Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Anti-Soviet resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" in English language version.
The OUN and the UPA can both be classified as terrorist organizations because their actions correspond to academic definitions of terrorism as the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors in order to intimidate and to achieve political goals.
However, historical studies and archival documents show that the OUN relied on terrorism and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II. The OUN-B (Stepan Bandera faction) by means of its control over the UPA masterminded a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia during the war and mounted an anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine after the war. These nationalist organizations, based mostly in Western Ukraine, primarily, in Galicia, were also involved in mass murder of Jews during World War II. The 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that only minorities of the residents of Ukraine have favorable views of the OUN-B and the UPA and deny involvement of these organizations in mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in the 1940s.
Founded in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists became the dominant political movement of the Ukrainian far right. It was formed out of a number of radical nationalist and fascist groups and was, initially, led by war veterans, frustrated by their failure to establish a Ukrainian state in 1917–1920. In the increasingly authoritarian political environment of interwar Poland, radicalized the Ukrainian nationalists...The ideology of the organization was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Dmytro Dontsov, Italian Fascism, Nietzsche, and German National Socialism, combining extreme nationalism with terrorism, corporatism, and the Führerprinzip...From the moment of its founding, fascists were integral to, and played a central role in, the organization. The OUN perceived a "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" as an ethnically cleansed totalitarian state, where all other political parties were to be banned.
The OUN cooperated closely with other fascist states and movements—Italy, Japan, Spain, and, in particular, Germany. It established contacts with the Iron Guard in Romania and later the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailovic.
The ideology of the organization was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Dmytro Dontsov, Italian Fascism, Nietzsche, and German National Socialism, combining extreme nationalism with terrorism, corporatism, and the Führerprinzip.
The outcome of the battle of Stalingrad had changed the geopolitical situation and necessitated a reorientation. The OUN(b) now started to do away with its overtly fascist attributes. In February 1943 the Third Congress of the OUN(b) decided that raising the right arm was no longer to be considered an obligatory party salute and began to remove any references to it in their own documents...The OUN(b) leaders issued explicit instructions on how to blame pogroms and anti-Jewish violence on the Germans and Poles... One of these collections, 'The Book of Facts' (Do pochatku knyha faktiv), was aimed at deflecting attention from OUN(b) and UPA participation in the Holocaust...It claimed that the Germans asked the OUN(b) to take part in a three-day pogrom in early July 1941, but that the OUN(b) regarded it as a German provocation, and refused...The Banderite narrative represented their own legacy as a 'heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists' which had been 'misrepresented and maligned' by 'Moscow propaganda' the OUN(b) and the UPA were fighting 'not only for Ukraine, but also for all of Europe'. The OUN(b) regularly censored any documents that contradicted the image they wanted to produce ... In 1947 and 1948, the OUN-UPA annual commemoration was presented as an oppositional, anti-German step. At this time, the OUN's denial of its own anti-Semitism was already categorical. In 1947, the OUN issued an English-language propaganda leaflet in post-war Poland..Given the particular stigma anti-Semitism carried following the Holocaust, pronationalist historians have gone to great lengths to deny its very existence. Denial of the fascist and anti-Semitic nature of the OUN, its war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and participation in the Holocaust have become central components of the intellectual history of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Before 1939, Ukraine was not united in one republic, but remained divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
While the influences from Nazi Germany had a significant impact on the anti-Semitic attitudes of the OUN, the organization had its own anti-Semitic tradition, independent of the Nazis.
OUN activists participated in the July 1941 pogroms, in which many of them displayed an above-average brutality. Upon their arrival in L'viv the commandos of the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion could rely on a fanatically anti-Semitic auxiliary contingent with good knowledge of local conditions..Similar pogroms took place across Western Ukraine. At least 58 pogroms are documented in Western Ukrainian cities, the estimated number of victims of which range between 13,000 and 35,000.
The UPA's ethnic cleansing of the Poles in Volhynia and Galicia continued through 1943 and much of 1944, until the arrival of the Soviets. Whereas the UPA also killed Jews, Czechs, Magyars, Armenians, and other ethnic minorities, Poles were their main target. "Long live the great, independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, or Germans. Poles behind the San, the Germans to Berlin, and Jews to the gallows," went one OUN(b) slogan in the late fall of 1941.
After the outbreak of World War II, the Germans constantly favored the OUN, at the expense of more moderate Ukrainian groups. The extremist Ukrainian nationalist groups then launched a campaign of vilification against moderate leaders, accusing them of various misdeeds ... As early as the spring of 1940, a central Ukrainian committee was organized in Cracow under the chairmanship of Volodimir Kubiovitch ... Shortly before the outbreak of Russo-German hostilities, the Germans, through Colonel Erwin Stolze, of the Abwehr, conducted negotiations with both OUN leaders, Melnyk and Bandera, requesting that they engage in underground activities in the rear of the Soviet armies in the Ukraine.
... after the massive exodus of the Polish people created a hiatus in the flow of requisitions, the Germans decided to stop the UPA terrorist attacks against civilians ... These anti-Jewish actions were carried out by the members of the Ukrainian police who eventually joined the UPA ... By October (1944), all of Eastern Poland lay in Soviet hands. As the German army began its withdrawal, the UPA began to attack its rearguard and seize its equipment. The Germans reacted with raids on UPA positions. On July 15, 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, or UHVR, an OUN-B outfit) was formed and, at the end of that month, signed an agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet threat. This ended the UPA attacks as well as the German countermeasures. In exchange for diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front, Germans began providing the Ukrainian underground with supplies, arms, and training materials.
Before the war, the moderate UNDO party was more important among Ukrainians in Poland than the radical nationalists of the OUN. See Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, 'The 'Ukrainian National Revolution' of 1941'
Beginning on 'bloody Sunday, 11 July 1943, the UPA slaughtered some 70,000 Poles, mainly women and children and some unarmed men, in Volyn, and by 1945 it had killed at least 130,000 in Eastern Galicia. Whole families had their eyes gouged out if suspected of being informers, before being hacked to death.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929 by western Ukrainians from East Galicia, called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine. Its prime enemy was Poland, which then controlled the ethnically mixed regions of East Galicia and Volhynia.
..the OUN turned its hopes toward the Germans. In late 1939 the Germans housed OUN leaders in Krakow, then the capital of the German-occupied General Government.
UPA fighters were ordinary Banderists, but others also listed Slovak Hlinka Guards, Ukrainian SS from the 14th Grenadier Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and escaped German SS men as those among the UPA forces. Most UPA fighters recognized Bandera as their leader. ...One source said in September 1947 that Banderists were recruiting more members in DP camps, their main recruiter being Anton Eichner, a former SS officer. (page 79)
Several organizations of former Nazi collaborators were ready to undertake such slayings on a major scale. Covert operations chief Wisner estimated in 1951 that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas connected with the Nazi collaborationist OUN/UPA in the Ukraine since the end of the war ... But Hitler had no intention of accepting an alliance of equals with persons he considered Slavic 'subhumans.' He double-crossed and arrested a number of OUN leaders who insisted on more autonomy than he was willing to give. At this point a still more complicated relationship between the Nazis and the OUN emerged. OUN activists continued to play major roles in local quisling governments and in Nazi-sponsored police and militia groups, although the OUN organization as such was banned ... The OUN/UPA succeeded in tying down some 200,000 Red Army troops and killing more than 7,000 Soviet officers14 during the Wehrmacht's disordered flight across Europe during 1944 and 1945.
The OUN was an illegal, conspirational, and terrorist organization bound to destroy the status quo. The OUN counted on German help ... Germany was the only possible ally.
Ukrainian Nationalist "patriots" served their Nazi masters long before the outbreak of World War II. In the 1930's (and earlier), OUN had close connections with the Nazi Abwehr (intelligence service) in Berlin. Many members of OUN were Nazi agents, involved in subversion, espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and outright murder. In 1934, the OUN assassinated Bronislav Pieracki, Poland's Interior Minister, in Warsaw. (The OUN-UPA also boasted about the murder of Soviet Marshal M. Vatutin and Polish General W. Swierczewski— after the war.) Espionage information provided by the OUN network in the Western Ukraine before World War II was utilized by the Third Reich to its best advantage when it invaded the Soviet Union...post-World War II situation, Ukrainian Nationalism transformed itself into a movement of 'freedom-loving' liberals and democrats, defending human rights and liberties. On the first page of the above-mentioned OUN weekly, National Tribune, one can read the slogan: 'Freedom for Individuals — Freedom for Nations.' Yesteryear's Nazi allies have become today's Jeffersonian ideologues.
Andrei Melnyk, Richard Jarii and Colonel Roman Sushko, who was head of the OUN military organisation, continued to develop close ties with the Abwehr and opened an 'excellent communications' channel to Admiral Canaris. He 'cared little about the details of the OUN's programme'; what mattered was that it was a 'nationalist fascist group'. At the end of 1938, the Abwehr used OUN activists to encourage Ukrainian nationalism in Ruthenia — a province in eastern Slovakia, renamed Carpatho/Ukraine — in a bid to undermine the Soviet Union and Poland ... The OUN-B wanted an independent government, allied to Hitler's Reich, which would consolidate 'the new ethnic order in Eastern Europe' through the 'destruction of the seditious Jewish- Bolshevist influence'. On behalf of Bandera, who had remained in Cracow, the OUN-B's chief political officer, Wolodymyr, wrote to Adolf Hitler asking him to 'support our ethnic struggle'. Following hard on the heels of Nachtigall, Stetsko arrived in Lvov on 30 June ready to organise a hastily summoned 'National Assembly'. The Assembly proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in the name of Stefan Bandera, who had been recalled to Berlin.
Today, the Division's veterans represent themselves as veteran freedom fighters, advocates of democracy and national self-realization. However, given the ideological history of the Division and its OUN sponsor, its advocacy of democratic freedom rings hollow. Bandera, Melnyk, Lebed, Stetsko and Dontsov remain revered figures in the Nationalist firmament; their fascist ideology barely camouflaged by the 'integral nationalist' label. Nationalist Ukrainian scholars and journalists have laboured hard to portray Ukrainian Nationalism as a righteous national liberation movement and to distance it from the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. Frequently, they elaborate on spurious distinctions without a significant difference. For example, one journalist insisted that fascism was a way of organizing an existent state, but since the Ukrainians had not yet achieved independent statehood, they could not be considered fascists.
The investigation of Bandera's life, his cult, and the history of the OUN and UPA are highly contingent upon the study of archivial documents and original publications. Because of the extremist nature of the OUN and its involvement in the Holocaust and other kinds of etnic and political mass violence during and after the Second World War, OUN émigrés and UPA veterans began producing forged or manipulated documents during the Cold War, by means of which they whitewashed their own history. They removed undesiderable and inconvenient phrases from republished documents, especially those relating to fascism, the Holocaust, and other atrocities. In 1955, for example, in a new edition of documents entitled The OUN in the Light of the Resolutions of Great Congresses, the OUN reprinted the resolutions of the Second Great Congress of the OUN in Cracow in April 1941. According to the original resolutions, the OUN adopted a fascist salute, consisting of raising the right arm 'slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head,' while saying 'Glory to Ukraine' (Slava Ukraïni!), and answering 'Glory to the Heroes' (Heroiam Slava!)
One of the main sources of financial support in this period for the OUN was Germany.
..the Ukrainian Central Committee set up in Cracow under the leadership of Volodymyr Kubiyovych..
Both factions of the OUN hoped that the Germans would permit the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state, at least in Galicia... OUN-B who used it as a vehicle to perpetrate ethnic cleansing — indeed genocide — across Wolyn. As German forces abandoned the countryside, UPA units murdered the entire populations of Polish villages (and many Ukrainians as well) in an attempt to frighten the remainder into fleeing.
In 1943–1944, OUN(b) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), carried out large-scale ethnic cleansing, resulting in the deaths of more than 90,000 Poles and thousands of Jews. After the war, the UPA continued a hopeless struggle against the Soviet authorities until 1953, in which they killed 20,000 Ukrainians. The Soviet authorities killed 153,000 people, arrested 134,000 and deported 203,000 UPA members, sympathizers and their families (Siemaszko, 2010: 93; Motyka, 2006: 649). The OUN was dominant among the Ukrainian Displaced Persons who settled in the West after the war....The OUN wings disagreed on strategy and ideology but shared a commitment to the manufacture of a historical past based on victimization and heroism. The émigrés developed an entire literature that denied the OUN's fascism, its collaboration with Nazi Germany, and its participation in atrocities, instead presenting the organization as composed of democrats and pluralists who had rescued Jews during the Holocaust. The diaspora narrative was contradictory, combining celebrations of the supposedly anti-Nazi resistance struggle of the OUN-UPA with celebrations of the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Ukrainian collaborationist formation established by Heinrich Himmler in 1943.
However, historical studies and archival documents show that the OUN relied on terrorism and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II. The OUN-B (Stepan Bandera faction) by means of its control over the UPA masterminded a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia during the war and mounted an anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine after the war. These nationalist organizations, based mostly in Western Ukraine, primarily, in Galicia, were also involved in mass murder of Jews during World War II. The 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that only minorities of the residents of Ukraine have favorable views of the OUN-B and the UPA and deny involvement of these organizations in mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in the 1940s.
In interwar Poland, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN was a far smaller party than the moderate UNDO.
Before 1939, Ukraine was not united in one republic, but remained divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had close to 100,000 soldiers at its height in the summer of 1944, was fighting behind the Soviet lines, disrupting Red Army communications and attacking units farther from the front ... Among the UPA's major successes was the killing of a leading Soviet commander, General Nikolai Vatutin. On 29 February 1944, UPA fighters ambushed and wounded Vatutin as he was returning from a meeting with subordinates in Rivne, the former capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He died in Kyiv in mid-April. Khrushchev, who attended Vatutin's funeral, buried his friend in the government center of Kyiv ... not all the UPA fighters shared the nationalist ideology or belonged to the OUN.
In interwar Poland, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN was a far smaller party than the moderate UNDO.
OUN leaders emulated the Nazi's organizational structure and portions of its political ideology. Both wings of the OUN had an affinity for Nazi-style organization, based on the dictatorial fiihrerprinzip that placed a single leader above the law itself.
In interwar Poland, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN was a far smaller party than the moderate UNDO.
Before 1939, Ukraine was not united in one republic, but remained divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
Simultaneously, deportations assumed colossal magnitude. In the thirteen years between the annexation of western Ukraine and Stalin's death, some 570,826 people were deported from the Soviet Ukrainian Republic without permission to return, of whom 328,011 were sent to special settlements. A close look at the deportation figures, however, highlighted the exterminatory character of the anti-nationalist campaign in the field. Between February 1944 and January 1946 the NKVD claimed to have detained 110,785 bandits (50,058 were convicted), but only 8,370 people were arrested as OUN members and 15,959 as active insurgents. The 182,543 nationalists deported from the seven western regions between 1944 and 1952 included family members of the OUN and the UPA and their supporters, nonadults, and families of those killed in clashes. Simply put, most of the active nationalist guerrillas were killed on the battlefield
Some Ukrainian immigrant circles in Canada, the United States, and Germany had been active for decades in trying to suppress the topic and reacted to any testimony about Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence with virulent diatribes against what they dismissed as 'Jewish propaganda' ... the Ukrainian Insurrectional Army (UPA), which was responsible for ethnic 'cleansing' actions against Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Galicia.
Encouraged by German forces to begin violent actions against the Jewish population in Lvov, Ukrainian nationalists massacred about 4,000 Jews in early July 1941. Another pogrom, known as the Petliura Days, was organized in late July. This pogrom was named for Simon Petliura, who had organized anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine after World War I. For three days, Ukrainian militants went on a rampage through the Jewish districts of Lvov. They took groups of Jews to the Jewish cemetery and to Lunecki prison and shot them. More than 2,000 Jews were murdered and thousands more were injured.
Encouraged by German forces to begin violent actions against the Jewish population in Lvov, Ukrainian nationalists massacred about 4,000 Jews in early July 1941. Another pogrom, known as the Petliura Days, was organized in late July. This pogrom was named for Simon Petliura, who had organized anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine after World War I. For three days, Ukrainian militants went on a rampage through the Jewish districts of Lvov. They took groups of Jews to the Jewish cemetery and to Lunecki prison and shot them. More than 2,000 Jews were murdered and thousands more were injured.
The pogroms were organized by Ukrainian nationalist circles with German encouragement. Among the Jews of Lvov, rumors had spread that the Ukrainians were planning a pogrom. As July 25 approached, an unusual bustle was noticed among the Ukrainian police in the city. Jews tried not to step outside. Early in the morning of July 25, groups of peasants from nearby villages began to flow into Lvov. They assembled on the premises of police stations, set out from there to the street accompanied by Ukrainian policemen, and assaulted any Jew whom they encountered with clubs, knives, and axes. Groups of Jews were taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered brutally.
However, historical studies and archival documents show that the OUN relied on terrorism and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II. The OUN-B (Stepan Bandera faction) by means of its control over the UPA masterminded a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia during the war and mounted an anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine after the war. These nationalist organizations, based mostly in Western Ukraine, primarily, in Galicia, were also involved in mass murder of Jews during World War II. The 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that only minorities of the residents of Ukraine have favorable views of the OUN-B and the UPA and deny involvement of these organizations in mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in the 1940s.
Founded in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists became the dominant political movement of the Ukrainian far right. It was formed out of a number of radical nationalist and fascist groups and was, initially, led by war veterans, frustrated by their failure to establish a Ukrainian state in 1917–1920. In the increasingly authoritarian political environment of interwar Poland, radicalized the Ukrainian nationalists...The ideology of the organization was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Dmytro Dontsov, Italian Fascism, Nietzsche, and German National Socialism, combining extreme nationalism with terrorism, corporatism, and the Führerprinzip...From the moment of its founding, fascists were integral to, and played a central role in, the organization. The OUN perceived a "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" as an ethnically cleansed totalitarian state, where all other political parties were to be banned.
In interwar Poland, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN was a far smaller party than the moderate UNDO.
The OUN cooperated closely with other fascist states and movements—Italy, Japan, Spain, and, in particular, Germany. It established contacts with the Iron Guard in Romania and later the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailovic.
The ideology of the organization was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Dmytro Dontsov, Italian Fascism, Nietzsche, and German National Socialism, combining extreme nationalism with terrorism, corporatism, and the Führerprinzip.
The outcome of the battle of Stalingrad had changed the geopolitical situation and necessitated a reorientation. The OUN(b) now started to do away with its overtly fascist attributes. In February 1943 the Third Congress of the OUN(b) decided that raising the right arm was no longer to be considered an obligatory party salute and began to remove any references to it in their own documents...The OUN(b) leaders issued explicit instructions on how to blame pogroms and anti-Jewish violence on the Germans and Poles... One of these collections, 'The Book of Facts' (Do pochatku knyha faktiv), was aimed at deflecting attention from OUN(b) and UPA participation in the Holocaust...It claimed that the Germans asked the OUN(b) to take part in a three-day pogrom in early July 1941, but that the OUN(b) regarded it as a German provocation, and refused...The Banderite narrative represented their own legacy as a 'heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists' which had been 'misrepresented and maligned' by 'Moscow propaganda' the OUN(b) and the UPA were fighting 'not only for Ukraine, but also for all of Europe'. The OUN(b) regularly censored any documents that contradicted the image they wanted to produce ... In 1947 and 1948, the OUN-UPA annual commemoration was presented as an oppositional, anti-German step. At this time, the OUN's denial of its own anti-Semitism was already categorical. In 1947, the OUN issued an English-language propaganda leaflet in post-war Poland..Given the particular stigma anti-Semitism carried following the Holocaust, pronationalist historians have gone to great lengths to deny its very existence. Denial of the fascist and anti-Semitic nature of the OUN, its war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and participation in the Holocaust have become central components of the intellectual history of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Before 1939, Ukraine was not united in one republic, but remained divided between the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
While the influences from Nazi Germany had a significant impact on the anti-Semitic attitudes of the OUN, the organization had its own anti-Semitic tradition, independent of the Nazis.
OUN activists participated in the July 1941 pogroms, in which many of them displayed an above-average brutality. Upon their arrival in L'viv the commandos of the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion could rely on a fanatically anti-Semitic auxiliary contingent with good knowledge of local conditions..Similar pogroms took place across Western Ukraine. At least 58 pogroms are documented in Western Ukrainian cities, the estimated number of victims of which range between 13,000 and 35,000.
The UPA's ethnic cleansing of the Poles in Volhynia and Galicia continued through 1943 and much of 1944, until the arrival of the Soviets. Whereas the UPA also killed Jews, Czechs, Magyars, Armenians, and other ethnic minorities, Poles were their main target. "Long live the great, independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, or Germans. Poles behind the San, the Germans to Berlin, and Jews to the gallows," went one OUN(b) slogan in the late fall of 1941.
The pogroms were organized by Ukrainian nationalist circles with German encouragement. Among the Jews of Lvov, rumors had spread that the Ukrainians were planning a pogrom. As July 25 approached, an unusual bustle was noticed among the Ukrainian police in the city. Jews tried not to step outside. Early in the morning of July 25, groups of peasants from nearby villages began to flow into Lvov. They assembled on the premises of police stations, set out from there to the street accompanied by Ukrainian policemen, and assaulted any Jew whom they encountered with clubs, knives, and axes. Groups of Jews were taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered brutally.
