Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany

Stalin and Hitler pursued a policy of demanding 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 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 brand new German administrative units: to the southwest, the District of Galicia of the Nazi General Government, and the northeast, Reichskommissariat Ukraine stretching all the way to Donbas by 1943.[6]

"Hitler the Liberator" poster in Ukrainian

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 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 Dr. 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 have been 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 The Allies (The United States, The Soviet Union and The United Kingdom). 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.

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 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 encouraged loyalty to the new regime in the hope that the Germans would support it. In 1939, during the German-Polish War, the OUN was "a faithful German auxiliary".[13]

Ukrainian women dressed in national costumes salute German high command during the parade in Stanislaviv

Despite initially reacting warmly to the idea of an independent Ukraine (see Ukrainian national government (1941)), the Nazi administration had other ideas, particularly the Lebensraum programme and the total 'Aryanisation' of the population. It played the Slavic nations against one another. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages to try to exterminate Polish populations or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory.[13] This culminated in the mass killings of Polish families in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

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 in Reichskommissariat Ukraine: the map

The elimination of Jews during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, which formed mid August 1941,[15] assisted by Einsatzgruppen C, and Police battalions rounded up Jews and undesirables for the Babi Yar massacre,[16] as well as other later massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Kolky,[17][18] Stepan,[19][20] Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr.[21] During this period, on 1 September 1941, Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in the article "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][25] "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".[26][27]

The Ukrainian clergy's address to the Ukrainians, calling them to pledge allegiance to Germany

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.[28] The NKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police while they retreated eastward were blamed on Jews. The antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultranationalist Ukrainian People's Militia, which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[28] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd, which had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square, 24 hours to act as they wished against Polish Jews, who were forced to clean the dead bodies and to dance and then were killed by beating with axes, pipes etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany. During Lviv pogroms, 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, led by the Ukrainian People's Militia.[28][29][30] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[31]

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.[32] 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.[33] Another 1,000 defected during field operations.[33] 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.[34] The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted and so were always overseen by Volksdeutsche.[35] Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.[36][37]

Ukrainian women greet advancing German Army, sign in the background says "Herzlich Willkommen, Heil Hitler"

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".[38]

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 SS Division Galicia, the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UVV) and the Ukrainian National Army (Ukrainische Nationalarmee, UNA).[6][39] By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 native police and 15,000 Germans, a ratio of 1 to 16.[40]

Auxiliary police

German officers visiting the Schutzmannschaft unit in Zarig, near Kiev

Main article: Ukrainian Auxiliary Police

The 109th, 114th, 115th, 116th, 117th, 118th, 201st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft-battalions participated in anti-partisan operations in Ukraine and Belarus. In February and March 1943, the 50th Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft 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.[41] On March 22, 1943, all inhabitants of the village of Khatyn in Belarus were burned alive by the Nazis in what became known as the Khatyn massacre, with the participation of the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion.[42][43]

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".[44]

SS Division Galicia

Main article: 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)

Contemporary Ukrainian newspaper with slogans such as "God with Us!" and "Glory to Ukraine!". The headlines read: "From Peter the Great to Stalin – the Eastern Menace" and "Japan declares war on the United States of America and England"

On 28 April 1943, the German Governor of the District of 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 and numbered 80,000.[45] On 27 July 1944, the division was formed into the Waffen-SS as 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian).[46]

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.[47] Also, at least some of them were victims of compulsory conscription, since Germany had by then suffered defeats and lost manpower on the eastern front.[48] 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 minorities, particularly Jews during World War II.[49] However other authors, including Michael Melnyk,[48] 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 during the accusations.[46][50] (See 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)#Atrocities and war crimes).

• Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
• History of the Jews in Ukraine
• List of Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations

• 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 ADL. ISBN 0-88125-376-6.
• Mordecai Paldiel and Elie Wiesel (2007). The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. HarperCollins Publishers. 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.