Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists" in English language version.
Founded in 1929, the OUN was the largest and most important Ukrainian far-right organization. Explicitly totalitarian, the movement embraced the Führerprinzip, a cult of political violence, racism, and an aggressive anti Semitism. It sought the establishment of Ukrainian statehood at any price..
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 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.
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.
A typical fascist movement, the OUN cultivated close relations with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Falange and the Croatian Ustaše.
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.
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'.
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.
..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.
The OUN divided in 1940 into a radical wing under Bandera and a more conservative one under Melnyk ...
[...] fascist Italy [...] developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples were Estado Novo in Portugal (1932-1968) and Brazil (1937-1945), the Austrian Standestaat (1933-1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
On February 10, 1941, Bandera called a conference of radicals in Kraków, Poland. The conference refused to accept Melnyk as leader, and named Bandera head of the OUN. This led to the split of the OUN in the spring of 1941 into two groups: OUN-B (Banderites), who were more militant, younger and supported Bandera, and OUN-M (Melnykites), who were generally older, more ideological.
The investigation of Bandera's life, his cult, and the history of the OUN and UPA are highly contingent upon the study of archival 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!)
During the rise of European fascism after World War I, some Ukrainian nationalist groups tied their hopes to fascism as an ideology and then collaborated with Hitler and nazism in World War II. One Ukrainian nationalist group was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which split into two organizations: a less militant wing, led by Andrew Melnyk and known as OUN-M, and the extremist group of Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B.
The question of whether OUN was fascist has exercised a number of scholars, particularly since the rehabilitation of the nationalists in independent Ukraine. OUN certainly looked fascist. At the trials of the OUN leaders in 1935-36, OUN defendants and witnesses shocked the courtroom by giving what a Polish newspaper called "the Hitlerite greeting. .. "The organizational greeting has the form of raising the extended right arm to the right, higher than the crown of the head. The mandatory words of the full greeting: 'Glory to Ukraine!' with the answer 'Glory to the heroes.'" The same document stipulated that the (Banderite) OUN was to have its own flag, in red and black which alluded to the German nationalist and national socialist concept of blood and soil.
OUN relied on terrorism, violence and assassinations, not least against other Ukrainians, to achieve its goal of a totalitarian and ethnically homogenous Ukrainian nation-state...The former Marxist Dmytro Dontsov created an indigenous Ukrainian fascism based upon Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras and translated the works of Hitler and Mussolini into Ukrainian
The ideology, organisational foundations and political style of the OUN were markedly influenced by fascism, especially Italian, and from 1929 to 1939 this influence steadily increased... The German version of fascism – National Socialism – attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Nationalists in the autumn of 1930, when the NSDAP achieved its first major success in the Reichstag elections.
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.
..(OUN), a nationalist, terrorist organization which had plotted to create an independent Ukrainian state in eastern Poland and carried out the assassination of several Polish leaders in interwar Poland. The OUN had many factions and was rife with ideological disputes, but on the whole it harmonized with the fascist, integral-nationalist, anticommunist, and antisemitic profile of German National Socialists.
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..
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!)
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.
Founded in 1929, the OUN was the largest and most important Ukrainian far-right organization. Explicitly totalitarian, the movement embraced the Führerprinzip, a cult of political violence, racism, and an aggressive anti Semitism. It sought the establishment of Ukrainian statehood at any price..
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.
A typical fascist movement, the OUN cultivated close relations with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Falange and the Croatian Ustaše.
In 1990, one of the best known nationalist parties—the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), headed by Dmytro Korchyns'kyi—was established in Lviv ... . In Ukraine itself, the UNA-UNSD became a media phenomenon, not least thanks to its deliberate provocation aimed at left-wing and pro-Russian forces and its frequent clashes with the police. But the UNA had little political success ... . The second best-known ultraright party to emerge at the beginning of the 1990s was the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN)—a direct heir of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera) (OUN-B), which Stepan Bandera headed in 1940 after a split in the original OUN. The continuity between the OUN-B and the CUN was ensured by the return from abroad of Iaroslava Stets'ko, a former member of the OUN-B and the widow of Iaroslav Stets'ko, one of the leaders of the OUN-B and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
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.
It saw itself as a fascist movement, but it called itself the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and not the Organization of Ukrainian Fascists. The members of the movement called themselves the Ukrainian nationalists, too, but they claimed to be related to movements such as the Italian Fascists, the German Nazis, the Ustasa, and the Iron Guard. Mussolini trained Ukrainian nationalists together with Ustasa revolutionaries in Sicily, and the OUN had offices in Berlin and Vienna.
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.
Most writers concur that the UVO was one of the principal foundation stones for the creation of OUN, which—Kost' Bondarenko maintains—"was a classical, radical rightist terrorist organization," ideologically close to Fascism of the Italian type, which was believed to be the "avant-garde European ideology" of that time
In interwar Poland, the Ukrainian nationalist OUN was a far smaller party than the moderate UNDO.
In 1990, one of the best known nationalist parties—the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), headed by Dmytro Korchyns'kyi—was established in Lviv ... . In Ukraine itself, the UNA-UNSD became a media phenomenon, not least thanks to its deliberate provocation aimed at left-wing and pro-Russian forces and its frequent clashes with the police. But the UNA had little political success ... . The second best-known ultraright party to emerge at the beginning of the 1990s was the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN)—a direct heir of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera) (OUN-B), which Stepan Bandera headed in 1940 after a split in the original OUN. The continuity between the OUN-B and the CUN was ensured by the return from abroad of Iaroslava Stets'ko, a former member of the OUN-B and the widow of Iaroslav Stets'ko, one of the leaders of the OUN-B and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
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.
Founded in 1929, the OUN was the largest and most important Ukrainian far-right organization. Explicitly totalitarian, the movement embraced the Führerprinzip, a cult of political violence, racism, and an aggressive anti Semitism. It sought the establishment of Ukrainian statehood at any price..
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.
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.
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.
A typical fascist movement, the OUN cultivated close relations with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Falange and the Croatian Ustaše.
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.
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.
