OUN and UPA in WWII: Collaboration, Resistance, and Atrocities

Collaboration and or Resistance: The OUN and UPA during the War
John-Paul Himka
Paper prepared for the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Shared Narrative Series:
Conference on Issues Relating to World War II
Potsdam, 27-30 June 2011
[Questions set by the conference organizers. Desired length: 4000-5000 words.]
1. What does the historical record establish as to the role of OUN and
UPA in relation to resistance and collaboration, murder of Jews, and
the 1943 massacre of Poles in Volhynia?
Let me start with a brief look at the historiography. Publications by the
nationalists themselves in the postwar era studiously avoided publishing material on their
antisemitism or campaigns against the Poles. They censored documents to conceal their
wartime attitudes.1 John A. Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism, which was based to a
large extent on interviews with nationalist leaders, differed little from the OUN’s own
narrative. It totally avoided discussion of OUN’s role in the Holocaust and barely
mentioned the mass murder of Poles by UPA. On the other hand, it propagated the
nationalists’ myth about Jewish participation in UPA.2 It is little wonder that this work is
regarded authoritative by champions of the OUN-UPA heritage.
A different story was told by some Israeli historians of the Holocaust, but these
left something to be desired in precision. Eliyahu Yones, for example, wrote a substantial
monograph on the Holocaust in Lviv. He noted that on the eve of the Lviv pogrom, OUN
postered the city with incendiary antisemitic leaflets and that Ukrainians took an active
part in the pogrom, especially “young men sporting blue and yellow armbands.”3 But he
was unable to connect the dots that the latter young men were the militia established by
the OUN government. Another example is Shmuel Spector’s monograph on the murder
of Jews in Volhynia. It contains a section specifically devoted to UPA, but it is largely
devoid of concrete information.4
1 Some examples can be found in Taras Kurylo and John-Paul Himka [Ivan Khymka],
“Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv? Rozdumy nad knyzhkoiu Volodymyra V”iatrovycha,”
Ukraina Moderna 13 (2008): 259-60. Another example: Zlochyny komunistychnoi
Moskvy v Ukraini v liti 1941 roku (New York: Proloh, 1960). I carefully compared all the
texts in this volume that were taken from the wartime newspaper Krakivs'ki visti with the
originals in the newspaper. Several of the originals were vehemently antisemitic, but the
offending passages were all eliminated or modified in the document collection.
2 John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Littleton, CO.: Ukrainian
Academic Press, 1980).
3 Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939-1944
(Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 2004), 80. Yones’ book originally appeared in Hebrew
in 1960.
4 Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews 1941-1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem,
The Federation of Volhynian Jews, 1990), 268-73.

Better informed was Philip Friedman, a long-time student of the history of Jewish
Galicia and a father of Holocaust studies. In his small monograph on the destruction of
the Jews of Lviv, he identified the Germans and the Ukrainian militia as the prime
movers of the outrages. However, he mistakenly believed that it was the Germans, not
OUN under German prodding, that organized the militia.5 In his survey of Ukrainian-
Jewish relations during the war, he mentioned that he had come across reports of UPA
setting up labor camps for Jews and liquidating the Jews later; he was not sure, however,
whether to give credence to them.6 (Since he wrote, many other such reports have been
found.)
In the 1970s, the Soviets, for political reasons, began to be interested in the
connection between OUN and the Holocaust. They prepared a number of inflammatory
pamphlets on that theme, notably Lest We Forget, published by Ukrainian-American
communists.7 At the time, there was no way to verify any of the information contained in
these works, and scholars did not consider them usable sources. Since then, however,
much of the material has been verified.
Of the pre-1989 studies of the connections between OUN and the Holocaust, one
of the most impressive was never published. This was a report by Günter Plum of the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte on OUN involvement in the Lviv pogrom of 1941. The report
concluded that the OUN militia perpetrated the pogrom together with civilian assistance.8
The opening of the former Soviet archives made it possible to learn a great deal
more about OUN and UPA during World War II, including their treatment of national
minorities. In 1997 Dieter Pohl published an overview of the Holocaust in Galicia that
indicated significant involvement of OUN. Pohl characterized the Bandera faction of
OUN as antisemitic for much of the war, particularly in the spring and summer of 1941
and again, as the Soviets closed in, in 1944; in 1942-43 OUN distanced itself from the
Germans’ murder of the Jewish population.9 Pohl did not link the OUN directly to any
concrete war crimes. His treatment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in relation to the
Holocaust was ambiguous. Some of his later articles said more about nationalist
5 Filip Friedman, Zagłada Zydów lwowskich w okresie okupacji niemieckiej (Munich,
1947), 7-8.
6 Philip Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Nazi Occupation," in Philip
Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New
York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Publication Society of America,
1980), 176-208.
7 Michael Hanusiak, Lest We Forget (New York: Ukrainian-American League, 1975).
The first, shorter edition of this work appeared in 1973.
8 Günter Plum, [Report on OUN involvement in 1941 pogroms] (Munich: Institut für
Zeitgeschichte, 1965), typescript in Mykola Lebed archives, consulted at Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute, box 1, file 3. A copy of the report is in the author’s
possession.
9 Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944:
Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: R.
Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997), 40, 48-49, 375, 382.

collaboration in the Holocaust.10 Pohl’s work, however, relied almost exclusively on
German and OUN documents, without much consultation of victim testimony. As a
result, he was not able to arrive at a clearer picture of the nationalists as perpetrators.
The Ukrainian historian Ivan Patryliak, although sympathetic to the nationalists,
in his study of 2004 identified the OUN militia as the most likely perpetrator of the
pogroms and other anti-Jewish violence that encompassed Western Ukraine in the
summer of 1941.11 The involvement of both OUN and its armed forces, UPA, in the
murder of Jews was documented, although not at great length, in Franziska Bruder’s
monograph on OUN of 2007.12 Crucial was her use of contemporary testimony. In the
last few years, Karel Berkhoff,13 Marco Carynnyk,14 Christof Mick,15 John-Paul Himka,16
10 Dieter Pohl, "Ukrainische Hilfskräfte beim Mord an den Juden," in Die Täter der
Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche, ed. Gerhard Paul
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 205-36. Dieter Pohl, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Western
Ukraine – A Research Agenda,” in Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others
in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939-1941, ed. Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai
Struve (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 305-13.
11 I.K. Patryliak, Viis’kova diial’nist OUN (B) u 1940-1942 rokakh (Kyiv: Kyivs’kyi
natsional’nyi universytet imeni Tarasa Shevchenka Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN
Ukrainy, 2004), 232, 333-34, 350, 364.
12 Franziska Bruder, “Den ukrainischen Staat erkämpfen oder sterben!” Die
Organisation Ukrainischer Nationalisten (OUN) 1929-1948 (Berlin: Metropol, 2007),
145-48, 218-19.
13 Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
and Its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets'ko's 1941 Zhyttiepys," Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 23, no. 3-4 (1999):149-84. There is a failed attempt to rebut the latter
documentary publication: Taras Hunczak, “Problems of Historiography: History and Its
Sources,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, no. 1-2 (2001): 129-42. The problems with
Hunczak’s arguments are explained in Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do
ievreiv?” 253. Karel C. Berkhoff, “Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving the Babi Yar
Massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian Records,” in The Shoah in
Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 303.
14 Marco Carynnyk [Marko Tsarynnyk], “Zolochiv movchyt’,” Krytyka 9.10 (2005): 14-
17.Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about
Jews, 1929-1947,” Nationalities Papers, forthcoming.
15 Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under
Soviet and German Occupation, 1939-44,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2
(2011): 346-51.
16 John-Paul Himka, Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories
(Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2009). John-Paul Himka, “The Ukrainian Insurgent Army
and the Holocaust,” American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies,
Boston, 12-15 November 2009. John-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941,” Annual
Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York, 14-16 April
2011. Many more relevant papers and articles are available on the site academia.edu.

Taras Kurylo,17 Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,18 and Per Anders Rudling19 have also
documented OUN and UPA antisemitism and mass murder of Jews, although some of
their work exists so far only as conference papers or are still in print. The publication of
document collections such as Ukrains’ke derzhavotvorennia (2001) has made available
OUN documents evincing and inciting hatred of Jews.20
Nationalist apologetics still exist of course. An example is Volodymyr
Viatrovych’s monograph on OUN and the Jews.21 As Taras Kurylo and I demonstrated in
a detailed review, this is a work not up to scholarly standards. The monograph attempts to
exonerate the OUN of charges of antisemitism and complicity in the Holocaust by
employing a series of dubious procedures: rejecting sources that compromise the OUN,
accepting uncritically censored sources emanating from émigré OUN circles, failing to
recognize antisemitism in OUN texts, limiting the source base to official OUN
proclamations and decisions, excluding Jewish memoirs, refusing to consider contextual
and comparative factors, failing to consult German document collections, and ignoring
the mass of historical literature on the subject written in the English and German
languages.22
The UPA murder of the Poles has generated a much larger historiography, but my
remarks about it will be even more cursory. Although the large compendium on the
“genocide” put together by Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko can be criticized
for being one-sided, the many testimonies collected in it cannot be easily dismissed.23 A
series of monographs and conference proceedings have dealt with the UPA murders of
Poles in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943-44. Among the important individual works are
those by Grzegorz Motyka24 and Ihor Iliushyn.25 Yaroslav Hrytsak referred to this
17 Taras Kurylo, article on Dontsov and the OUN press on the Jews forthcoming in Polin
26.
18 Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “The ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’ of 1941: Discourse
and Practice of a Fascist Movement,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
History 12, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 83-114.
19 Per Anders Rudling, “Szkolenie w Mordowaniu: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 i
Hauptmann Roman Szuchewycz na Białorusi 1942 roku,” in Prawda historyczna a
prawda polityczna w badaniach naukowych. Przykład ludobójstwa na kresach
połudiowej Polski w latach 1939-1946, ed. Bogusław Paź, forthcoming. Per A. Rudling,
The OUN, UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths,
Carl Beck Papers, forthcoming.
20 Orest Dziuban, ed., Ukrains’ke derzhavotvorennia. Akt 30 chervnia 1941. Zbirnyk
dokumentiv i materialiv (L’viv-Kyïv: Piramida, 2001), 77, 129, 190, 394.
21 Volodymyr V”iatrovych, Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv: formuvannia pozytsii na tli
katastrofy (Lviv: Vydavnytstvo Ms, 2006).
22 Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv?”
23 Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo dokonane przez
nacjonalistów ukraińskich na ludności polskiej Wołynia, 1939-1945, 2 vols. (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo von borowiecky, 2000).
24 Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942-1960 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów
Politycznych PAN, 2006).

historiographical discussion, involving both Polish and Ukrainian historians and
productive of a massive body of literature, as the Ukrainian Historikerstreit. This issue
has also been researched in depth by the American historian Timothy Snyder.26 There is
no longer any dispute among scholars that UPA killed tens of thousand of Poles in
Western Ukraine. But given the central place of UPA in nationalist mythology, the mass
murder of the Poles is still a matter that is hushed up in the Ukrainian diaspora public
sphere.27
Getting a clear picture of what actually happened between the nationalists and the
minorities during the war has been hindered by a number of deliberate obfuscations. Here
I will only mention three incidents.
In 1954 Ukrainian nationalists in the overseas diaspora published a fictive
autobiography of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach, who supposedly fought in the ranks
of UPA and then went to Israel. This has been a pillar of the nationalist legend that Jews
served in UPA, and therefore UPA could not have been antisemitic or involved in the
Holocaust. The “memoirs” were exposed very soon after they were printed both by the
nationalist Bohdan Kordiuk and the Jewish historian Philip Friedman, each following a
different line of argument.28 Nonetheless, the Krenzbach text was reprinted in Ukraine
after independence and later posted on line by the poet Moisei Fishbein, for whom “UPA
is sacred.”29 The memoirs are also treated as genuine by other champions of the
nationalist heritage, such as Volodymyr Viatrovych, in his above-mentioned book,30 and
Marco Levytsky, editor of Edmonton’s Ukrainian News.31
In 1959-60 the Soviets tried to embarrass the Adenauer government in West
Germany by linking one of its ministers, Theodor Oberländer, with the Lviv pogrom.
Oberländer was the German liaison to the nationalist battalion Nachtigall that fought
25 I.I. Il'iushyn, Volyns'ka trahediia 1943-1944 rr. (Kyiv: Natsional'na akademiia nauk
Ukrainy, Instytut istorii Ukrainy; Kyivs'kyi slavistychnyi, universytet, 2003).
26 Timothy Snyder, “To Resolve the Ukrainian Question Once and for All: The Ethnic
Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943-1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2
(Spring 1999): 86-120. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland,
Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven & London, 2003), 166-201.
Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate
Soviet Ukraine (New Haven and London, 2005), 185-191.
27 John-Paul Himka, War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the
Ukrainian Diaspora." Spaces of Identity 5, no. 1 (April 2005).
28 B. Kordiuk, “Pro liudei, spovnenykh samoposviaty.” Suchasna Ukraina, 20 July 1958.
Friedman, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 203-04 n. 57. I have summarized their
arguments in John-Paul Himka, “Falsifying World War II History in Ukraine.” Kyiv Post,
9 May 2011, http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/103895/.
29 Stella Krentsbakh, “Zhyvu shche zavdiaky UPA,” Poklyk sumlinnia, 20 June 1993. Moisei
Fishbein posted the 1957 version together with an English translation by Marta D. Olynyk on his
blogsite, http://mosesfishbein.blogspot.com/2009/10/memoirs-of-stella-krenzbach-i-am-
alive.html (accessed 26 October 2009). See also Ol’ha Betko, “Poet M. Fishbein: dlia mene
UPA – tse sviate,” BBC Ukrainian.com, 14 October 2008.
30 V”iatrovych, Stavlennia OUN do ievreiv,” 79.
31 Marco Levytsky, “Open Letter Villifies Freedom Fighters, Minimizes Holodomor,”
Kyiv Post, 6 May 2011.