Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ official reports on their findings.”35

There were two tendencies in the work of the Extraordinary State Commission that affected how OUN and UPA were represented in its documentation. First, the Commission was interested in ascribing as much destruction and murder to the Germans as possible, with the aim of receiving large reparations. Second, the Commission avoided disturbing the image of a united Soviet people that resisted the fascist onslaught. Both of these factors led to downplaying the role of local, non-German accomplices. For example, the Commission compiled a list of persons responsible for war crimes committed in Lviv. Of the 69 persons on the list, only 3 were non-Germans,36 although we know that the Ukrainian National Militia and later the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were deeply involved in mass murder in the city. However, the Commission’s investigations at the local, i.e., raion, levels were more open to information about local collaborators in Nazi crimes. But when summaries of these reports were drafted at the oblast level, the activities of non-German accomplices were often edited out. The higher the level of summary, the lower the profile of non-German perpetrators.

Moreover, the Commission’s work was, as Solonari noted, “very uneven: in some districts it worked thoroughly, in others less so. Sometimes it could rely on relatively qualified personnel, but quite often barely literate party activists performed the entire task.”37 An example of the unreliability that Solonari describes appeared in the Commission’s investigation of a horrendous pogrom in Hrymailiv (P Grzymałów), north of Husiatyn in Ternopil oblast, in which many young Ukrainian men of the town participated. Relying on local witnesses, the Commission stated that SS officer Daniel Nerling participated in the pogrom, which occurred on 5 July 1941.38 However, as we know from Nerling’s trial in Lübeck in 1969, he did not arrive in Hrymailiv until late October 1941.39

On the more positive side, as Solonari also noted, the Commission would sometimes “collect handwritten accounts of the survivors or eyewitnesses and attach them to their minutes or would transcribe verbal testimony that contained vivid descriptions of the killing operations.”40 As we have seen, one of the eyewitness accounts in a Commission report led to the reopening of the trial of the policeman Ostrovsky in 1981.

One aspect of testimonies recorded by the Extraordinary Commission and similar bodies was always marred by outright falsification, namely testimony that concerned crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets themselves. A disturbing case of this involved the historian Friedman. In 1946 he testified to both the Extraordinary Commission and the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War that the Germans had rounded up Jews when they took Lviv on 30 June 1941, shot them in prisons, disguised their nationality, and blamed the episode on the NKVD. Here are his exact words: “The destruction of the Jews in the city of Lviv began from the first day of the arrival of the Germans, that is, on 30 June 1941. Moreover, at the very beginning the Germans conducted this destruction as a provocation. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Germans led a portion of the Jewish population to the prisons and shot them there....At the same time they pursued a second aim: to present this as an example of the ‘bestial crimes’ of the NKVD, which before its departure from Lviv was allegedly shooting political prisoners.”41 In his subsequent published scholarly work Friedman did not repeat the falsehood of a German provocation and correctly indicated that the corpses in the prisons were victims of the Soviets.42 Similarly, the Soviets recorded testimony of a captured German Wehrmacht officer, Erwin Bingle, that blamed the Soviet mass murders at Vinnytsia from 1936-38 on the German SS and Ukrainian police.43 Again, the murdered political prisoners were presented as murdered Jews. Bingle called the “frame-up” “baseless and utterly ridiculous.”44 Of course, the Soviets were unwilling to wash their bloody laundry in public but quite willing to add their own murders to the Germans’ account, so they induced testimony that served their purposes. This was part of a general policy, the most notorious incident of which was blaming the Germans for the mass murder of Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940 at Katyń.

I found of particular value to my research a set of documents that were sent to the highest echelons of the Soviet Ukrainian communist party in the years 1943-44, as the Soviets entered and reconquered Western Ukrainian territory. These documents had various provenances, but what united them was that they contained information considered worthy of the notice of the top Soviet Ukrainian leadership. Many of these documents concerned OUN and UPA. Like the interrogation documents, these materials were also aimed at trying to understand what was happening. Of course, reports and analyses understood events through a Soviet ideological prism, but materials in this collection also included captured OUN and UPA documents, copies of the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, and even the fascinating diary of a young man drafted into UPA.45

      Information on UPA can also be found in the reports of the Soviet partisans who encountered them.

      OUN Documents

There is a great variety of OUN and UPA documentation. Wartime OUN and UPA had well developed administrative structures that generated masses of documents. Some have been preserved by OUN members in the diaspora and have ended up in published collections as well as in archives, libraries, and museums across North America and Europe. But the richest trove is in archives in Ukraine, comprised primarily of documentation captured by the Soviets. Occasionally, too, OUN-UPA archives buried in containers for more than half a century have been unearthed.46

The most official of the OUN documents are the resolutions of the organization’s congresses and conferences as well as various programmatic documents. But aside from these, there are many other kinds of documents, including:47

       drafts of programmatic documents;

       transcripts of meetings;

       orders and instructions to units of UPA and OUN’s security service (SB OUN);

       field reports from units of UPA and SB OUN;

       SB OUN interrogation records;

       materials from OUN-UPA training courses;

       memoranda of both factions of OUN to various German offices;

       proclamations and announcements to the population.

In using OUN-UPA documents, an important factor to consider is to whom a particular document is addressed. Leader Stepan Bandera himself stated: “One program should be addressed to the members and sympathizers of nationalism, and the second for external factors. The first should be the main credo for members and sympathizers. The second program should exist for external consumption. It can change according to the circumstances and external situation.”48 Particularly with regard to documents aimed for external audiences, it is necessary to consider the time and context in which documents emerged. There were moments when OUN was close to the Germans, other moments when they were enemies, yet other moments when OUN hoped to court the Western allies. СКАЧАТЬ