Debates in Ukraine over nationalist involvement in the Holocaust, 2004–2008

Abstract

The article concerns debate about the memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine. It covers the period 2004–2008.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• Holocaust
• memory

Notes

In the late winter and spring of 1943 thousands of Ukrainian policemen deserted from German service and entered the Ukrainian Insurgent Army under the command of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera wing). They attacked Polish settlements in Volhynia and murdered their inhabitants. Later in the summer the violence spread to Galicia as well. The Ukrainian nationalist partisans and peasants “killed at least 40,000 Polish civilians in the spring and summer of 1943” (Snyder 99).

Hrytsak was also scheduled to present a paper at a conference in Italy in November 2004 entitled “The First Ukrainian Historikerstreit: Academic Debates on Volhyn 1943 and Their Public Dimension” (Brogi and Lami).

This article is based on a paper originally written for the Association of Jewish Studies conference of 21–23 December 2008. Although I have revised and updated the article somewhat, it still focuses primarily on the debates that took place before 2009.

Yones was a forced laborer in Galicia who escaped in August 1943 and joined a partisan group and later the Red Army. He moved to Israel in 1950, where he wrote the book on the Jews of Lviv four years later. The original Hebrew version was published in 1960. The book also appeared in English translation (Yones, Smoke in the Sand).

The historian Vasyl' Rasevych characterized Nakonechnyi as a “morally honest man, a convinced Ukrainian patriot.”

Cf: “…As long as Polish society was unable to mourn its Jewish neighbors' deaths, it had either to purge them or live in infamy” (Gross 258).

Michael Shafir has called this kind of move “deflective negationism.” It consists of “deflecting the blame for … [one's own nation's] perpetration onto either the Germans or onto a combination between them and the traditional ‘historic enemy’” (95, 10ff).

After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Soviets planned to deport political prisoners to the east so that they would not be able to collaborate with the German occupiers, but they ran out of time. Instead, they killed many thousands of them lest they fall into German hands. When the Germans marched into Western Ukraine, they had Jews carry the corpses out of the prisons and mass graves, which served as a pretext for pogroms against the Jewish population. On the NKVD murders, see Romaniv and Fedushchak. On the connection with the pogroms, see Musial. For Ukrainian reporting, see Himka “Ethnicity and the Reporting.”

Jewish overrepresentation in the Soviet organs of repression is a letimotif in the writings of the defenders of the nationalist heritage. It is directly adopted from the nationalists' belief in “Judeobolshevism.” Indeed, in the mid-1930s, Jews made up close to 40% of the leadership of the NKVD. Most Jews were purged, however, in 1937 and after. By the early 1940s, the Jewish percentage had dropped to four or five (Petrov and Skorkin 495; Weiner 269 n. 101).

But see Nakonechnyi 20–2, 93.

This terminology stems from Hrytsak, “Ukrains'ko-ievreis'ki stosunky.”

He later developed these ideas in Prorok u svoii vitchyzni (337–63).

The Ukrainian overseas diaspora was dominated from the late 1940s and at least through the 1970s by persons who had left Ukraine after World War II. Although some came to Germany during the war as forced laborers, these Ostarbeiter never played a leading role in the Ukrainian communities abroad. Instead, the leaders were those who had followed the German army out as it retreated westward. The vast majority of these had been connected with OUN, had served in the civil administration under German occupation, and/or had served in the Waffen-SS division Galizien. Their children, who now constitute the community's leadership, are predominantly nationalist in outlook (Himka “Central European Diaspora”). See also Rossoliński-Liebe.

The Holodomor is the name used by many Ukrainians for the famine of 1932–1933. For the relationship between the memory of the Holodomor and the memory of the Holocaust, see Dietsch (111–46, 198–226).

This is evident from the judgments he advances in his article, but I note that already in 1984 Carynnyk had criticized Ukrainian wartime antisemitism in the journal Suchasnist'.

Information from Sofia Grachova, 17 November 2007.

This point is well demonstrated on Johan Dietsch's important study (147–97).

The main reason I refrain from an account of them is that I myself was an active participant in these debates, which were carried on and reprinted not only in Krytyka, but in many other forums in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and English. I am publishing my personal reflections on the debates of 2010 elsewhere (Himka “Interventions”). Most of the contributions are available in Amar, Balyns'kyi and Hrytsak, Strasti za Banderoiu.

Schutzmannschaften were units used by the Germans for policing and anti-partisan warfare. For a survey of Ukrainian Schutzmannschaften, see Bolianovs'kyi (124–55). See also below, n. 24.

For a critique of the book, see Kurylo and Himka.

A press conference on the subject was aired that day on Channel 5 in Ukraine. The news clip is available on YouTube (“Biitsi Shukhevycha”). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ9M7N4Vqqs 13 Oct. 2008. The news was also spread in the press and Internet (e.g. “SBU rozsekretyla dokumenty”). According to the announcement of it, the Public Hearing was sponsored by both the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (“Zvynuvachennia ‘Nakhtihaliu’”).

I received a copy on 22 March 2008, the day the press release was dated.

Marco Carynnyk later also spoke out about this falsification (Rybakov).

Per Anders Rudling has subsequently been researching the Ukrainian Schutzmannschaften, particularly Shukhevych's, and their role in anti-partisan warfare and atrocities against civilians. (Rudling, “Szkolenie w Mordowaniu”; Rudling, “Nationalist Representations”).

Oxford, LSE, and Princeton.

Much the same point has been made by a German scholar studying the memory of the Holocaust in post-Soviet states (Rohdewald 181).

Of course, the articulation of Holocaust memory has also been occurring in an international context, particularly the context of the European Union. This is well explored by Rohdewald. Also, there is an international scholarship on the Holocaust in Ukraine which influences the Ukrainian discussions.

Some of the comments on the Internet following Tarik Cyril Amar's response to V”iatrovych (Amar, “Roman Shukhevych”) include: “I do not know Mr. Tarik personally, but when a foreigner learns the Ukrainian language and goes to work in Lviv, and not, say, Benelux, then that has to be respected.” “Who is he? Let him sit across the ocean and keep quiet….” “You will continue to walk as naked Mongols and listen to the Harvard/Oxford/Warsaw or Kremlin oracles who will explain your history to you.” “Boy, this is our land and our history, understand?” “I haven't read it yet. I won't read it for sure, but what can a foreigner tell us about ourselves – no more than I about his history.”