Volodymyr Kubijovyč

Volodymyr Kubijovyč (also spelled Kubiiovych or Kubiyovych; Ukrainian: Володи́мир Миха́йлович Кубійо́вич, romanized: Volodymyr Mykhailovych Kubiiovych; 23 September 1900 – 2 November 1985) was an anthropological geographer in prewar Poland, a wartime Ukrainian nationalist politician, a Nazi collaborator and a post-war émigré intellectual of mixed Ukrainian-Polish background.[1][2]

Volodymyr Kubijovyč
Володимир Кубійович
Deputy of the President of the Ukrainian National Committee
In office
17 March 1945  1945
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Chairman of the Ukrainian Central Committee
In office
1939–1945
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Personal details
Born(1900-09-23)23 September 1900
Nowy Sącz, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria–Hungary
Died2 November 1985(1985-11-02) (aged 85)
Paris, France

During the war Kubijovyč headed the social welfare and the economic committee called UCC (Ukrainian Central Committee). He was a devotee of Adolf Hitler, an anti-Semite and a proponent of ethnic cleansing.[3][4][5] In 1943, he was a founder of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.[6][7][4][8] Kubijovyč was a supporter of the OUN-M, Andriy Melnyk's faction in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[9][2] After the collapse of Nazi Germany, Kubijovyč settled in France. He later became the chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Secretary General of Shevchenko Scientific Society.[3] Kubijovyč also supported other projects of the Ukrainian diaspora.[3] He died in Paris on 2 November 1985.

Early life

Volodymyr Kubijovyč in the uniform of an artillery officer of the Ukrainian Galician Army, 1918

Kubijovyč was born in 1900 in Nowy Sącz; his father Mykhailo was a Greek-Catholic of Ukrainian descent, while his mother was Maria Dobrowolska, a Catholic of Polish extraction.[2] He was baptized into the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and, as he stated, became automatically Ruthenian but grew up in mix Polish-Ukrainian surroundings and spoke both, Ukrainian and Polish.[2] At age 13, he read Mykhailo Hrushevsky's multi-volume History of Ukraine-Rusʹ. Between the ages of 15 and 18, Kubijovyč studied cartography, he also read books by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Polish and other works in German.[2] In 1918, Kubijovyč enrolled on a doctoral programme at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but World War I and his enlistment into the Ukrainian Galician Army interrupted his education.[2] He returned home on sick leave with Typhus before the end of the Polish-Ukrainian war and, in 1919, resumed his studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1923, Kubijovyč concluded his doctorate and successfully defended his habilitation on 9 May 1928.[10] In 1932, he became a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lwów (today Lviv).[2] During the years 1928 to 1939, Kubijovyč taught at Cracow's Jagiellonian University as a lecturer (docent) and collaborated with various academic institution. In recognition of his work, Kubijovych obtained a financial scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education for his journey to Czechoslovakia and Romania. He also received time off from his university duties.[2]

In 1939, was denied further tenure under political pressure from the Polish Ministry of War. In 1940, he was appointed professor of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague.[11]

Before 1939, Kubijovyč's scholarly works concentrated on the geography and demography of the Carpathian Mountains, especially the eastern Beskids, populated largely by the Ukrainian-speaking minority. At this time, he questioned official Polish statistics concerning the ethnic make-up of the inter-war Polish Republic and maintained that the official numbers of Ukrainians were grossly understated. He was an editor and co-author of the pioneering Ukrainian-language Atlas of Ukraine and Adjacent Lands (1937) and the equally pioneering Ukrainian-language Geography of Ukraine and Neighbouring Lands (1938, 1943).[citation needed]

Second World War

Kubijovyč and Hans Frank with the Ukrainian harvest festival delegation. Wawel, German Occupied Poland, 1943.

Kubijovyč was a supporter of the OUN-M (Andriy Melnyk's faction in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists).[9][2] He was one of the major Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany.[1][3][12] In April 1941, Kubijovyč asked Hans Frank to create under the auspices of Nazi Germany an ethnically filtered Ukrainian area within the General Government or an autonomous state, where Poles and Jews would not be allowed to live.[3][13][4][1]

In the spring of 1940, acting with the permission of Hans Frank, a number of Ukrainian self-help committees staffed by the OUN established in Kraków a coordinating structure called the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC). Volodymyr Kubijovyč was elected as its head. The UCC was the only officially authorized Ukrainian social welfare organization in the Nazi-occupied Polish territories, with a mandate to care for the elderly, sick and homeless, and to look after the welfare of the Ukrainian workers sent to Germany from the General Government.[14] As part of its activities, it published anti-Semitic materials in the collaborationist press[15][16][17][4]

On August 16 1942, a message from the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) was published in the Lviv News newspaper stating, "Anyone who hides Jews or hinders their resettlement will be punished."[18] Resettlement in August 1942 meant the deportation of 40,000 members of Lviv's Jewish population to Belzec extermination camp.[19][20]

In 1943, Volodymyr Kubijovyč worked closely with a high-ranking member of the SS, Otto Wächter, in organizing the Waffen-SS Galizien.[21][6][7][4][8] On 2 May 1943, he publicly announced his willingness to take up arms and declared himself ready to join the newly formed Ukrainian Waffen-SS.[4]

Throughout the war, Kubijovyč used his German contacts to shield the western Ukrainian population from Nazi policies. In 1943, as Ukrainian peasants in the Zamość region were accused of resistance, Volodymyr Kubijovyč successfully intervened with Hans Frank to prevent reprisals.[22] At other times, he was reduced to writing in protest to the German authorities against the impact of their rule of terror on the Ukrainian civilian population, which included unprovoked public abuse, arbitrary killings and mass shootings. Some of this material was later brought up as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.[23] In 1943 he communicated to Frank that "the Ukrainians would work for the [Reich's] final victory" and expressed appreciation for "the liberation from the Polish yoke due to the will of the Fuhrer and the glorious victory of the Wehrmacht".[5] Kubijovyč also supported recruitment for forced labour in Galicia. According to him, it was carried out with order and adherence to deportation orders by Ukrainians in some areas but in other areas "the process equaled a “massive manhunt,” in which people were picked up off the street, out of their homes, during school, at the market, and in movie theaters without notice and shipped to Germany."[24]

According to some Ukrainian sources, Kubijovyč tried to use his official position to ameliorate Ukrainian-Polish wartime tensions in Galicia by calling for an end to the armed underground conflict between the two sides in 1944. These sources also credit him with saving some three hundred people, most of them Jews, from arrest by the Nazi authorities.[25] The credibility of these Ukrainian sources is dubious as in his correspondence with Nazi officials "he glorified Hitler, shared anti-Semitic tropes, and advocated the cleansing of Jews and Poles from the majority Ukrainian areas of the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region".[5] In a letter dated February 1943 and addressed to Hans Frank, Kubijovych wrote, "Arrests and shootings of persons unfit for work in the District of Sanok. During the period from 18 to 24 January 1943 about 300 persons were arrested in the neighborhood of Sanok in accordance with lists compiled some time before by the local mayors on orders of the authorities. Some of them were soon set free, but the fate of the rest is unknown to us and their families. The shootings which are daily taking place on the Jewish cemetery promise no good."[26] Had these 300 individuals been Jewish they would not have been set free. The Jewish population of Sanok, including the Jewish ghetto, had been eradicated by December 1942.[27] By February 1943, the Jews from Sanok had been deported to Belzec Death Camp.[28] In addition, Ukrainian auxiliaries had helped the Nazis with deportations and murders of Jews in Sanok.[29] A few sentences later Kubijovych writes, "The current view is that now the shootings of the Jews [have] come to an end those of the Ukrainians begin."[26] His writing in this letter and the 1963 Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia, insinuates that Jews were not and could not be considered Ukrainian.

As the Red Army approached, in 1944 Kubijovyč and his Ukrainian Central Committee fled German-occupied Poland to Germany.[1]

Emigration

At the time of Nazi Germany's capitulation Kubijovyč was in the American occupation zone, from where he moved to France. In Germany, he reorganized the Shevchenko Scientific Society as an émigré institution. He acted as its Secretary General from 1947 to 1963, and, from 1952, President of its European branch.[citation needed]

In exile, Kubijovyč became the chief editor of the Ukrainian-language Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies (Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva, 10 vols., 1949–84), the largest scholarly project undertaken by Ukrainian émigrés during the Cold War. Reflecting Kubijovyč's own strong Ukrainophile views, it was intended to preserve the Ukrainian national heritage, which he saw as being neglected and downgraded under the Soviet rule. The English translation of its thematic section, Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia, was published in two volumes in 1963–71. A revised and expanded English-language edition of the ten-volume alphabetic part appeared under the title Encyclopedia of Ukraine in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, only after Kubijovyč's death, and is presently being put on-line.

During his exile in France Kubijovyč enjoyed considerable prestige as the most prominent Ukrainian scholar in the West. He drew the respect of the Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyć, another resident of Paris, who noted in his autobiography that Kubijovyč had behaved honourably during the war ("Zachował się świetnie"). In 1991, after Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, scholars in Ukraine began reprinting Kubijovyč's major works, especially his encyclopedias, making them available to a wider readership in the home country for the first time.[citation needed]

In his later years, Kubijovyč published three volumes of memoirs describing his experiences in interwar Poland and during the Second World War, and his émigré scholarly life in Germany and France during the Cold War. The most wide-ranging of these was the Ukrainian-language volume titled I am 85 Years Old (Paris and Munich, 1985).

Volodymyr Kubijovyč died on 2 November 1985 in Paris.

Modern legacy

Volodymyr Kubijovyč on a Ukrainian postal stationery item.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hostile Soviet propaganda line on Kubijovyč lost its official status and was replaced by a nationalist line. His works, including his encyclopedias, were published in Ukraine where they are now in wide circulation.[citation needed] They have been criticized for not having an entry on The Holocaust and stating within the entry on "antisemitism" that no Ukrainian "anti-Semitic organization or political party" has ever existed.[5] The 1963 edition writes on De-Stalinization, however, there is no mention of Denazification.[30] It also includes pseudoscience in relation to race, referencing theories by one of the foremost racial theorists in Nazi Germany Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß in an attempt to analyze the psychology of the Ukrainian population.[30]

In 1975, Kubijovych published an apologist account of history titled "The Ukrainians in the Generalgouvernment - 1939-1941".[31] The National Archives of Canada has a Volodymyr Kubijovyc collection. It consists of 28 volumes, with each volume being 20 cm of files, that were donated between 1987 and 1993.[32] None of the documents appear to have been digitized.

In 2000 a pre-stamped envelope was issued by the Ukrainian postal service honouring the hundredth anniversary of Kubijovyč's birthday.[33] In the 2020s, Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky, has been a vocal opponent on the veneration of Kubijovyč, stating that Kubiiovich should be remembered as a direct accomplice in the murder of Ukrainian Jews and the plunder of their property.[34]

The University of Alberta's Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies has an endowment of 437,757 Canadian dollars, that is used to support the institute's encyclopedia projects. [35] The endowment was established in November, 1986 with support from the Government of Alberta. The Deschênes Commission submitted their final report to the federal government on December 30th, 1986.

In April 2023, a majority of people who partook in a vote regarding the renaming of Przhevalsky Street in Kyiv voted to rename the street after Volodymyr Kubijovyč.[33][36] An online petition was launched through Kyiv City Council to prevent the renaming, which received 696 signatures, after a motion for the renaming was adopted by the city council. However, following a complaint from Israeli ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky, the mayor of Kyiv, Vitalii Klychko, personally intervened and prevented the street from being renamed.[37] In July 2023, a Ukrainian village was deciding between Levko Matsievich Street and Volodymyr Kubiyovych Street for the renaming of Chelyuskin Street.[38] There is currently a street honouring him in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Since 1992, there has been a street named after him in Lviv.[39]

References

General
  • Kubijovyč, Volodymyr, ed. (1963). Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3105-6.
  • "Kubijovyc, Volodymyr". Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Vol. II. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1988. p. 697.
  • Shablii, Oleh (1996). Volodymyr Kubiiovych: Entsyklopediia zhyttia i tvorennia (Volodymyr Kubiyovych: Encyclopedia of Life and Creativity) (in Ukrainian). Paris-Lviv: Feniks. A sympathetic and detailed account of his life and work in Ukrainian written by a professional geographer.
Inline
  1. Markiewicz, Paweł (2021). Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II. Purdue University Press. ISBN 978-1-61249-680-1. Volodymyr Kubiiovych ... top Ukrainian collaborator in occupied Poland ... a prewar academic and ardent nationalist ... hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich.
  2. Markiewicz, Pawel (2016). "Volodymyr Kubijovych's Ethnographic Ukraine: Theory into Practice on the Western Okraiiny". Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 64 (2): 228–259. doi:10.25162/jgo-2016-0008. ISSN 0021-4019. S2CID 252447034. He was born ...into a mixed ethnic and religious family - his father Mykhailo, a Greek-Catholic of Ukrainian extraction; his mother Maria Dobrowolska, a Catholic of Polish extraction...Throughout the wartime period, he remained sympathetic and loyal to the original OUN, represented by Andri Melnyk.
  3. Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz (2014). Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. ibidem Press. pp. 452, 226. ISBN 978-3-8382-0686-8. The head of this important academic project (Encyclopedia of Ukraine) was Volodymyr Kubiiovych, one of the major Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis, and who, after the Second World War, became the Secretary General of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.(page 452)..In April 1941, Kubiiovych asked Hans Frank, head of the General Government, to set up an ethnically pure Ukrainian enclave there, free from Jews and Poles (Page 226)
  4. Rudling, Per Anders (2012-07-01). "'They Defended Ukraine': The 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited". The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. 25 (3): 329–368. doi:10.1080/13518046.2012.705633. ISSN 1351-8046. S2CID 144432759. In organizing Waffen-SS Galizien, Wächter worked closely with Volodymyr Kubijovyc, an enthusiastic proponent of ethnic cleansing. In April 1941 he requested that Hans Frank set up an ethnically pure Ukrainian enclave in the General Government, free from Jews and Poles. Kubijovyc benefited from Aryanization of Jewish property and published anti-Semitic materials in the collaborationist press...In contact with majority society the veterans generally omitted their background in the Waffen-SS. Within their community, however, it was regarded as merit. Among the more prominent alumni were Volodymyr Kubijovyc, who after the war came to edit the Encyclopedia of Ukraine
  5. Rudling, Per Anders (2023). "In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS "Galicia" Division and Its Legacy by Myroslav Shkandrij (review)". Ab Imperio. 2023 (2): 220–228. doi:10.1353/imp.2023.a906851.
  6. Bartov, Omer (2020-06-11). Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town. Berghahn Books. pp. 187 and 188. ISBN 978-1-78920-719-4. Yesterday Professor and head of the collaborationist Ukrainian Central Committee, Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Colonel and founder in 1943 of the Waffen-SS "Galicia" Division, Alfred
  7. Logusz, Michael O. (1997). Galicia Division: The Waffen-SS 14th Grenadier Division 1943-1945. Schiffer Pub. ISBN 978-0-7643-0081-3.
  8. Melnyk, Michael James (2017-05-17). The History of the Galician Division of the Waffen SS: On the Eastern Front: April 1943 to July 1944. Fonthill Media.
  9. Ryszard Torzecki, Kwestia ukraińska w polityce III Rzeszy 1933-1945 (The Ukrainian question in the politics of the Third Reich 1933-1945) Warsaw 1972, page 236.
  10. AUJ, WF I 121: Włodzimierz Kubijowicz, Habilitacja: Jagiellonian University - Faculty of Philosophy Protocol of Colloquium regarding Habilitation of dr. Włodzimierz Kubijowicz, 9 May 1928; MWRiOP, document 16 August 1928.
  11. Кубiйович Володмир. [W:] Енциклопедія історії України: Т. 5, page 442.
  12. Hale, Christopher (2011-04-11). Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret. The History Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-7524-6393-3. ...with Ukrainians including Professor Kubijovych, the leading Ukrainian collaborator with the German occupiers.
  13. Gross, Jan T. (1979). Polish Society Under German Occupation. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-691-65691-5.
  14. Subtelny, Orest (2009-11-10). Ukraine: A History, Fourth Edition. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-9728-7. In spring 1940, with the acquiescence of Frank, these committees formed a coordinating body in Cracow called the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) and elected Volodymyr Kubijovyè, a well-known geographer, as its head. The UCC was a Ukrainian social-welfare agency whose mandate was to look after the sick, the aged, and homeless children, to care for public health and education, to help prisoners of war, and to represent the interests of the Ukrainian workers from the General Government who were sent to Germany.
  15. Bitunjac, Martina; Schoeps, Julius H. (2021-06-21). Complicated Complicity: European Collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 94. ISBN 978-3-11-067118-6. The Ukrainian Central Committee was the only officially sanctioned Ukrainian political and community organization in the Generalgouvernement, i.e. territory which came under German control already in the fall of 1939...Ukrainian support for the intended SS Division, thus, for example, from the Ukrainian Central Committee, a nonpolitical, but influential social welfare and economic organization headed by Volodymyr Kubiyovych.
  16. Subtelny, Orest (2009-11-10). Ukraine: A History, Fourth Edition. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-9728-7. In spring 1940, with the acquiescence of Hans Frank, these committees formed a coordinating body in Cracow called the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) and elected Volodymyr Kubijovych, a well-known geographer, as its head. The UCC was a Ukrainian social-welfare agency whose mandate was to look after the sick, the aged, and homeless children, to care for public health and education, to help prisoners of war, and to represent the interests of the Ukrainian workers from the General Government who were sent to Germany. The Germans made it very clear that the UCC was not to have any political prerogatives whatsoever.
  17. Bankier, David; Gutman, Israel (2009). Nazi Europe and the Final Solution. Berghahn Books. p. 266. ISBN 978-1-84545-410-4. During this period the Ukrainian Committee, headed by Volodymyr Kubijovyc, took on a pronounced anti-Jewish position.
  18. . No. 184. Lviv News. August 16, 1942 https://libraria.ua/en/issues/175/. {{cite news}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  19. "Lviv" (PDF). Bełżec Museum and Memorial.
  20. "Lvov" (PDF). Yad Vashem.
  21. Rudling, Per Anders (July–September 2012). "'They Defended Ukraine': The 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited". Journal of Slavic Military Studies. 25 (3): 339–359. doi:10.1080/13518046.2012.705633. S2CID 144432759.
  22. Yekelchyk, Serhy (2007-03-29). Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-029413-7. Using his German connections, Kubijovyč tried to protect the Ukrainian interests in the General Government. In 1943, he successfully intervened with Governor General Hans Frank to stop the killing of Ukrainian peasants in the Zamosc region for their alleged resistance.
  23. "Translation of Document 1526-PS: Prof. Dr. Wolodymyr Kubijowytsch, Chairman of the Ukrainian Main Committee, to the Governor General, Reich Minister Dr. Frank (Cracow, February 1943)", Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1946, pp. 79–93
  24. Popowycz, Jennifer Lauren (2022). "World War II, Displacement, and the Making of the Postwar Ukrainian Diaspora, 1939-1951". LSU Doctoral Dissertations.
  25. Pidkova, Ihor; Shust, R. M.; Bondarenko, K. (1993–1999), "Кубійович Володимир", Довідник з історії України, vol. 2, Kyïv, ISBN 5-7707-8552-7{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  26. Kubijowytsch, Wolodymyr (February 1943). "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume IV Document No. 1526-PS". Yale Law School. The Avalon Project.
  27. "Sanok History". Polin: Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
  28. "September 1939, German soldiers guarding Jews in Sanok, Poland". Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
  29. Geoffrey, Megargee (2012). Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Volume II ed.). Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press. pp. 569–571. ISBN 978-0-253-35599-7.
  30. Kubiĭovych, Volodymyr, ed. (1963). Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia (Volume I ed.). University of Toronto Press. pp. 908, 947.
  31. Kubijovych, Volodymyr. "UKRAÏNTSI V HENERAL'NIÏ HUBERNIÄ : 1939-1941: ISTORIIA UKRAÏNS'KOHO TSENTRAL'NOHO KOMITETU. THE UKRAINIANS IN THE GENERALGOUVERNEMENT". AbeBooks. Chicago: Mykola Denysiuk Publishing Company.
  32. Momryk, Myron. "Volodymyr Kubijovyc MG 31, D 203 Finding Aid No. 1963" (PDF). Manuscript Division.
  33. Silkoff, Shira (11 April 2023). "Kyiv to name street for Ukrainian Nazi collaborator after public vote". The Jerusalem Post.
  34. Eichner, Itamar (April 11, 2023). "A street in Kyiv will be named after a Nazi collaborator, the Jewish community is outraged". Vesty Israel.
  35. "Support CIUS | Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies". 2023-09-26. Archived from the original on 2023-09-26. Retrieved 2023-09-30.
  36. "Kyiv could name street after former Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and SS official". i24NEWS. 11 April 2023.
  37. Grant, Anthony (11 April 2023). "Kyiv's Mayor Quashes City's Strange Attempt To Rename Street After a Ukrainian Nazi Collaborator". The New York Sun.
  38. "ЯК ПЕРЕЙМЕНУЮТЬ ВУЛИЦІ ТОЛСТОГО, ТУРГЕНЄВА, ЦІОЛКОВСЬКОГО: ЗАТВЕРДИЛИ НОВІ ВАРІАНТИ ЩЕ ДЛЯ 11 ТОПОНІМІВ ПОЛТАВИ".
  39. Gogol, Khrystyna. "У ЛЬВОВІ БІЛЯ СНОПКІВСЬКОГО ПАРКУ НА МІСЦІ ГАРАЖІВ ХОЧУТЬ ЗВЕСТИ БАГАТОПОВЕРХІВКИ". TBOE MICTO. Retrieved 1 October 2023.
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