The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Police, and the Holocaust John‐Paul Himka Paper prepared for the Seventh Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine, 20‐22 October 2011 In his final report on “The Solution of the Jewish Question in Galicia,” the head of the local SS and police, Fritz Katzmann, thanked those who made it possible to create a judenfrei Galicia, namely “the Security and Order Police, the Gendarmerie, the Sonderdienst, and the Ukrainian Police.”1 This paper discusses the Ukrainian police, its connections with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and its role in the Holocaust.2 There have been several important studies of the Ukrainian police already. They were preceded by general studies of the role of local police in the Nazi‐occupied Soviet Union.3 In 2000 Martin Dean published a monograph on the police in Belarus and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine that described their activities as a whole.4 He also looked at their motivations very broadly and took the view that for the most 1 Yad Vashem Archives, 06/28‐1 – originally USA. Exhibit 277, L‐18, dated 30 June 1943, International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. 2 I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Pinchas and Mark Wisen Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for supporting the research on which this article is based. I am also grateful to Eduard Baidaus for research assistance. 3 Richard Breitman, "Himmler's Police Auxiliaries in the Occupied Soviet Territories," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 7 (1990): 23‐39. Yehoshua R. Büchler, "Local Police Force Participation in the Extermination of Jews in Occupied Soviet Territory 1941‐1942," Shevut 20 (1996): 79‐98. 4 Martin Dean, Collaboration during the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941‐44.N(ew York: St. Martin's Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000). 1 part the police he studied were like the “ordinary men” of the famous book by Christopher Browning.5 Alexander Prusin and Gabriel Finder wrote articles that, like this paper, focused on the role of the Ukrainian police in the Holocaust. Prusin’s study of the Ukrainian police in Kyiv and Poltava oblasts confirmed many of the points already made by Dean and introduced additional ramifications to consider.6 In their joint article on the Ukrainian police in Galicia, Prusin and Finder concentrated on the ideological underpinnings of Ukrainian police activity.7 They considered the Ukrainian police to be “the institutional epicentre of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis in this region in the destruction of the Jews,”8 a finding that this paper does not challenge. They also considered the Ukrainian police to be a cornerstone of Ukrainian nationalists’ policy of creating a “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” They killed “in the name of the reconstruction of society.”9 This too is a finding that is not directly challenged here. But this paper looks at more context. The relationship between the existence of certain ideas and the existence of certain practices is not often straightforward. There is usually a great deal of mediation. Here, while not denying the role played by nationalist ideology, I concentrate on the role of a particular institution or movement, OUN, and its strategies and aspirations beyond ethnic cleansing. As I look at it, the ideological underpinnings facilitated rather than directly caused OUN’s interest in the police. In addition to following the connections between OUN, 5 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 6 Aleksandr Prusin, “Ukrainskaia politsiia i Kholokost v general’nom okruge Kiev, 1941‐1943: deistviia i motivatsii,” Holokost i suchasnist’, no. 1 (2007): 31‐59. 7 Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 95‐118. 8 Ibid., 96. 9 Ibid., 97. 2 the Ukrainian police, and the Holocaust, this paper also, near the end, takes a look at Ukrainian memory of this police force. The service of OUN members in the Ukrainian police was an important transitional stage in OUN involvement in the Holocaust, bridging the mass anti‐Jewish violence perpetrated by the OUN militias in the summer of 1941 and the ethnic cleansing and murder of Jewish survivors by UPA from the spring of 1943 until 1945. Although the auxiliary police was a different institution than the militia, and was under the ultimate authority of Heinrich Himmler rather than Yaroslav Stetsko and Stepan Bandera, there was considerable continuity in personnel and tasks. The transformation of the militia into the police was a somewhat gradual process. In the case of Lviv, the militia formally came into existence on 30 June 1941 and immediately began to arrest Jews for the so‐called prison actions10 and other forced labor. On 1 July, although still under the authority of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian State, it served German aims by organizing a spectacle of anti‐Jewish violence, the Lviv pogrom, and by apprehending Jews for execution by the Germans. On the next day, 2 July, although still nominally a Ukrainian force, the militia in Lviv was subordinated to the SS and used to assemble Jews for execution.11 In later July, the militia again arrested many Jews for execution in the course of the so‐called Petliura days. So the dissolution of the militia in Lviv on 13 August and its replacement by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police under direct German command was not such a radical change. Many of the former militiamen just continued on in the police.12 10 Before the Soviets retreated from Lviv, they killed thousands of political prisoners whom they could not evacuate. When the Germans took the city, they discovered the corpses in the prisons. Jews were impressed for labor in exhuming and carrying out for identification the already decomposing corpses. 11 John‐Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, forthcoming December 2011. 12 The dissolution of the Ukrainian militia probably resulted mainly from the uneasiness the Germans frequently expressed about the militia as a Ukrainian nationalist force. Volodymyr Kosyk, ed., Ukraina v 3 The duties of the Ukrainian police did not differ radically from those of the former militias either. Aside from more standard police work, the Ukrainian police played a major role in the roundups of Jews and other anti‐Jewish actions. Of course, as the German occupation and the Holocaust developed, the manifold of these anti‐Jewish activities expanded and became more systematically lethal. In both Galicia13 and Volhynia14 Ukrainian police rounded up Jews for deportation to death camps and for mass executions in the general vicinity of the ghettos. This can be considered the most important function that the policemen performed in the implementation of the Final Solution. Their participation in these actions deeply disturbed the head of the Greek Catholic church in Galicia, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. He protested directly to Himmler in February 1942 after Ukrainian policemen were used in the execution of the Jews of Rohatyn. From the March 1942 action in Lviv through the complete liquidation of Galicia’s Jews in June 1943, Sheptytsky became almost obsessed with the role Ukrainian policemen played in the mass murder of the Jews. Numerous pastoral letters and other writings, including letters to the Vatican, testify to the great depth of his concern.15 The preserved records of the Lviv Ukrainian police indicate that the March action took about five working days. On each of those days, on average, twenty‐six Ukrainian policemen in each of six commissariats took part in the roundups, at a time when the total Ukrainian police force in Lviv Druhii svitovii viini u dokumentakh. Zbirnyk arkhivnykh materialiv, vol. 1 (Lviv: Instytut ukrainoznavstva NAN Ukrainy, 1997), 92, 139, 159, 167, 259‐60. Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (AŻIH), 301/3108, Edmund Mateusz Kessler. “My cousin said that between January and April 1944, Ukrainian Militia working for the Germans rounded up the 15 Jewish families in Volkivtsi [Vovkivtsi, Borshchiv raion, Ternopil oblast], and took them to Borschiv where they were shot and buried along with 2,000 other Jews from the surrounding villages. I saw the burial mound in the outskirts of Borschiv.” Letter of Larry Warwaruk to the author, 5 February 2010. 13 14 Mykhailo Podvorniak, Viter z Volyni. Spohady (Winnipeg: Tovarystvo “Volyn’,” 1981), 152‐53. Yahad‐in Unum Testimony (YIUN), no. 570 & 571, Kalynivka, Sarny raion, Rivne oblast, USHMM RG‐50.589*0168. 15 John‐Paul Himka, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust,” Polin 26, forthcoming. 4 was under five hundred.16 This suggests that the vast majority of Ukrainian policemen were involved at one point or another in the actions. In the course of the roundups, Ukrainian policemen sometimes shot Jews (they had to report the number of bullets they used to their superiors).17 As can be expected, especially in light of the alcohol frequently distributed to the policemen, various forms of brutality and sexual violence accompanied the roundups as well.18 The Ukrainian police also performed a number of other roles in the Holocaust.19 Sometimes they took part in mass executions, although my impression is that this was less common in Galicia than in Volhynia or elsewhere in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.20 They 16 The largest manpower contingent in March 1942 was actually supplied by the Jewish police (Ordnungsdienst) – thirty‐seven per day per commissariat. There were thirteen Germans per day as well. Information on the March actions comes from USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, Derzhavnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koi oblasti (DALO), fond R12, op. 1. The Ukrainian police in Lviv consisted of thirteen officers and 465 policemen in October 1942, but expanded to nineteen officers and 841 policemen by July 1943. Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 105‐06. The microfilms of selected records of Lviv’s Ukrainian police at USHMM are all the more valuable now that DALO has closed these files to researchers, as one of my research assistants discovered in 2011. 17 USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 39, f. 31. Haim Tal, The Fields of Ukraine: A 17‐Year‐Old’s Survival of Nazi Occupation: The Story of Yosef Laufer written by Haim Tal (Denver: Dallci Press, 2009), 30. 18 The Schupo commander in Lviv, Major Fritz Weise, wrote to the Ukrainian police commander that “during the roundup of Jews on 27 March 1942 there were violations that must under all circumstances be avoided....There are ever more frequent complaints that Jews are mistreated without grounds.” USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 37, f. 43. Emphasis in the original. Survivor accounts that document brutality, sexual violence, and inebriation: AŻIH, 301/3109, Bronisław Teichholz, 1; AŻIH, 301/45, Alojzy Jazienicki; Henry Friedman, I’m no Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999), 29. A sixteen‐year old witness of the murders of the Jews of Vyshnivets (Zbarazh raion, Ternopil oblast, formerly Volhynia) wrote in his diary the next day that the Ukrainian policemen on the scene were “drunk as cobblers” (v stel’ku), and when the alcohol began to wear off, the Germans plied them with more. A. Kruglov, Sbornik dokumentov i materialov ob unichtozhenii natsistami evreev Ukrainy v 1941‐1944 godakh (Kyiv: Institut iudaiki, 2002), 396‐97. 19 These roles are summarized in Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 106‐07, and in Prusin, “Ukrainskaia politsiia,” 38‐40. 20 Nathan Livneh, ed. Pinkas hak’hilah Trisk: sefer isskor (Israel: Trisk‐Committe [sic] in Israel, 1975), 327. Martin Dean provided me with this source and an accompanying abridged translation into English. Hryhorii Zhulyns’kyi and Mykola Zhulyns’kyi, “To tvii, synu, bat’ko.” Ukrains’ka dusha – na Holhofi XX stolittia. Montazh svidchen’, dokumentiv ta komentari Volodymyra Drozda (Kyiv: Iaroslaviv Val, 2005), 5 patrolled the ghetto,21 arrested Jews they found outside the ghetto,22 guarded Jewish forced laborers,23 and participated in organized “Jew hunts.”24 In the course of their duties, but against regulations, Ukrainian policemen also took valuables as bribes from their victims.25 Those who have the power to do harm also have the power to rescue, and it is to be noted that occasionally policemen chose to rescue Jews, generally on an individual basis. Adam Landesberg, who was then twelve, was caught twice by the same Ukrainian policeman. Each time he cried and was released.26 More such cases have been documented in a monograph by Zhanna Kovba.27 However, it must be understood that this was a marginal phenomenon within the overall activities of the Ukrainian police. OUN from the beginning had a foothold in the police and deliberately infiltrated it,28 so that policemen who joined for entirely different reasons experienced ideological indoctrination. OUN involvement in the Ukrainian police predated the German invasion of the 107. YIUN, no. 841, Vyshnivets, Zbarazh raion, Ternopil oblast, USHMM RG‐50.589*0290. Samuel Rothenberg, List o zagładzie Żydów w Drohobyczu, ed. Edmund Silberner (London: Poets and Painters Press, 1984), 12. 21 USHMM, RG‐50.030*0198, interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz, 15 May 1990. 22 AŻIH, 301/3118, Juda Kneidel, 1. 23 Ibid., 1. 24 Jacob Biber, Survivors: A Personal Story of the Holocaust, Studies in Judaica and the Holocaust, 2 (San Bernardino: R. Reginald, The Borgo Press, 1989), 128, 137. YIUN, no. 841, Vyshnivets, Zbarazh raion, Ternopil oblast, USHMM RG‐50.589*0290. 25 Prusin, “Ukrainskaia politsiia,” 52. AŻIH, 301/305, Jakub Grinsberg, 2. AŻIH, 301/327, Izaak Szwarc, 1. AŻIH, 301/583, 1. AŻIH, 301/1181, Lilith Stern, 2. 26 AŻIH, 301/199, Adam Landesberg, 5. 27 Zhanna Kovba, Liudianist' u bezodni pekla. (Povedinka mistsevoho naselennia Skhidnoi Halychyny v roky "Ostatochnoho rozv"iazannia ievreis'koho pytannia") (Kyiv: Biblioteka Instytutu Iudaiky, 1998). 28 There is a German document, however, that claimed that OUN‐B forbade its members to join the police and automatically excluded anyone who did. Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, no. 10 (3 July 1942), 3. This flies in the face of all other evidence I have seen, but it needs to be cited nonetheless. 6 USSR. After the occupation of Poland the Germans established Ukrainian police academies for the Kraków and Lublin regions, where many Ukrainians lived; after the invasion of the Soviet Union, they transferred many of these policemen to Galicia.29 A prominent OUN representative, Colonel Roman Sushko, actively participated in the development of the Ukrainian police force in the General Government.30 Later, OUN took over the police schools in Lviv and Rivne and used the classroom for nationalist propaganda. When OUN decided to break with the Germans and mount an insurgency and ethnic cleansing action in early 1943, it had enough cadres in the auxiliary police to organize massive desertions to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Thousands of trained, experienced policemen left their posts for the woods almost simultaneously in Volhynia, taking their arms with them and forming the leadership of UPA. Not all who deserted were convinced nationalists under OUN control, but they were not in a position to resist the organization’s demand that they defect. Smaller‐scale desertions also encompassed Galicia somewhat later. Thus the Ukrainian police in German service was crucial to OUN during the period from late 1941 until early 1943, when it no longer had its own militias and did not yet have an insurgent military formation under its control. A similar role to the Ukrainian police was played by the mobile Schutzmannschaften.31 For example, after the nationalist battalion Nachtigall was dissolved, the group was reformed as Schutzmannschaft battalion 201 and sent to conduct antipartisan warfare in Belarus. The commander of Nachtigall, Roman Shukhevych, was also an officer in that battalion and later 29 Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 103. 30 John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Littleton, CO.: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1980), 50. 31 In Volhynia and the rest of the Reichkommissariat Ukraine, the Ukrainian police were also called Schutzmannschaften, but they were stationary Schutzmannschaften. In the General Government, including the District of Galicia, the Ukrainian police were officially designated the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (G Ukrainische Hilfspolizei, U Ukrains’ka dopomizhna politsiia). 7 chief commander of UPA. After Schutzmannschaft battalion 201 was dissolved, many of its members went into the ranks of UPA as well. Bukovyns’kyi kurin’, a nationalist unit formed by the Melnyk wing of OUN which probably took part in the shootings at Babi Yar,32 was also reformed as a Schutzmannschaft battalion and sent to Belarus as well to suppress the partisan movement. The grave atrocities they committed against the civilian population there are well documented. In this paper, however, the mobile Schutzmannschaften are not explored.33 From late 1941 through early 1943, the years in which the Ukrainian police played such a significant role, OUN was in difficult straits. By this time it was divided into two warring factions, OUN‐M under the leadership of Andrii Melnyk and OUN‐B under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. The Melnyk wing of the organization had virtually disappeared in Galicia and had never taken root in Volhynia.34 The Bandera movement, which was the dominant faction of OUN in Western Ukraine, was also at a loss. The German alliance had not worked out at all. This was a particular disappointment for OUN‐B, which had hoped to present the Germans with a fait accompli by declaring a Ukrainian state in Lviv on 30 June 1941. Within two weeks the Germans had arrested OUN‐B’s top leadership, and the Bandera movement had made no alternative plans on what to do in such an eventuality. Even after the arrests OUN‐B operated 32 This has been disputed by V.R. Nakhmanovych, “Bukovyns’kyi kurin’ i masovi rozstrily ievreiv Kyieva voseny 1941 r.,” Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2007, no. 3 (474): 76‐97. Nakhmanovych argued that Bukovyns’kyi kurin’ was not even in Kyiv when the shooting occurred. Evidence subsequently provided by Karel Berkhoff undermines this case. Karel Berkhoff, “Babi Yar: A Summary of the Current State of Knowledge,” paper presented at the experts roundtable of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative, Potsdam and Berlin, 27‐30 June 2011. 33 Important new research on the Schutzmannschaft units with roots in OUN is being conducted by Per Anders Rudling. Per Anders Rudling, “The Khatyn’ Massacre: A Historical Controversy Revisited,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, forthcoming November 2011. Per Anders Rudling, “Terror and Local Collaboration in Occupied Belarus: The Case of Schutzmannschaft Battailion 118,” Historical Yearbook, Nicolae Iorga History Institute, Romanian Academy, 8, forthcoming December 2011. 34 Mieczysław Adamczyk, Janusz Gmitruk, and Adam Koseski, eds., Ziemie Wschodnie. Raporty Biura Wschodniego Delegatury Rządu na Kraj 1943‐1944 (Warsaw and Pułtusk: Muzeum Historii Polskiego Ruchu Ludowego, Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczna im. Aleksandra Gieysztora, 2005), 50. 8 openly, but it decided to go underground in mid‐September 1941.35 But this was not yet a definitive break with the Germans. That came later, in the second half of 1942, according to the historian Ivan Patryliak,36 or in early spring of 1943, if we take the desertion of the police to UPA as being the definitive marker. (And in 1944, with the Red Army rapidly approaching, OUN‐B and UPA once again grew close to the Germans.) The Melnyk faction of OUN never broke definitively with the Germans and collaborated with them until they were defeated. Both factions of OUN kept hoping that German policy would change, that Rosenberg’s plans for erecting a large Ukrainian state within a reorganized Eastern Europe would eventually overcome the radicalism of Himmler, but it was Himmler who had the Führer’s ear, not Rosenberg. Originally, both factions of OUN had placed their hopes on expeditionary groups or task forces (pokhidni hrupy) that would follow the German invasion and transplant their nationalist movement into pre‐1939 Soviet Ukraine. These efforts, however, failed to ignite the national revolution in that very different society.37 This failure was among the factors inclining OUN to put more emphasis on the police. Moreover, the one activity in which the expeditionary groups in Soviet Ukraine enjoyed relative success was setting up police units in German service. Oksana Surmach, author of a book on the Greek Catholic church under the Nazi occupation, said that for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Galicia, the Germans 35 Kost’ Pan’kivs’kyi, Roky nimets’koi okupatsii (New York and Toronto: Zhyttia i mysli, 1965), 147. 36 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), 131. 37 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 84‐86. Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 208‐10, 218, 222, 226, 228‐29. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 239‐71, 314, 331‐36. Taras Kurylo, “Syla ta slabkist’ ukrains’koho natsionalizmu v Kyievi pid chas nimets’koi okupatsii (1941‐1943),” Ukraina moderna 13 (2) (2008): 115‐30. 9 relied on the Jewish police, the kripo (criminal police), and Silesians (Polish‐speaking Volks‐ and Reichsdeutsche). She then added: “Here and there they forced the local Ukrainian police subordinate to them to take part in their actions; the police was forced against its will to participate in Nazi roundups of the Jews and became a blind tool of the occupational regime.”38 Bohdan Kazanivsky had stated something similar in his memoirs: “The Germans began to destroy in mass the Jewish population and frequently took Ukrainian policemen to guard a camp or ghetto. This was a function that the policemen did not at all want to perform, but they did so under explicit orders.”39 The notion that the Ukrainian police was reluctant to engage in anti‐Jewish actions and did so only under duress is not supported by anything I have found in police records themselves – quite the contrary. The archival legacy of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Lviv contains documents that comment on the Jewish police from the point of view of the Ukrainian police. Thus, a report from the March action (sixth commissariat, 25 March 1942), contained this passage: “The action was carried out listlessly on the part of the Jewish Ordnungsdienst. There was recorded an incident when a Jewish member of the Ordnungsdienst, no. 494, took correspondence from the escorted Jews and went away with the goal of delivering it.”40 A report from the same commissariat of 27 March complained that “the action did not give the successful results that were expected” because the Jewish police warned people in advance and released “without grounds” certain Jews who had been rounded up.41 On 30 March, the 38 Oksana Surmach, Dni kryvavykh svastyk. Hreko‐katolyts’ka tserkva v period nimets’koho okupatsiinoho rezhymu v Ukraini (1941‐1944 rr.) (Lviv: Spolom, 2005), 100. 39 Bohdan Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy. Spomyny (London: Ukrains’ka vydavnycha spilka, 1975), 264. He also writes here that Ivan Klymiv opposed having OUN members in the police take part in anti‐Jewish actions. 40 USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 37, f. 3. 41 USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 37, f. 35. 10 sixth commissariat worked without the Jewish police, just with some Germans. It was pleased with the results obtained without the Jewish police placing obstacles in its way.42 According to the Polish underground government’s Eastern Bureau, the Ukrainian police was responsible for the liquidation of Jewish policemen in Lviv: “On 13 February [1943] 170 Jewish policemen were taken away to the camp and their families were shot. Ukrainian militiamen executed this action, having first been made drunk on vodka by the Germans.”43 When in mid‐August 1941 the Germans dissolved the militia set up by OUN‐B and established in its place the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, many of the former militiamen in Lviv petitioned to be allowed to enter the new force that was directly under German command.44 In March 1942, according to a contemporary estimate, there were 122 former OUN militiamen in the Ukrainian police force in Lviv,45 of a total, as already mentioned, of under five hundred policemen. Bohdan Kazanivsky, who played an important role in the formation of the militia in Lviv,46 saw a large measure of continuity between the militia and police in the city: “The Ukrainian militia was renamed as the police, over which the German Schutzpolizei gradually took complete control.” The commander of the police became Major Volodymyr Pitulei, an officer of the former Polish force. Pitulei personally knew some of the leading OUN figures in the police, such as Yevhen Kachmarsky who was deputy commander of the fifth commissariat, but he never revealed them to the Germans in spite of their insistence that he do so. The OUN members served in the force on orders from the OUN leadership. As a result of the efforts of 42 USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 37, f. 57. 43 Adamczyk, Ziemie Wschodnie, 32. 44 Numerous such petitions, dated 13 August 1941, can be found in USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 1, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 4. 45 Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 105. 46 Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy, 212‐14. 11 Ivan Klymiv, an OUN network was set up within the police in Lviv and environs, subordinate to its own leader, who held the rank of a raion leader.47 The Ukrainian police force in Stanyslaviv is said to have been “seamlessly recruited” from the pre‐existing force of three hundred OUN militiamen.48 In Kremenets, Ternopil oblast (then in Volhynia), many of the original Ukrainian militiamen joined the Ukrainian police after the Ukrainian state was suppressed. A memoirist said that “ignorant and [nationally] unconscious” elements entered the police from the militia in order to drink moonshine, rob the Jews, and run rampant in the villages. “Truth be told, there also remained in the police good lads as well, because the Germans punished those families whose sons returned. They were still in the police, but their souls were tortured and they awaited an opportunity to escape from there.”49 For our purposes, the important point here is that the militiamen – good and bad – remained subsequently in the police. A member of the propaganda apparatus of the OUN leadership told his Soviet captors during interrogation that the Banderites had set up the original Ukrainian police force in Volhynia, but that the Germans dissolved it in the fall of 1941. “Yet at the start of 1942 almost all the Ukrainian auxiliary units with the German police were once again filled with those same Banderites who had been expelled in the fall.”50 The Eastern Bureau of the Polish underground government confirms this testimony. A report describing the situation in Volhynia in early 1943 said that OUN was trying to base itself on the local government and on the police. It assessed its 47 Ibid., 263‐65. 48 Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 105. 49 Podvorniak, Viter z Volyni, 138. 50 Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy, fond 13, spr. 372, vol. 2, f. 197 (interrogation of Volodymyr Porendovsky, 15 February 1948). 12 influence on the police as “rather significant,” adding: “One gets the impression that the main organizational core in Volhynia are the c. 200 police stations which exist on that territory.”51 Memoirs and especially case histories prepared for war crime trials also document that many policemen were former militiamen. Bohdan Koziy had joined OUN in 1939 and later served as a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police in Staryi Lysets, Tysmenytsia raion, Ivano‐ Frankivsk oblast. In August 1943 he defected to UPA; his nom de guerre was “Yarema.”52 Wolodymyr Osidach was a member of OUN who had been imprisoned by the Poles for approximately six years in 1930‐39. In the summer of 1941 he followed the German invasion into Rava Ruska, Zhovkva raion, Lviv oblast, where he first worked for the dairy cooperative Maslosoiuz, but then became the commandant of the local Ukrainian militia. After the militia was dissolved by the Germans, he joined the Ukrainian police. First he went through three months of training at the Ukrainian police school in Lviv.53 Although the Wehrmacht on 17 November 1941 categorically forbade the incorporation of adherents of the Bandera movement into the auxiliary police, the OUN‐B itself did everything possible to infiltrate the force and eventually control it. They were particularly interested in penetrating the police force in Eastern Ukraine, where their movement was almost nonexistent. The OUN‐B leadership in March 1942 sent out instructions that said: “Ukrainian nationally conscious youth should volunteer in mass to join the Ukrainian Police” in 51 Adamczyk, Ziemie Wschodnie, 22. 52 Testimony of Bohdan Koziy at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*21, Box 21, case of Bohdan Koziy, 22 September 1981, 71; testimony of Jaroslav Koziy, 25 September 1981, ibid., 107‐16. 53 Neal M. Sher for the United States at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*32, Box 35A, case of Wolodymyr Osidach, 15 September 1980, 1‐8 – 1‐11. See also the testimony of Wolodymyr Osidach, 16 September 1980, ibid., 2‐162 – 2‐165. 13 the Eastern Ukrainian Lands. The instructions also called upon each stanytsia54 in Galicia to send ten men to join the police on Ukraine’s eastern territories.55 Although these instructions proved overly ambitious, they did bear some fruit. OUN had influence on the police in a number of eastern and southern localities.56 Alexander Prusin studied Soviet trials of eighty‐ two former Ukrainian policemen of the general district of Kyiv (Kyiv and Poltava oblasts). Four were members of OUN.57 In fall 1941 there were significant numbers of members of both OUN factions in the police forces of Kyiv, Vasylkiv, Fastiv, Uman, and Bila Tserkva, but their numbers were later reduced by arrests. The chief of police in Fastiv was Ivan Lanovyi, who had arrived with an OUN‐B expeditionary group in July 1941.58 In Kharkiv, OUN‐M emissaries headed by Bohdan Konyk organized the police force, which aided the Germans in the mass execution of Jews.59 After organizing a series of pogroms in Bukovina and before (probably) taking part in 54 A stanytsia was defined in the May 1941 instructions as “the lowest territorial‐organizational unit. It encompasses in its activity a single village, usually, but in larger settlements it encompasses one large street, a neighborhood, a factory or other not overly large concentration of people.” Patryliak, Viis’kova diial’nist OUN (B), 514. 55 “Instruktsii Providnomu aktyvovi OUN,” 29 March 1942, Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, fond 3833, op. 1, spr. 46, f. 1. Patryliak, Viis’kova diial’nist OUN (B), 240. 56 “A couple of days ago, I read a case file from the Bohuslav district in the Kyiv region. It appears the OUN and ‘Petliurites’ (also described as OUN members), took control of the native administration in the district, including the police. According to protocols of interrogations in the case file, these men were involved in shootings of the Jews and Soviet activists in the Boguslav district. In 1941‐early 1942 the OUN cadres also commanded the police in Kyiv, Kherson and probably in some other places as well.” Letter of Oleksandr Melnyk to the author, 23 October 2010. 57 Prusin, “Ukrainskaia politsiia,” 43. 58 Prusin, “Ukrainskaia politsiia,” 44. Eduard Mondzelevs’kyi, “Pochatok viiny na Fastivshchyni,” Borovaia, http://borova.org/?page_id=149 (accessed 30 September 2011). 59 Iurii Iuriiovych Radchenko, “Znyshchennia kharkivs’kykh ievreiv orhanamy HFP ta SD v roky Druhoi svitovoi viiny” (typescript 2011), 4‐5. See also A.V. Skorobohatov, “OUN u Kharkovi za chasiv okupatsii (1941‐1943 rr.),” Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 6 (1999): 83‐87. 14 the murder of Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv, OUN leader Petro Voinovsky left twenty‐five of his men to work as police in Kamianets Podilskyi, in pre‐1939 Ukraine (Khmelnytsky oblast).60 The induction of men into the police through OUN mediation and their subsequent career paths are documented in Soviet trials of former policemen.61 In July 1941 nationalists from Galicia came to the village of Rafalivka, Rivne oblast. They called a meeting at which they explained that it was necessary to help the Germans in their battle with the Bolsheviks, Poles, and Jews. To this end, they urged the young men in the village to join the Ukrainian militia they were setting up. Among those who volunteered was twenty‐year‐old Volodymyr Panasiuk. The militiamen wore blue and yellow armbands. Two Galicians came and trained them in the use of firearms. The militiamen were informed that Stepan Bandera had proclaimed an independent Ukraine, and they had to swear an oath to it. After swearing, they sang the Ukrainian national hymn “Shche ne vmerla.” Then they celebrated with drinks. When the Germans dissolved the militia in Rafalivka in September 1941, Panasiuk remained in the police in German service (the stationary Schutzmannschaft). His duties included guarding the ghetto and escorting Jews to executions. He denied that he himself executed Jews, but he was accused of murdering at least two. Later the Germans transferred him into a Sonderkommando under the SS and SD. In the SS Sonderkommando he fought against Polish partisans in the Warsaw uprising. He wore the Ukrainian national emblem, the trident (tryzub) on his uniform.62 60 Ivan Fostii, “Diial’nist’ OUN na Bukovyni u 1940‐1941 rr.” http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/doccatalog%5Cdocument?id=42164 (accessed 24 May 2011), 14. 61 The reliability of these sources has not yet been fully explored, but see: Alexander Victor Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945‐ February 1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1‐30. Tanja Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943‐1953),” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, no. 2‐3 (April‐September 2008): 1‐24. 62 USHMM RG 31.018M, reel 20; Upravlinnia Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy v Rivens’kii oblasti, no. 19090, t. 1, ffl. 9, 16, 16v, 17 and , t. 3, ff. 3, 3v, 100, 101. 15 During the first period of Soviet rule in Volhynia, 1939‐41, Yakiv Ostrovsky agreed to inform on Ukrainian nationalists to the NKVD. When the Germans arrived, and the nationalists with them, his activities as an informer were revealed. He was taken to the commandant of the local militia. He wept and begged for his life; his wife and family pleaded for him as well. The commandant agreed to spare him if he served in the militia. Later, when the militia was disbanded, Ostrovsky went to work in a dairy plant. But he only had a few months’ reprieve before the nationalists told him to join the Ukrainian police. Otherwise he would face the consequences for his earlier informing. He did as he was told, trained at the police academy in Kremenets, Ternopil oblast (then in Volhynia), and was appointed deputy commandant of Vyshnevets raion. When he turned himself into the NKVD at the end of the war, asking for clemency and a chance to redeem himself at the front, he confessed that he had been involved in killing, but only on a small scale. (Q Tell us, did you kill many people? A No, not many – twenty‐five to thirty people.) He also admitted to taking gold and jewelry. It did not come up in his original trial, but there was testimony taken in 1944 from a man who was forced to bury Jewish victims, some of whom were still alive. The witness identified Ostrovsky as one of those who made him do this. In March 1943 Ostrovsky deserted the police and joined UPA. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1944, but released, probably through the intercession of his brother, who fought on the front. New evidence, however, led to a new trial in the early 1980s. He was convicted of mass murder and executed in 1983.63 Many such fascinating stories could be presented here, but these can serve as an illustration of the complex texture of the policemen’s experiences. 63 USHMM RG‐ 31‐018M (Postwar War Crimes Trials Related to the Holocaust in Ukraine from the Archives of the Security Services of Ukraine), reel 29. 16 OUN not only recruited to , but proselytized within the ranks of the police. There is even a bizarre instance in which a Jew using false identity papers was recruited into UPA as a result of taking his meals in the police cafeteria!64 In spring 1942 the Germans discovered that the police academy in Rivne had been completely taken over by OUN, which was indoctrinating recruits and stockpiling weapons.65 The academy in Lviv was also in OUN hands, according to Bohdan Kazanivsky: “The commanding personnel, headed by centurion I.K., was composed almost entirely of members of OUN.”66 It is noteworthy that the academy sent almost all of its students to aid in the liquidation of the Lviv ghetto.67 This seems to stand at odds with Kazanivsky’s claim that “the commander of the school took care that the trained policemen knew how to behave themselves in service in order not to soil the Ukrainian name.”68 The Germans eventually understood that the Ukrainian police were more loyal to OUN than to them. An OUN meeting was to take place under the cover of a parish festival to be held in Ohliadiv, Radekhiv raion, Lviv oblast, on the feast of St. Michael, 21 November 1943. The Germans learned about this in advance and took precautionary measures – they disarmed the Ukrainian police in the village and arrested the commandant as well as those policemen who were on duty.69 64 Oleksandr Namozov, “Ukrains’kyi povstanets’ Leiba Dobrovs’kyi?” Viche Kostopil’shchyny, 20 June 2009, http://www.kostopilpost.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=109&Itemid=26 (accessed 26 October 2009). 65 Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, no. 4 (22 May 1942). 66 Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy, 266. 67 The academy assigned ten men to a roundup in the second commissariat, twenty to the third commissariat, and ten to the fourth commissariat on 24 June 1942. USHMM RG Acc 1995 A 1086, reel 3, DALO, fond R12, op. 1, od. zb. 38, ff. 41, 44, 50. At the beginning of 1942, the academy had sixteen officers and twenty‐four patrolmen enrolled. Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 104. 68 Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy, 266. 69 Vasyl’ Dmytrovych Pukas, Tryvohy moiei iunosti (Spomyny v”iaznia HULAHu) (Lviv: Vydavets Taras Soroka, 2007), 42. 17 Having its members serve in the police gave many advantages to OUN. The main one is that it provided training and weapons for men who were later to defect from the police and form the leading cadres of UPA. According to Kazanivsky, Ivan Klymiv early on was thinking that “the Ukrainian police will in future serve Ukraine.”70 The Germans feared precisely that. An Einsatzgruppe report from 10 April 1942 said that OUN was trying to gain influence in the stationary Schutzmannschaften. It was trying to make the police units as strong as possible while German forces were overextended. “There is a telling saying: ‘If one day fifty militiamen face five Germans, who will hold power then?’”71 But there were also other ways in which the police, who had some genuine authority, could serve the movement. For example, they could provide the forms and stamps necessary for false papers for OUN activists. One such activist said, at his deportation hearing: The Kennkartes – issue of the Kennkartes was performed by the German police with a Ukrainian assistance, Ukrainian policemen, so say, they come to Lisets [Staryi Lysets, Tysmenytsia raion, Ivano‐Frankivsk oblast] once a month, or once in two months for issuing, for the population, the Kennkarte. So Marko, he was himself a member of our resistance movement. The only thing, he was policeman. So I deliver Marko only photography, ten, fifteen people, working with the German, exchanged. The main thing was the stamp. Kennkarte was easy to get for him than a stamp, so took me sometime long time, four, five, six 70 Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy, 266. 71 Ereignismeldungen UdSSR des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und SD, no. 191 (10 April 1942): 38. 18 weeks, but I always got it from him the Kennkartes....Each were very valuable to us.72 Police also helped transport weapons and a radio transmitter for OUN.73 Ukrainian memory of the Ukrainian police is conflicted, which is not surprising considering the uneasy conjuncture of service to the Germans, simultaneous service to the nationalist movement, and notorious involvement in repressions and atrocities. Bohdan Koziy, who denied he was a Ukrainian policeman but faced deportation from the United States on the grounds that he was, told the court that the Ukrainian police were a normal force like any other: Q Do you know what the Ukrainian Police did in Stanislau? A What they did in Stanislau? Q What were their functions in Stanislau? A Just normal police in any country. Q What does that mean? A Keep the order, keep the hospitals, watch the banks, just like American police.74 72 Testimony of Bohdan Koziy at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*21, Box 21, case of Bohdan Koziy, 2 October 1981, 56. 73 Kazanivs’kyi, Shliakhom Legendy, 266‐67. 74 Testimony of Bohdan Koziy at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*21, Box 21, case of Bohdan Koziy, 2 October 1981, 164. 19 A bit later in the hearing he was asked directly about the police’s involvement in the persecution of Galician Jews: Q Mr. Koziy, didn’t the Ukrainian Police assist in leading Jews to the Ghetto in Stanislau and other big cities? A I don’t know that. I never saw myself. Q You don’t know anything about that? A No, sir.75 The sister of another individual accused of being a Ukrainian policeman also told a deportation hearing in Baltimore that the Ukrainian police was just a normal force: Q At the time what was your understanding of what Ukrainian policemen had for duties?... A I understood like in any other country police duties is to keep law and order.76 75 Testimony of Bohdan Koziy at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*21, Box 21, case of Bohdan Koziy, 2 October 1981, 172. 76 Testimony of Irene Rodd at deportation hearing, USHMM RG‐06.029.01*43, Box 45, case of George Theodorovich, 11 March 1985, 1190. 20 Similar benign presentations of the Ukrainian police as simply a normal police force and even a rather pro‐Ukrainian police force can be found in the Galician testimonies collected by the Yahad‐In Unum project under the direction of Fr. Patrick Desbois77 as well as in the interviews with elderly nationalists in Lviv conducted by Eva Himka,78 although in both cases there were also dissenting opinions. A former policeman who appeared at the Ukrainian‐Jewish conference held in Canada in 1983 denied emphatically that the Ukrainian police had anything to do with the Holocaust.79 In my capacity as co‐editor for History for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, I had tried to introduce a sentence in the entry on the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police that the police had been forced by the Germans to engage in anti‐Jewish actions; even this half truth was not allowed into the encyclopedia.80 There have been nationalist memoirists who have written frankly about Ukrainian police atrocities against Jews, notably Yevhen Nakonechny.81 Kost Pankivsky, who worked in the Ukrainian civil administration, generally thought that the Ukrainian police was a positive factor. “From our point of view, it was a serious plus; it 77 YIUN, no. 764, Khlopivka [Khloptitsy in Yahad‐in‐Unum records], Husiatyn raion, Ternopil oblast, USHMM RG‐50.589*0214. YIUN, no. 785, Skalat, USHMM RG‐50.589*0235. Ternopil oblast A member of OUN‐M registered a negative opinion of the Ukrainian police, however, who, he said, behaved as badly as the Germans. YIUN, no. 737, Lviv, USHMM RG‐50.589*0187. Another man commented that the original militia was composed of patriots but the Ukrainian police in German service was not. YIUN, no. 827, Ozerna, Zboriv raion, Ternopil oblast, USHMM RG‐50.589*0276. 78 Eva Himka and John‐Paul Himka, ““Absence and Presence of Genocide and Memory: The Holocaust and the Holodomor in Interviews with Elderly Ukrainian Nationalists in Lviv,” paper presented at the Fifth Annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies, sponsored by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, 29‐31 October 2009. 79 I was present. 80 John‐Paul Himka, "Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews during the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long‐Term and Conjunctural Factors," in The Fate of the European Jews, 1939‐ 1945: Continuity or Contingency, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1997): 186 n. 11. 81 Ievhen Nakonechnyi, "Shoa" u L'vovi, 2nd ed. (Lviv: Piramida, 2006), 244‐46; see also 188 and 266. 21 was ‘our police’; the fact of its existence raised our prestige both in our own community and among the other inhabitants of Galicia.” He dealt delicately with its involvement in the roundup of Jews for destruction: “...The German command used it to carry out certain orders which did not enter into the compass of its activities and which the police was unable to decline.”82 The Ukrainian writer Arkadii Liubchenko noted in his diary on 7 April 1943 that one could see in the Ukrainian police “the new seed of the Ukrainian army. They hate Poles, and the yellow and blue badge with its trident is a knife in the heart of every Pole.”83 The evidence laid out in this paper, although deriving from many different sources and perspectives, converges, on the whole, in the narrative it supports. It shows that OUN deliberately sought influence in the Ukrainian police. It did so to train cadres and procure other advantages. It was to successfully harvest the police in the spring of 1943 to launch its insurgency and ethnic cleansing projects and to provide the armed, trained backbone of UPA. I have found no evidence that OUN entered the police specifically in order to kill Jews, although it certainly was consistent with their aim to eliminate the minority population and create a “Ukraine for Ukrainians.”84 But although OUN members did not join the police to kill Jews, they joined a force that played a major role in the Holocaust in Western Ukraine. It served the Germans by delivering the victims either to the killing sites or to the train stations that would take them to more distant killing sites. In the course of this, Ukrainian policemen became implicated in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. They also guarded ghettos and forced laborers and mishandled and abused the Jews whom they rounded up and watched. 82 Pan’kivs’kyi, Roky nimets’koi okupatsii, 395. 83 Cited in Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939‐1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (2011): 356. 84 Finder and Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia,” 97‐98. See also Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929‐1947,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 315‐52. 22 They also extorted bribes from the doomed Jewish population, thus stealing the wealth on which Jews often depended for survival. 23