Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ days the secret police worked with the assumption that anyone who was arrested must be guilty and they felt it their duty to extract confessions by whatever means necessary.26 As a result, they forced people to confess to nonexistent conspiracies, to falsely admit to espionage for various foreign countries, and to name names of the confederates they worked with in these nefarious but fictitious antistate activities. How were the interrogations of the late-war and postwar period any different? As I read the situation, the fundamental difference between the 1930s and the period from 1943 into the 1950s is that in the former time truth did not matter at all, but in the latter time truth was of paramount importance.

The Soviets knew very little of what was going on in Western Ukraine during the German occupation. This became very clear to me when studying a volume on the Greek Catholic metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky as he was reflected in the documents of Soviet security organs.27 The volume contains detailed reports on the churchman from the period of the “first Soviets,” i.e., the period from September 1939 until the end of June 1941, when Lviv was under Soviet rule. And again, there are many informative documents from the period after the Soviets regained Lviv in late July 1943 until Sheptytsky’s death in early November 1944. But there is very little material on the period of the German occupation, i.e., the time period in between, and what there is from that period is full of inaccuracies. To me this signals a breakdown of the Soviet intelligence network in Western Ukraine. The Soviets were unable to follow events there. And no other documents I have encountered elsewhere indicate otherwise. Yet, as the Red partisans moved westward in spring 1943, they found themselves engaging in battle with Banderite forces (UPA), armed guerrillas who enjoyed more support than did the former from the local Ukrainian population. And once the Red Army reconquered Galicia and Volhynia, they faced the eruption of a dangerous insurgency led by UPA and the OUN underground. As a result, when SMERSH and other Soviet security and counterintelligence units were interrogating captured Ukrainian nationalists, they were not interested in fake conspiracies and false confederates: they wanted to understand exactly what they were coming up against. And overall, the interrogators had no incentive to fabricate information about the murder of Jews, since the particular suffering of the Jewish population was not of interest to their superiors.

Furthermore, I have sometimes been able to corroborate information from the Soviet interrogations by comparing them with other, non-Soviet sources. I have also not run across any patently evident falsehoods in the interrogations. Diana Dumitru too accepts the general reliability of Soviet Moldavian interrogations from the same period based on her own triangulation with other sources.28 Vladimir Solonari, who worked with Soviet interrogations and trials from Moldavia and Bukovina, pointed to “plausible details of local life and death, such as the pillows that a killer brought from the killing site, a particular phrase that a Jew said before the execution of himself and his family, or what a perpetrator retorted to his neighbor when the latter rebuked him for his cruelty. It is highly unlikely that investigators would invent those details....”29 Alexander Prusin, who examined interrogations and trials from Ukraine and the Baltic area, concurred: “While the testimonies...do not give exact dates or numbers of victims, they provide relatively accurate descriptions of the Holocaust in various localities. These descriptions are corroborated by archival documents and modern studies. Hence, there is no reason why the interrogation and trial records—if combined with other available materials—should not be used as historical sources relating to the sites and instances of genocide.”30 Another analyst of these same records, Tanja Penter, essentially agreed. In spite of problems which she carefully identified, “trial records represent an extremely valuable resource for the study of Nazi occupation and crimes in occupied Soviet territories. They contain detailed descriptions of the Holocaust in different local settings, towns and villages, and of life in ghettos and camps.”31

      The general validity of the information in Soviet interrogations was also accepted by the historical working group in Ukraine that provided the ammunition to rehabilitate OUN and UPA in the 1990s and early 2000s. Anatolii Kentii in particular used them for his work on OUN and UPA. Large extracts of these interrogations have also been published by the pro-UPA documentary series Litopys UPA.

Much of what has been said about interrogations also applies to Soviet trial records, but there are a few additional nuances. The records of trials, or simply of military tribunals, from the mid-1940s indicate to me that Soviet authorities in this era proceeded from some rough notions of justice—the courts and tribunals do not strike me as totally arbitrary. I was surprised, for instance, to discover in my research that accused war criminals, even members of OUN and UPA, were not convicted of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence. There had to be eyewitness testimony or other evidence to convict. Thus, if an OUN militia executed a group of Jews in the summer of 1941, a participant in that execution could state that he was present at the execution but did not shoot; if none of his comrades betrayed him, he was likely to be convicted not of murder but of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization. A conviction of murder could result in execution, but participating in an anti-Soviet organization generally brought a sentence of ten years in a labor camp. Also, after the end of the Great Terror, i.e., from 1938 onwards, Soviet judicial proceedings became more professional and less arbitrary.32

The other point to make about trials is that the records of the 1940s tend to be fairly brief. But sometimes cases were reopened later with an eye towards a deeper investigation of instances of mass murder, and these reopened cases produced quite voluminous files. An example is the case of Yakiv Ostrovsky a former Ukrainian policeman (Schutzmann) in Volhynia who deserted German service to join UPA. In July 1944 he turned himself into the NKVD and was interrogated by a famous Soviet partisan leader, Aleksandr Saburov. Over the course of his interrogation, Ostrovsky freely admitted to killing people as a policeman, but “not many—twenty-five to thirty people.” Yet when sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in 1945, he was convicted not of murder, but of treason (as a policeman working for the Germans) and of membership in a counterrevolutionary organization (UPA). The case, however, was reopened in 1981. I suspect this happened in the context of growing global interest in the Holocaust and the Soviets’ realization at that time of the propaganda value of linking Ukrainian nationalism to the murder of Jews.33 In any case, new evidence came to light that allowed Ostrovsky’s case to be reopened. It turned out that there had been an eyewitness after all to Ostrovsky killing Jews in an extermination action of 1942. The testimony had been recorded in July 1944, actually a day before Ostrovsky had turned himself in to the NKVD. But this testimony had been given not to the NKVD, but instead to the Extraordinary State Commission, the procedures and documents of which will be discussed immediately below. The lack of communication between the two Soviet investigative units meant that the relevant eyewitness testimony had not been considered at Ostrovsky’s original trial. The eyewitness was a non-Jew who had been forced to bury the victims of the execution action, some of whom were still alive as he buried them. He had named Ostrovsky as one of the shooters. Ostrovsky was put on trial again in 1982, and much more evidence was brought to bear; this time Ostrovsky was convicted of murder and executed in the following year.34

Aside from investigation and trial records, another large collection of Soviet documentation relevant to our study are the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR. Established in 1942, its purpose was “to conduct investigations of Hitler’s war crimes and to determine the material damage suffered by the USSR, to coordinate the activities of all Soviet organizations in this СКАЧАТЬ