disclaimer: “Until today, huge parts of the Ukrainian context of the war have not been solidly analyzed in historiographical publications.” ⁴⁹ In his article, he paid much attention to the OUN and UPA. He mentioned that antisemitism was widespread among Ukrainian nationalists and that the “Germans may have found for their annihilation of the Jews willing executioners” among them. He mentioned the OUN-B task forces, the militia, the Nachtigall battalion, the role that the corps of political prisoners left by the Soviets played in the pogroms, the mass shootings of the Jews by Einsatzgruppe C, the SD, and the SS, and several other important aspects of the events in the first days after the German attack of the Soviet Union. Given the sources Golczewski used, his description is astonishingly adequate. Nevertheless, we do not find any specific information about the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists and ordinary Ukrainians in the mass violence against the Jews. ⁵⁰ Similarly, we do not find any information about the murder of Jews by the UPA and about the ethnic cleansing of the Poles in Volhynian and eastern Galicia. The latter event is characterized by Golczewski as a “Polish-Ukrainian-Communist civil war” during which the Ukrainian nationalists fought “the Soviet partisans and the Polish colonists.” ⁵¹ A look at the cited sources and publications provides an explanation for the ambiguous mixture of arguments and explanations. Golczewski relied on and cited Armstrong several times but he cited neither Friedman—who in the meantime had also published another important article about the Holocaust in western Ukraine—nor any other Jewish historian who published on this subject, such as Aharon Weiss or Shmuel Spector who studied the accounts of the Holocaust survivors. The only Jewish source quoted in this article is David Kahane’s diary. ⁵²

Three years after Golczewski, two other German historians, Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sandkühler, published monographs about the Holocaust in eastern Galicia. Both provided excellent analysis of the German role in the genocide of the Jews but analyzed the role of the Ukrainian nationalists and the local population only marginally. Ukrainian perpetrators appear in these monographs mainly as German collaborators, in particular Ukrainian policemen. The murders committed by Ukrainians who did not collaborate with the Nazis are marginalized in both monographs. Similarly, both Pohl and Sandkühler did not investigate the attempts of the OUN to install as many members as possible in the Ukrainian police and to control it. The concentration on the German actors substantially marginalized the agency of the non-German perpetrators, in particular the Ukrainian nationalists, and deprived the Holocaust in western Ukraine of an important element. ⁵³ A similar description of events can be found in Frank Grelka’s monograph published in 2006. Yet we do not find this Germano centric narrative in Franziska Bruder’s monograph on the OUN, published in 2007. ⁵⁴ Unlike Golczewski (in 1993), Pohl, Sandkühler, and Grelka, Bruder did not exclude the testimonies and other accounts left by the survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia, and she did not assume that the German documents provide the most valuable sort of information.

Bruder provided both a critical analysis of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism and explained many facets of their terror against Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other ethnic groups. She achieved it because of two reasons. First, unlike Armstrong, she critically analyzed all documents of the Ukrainian nationalists, without being misled by the whitewashed accounts of the OUN and UPA veterans. Second, unlike Armstrong, Golczewski (in 1993), Pohl, Sandkühler, and Grelka, she explored the testimonies left by the survivors and regarded them as documents equally important to the documents left by the Germans and Ukrainians. Although she did not explore in depth the ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilians in 1943–1944, the investigation of the survivor testimonies allowed her to achieve a more comprehensive and adequate study of the different forms of mass violence in Volhynia and eastern Galicia than the former publications. ⁵⁵

In the last seven years, a number of papers about Ukrainian nationalism and Holocaust in eastern Galicia and Volhynia have appeared, including an article by Frank Golczewski. ⁵⁶ The authors of these publications included the analysis of victims’ and survivors’ accounts. They did not marginalize the role that Ukrainian nationalists and ordinary Ukrainians played during the genocide of the Jews, even if some of them did not treat the sources of Ukrainian perpetrators critically enough. ⁵⁷ Their authors investigated various aspects of the Ukrainian radical nationalist movement such as its fascistization, the invention of Ukrainian racism, the ethnic cleansing drives against the Poles in 1943–1944, and the attempts to deny the role that the Ukrainian nationalists played during the Holocaust as well as the denial of other forms of mass violence. ⁵⁸ At the same time, however, several scholars based in western Ukraine published a number of books and articles that reintroduced the narrative invented by the OUN and UPA veterans and the diaspora historians soon after the war. Their authors portrayed the Ukrainian nationalists as national heroes and victims of Nazi Germany, marginalized or ignored the mass violence performed by the OUN and UPA, and treated the testimonies left by the survivors as fantasy or anti-Ukrainian propaganda. ⁵⁹

Conclusion

The coming to terms with the Holocaust in western Ukraine has been a long and challenging process that is not finished yet. It was a conglomeration of various cultural, social, and political factors that hindered the exploration of the Holocaust in this part of Ukraine and prevented the building of good relationships between Ukrainians and Jews. Ukrainians found it especially difficult to accept the fact that the Ukrainian nationalists were among the Holocaust perpetrators because the patriotic narrative and the “official” national version of Ukrainian history portrayed the OUN and UPA as national heroes who fought for an independent Ukraine, resisting Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Because the Ukrainian nationalists faked and destroyed the evidences of their involvement in the mass murder of Jews and the German occupiers did not keep records of Ukrainian nationalists’ killings of Jews, the testimonies of the survivors have been a very important, although not the sole, source of evidence. Given that testimonies and memoirs of the survivors were accessible to historians, it remains a mystery why for a very long time only Jewish historians, among them Holocaust survivors themselves, used these documents to study the subject, and why their studies were dismissed as “subjective” or “mythical” by other historians such as Martin Broszat.

Although the survivors and diarists frequently confused a date or wrongly remembered the exact place of an event, they witnessed an essential dimension of the Shoah. In the case of the OUN and UPA, the documents left by victims and survivors were especially important. They were, next to the original internal OUN documents, the only sources, which allowed comprehension of the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust. This was so because the Ukrainian nationalists destroyed evidence and forged documents during and after the war, and because they established a discourse of a patriotic struggle for an independent Ukraine against Nazi German and Soviet Union, which suggested that they did not kill civilians and were not involved in the Holocaust. Similarly, the German documents were not specific about the involvement of the OUN and UPA in the Holocaust because the Nazis did not make any records of the complicity of the Ukrainian nationalists, and many Germans did not even understand to what extent the Ukrainian police, who worked for them, were infiltrated by the OUN.

For a long time, Jewish historians such as Philip Friedman or Aharon Weiss were the only group of historians who described the crimes committed by the Ukrainian nationalists during the German occupation of Ukraine as a part of the Holocaust. John Armstrong, the first non-Jewish professional historian who studied the OUN during the Second World War, neither worked with survivor testimonies nor took notice of publications based on these documents. Although Armstrong did not eulogize the Ukrainian nationalists like Ukrainian diaspora historians and the OUN and UPA veterans, he did not pay much attention to the genocide of the Jews and other forms of mass violence conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists. On the contrary, relying on German archival documents and testimonies of OUN and UPA veterans, Armstrong “overlooked” the complicity of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities committed by them during the Second World War.

German historians paid much attention to the genocide of the Jews but they concentrated almost entirely on the German actors and the Nazi role in the Holocaust. In addition, they did not work with the survivor accounts because they regarded these documents as “mythical memory.” Although they examined the German occupation of western Ukraine in depth and carefully analyzed the role of the Germans in the destruction of the Jews, they did understand the OUN and UPA as relevant actors. As a result, their explorations of the mass violence conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists were inadequate and insufficient or noncomprehensive. The dismissal of the accounts left by victims and survivors and also of the studies published by the Jewish historians, and an almost exclusive concentration on the politics and conduct of the German occupiers, did not allow them to write an all-inclusive or transnational history of the Holocaust in western Ukraine. Although their publications helped the German and Ukrainian society understand how Nazi Germany persecuted and annihilated Jews, they did not help Ukrainians to come to the terms with the Shoah.

Because of methodological and ethical issues, many historians of the Holocaust in western Ukraine could not come closer to Saul Friedländer’s concept of “integrated history.” With the exception of some Jewish scholars, historians began to uncover the Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust in Volhynia and eastern Galicia only about a decade ago. In 2007, Franziska Bruder published her dissertation on the OUN, and after her a number of other historians published several critical articles on the Ukrainian nationalists and the Shoah. The uncovering of this aspect of Ukrainian history evoked voices of protest among Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian intellectuals, and scholars who disbelieved the survivor testimonies and leant toward Armstrong’s anticommunist explanations of history or cultivated the Germanocentric explanation of the Second World War in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the rethinking of the accounts of the victims as archival sources brought forward the coming to terms with the Holocaust and other unheroic features of Ukrainian history.