Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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      Yaroslav Stetsko’s Autobiography of July 1941

      As we will describe in more detail later,108 one of the most prominent leaders of OUN-B, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared the renewal of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv on 30 June 1941. OUN-B was hoping to present the Germans with a fait accompli, but they miscalculated, and over the course of July a number of OUN-B leaders were arrested. Stetsko was arrested by the Security Police on 9 July and taken to Berlin; there on 12 July or within a day or two thereafter he wrote an autobiography in two languages, Ukrainian and German. A passage in the Ukrainian version reads:

      I consider Marxism to be a product of the Jewish mind, which, however, has been applied in practice in the Muscovite prison of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic people with the assistance of Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s greatest enemies and bearers of corruptive Bolshevik international ideas.

Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.109

      The corresponding passage in the German version is:

      Marxism is indeed to be considered as a creation of the Jewish brain, but its practical realization (also with Jewish help) was and is in the Muscovite prison of peoples, brought about by the Muscovite people. Moscow and Jewry are the greatest enemies of Ukraine and the carriers of disintegrative Bolshevik international Ideas.

The main enemy of Ukraine is not Jewry, but Moscow, which has subjugated Ukraine; Muscovite imperialism is not to be confused with the disintegrative assistance of the Jews. Nevertheless the role of the Jews is not to be underestimated. I am of the opinion that in the struggle against Jewry in Ukraine German methods are to be employed.110

These passages were first published in the KGB-produced book Lest We Forget “authored” by Michael Hanusiak, and Western scholars were reluctant to rely on them.111 But after the archives were opened in the 1990s, Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk published the full texts of Stetsko’s autobiography with extensive commentary in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. In a subsequent issue of that journal, Taras Hunczak cast doubt on the autobiography’s authenticity.112 Hunczak was a professor at Rutgers Newark who had made some solid contributions to the study of modern Ukrainian history, mainly of an editorial and compilatory nature. As a child during World War II, he had served as a courier for OUN, and later in the emigration he was associated with the Lebed group, the dviikari. He was also a passionate defender of Ukrainians against accusations of antisemitism; for example, he wrote an article exonerating Symon Petliura of responsibility for the pogroms that raged in Ukraine in 1919113 and an account of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during World War II intended as a response to Judge Jules Deschênes’ Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada.114 So it is not unusual that he would take up the issue of the Stetsko memoirs and conclude that they were forgeries.

      I will examine Hunczak’s major arguments and then offer some additional considerations. First, he wondered why the memoirs were found in Ukraine rather than in Germany; he raised the question in order to buttress his final conclusion, which was that the autobiography “was written in the offices of KGB functionaries.” At present, there is no precise answer to Hunczak’s question. But there is a general answer: the Soviets took German records that interested them. Thus records of the RSHA are in Moscow and the records of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg are in Kyiv; the Soviets also took records of the secret police and intelligence units. The best informed specialist on Soviet archives, Patricia Grimsted, explained:

The seizure of Nazi records was specifically ordered by Allied Control Commission laws and paralleled similar seizures by the Western Allies. The only difference was that the Western Allies worked together with seized Nazi records, while Soviet authorities refused to cooperate....[B]y the 1960s, the Western Allies had agreed to return to West Germany almost all the Nazi records they had seized (with the exception of some military and intelligence files), following analysis and microfilming. Soviet authorities, by contrast, never even made known which Nazi records they had retrieved.115

      His second argument was that Lest We Forget was untrustworthy and outright deceitful. This was an accurate assessment, but it does not follow logically that therefore everything in the book was manufactured. Hunczak was able to show that “Hanusiak” deliberately distorted and misrepresented sources, but not that he used fake evidence. For example, he analyzed a photograph of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky that Hanusiak claimed was a picture of the churchman receiving a swastika during a military exercise in 1939; in fact, Hunczak had found the original of the photo in the Lviv archives and determined that Sheptytsky was receiving a scout (Plast) badge at a scouting camp in 1930. Thus the photo was real, but the meaning the KGB wanted viewers to derive from it was not. As the saying goes, even the devil can quote scripture.

The third argument he brought to bear was linguistic. He maintained that the spelling of the adjective pidpol’nyi was “a transparent Russian variation of the Ukrainian pidpillia.” But if he had checked the spelling used by Lviv’s major newspaper, Dilo, in the 1930s, he would have found the supposed “transparent Russian variant” pidpol’nyi employed frequently.116 Hunczak’s major linguistic argument was that the spelling in the autobiography uses an h (г) “where an individual from western Ukraine, particularly in 1941, would have used the letter g” (ґ). An example he cites is “propahanda instead of propaganda.” But the legal newspaper under the German occupation, L’vivs’ki visti, used the spelling propahanda in 1941, and Stetsko himself used the spelling propahanda.117 The linguistic arguments, in sum, fail.118

In Hunczak’s opinion, “the ultimate fraud” was a statement in the autobiography that Stetsko edited the journal Ideia i chyn in 1939-40. Again, Hunczak made an error, confusing the Ideia i chyn of 1942-46, in which Stetsko indeed had no role, with a periodical that bore the same title, but came out earlier and was in fact edited by Stetsko.119 Thus none of Hunczak’s proofs of fabrication hold up.

      On the other hand, there are solid arguments in favor of the authenticity of the autobiography. For one thing, we know of no other example of the KGB seeding secret archives with false documents. We certainly know of Soviet falsifications, but not of falsifications that they secreted in archives that were basically closed to researchers. Moreover, the autobiography is an oddly preserved document. There is no full text of the German version; instead, there is a draft of the first page and then a fair copy of the rest of the pages, but some text missing in between. And there are also some discrepancies between the German and Ukrainian texts; for example, the German version notes that Stetsko was born in a priest’s family, but the Ukrainian version omits that information. Would the KGB have put together such a sloppy document? These odd features smack of the irregularity of a genuine archival document.

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