That is the third in a four-part sequence. The first half launched Canadian imperialism’s long-standing alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalism. Half two investigated the origins of the Group of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi report of Krakivski Visti, which was edited by Mikhailo Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Half 4 will look at how the Canadian state offered a protected haven to the Nazis’ fascist OUN (M) and OUN (B) collaborators, assisted them in whitewashing their crimes, and used them and far-right Ukrainian nationalism as devices of its imperialist overseas and home coverage.
Though bitterly divided over easy methods to most successfully cooperate with the Nazis in bringing about an “impartial Ukraine,” the rival Melnyk and Bandera wings of the Group of Ukrainian Nationalists—respectively the OUN (M) and OUN (B)—hailed and took part within the Nazi’s conflict of annihilation towards the Soviet Union and served because the Nazis’ henchman within the Holocaust.
The Nazi invasion of the USSR was conceived of, from the beginning, as a “conflict of extermination” aimed toward establishing German imperialist domination over colonies stretching to the Urals. It was characterised by unprecedented brutality and savagery. Beneath the “Generalplan Ost,” developed by state establishments and the Friedrich-Wilhelm College in Berlin, the peoples residing in Jap Europe or Russia had been to be exterminated or reworked into colonial slaves. Because the bloody violence unleashed by this campaign gathered tempo, Hitler and his closest collaborators moved in late 1941 to implement their “ultimate answer” for Europe’s Jews, i.e., the deliberate and systematic extermination of 6 million individuals within the Holocaust.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), different modern proper and far-right Ukrainian nationalists who promote, defend and whitewash the OUN, and their imperialist sponsors in Ottawa, Washington, London and Berlin make a sequence of self-serving, totally improbable claims in regards to the OUN’s report in World Warfare II. All of them are a pack of lies.
They declare that the OUN and the Banderite Ukrainian Rebel Army (UPA) had been a “nationwide liberation motion.” In actuality, they had been fascists, subservient to Nazi Germany and later to British and US imperialism. They declare the OUN and UPA fought “each the Nazis and the Soviets.” This regardless of the Ukrainian fascists having eagerly served within the June 1941 invasion of the USSR and their having continued to combat the Soviets, both instantly below Nazi command or in coordination with them, till they had been pressured to flee in 1945 to the ultimate Nazi redoubts in Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.
Particularly the UCC and Ukrainian far-right venerate the genocidal report of the UPA—a pressure whose management and fighters had been largely comprised of fascists who, below Bandera’s orders, had beforehand served the Third Reich’s conflict machine and the SS. Lastly, the present-day defenders of the Ukrainian fascists declare that they performed no half within the Holocaust. Had been we not talking of the extermination of nicely over 1 million Ukrainian Jews, this may be laughable. Quite a few OUN paperwork and publications, throughout and even nicely earlier than the outbreak of World Warfare II, advocated mass violence towards the Jews. Current historic analysis has documented in chilling element the OUN and UPA cadres’ participation within the Holocaust—together with within the rounding up of Jews, their mass slaughter and the staffing of the loss of life camps—in addition to the homicide of greater than 100,000 Poles in ethnic cleaning operations and tens of hundreds of Soviet Russian and Ukrainian partisans. The better the proof towards the Ukrainian fascists, the louder their modern defenders scream. However they can’t cry loud sufficient to silence goal historic info.
Canadian historian John Paul Himka, himself as soon as a promoter of the parable of Bandera as “nationwide liberation fighter” and a life-long liberal promoter of 1 kind or one other of Ukrainian nationwide identification politics, has been pressured to confess, by means of a confrontation with these info, that the OUN was a prison group which participated within the genocide of European Jewry and within the ethnic cleaning of Poles. In his latest ebook, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation within the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944, Himka summarizes the OUN-UPA function within the Holocaust:
There have been three main phases during which the nationalists contributed to the mass homicide. …
First, militias organized by OUN had been key actors within the anti-Jewish violence of the summer season of 1941, within the speedy aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The militias arrested Jews to be able to topic them to pressured labour, humiliation and homicide; hundreds of these arrested had been executed by German items, primarily Einsatzgruppe C and Waffen SS Division ‘Wiking.’ The Ukrainian nationalist militias assembled the Jews for the German’s violence, since they might determine Jews extra simply than the invaders and knew the localities, together with the Jewish neighbourhoods within the cities. Typically the violence was accompanied by bloody public spectacles, as within the pogroms unleashed in Lviv and Zolochiv in early July 1941; generally the OUN militias murdered chosen Jews and their households extra discreetly, and generally they simply murdered all of the Jews within the village.
Second, OUN recruited for and infiltrated the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Galicia and the stationary Schutzmannschaften in Volhynia. These police items offered the indispensable manpower for the Holocaust. They rounded up Jews for deportation to the loss of life camp at Belzec or for execution by capturing; though a lot of the precise killing was carried out by Germans, the Ukrainian policemen additionally killed in sure circumstances. These liquidations happened primarily from early 1942 to the center of 1943.
Third, early in 1943 hundreds of those Ukrainian policemen abandoned from German service to affix the OUN-led nationalist insurgency. Possessed of some navy coaching and familiarity with each weapons and killing, they took management positions in UPA. As quickly as the previous policemen joined them, UPA launched a large ethnic cleaning undertaking, at first in Volhynia and later in Galicia. Though it was primarily directed towards Poles, there have been different non-Ukrainian victims. Within the winter of 1943-44, because the Crimson Army moved westward, UPA lured surviving Jews out of their hiding locations within the forests, briefly positioned them in labor camps, after which murdered them.
The Ukrainian fascists and Operation Barbarossa
The rival wings of the OUN mobilized hundreds, probably tens of hundreds, of their cadres and supporters to actively take part in Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union launched on June 22, 1941. They did so in a number of types. Within the months main as much as Operation Barbarossa’s launch, German navy intelligence arrange two Ukrainian battalions staffed primarily, if not completely, by OUN (B) supporters. The lead Ukrainian officer of the Nachtigall Battalion was, as we famous in Half 2, the shut Bandera affiliate Roman Shukhevych, who would later develop into the navy commander of the UPA.
Each the OUN (M) and (B) arrange prohidny hruppy (process forces) that supported and adopted the Nazi armies as they superior into Soviet Ukraine. A lot of them quickly assumed “police” features, that’s suppressing the inhabitants, ferreting out supporters of the Soviet regime, and rounding up and killing Jews. The OUN (B) additionally shaped a “Ukrainian Individuals’s Militia,” a paramilitary pressured that labored behind the advancing German traces helping the SS and the Einsatzgruppen loss of life squads.
Krakivski Visti—the day by day printed by the OUN (M)-aligned Ukrainian Central Committee and edited by Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather, Mikhailo Chomiak—was all however delirious within the June 23, 1941 challenge saying the launching of what it known as a “holy conflict” towards the “antichrist.”
Beneath the heading “The Most Justified Warfare in Historical past,” Krakivski Visti declared:
“By no means earlier than in historical past has there been a extra simply conflict than the conflict began by German troops on Sunday, June 22, 1941. The conflict that has begun right now is one thing like an enormous campaign for the liberation of man, for the liberation of countries, with liberation of the entire world from the horrible ghost of the antichrist. … Immediately, the German Führer would be the savior of all of the peoples enslaved by Crimson Moscow … the blood of German troopers who had already died and can proceed to die a heroic loss of life in THIS holy conflict will develop into the inspiration of a brand new future for all of the liberated peoples of Jap Europe, Western Asia, and all mankind.”
Because the Nazis set Operation Barbarossa in movement, each the OUN (M) and (B) had been busy planning for a better function for themselves in a Nazi-led “New Europe.”
On June 10,1941, 12 days earlier than the Nazi invasion, Krakivski Visti writer and the Ukrainian Central Committee (UTsK) head Volodymyr Kubiyovych wrote a letter to Adolph Hitler outlining the OUN (M)’s plan for a fascist Ukrainian state below the Third Reich’s tutelage.
In his letter he known as for:
“A ‘Fuhrer’ state
“Going again to the custom of the Ukrainian ‘Hetman’ state, the longer term Ukrainian state may have an authoritarian structure. The manager energy will probably be concentrated within the arms of a Fuhrer, (Vozhd).
“One Get together State
“As an advisory physique, the management of the political social gathering and the advisory board made up of representatives of the varied companies will probably be accessible to help him. A nationwide social gathering would be the solely type of political group in full and can kind the premise of the state order in addition to the only issue of nationwide schooling and the group of neighborhood life. …
“Financial system
“… Just like the management, the administration and the economic system will even be organized in an authoritarian method.”
Hitler and the Nazis weren’t about to create a “Ukrainian state,” even one led by a “Vozhd” as slavishly obedient as Kubiyovych. They had been, nonetheless, amenable to his proposal that Western Galicia be included within the territories of the Common Authorities as soon as it was occupied by the Nazi invaders. This allowed the UTsK to develop its operations into a part of the Ukrainian heartland.
Ukrainian “independence” in bondage to Nazi-led German imperialism
Based on the OUN (B)’s personal account, the OUN-staffed Nachtigall Battalion of the German military reached Lviv on June 30, 1941, “and OUN leaders headed by Yaroslav Stetsko declared the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and shaped a authorities.”
To this present day, the Ukrainian fascists and their defenders and apologists rejoice the “Akt Proholoshenia Ukrainskoi Derzhavy” (Proclamation of Ukrainian State Energy) that Stetsko pronounced at a gathering in Lviv, on the identical day a horrific pogrom towards town’s Jewish inhabitants started, as a “declaration of independence.”
The proclamation is seldom quoted in full by Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalist apologizers. As a result of it will solely serve to additional underline that having arrived in Ukraine as keen individuals within the Nazi conflict of extermination towards the Soviet Union, they weren’t declaring Ukraine’s independence however its vassalage to Nazi-led German imperialism.
A brief textual content that doesn’t even use the phrase independence, the proclamation pledges that the “Ukrainian state energy” will “cooperate intently with Nationwide Socialist Nice Germany, below the management of Adolph Hitler, to create a brand new order in Europe and the world … and to strongly cooperate with the German military towards the Muscovite occupation. …”
The Banderites had been clearly attempting to emulate their fellow fascist allies in Slovakia, the place the Hlinka Guard had shaped a authorities below Nazi tutelage, and the Croatian Ustasce, with which the OUN leaders had skilled within the Nineteen Thirties, who had been granted their very own fascist puppet state.
Seeing the operational usefulness of the OUN-B terrorists, sections of the Wehrmacht (German navy) welcomed the Lviv proclamation, and a gaggle of Wehrmacht officers current when Stetsko made it reportedly cheered. However Hitler noticed the huge fertile lands of Ukraine as too important to his racialist-fascist undertaking of making Lebensraum for the Germans to permit any type of a Ukrainian state.
On July 5 1941, Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and brought to Berlin. Stetsko, who had named himself Ukraine’s “Prime Minister,” adopted per week later. Whereas detained in Berlin, Bandera and Stetsko continued to get pleasure from political freedom. Bandera’s correspondence, a few of it marked “Secret,” continued. Bandera and Stetsko had been launched on July 14, and continued to barter with the Nazi regime, proposing varied initiatives to completely different Nazi navy and police organs. In a grovelling August 3, 1941 “letter of protest” to Hitler concerning Galicia’s separation from the remainder of Ukraine and incorporation into the Common Authorities, which was itself partially a response to the OUN-B’s proclamation, Bandera affirmed his “deepest respect” for Hitler as a fellow “nationalist of the Western Mark.”
Stetsko, for his, half affirmed {that a} Ukraine below their governance would operate as a nationwide pressured labour camp for Nazi Germany: “I do know,” he wrote, “that the reconstruction of a sovereign and united Ukrainian state is feasible solely with (Nazi) Germany’s victory … we uphold the entire financial help of Germany by Ukraine with all accessible means …”
It was the Banderites’ assassination of Mykola Stisiborskyi, a rival chief and ideologue of the OUN (M), the Nazis different Ukrainian fascist allies, that prompted the Nazis to once more detain Bandera and Stetsko.
The OUN’s supporters and apologists like to color the “custody” of Stetsko and Bandera as one thing equal to the form of brutal imprisonment the Nazis (and OUN!) meted out to communists, Jews, Roma and political prisoners. OUN pamphlets communicate ominously of the “focus camps” into which Stetsko and Bandera had been put.
In actuality, the OUN (B) leaders had been held in “Sonder und Ehrenhaft,” a particular and privileged standing of detention the Nazis reserved for diplomats and heads of state. Furthermore, they had been allowed to proceed to correspond with their followers embedded within the Nazi repressive equipment, though the Nazis took steps to tighten their surveillance and management by integrating OUN militia and process pressure members into Ukrainian police items.
Whereas in custody, Stetsko produced a doc to which Ukrainian nationalists don’t prefer to refer, his “Zhitiepys” or “Life story.” It additional attests to OUN’s help for the extermination of the Jews and fascist character.
“I contemplate Marxism,” wrote Stetsko, “to be a product of the Jewish thoughts, which nonetheless, has been utilized in follow within the Muscovite jail of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic individuals with the help of Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s biggest enemies and bearers of corrupting Bolshevik worldwide concepts. I absolutely recognize the undeniably dangerous and hostile function of the Jews, who’re serving to Moscow to enslave Ukraine … I subsequently help the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German strategies of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine.”
As a result of we’re talking of such grave issues, it should be emphasised that Stetsko used the phrases “vinisheniya”—destruction—and “eksterminatsii zhidivstve”—extermination of Jewry.
In one other passage, Stetsko forthrightly expounds the Ukrainian nationalists’ implacable opposition to and hatred of socialism and democracy:
“I co-created the ideology and program of the Group (OUN) as fully hostile to Marxism, democracy, and all class-based ideologies and packages. Politically, I help authoritarian, single-party system in Ukraine. Within the social sphere, I help nationwide solidarism, which is near the Nationwide Socialist (Nazi) program, however mine differs within the specific options of the Ukrainian land …”
Stetsko—who would succeed Bandera, on the latter’s loss of life, as head of the OUN (B)—was not telling the Nazis what he thought they needed to listen to to get out of jail, for which he volunteered. He was merely stating to his Nazi captors and patrons the already established coverage of the OUN (B).
Borotba I diialnist OUN pidchas vinny (Wrestle and Actions of the OUN in Wartime)—an OUN (B) doc ready as a information to the Ukrainian fascist prohidny hurupy (process forces) that supported and adopted the Nazi armies as they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941—explicitly sanctioned mass homicide: “At a time of chaos and confusion, liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite and Jewish activists is permitted, particularly supporters of Jewish-Muscovite imperialism.”
This doc, which modern fascists supporters of the OUN proceed to quote, additional states:
“As soon as the OUN establishes a authorities, it’s to be based mostly upon the next social rules:
“The nationwide minorities are divided right into a) these which are pleasant to us … and b) these which are hostile to us—Muscovites, Poles and Jews …
“Re: a) Have the identical rights as Ukrainians …
“Re: b) Destruction within the battle, particularly those that defended the regime: deportation to their homelands, destruction, particularly of the intelligentsia, which shouldn’t be allowed to carry any administrative positions. On the whole, we make it unimaginable to supply an intelligentsia that’s entry to varsities, and so on. For instance, the so-called Polish peasants are to be assimilated, making them perceive from the outset … that they’re Ukrainians, solely forcibly assimilated to the Latin ceremony. Leaders are to be destroyed. Jews are to be remoted and faraway from administrative positions in order to stop sabotage. If, for instance, there’s an absolute have to retain a Jew within the financial administration, one among our militiamen ought to be positioned over him and he ought to be liquidated for the slightest transgressions. Solely Ukrainians and never overseas enemies might be leaders within the varied branches of life. Assimilation of Jews is forbidden.”
Working alongside and throughout the Nazi the safety forces, the Ukrainian fascists of each factions of the OUN put these genocidal notions into follow in pursuit of their aim of creating a “Ukraine for the Ukrainians”—that’s an ethnically “pure” Ukrainian state.
The Nachtigall Battalion and OUN (B) auxiliary teams participated in two murderous sprees in Lviv in 1941, from June 30 to July 3, and once more from July 25 to 29, during which as much as 9,000 of Lviv’s Jews had been murdered by Nazis and Ukrainian fascists. Related pogroms occurred in Ternopil, Kremianets, Zolochev and Zboriv. These homicide campaigns led to a lot bigger mass shootings. Organized by the Einsatzgruppen loss of life squads with the help and participation of OUN militia and police auxiliaries, they killed greater than 50,000 individuals in the summertime of 1941.
College of Ottawa political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, who has extensively researched and documented the dominant function former Ukrainian police and auxiliary forces concerned within the slaughter of Jews performed within the UPA, additionally factors to the involvement of OUN (M)-led police in among the most horrific crimes, together with the September 1941 capturing of 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev.
Many OUN (B) members who performed a number one function within the auxiliary police items, together with the notorious Mykola Lebed, obtained coaching in torture and different “abilities” at German navy and police colleges run by the Gestapo and the SS. Lebed, who would go on to go the OUN (B)’s ruthless SB safety companies, commanded the group of 120 Ukrainians recruited by the Nazis for coaching on the Zakopane Gestapo coaching faculty instantly following their invasion of Poland in 1939. After the conflict, he was a lifelong CIA asset, who ran the “Prolog” propaganda publishing home in america.
His coaching on the Zakopane Gestapo faculty concerned the random collection of harmless Jews for hands-on torture and homicide. An OUN-B defector, Mykyta Kosakivsky, would confess many years later how he witnessed Lebed “enter some Jewish dwelling … seize a Jew, and produce him to the Unit …” Gestapo officers taught “the right strategies of interrogation.” “[T]o induce the harmless Jew to admit that he had raped an Aryan girl, the German officers beat and tortured him, utilizing their fists, a sword and iron bars. When he was bloody from head to toe, they utilized salt and flame to his wounds …” Later the Gestapo commander “Rosenbaum beat the Jew once more with an iron pipe and Lebid (sic) too assisted in that heroic motion.”
The Ukrainian fascists’ response to the flip within the conflict towards the Nazis
The dual defeats of Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad within the fall/winter of 1942-1943 and the Battle of Kursk in the summertime of 1943 prompted each the rival factions of the Ukrainian fascists to make opportunistic and cynical tactical shifts.
Within the spring of 1943, the OUN (M) started mobilizing its supporters to kind a Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS. Previous to the disaster prompted by the defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazis had restricted entry into the Waffen SS to “pure Aryans.” As the one Ukrainian-language publication allowed within the Nazi Common Authorities, Krakivski Visti, below Chomiak’s editorship, performed an important function on this marketing campaign.
On Might 16, 1943, Krakivski Visti printed the next enchantment from Kubiyovych:
“The long-awaited second has arrived when the Ukrainian individuals will once more have the chance to return out with gun in hand to do battle towards its most grievous foe—Bolshevism. The Führer of the Better German Reich has agreed to the formation of a separate Ukrainian volunteer navy unit below the identify of SS Infantry Division ‘Galicia.’ … You should stand shoulder to shoulder with the invincible German military and destroy, as soon as and for all, the Bolshevik beast …”
Kubiyovych himself grew to become the Waffen SS Division Galizien’s first official member, swearing an oath to the Waffen SS and to the SS’s head Heinrich Himmler.
Krakivski Visti accompanied its recruitment marketing campaign for the Waffen-SS with a foul torrent of anti-Semitic articles. German Press chief Emil Gasner demanded that these articles ought to be authored by Ukrainians, versus the numerous reprints of German anti-Semitic content material that the paper usually printed. These articles would serve to underline Ukrainian help for the Waffen SS recruitment marketing campaign. A number of volunteers stepped up, together with Oleksander Mokh, who would later go on to a publishing profession in Toronto. However earlier than his immigration, his contributions to world literature consisted of such titles as “How the Jews are Depraving Europe,” “How They (the Jews) helped the Bolsheviks” and “Conscience and Sodom,” printed in Might and June 1943. These contributions are conspicuously absent from his biography within the “Encyclopedia of Ukraine,” which was edited by none aside from Kubiyovych himself and would finally come to be sponsored by the College of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Research.
The Waffen SS 14th or Galicia Division was skilled adjoining to numerous focus and compelled labour camps in 1943, together with Dachau, in accordance with the confessions of former division members. Camp inmates had been pressured to take away their hats when the brand new SS recruits marched by. They obtained two hours of indoctrination in Nationwide Socialist principle every week, whereas the remainder of their days had been crammed with its follow. On the finish of August 1943, the members swore an oath to Adolph Hitler, after having been tattooed with their blood group. Because the 8,000 enlistment goal was oversubscribed, those that didn’t make the lower had been integrated into 4 particular police items, who additionally went on to take part in atrocities.
The Galicia Division wouldn’t see fight till February 1944, when it was despatched into motion towards the resistance to the Nazis. In July 1944, the Division misplaced 73 % of its forces at Brody resisting the Soviet counteroffensive which corresponded with the D Day landings. The unit was rebuilt by the Nazis from reserve forces and despatched to Slovakia to crush the rebellion of the Slovak working class towards fascist rule in early 1945.
The commanding officers of the Waffen SS 14th Galizien had been drawn from the ranks of the worst Nazi mass murderers. Fritz Freitag was a veteran of Einsatzgruppen killings, who stored an in depth diary of his atrocities, with entries reminiscent of “114 prisoners taken, 283 Jews shot.” SS-Obersturmbahnfuherer Franz Magall additionally recorded his Einsatzgruppen crimes in a diary: “Driving ladies and kids into swamps was not as profitable because it ought to have been, because the swamps weren’t deep sufficient for them to sink.”
Michael James Melnyk, who has written three books on the historical past of the Galicia Division, describes in minute element the anti-partisan operations it carried out towards the native inhabitants of Ukraine after which towards the Slovaks. However because the son of a former Waffen SS member, he merely assumes that all the unit’s victims had it coming, as “communists” or partisans.
It’s helpful subsequently to match Melnyk’s description of the spring 1944 Huta Pieniacka bloodbath with the accounts of the Polish Institute of Nationwide Remembrance and that of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
Melnyk justifies the atrocity as follows: “The village (with roughly 1,000 inhabitants) is overtly acknowledged to have develop into a well-fortified armed stronghold and main resistance centre for each Polish and Soviet led partisan teams. These partisans, along with harassing German provide columns and disrupting the rear areas of the German Army, are additionally recognized to have fought towards the UPA in addition to terrorizing the native Ukrainian inhabitants by raiding the encompassing villages.” Melnyk then goes on to confess that the village was topic to a “‘pacification motion’ which finally led to the destruction of the village and the liquidation of lots of the remaining civilian inhabitants,” however that this was the work of the Germans. Melnyk additionally leaves out the truth that the individuals of Huta Pienacka had fled the massacres by the OUN (B) of greater than 100,000 Poles and Jews within the earlier yr. The “pacification motion” completed them off.
The Poles bear in mind issues in another way:
“… the crime was dedicated by the 4th battalion of the 14th division on February 28. On that day, early within the morning, troopers of this division, wearing white, masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery. SS males of the 14th Division of the SS ‘Galizien’ entered the village, capturing the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, largely ladies and kids, had been divided and locked in barns that had been set on fireplace. Those that tried to run away had been killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head Fee described the morbid particulars of the act. The crime was dedicated towards ladies, kids, and new child infants.”
The Ukrainian Academy of Science writes:
“The SS detachment’s assault on the village was the results of the denunciation to the Ukrainian police by the inhabitants in Pidhirtsiv, which knowledgeable the Germans that the Poles of Huta Pieniacka had been hiding Jews, supported Bolshevik partisans, saved weapons and so forth. The Ukrainian SS males arrived within the village to conduct an inspection. Once they started robbing the inhabitants, talking Ukrainian to one another the Poles took them for bandits in disguise, and commenced defending themselves. Then, a Ukrainian squadron of the SS arrived within the village from Pidhirtsiv. After having encircled the village, it started to homicide individuals.”
The OUN (B) and the Ukrainian Rebel Army
After the German give up at Stalingrad in February 1943 and with help swelling among the many Ukrainian individuals for the Soviet partisan resistance to the Nazis, the OUN (B) started to arrange for the chance that its Nazi allies might go all the way down to defeat and the prospect of an “impartial Ukraine” misplaced.
The OUN-organized Ukrainian Rebel Army (UPA) is alleged to have been based in October 1942. Nevertheless it solely emerged as a big pressure within the spring of 1943 after which solely as the results of the March-April 1943 mass desertion to it of Ukrainian police commanders and officers.
Some 4,000-6,000 Ukrainian police responded to the UPA’s name to affix its ranks within the Volhynia area of Nazi occupied-Poland in spring 1943. Based on Katchanovski, on the finish of that yr police defectors continued to comprise greater than half of all UPA fighters. The UPA would even be joined by others who had served as Nazi henchmen together with within the Nachtigall and Roland German particular operations battalions, and finally by deserters from the Waffen SS Galicia Division.
On the peak of its energy, the UPA had maybe 20,000 fighters, a majority of whom had beforehand served and/or fought alongside the Nazis.
The political significance of the mass police defection to the UPA can’t be overemphasized. If the OUN (B) might command hundreds of cops to defect to the UPA, it was as a result of they had been serving within the Nazis’ auxiliary police on the OUN (B)’s directions; and once they helped implement the mass extermination of the Jews of Ukraine, they did so below its self-discipline and at its behest.
Katchanovski, by means of a evaluate of the biographies of 119 top-ranked and 210 middle-ranked OUN (B) leaders and UPA commanders, has demonstrated the extent to which this so-called “nationwide liberation motion” was led and staffed by Nazi henchman. Primarily based on the accessible proof, he has established that 55 % of center rating OUN/UPA cadre actively collaborated with the Nazi navy, police and/or intelligence, as did 77 % of the top-ranked OUN and UPA leaders. He stresses the true percentages are probably larger resulting from data gaps.
Lubomir Luciuk, a Royal Navy Faculty of Canada professor and recipient of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ Shevchenko Medal, would have us consider the UPA “fought each the Nazis AND the Soviets.” However any anti-German navy engagements had been few, and inconsequential. Katchanovski has documented that solely 6 % of prime OUN commanders, and solely 3 % of the highest UPA commanders, died as the results of navy engagement with the Germans, versus 54 % who died in fight with Soviet forces. Although 32 % of OUN leaders had been sooner or later taken prisoner by the Germans, virtually all of them had been launched shortly thereafter. Objectively verifiable info contradict the lies spun by the Ukrainian nationalists and their western imperialist allies.
Coincident with the Nazi tank military defeat within the Battle of Kursk, an OUN (B) congress in the summertime of 1943 made a very cynical and dishonest rhetorical shift, in order to place itself for a future try and court docket British and American imperialist help. It condemned “Nationwide Socialist ideology” and professed its help for “nationwide minorities.” Primarily, that is the place the OUN marketing campaign of mendacity about itself and its political historical past begins.
In follow, the UPA continued to perpetrate mass violence. A scientific marketing campaign of ethnic cleaning of as much as 100,000 Poles within the Volhynia, Galicia, Lublin and Polesia areas peaked simply because the OUN was declaring its love for “nationwide minorities.” In June 1943, the commander of the UPA-North, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, issued a secret directive saying: “We should always make a big motion of the liquidation of the Polish factor. Because the German armies withdraw, we must always make the most of this handy second for liquidating your entire male inhabitants within the age from 16 as much as 60 years. … Villages and settlements mendacity subsequent to the huge forests, ought to disappear from the face of the earth.” Nearly all of these massacred had been in truth ladies and kids. The murders continued till 1945. The UPA even shot the few conscripted Jewish medical doctors it had pressed into service.
All through the UPA performed a task in defending the Nazi rear, allowing German items to be deployed towards the Soviets in a extra environment friendly method.
Going through the prospect of imminent defeat, the Nazis launched Bandera from captivity in September 1944. This resulted in nonetheless nearer cooperation between the UPA-OUN (B) and the Nazis in preventing the advancing Crimson Army. Based on Bandera’s biographer, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, “Bandera along with the opposite Ukrainian main politicians reminiscent of Melnyk, Kubiyovych, and Pavlo Shandruk, agreed to assist the Germans to mobilise Ukrainians for the combat towards the Soviet Union.”
Because the Soviet Crimson Army inflicted defeat after defeat on the German Wehrmacht throughout 1944 and early 1945, bringing the collapse of Nazi Germany ever nearer, the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN (B) and OUN (M) fled westwards. Freeland’s grandfather Mykhailo Chomiak and his collaborators travelled to Vienna, the place they continued to publish Krakivski Visti. The final challenge appeared in March 1945. Many main figures ended up in displaced individuals’s camps, the place OUN members operated mafia-like buildings.
Bandera fled to Munich, the place he would later collaborate with the CIA and West German intelligence. The OUN (B), after a quick suspension of its actions, was reconstituted below the auspices of Britain’s MI6 in 1946 for use as an ally in an anti-Soviet insurgency in Ukraine that the Individuals would covertly again till a minimum of the tip of the Fifties. By the mid-Fifties, Bandera’s intransigent fascism had alienated the CIA and plenty of of his former allies, who discovered it “distasteful” and politically out of step with western imperialist propaganda about democracy and freedom for “captive nations.” He was apparently assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959. His spouse and son fled to Toronto, Canada, the place they continued to advertise the OUN trigger.
The give up of the 14th (Galicia) Division of the Waffen SS to the British forces is illustrative of the marketing campaign of lies informed by the Ukrainian fascists to cowl their tracks and clear up their political fame to make themselves extra palatable to their new American—and Canadian—masters. Round April 25, 1945, simply earlier than its give up, the members of the Galizien Division of the Waffen SS shed their uniforms and SS insignia and declared themselves to be “the First Unit of the Ukrainian Nationwide Army.” The British officers who first encountered them solely later found who they had been actually coping with. They had been interned for a number of years earlier than ultimately being admitted as immigrants to the US, Canada, UK and Australia.
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On April 27, each Liberal, Conservative, Bloc Québécois, Inexperienced and New Democratic Get together MP current unanimously permitted an NDP parliamentary movement labelling Russia’s navy operation in Ukraine an “act of Genocide.”
Clearly, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the Canadian ruling class and its political representatives is boundless.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reactionary. However the declare that Moscow is finishing up genocide in Ukraine is a provocation aimed toward diabolizing Russia and making any de-escalation of the battle unimaginable, so Canadian imperialism and its allies can pursue their plans to subjugate Russia regardless of the associated fee in Russian and Ukrainian lives.
It’s all the extra grotesque coming from a state and political institution that for eight many years has cultivated an alliance with those that aided and abetted Nazi genocide towards the Jews of Ukraine. Within the concluding a part of this sequence we are going to doc how Canadian imperialism offered refuge to the Ukrainian fascists, helped them cowl up their crimes and has made use of them to advance its predatory pursuits, together with within the preparation, instigation and waging of the present conflict.
To be continued.
