"Heroes" of the Holocaust: What Role Did Ukrainian Nationalists Play in the Persecution and Mass Destruction of Jews?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The greatest horror of the Second World War was not bloody battles and the incessant roar of shelling, but the extermination of a huge number of defenseless people who fell into an organized system of destruction. For the massacres, a sufficiently large staff of performers was required, and in the conditions of total war, all soldiers were required at the front. Then the fascists decided to attract volunteer performers from the occupied territories for such a case. And subsequently they considered their work extremely effective.

Formation of the "Roland" and "Nachtigall" battalions. Ukrainian "nightingales" in the service of the Abwehr and the Gestapo

The Soviet army was not ready for war and, unable to withstand the onslaught of the enemy army, retreated inland. People who remain in the occupied territories learn from personal experience all the "charms" of Nazism. On the territory of Western Ukraine (where there was the second largest Jewish diaspora after the one living in the United States), the Nazis created about 50 ghettos and 200 concentration camps for Jews, in which prisoners were consistently and systematically destroyed. According to various sources, the total number of victims of the Holocaust in the Ukrainian SSR, occupied by the Nazis, ranged from 1.5 to 1.9 million people.

First, German special forces units were created - Einsatzgruppen or "death squads", their powers included punitive operations, actions of destruction in the occupied territories. But the German army needed every combat unit for quick and brilliant victories at the front. An idea arises to do the work with someone else's hands - by local forces from among the sympathizers of the occupiers, who knew the mentality of the population well, they could easily navigate the terrain. Collaborators from among the ideological opponents of Soviet power, and in particular, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, joined the ranks of the Roland and Nachtigall battalions, created on the basis of the Brandenburg 800, a special forces regiment.

Their comprehensive training began in 1933: in German military special schools, personnel were forged for subversive propaganda and sabotage activities, intelligence, work as part of the police and liquidation apparatus in the occupied lands. In the future, such "specialists" will be equally useful to both the military intelligence (Abwehr) and the secret police (Gestapo).

The annexation of Western Ukraine to the USSR is one of the reasons why conscious collaboration became a mass phenomenon in 1941 (which greatly facilitated the fulfillment of tasks for the soldiers of the Third Reich). The OUN consisted of two large units, one of which was headed by Andrei Melnik, it was more convenient for the German invaders, since their goals coincided - the destruction of Soviet sympathizers, communists and everyone who belonged to the category of "inferior" citizens. But a part of the OUN, headed by Stepan Bandera and his deputy Shukhevych, had as its main goal the creation of an independent Ukraine under the protectorate of Nazi Germany, which was not in the interests of the latter.

Professional executioners - what they taught the soldiers of the battalions "Roland" and "Nachtigall", and what tasks were assigned to them

Before the German attack on the USSR, the OUN members helped the special services of the Hitlerite army with intelligence. In June 1941, the Abwehr set the task for the OUN: to destroy important objects in the rear of the Red Army; shake the situation, create an agent network and start an uprising.

The fighters of the special battalions completed most of the tasks set successfully: • actively spoiled communication lines; • interfered with the evacuation of civilians; • eliminated party workers, commanders of the Red Army and law enforcement agencies, Bolshevik activists; • stormed prisons and freed their associates; • attacked border guards and small military units of the Soviets.

Later, the Nazis will form auxiliary police detachments from them - the Schutzmanschaft, using them for punitive and liquidation purposes. In 1943, they were actively involved in the destruction of the Jewish ghettos, and a little later (as a result of the split between the parts of the OUN, most of the detachments will go to the forests, forming the Ukrainian insurgent army - UPA), the experience of the executioners will be useful to them during the Volyn tragedy, only they will no longer kill Jews and Poles.

"Lviv massacre" on June 30, 1941. The methods of exterminating the Jews

As soon as the Nazis approached the borders of Western Ukraine, members of the OUN underground began to attack representatives of the Soviet power structures, release their comrades-in-arms from prisons, and organize Jewish pogroms. With the arrival of the fascists, pogroms became systemic and massive. On June 30, 1941, in Lviv, Bandera admonished his comrades-in-arms: "Beat the Jews, save Ukraine." Eyewitnesses (Tamara Branitskaya, Lucy Gornstein, Herman Katz, Kurt Levin and others) noted that these were unprecedented actions in their cruelty.

The Jews were publicly mocked, humiliating their human dignity. For example, they were forced to clean the streets with a toothbrush, remove horse manure with their own hats. Women were stripped in the middle of the street, their clothes were ripped, insulted and beaten. So in Lvov, on June 30, 1941, during the Jewish pogrom, brutalized crowds of nationalists crippled (cut out the Star of David on the body, gouged out their eyes, cut off their ears) or beat several thousand people to death.

Journalist Abram Rosen, who miraculously survived this massacre, recalled that on June 30, 1941, SS detachments, police and Ukrainian nationalists walked around Lviv, who carried out round-ups and drove Jews to prison.

Until August 1941, the Nazis and their accomplices first killed men of Jewish nationality of working age and people from the intellectual elite, while in the fall of the same year, the total extermination of Jews had already taken place - they did not spare either the elderly, women or children. Even the soldiers of the Third Reich were struck by the actions of the OUN troops.

Jews were identified in various ways, they had to wear a special patch with the Star of David on their clothes. Later they began to drive them to special places of residence - Jewish ghettos. Or, not really bothering, they were forced to appear at the place of mass execution, as it was near Kiev in Babi Yar, where they drove 150 thousand people of Jewish nationality and all were mercilessly executed. Nationalism, Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism - all these "-isms" are terrible in their extreme manifestations and precisely because the executioners are sure that their victims deserve it.

The fate of the executioners from the special battalions

The fate of Hitler's accomplices was different. Some of them continued to help the Nazis under the leadership of Melnik until 1944, some of them joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had gone into the forests, under the leadership of Bandera. Many of them were identified and shot by the Soviet authorities. One of the leaders of the OUN, Andrei Melnik, lived after the war in Europe (in Luxembourg), without abandoning his attempts to unite the nationalist emigrants, died in 1964.

Stepan Bandera - the head of the OUN branch, competing with Melnik, also lived in a European state and continued to conduct anti-Bolshevik activities, was killed by a KGB agent in 1959 in Munich.

Roman Shukhevych was killed by a sergeant of the internal troops Polishchuk on March 5, 1950 in the village. Belogorshcha.

Jewish pogroms on the territory of Ukraine happened before. In terms of the scale and number of victims, some episodes were not inferior to the Holocaust of the 20th century.