Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ important—two detailed monographs on Ukrainian military and police units in German service.147 Moreover, other Lviv-based historians have written quite critically of OUN, including Marta Havryshko, who has published on the situation of women in UPA, and the prominent historians, essayists, and bloggers Yaroslav Hrytsak148 and Vasyl Rasevych.149 Oleksandr Zaitsev, at this writing head of the history department at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, has done particularly valuable work on OUN prior to 1941, including a detailed survey of integral nationalist ideology150 and the publication of a text by a leading member of OUN advocating the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.151

At present, some of the best researched and frankest discussion of OUN and Holocaust perpetration is being conducted in Ukraine by scholars younger than all the other Ukrainian scholars mentioned so far. An outstanding figure is Yuri Radchenko of Kharkiv, who knows all the languages necessary for Holocaust research, not only Slavic and Western languages but Hebrew and Yiddish as well. He has researched the Holocaust in Kharkiv and the Donbas and the memory politics surrounding the nationalists and their collaboration in the Holocaust, and he has broken new ground by working on the Melnyk wing of OUN in relation to the Holocaust.152 Other younger, up-and-coming scholars are doing exciting work too, though much of what they have discovered has so far been presented only in unpublished papers. Andrii Usach started his scholarly career in the pro-OUN Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement in Lviv, but left that organization and now is assembling the most intimate portraits yet of Ukrainian Holocaust perpetrators.153 Roman Shliakhtych of Kryvyi Rih has also been working on local perpetrators, particularly Ukrainian policemen in German service.154 These excellent young historians—and I am sure there are more of whom I am unaware—are certain to redefine the contours of Ukrainian historiography on OUN and UPA and their relation to the Holocaust. But it is not just young historians who are making breakthroughs. Two older historians from Ternopil, Oleh Klymenko and Serhii Tkachov, have done tremendous work in the archives of their city, producing two detailed monographs on the Ukrainian police in the Ternopil and Kremenets regions; both monographs treat both police involvement in the Holocaust and OUN involvement with the police in an open and balanced manner.

Finally, it is necessary to mention that the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA attracted criticism from political circles in Ukraine that took a more positive view of Russia and the Soviet past, notably the former Party of Regions. One of that party’s deputies to the Ukrainian parliament, Vadym Kolesnichenko, proposed a law in May 2013 to ban the glorification and rehabilitation of the nationalists, whom he identified as fascists and Nazis.155 Kolesnichenko and his “International Antifascist Front” contributed nothing to the scholarship on OUN and UPA, but in 2012 and 2013 they published Russian and Ukrainian translations of articles written by Western historians John-Paul Himka (i.e., this author), Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, and Timothy Snyder. None of these scholars had agreed to have their articles published by Kolesnichenko and had in fact specifically declined to be published by him.156 This was a clear case of the political instrumentalization of critical scholarship on the Ukrainian nationalists.

      Russian propaganda has also instrumentalized the scholarship of what I have termed the post-Neighbors consensus. Even before, but particularly since 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, seized Crimea, and began a hybrid war in the eastern Donbas, the Russian state under Putin has tried to link contemporary Ukrainian aspirations for independence from Russian tutelage with fascism. Yet serious scholarly monographs relevant to our theme have appeared in Russia within the framework of Russian historical politics, notably Aleksandr Diukov’s study of OUN’s attitude to Jews, its “second-rank enemy,”157 and Aleksei Bakanov’s more nuanced study of the national question in OUN ideology.158

1 Friedman, Die galizischen Juden.

2 Aleksiun, “Invisible Web.” Aleksiun, “Philip Friedman.”

3 I have used the second, expanded edition of 1947 (Friedman, Zagłada) as well as the English translation of the 1956 Hebrew version (Friedman, “Destruction”).

4 He noted correctly at one point that the Ukrainian militia was disbanded “and in its place was organized the Ukrainian auxiliary police under German direction,” but otherwise used the terms militia and auxiliary police interchangeably. Quotation from Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.

5 Friedman, Zagłada, 7.

6 Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181.

7 “In letters exchanged with fellow Jewish historians, Friedman expressed particular interest in exploring the attitudes of the Ukrainian leadership and military organisations, especially The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, UPA) and their collaboration in the mass murder of the Jews.” Aleksiun, “Invisible Web,” 158. Aleksiun specifically cites a letter of Friedman to Szymon Datner, 30 April 1958.

8 Ibid., 152.

9 Hilberg, Destruction, xiii (quotation from the preface to the revised edition, written in 1984). “Neumann said yes [to Hilberg’s proposal to write a dissertation on “The Destruction of the European Jews”], but he knew that at this moment I was separating myself from the mainstream of academic research to tread in territory that had been avoided by the academic world and the public alike. What he said to me in three words was, ‘It’s your funeral.’“ Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 66.

10 They formed the basis for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

11 For example, Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance, and Krakowski, War of the Doomed.

12 Trunk, Judenrat.

13 “In fact the behavior of the population during the killing operations was characterized by a tendency toward passivity. This inertness was the product of conflicting emotions and opposing restraints. The Slavs had no particular liking for their Jewish neighbors, and they felt no overpowering urge to help the Jews in their hour of need. In so far as there were such inclinations, they were effectively curbed by fear of reprisals from the Germans.” Hilberg, Destruction, 316.

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