Ukrainian collaborationism with the Axis powers



During the military occupation of Ukraine by Nazi Germany, a number of Ukrainians initially chose to cooperate with the Nazis. Their reasons included the hopes of independence from the Soviet Union and past maltreatment by Soviet authorities.

However, the absence of Ukrainian autonomy under the Nazis, mistreatment by the occupiers, and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as slave laborers, soon led to a rapid change in the attitude among the collaborators. By the time the Red Army returned to Ukraine, a significant number of the population welcomed the soldiers as liberators. At the same time, more than 4.5 million Ukrainians had joined the Red Army to fight Germany and more than 250,000 served as Soviet partisan paramilitary units.

Initial attitudes towards German invasion
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, and by September the occupied territory was divided between two German administrative units the General Government and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Many Ukrainians chose to resist and fight German occupation forces by joining the Red Army or the Soviet Partisans. However, particularly in the Western Ukraine assigned to General Government, loyalty to the Soviet State was low due to the fact that it had been under Soviet control for a brief period of 2 years after the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland under the Hitler-Stalin-agreement following September 17, 1939. Although the Ukrainian SSR did give the population the national and cultural autonomy that neither the Second Polish Republic nor the interwar Romania did, it came at a price. In 1933 millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the infamous famine, the Holodomor and in 1937 several thousand intelligentsia were exiled, sentenced to Gulag labor camps or executed. The negative impact of Soviet policies helped garner support for the German cause, and in some regions, parts of the nationalist minority initially viewed the Germans as allies in the struggle to free Ukraine from Stalinist oppression and achieve independence.

Under occupation
Some Ukrainians cooperated with the German occupiers, participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, and serving as concentration camp guards. Nationalists in the west of Ukraine were among the most enthusiastic early on, hoping that their efforts would enable them to establish independent state later on. For example, on the eve of Barbarossa as many as four thousand Ukrainians, operating under Wehrmacht orders, sought to cause disruption behind Soviet lines. After the capture of Lviv, in important Ukrainian city, OUN leaders proclaimed a new Ukrainian State on June 30, 1941 and were simultaneously encouraging loyalty to the new regime, in hope that they would be supported by the Germans. Already in 1939, during the German-Polish war, the OUN had been “a faithful German auxiliary”, according to

Professor Ivan Katchanovski of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University writes that during the war the leadership of OUN B and UPA was heavily engaged in Nazi collaboration - at least 23% of its leaders in Ukraine were in the auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 as well as other police formations, 18% took part in training in Nazi Germany's military and intelligence schools in Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland, 11% served the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions, 8% in local administration during the Nazi occupation, and 1% in the SS Galicia Division;according to Katchanovski the percentage of Nazi collaborators among the OUN-B and UPA leadership is likely higher than those numbers, as much data from early occupation is missing

However, despite initially acting warmly to the idea of an independent Ukraine, the Nazi administration had other ideas, in particular the Lebensraum programme and the total 'Aryanisation' of the population. They preferred to play Slavic nations out one against the other. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages, trying to destroy or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory. When OUN help was no longer needed, its leaders were imprisoned, and many member were summariry executed, with over 600 shot in the Babi Yar massacres.The arrests were only temporary however according to professor Katchanovski;while 27% of the leadership of OUN B and UPA were arrested at one time, they were released relatively soon or allowed to escape

Holocaust
The atrocities against the Jewish population during the Holocaust started within a few days of the beginning of German occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian auxiliary police was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre and in other Ukrainian cities and towns, such as Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr. On September 1, 1941, Nazi-controlled Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote "The element that settled our cities (Jews)... must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved."

In May 2006, a Ukrainian newspaper Ukraine Christian News commented: "Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine.".

While some proportion of collaborators were volunteers, others were given little choice. Ukrainian and some other nationalities caught fighting for the Red Army were sometimes given the option between dying of starvation and exposure in the ill-equipped POW camps reserved for the Red Army or working for the Germans as a hiwi including duty in the concentration camps and ghettos primarily as guards. The men selected for such duty were trained in the Trawniki concentration camp and were used for that part of the Final Solution known as Operation Reinhard. However they were never fully trusted, and with good reason as some would escape their enforced duty, sometimes along with the prisoners they were meant to be guarding and occasionally killing their SS commanders in the process.

Righteous Among the Nations in Ukraine
According to Yad Vashem, 2185 righteous Ukrainians had been identified by the year 2007. These are the people who risked their lives to save the Jews. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, little information was known of these acts due to Soviet censorship of this topic.

During his visit to Ukraine, Pope John Paul II beatified one of the righteous - Father Omelyan Kovch who sacrificed his life while saving several hundred of Jews. In 1942, father Kovch issued Jews large numbers of baptism certificates in attempt to save their lives. In doing so, he broke the Nazi prohibitions and so he was arrested in December 1942 and deported to the Majdanek concentration camp where he was gassed and burned on March 26, 1943.

The most famous instances of the saving of hundreds of Jews during World War II features the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Andrey Sheptytsky. He harbored hundreds of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries. He also issued two pastoral letters, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "On Misericordia" that instructed the Greek-Catholic believers not to participate Nazi atrocities and aid those persecuted. Despite this, however, Sheptytsky remains unrecognized for his acts by Yad Vashem

Auxiliary police


109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 201-st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaftant-battalions participated in anti-partisan operations in Ukraine and Belarus. In February — March 1943 50-th Ukrainian Schutzmannschaftant-battalion participated in the large anti-guerrilla action «Winterzauber» (Winter magic) in Belarus, cooperating with several Latvian and 2nd Lithuanian battalion. Schuma-battalions burned down villages suspected in supporting Soviet partisans. All the inhabitants of the village Chatyń in Belarus were burnt alive by the Nazis with participation of the 118th Schutzmannschaft battalion on 22 March 1943

Ukrainian volunteers in the German armed forces

 * Nachtigall Battalion
 * Roland Battalion
 * Freiwilligen-Stamm-Regiment 3 & 4 (Russians & Ukrainians)

SS Division "Galizien"


On 28 April 1943 the German Governor of District Galicia, Dr. Otto von Wächter, and the local Ukrainian administration officially declared the creation of the SS-Freiwilligen-Schützen-Division Galizien. Volunteers signed for service as of 3 June 1943 numbered 80 thousand. On 27 July 1944 the Galizien division was formed into the Waffen SS as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (gal. Nr. 1).

One theory is that these men volunteered eagerly for war against the Soviets, rather than being an example of evidence for active support of Nazi Germany. A counter theory is that at least some of them were victims of compulsory conscription as Germany suffered defeats and lost manpower on the eastern front. Sol Litman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center claims that there are many proven and documented incidents of atrocities and massacres committed by the Waffen-SS Galizien against minorities, particularly Jews during the course of World War II, however other authors, such as Michael Melnyk, and Michael O. Logusz, maintain that members of the division fought almost entirely at the front against the Soviet Red Army. They also defend the unit against the accusations made by Litman and others since the war. German official records noted that the 4,5,6 and 7 SS-Freiwilligen regiments were under Ordnungspolizei command at the time of the accusations. Neither the division nor any of its members were ever charged with any war crime (see 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian)).

Ukraine propaganda news

 * Ukrainskyi Dobrovoletz (Der ukrainische Kämpfer) - Ukrainische Freiwilligenverbände

Ukrainian units in the German work organization

 * Organization Todt OT-Einsatzgruppe Ost (Kiev)

Ukrainian collaborators (heads of local administration and public figures)

 * Oleksander Ohloblyn (Kiev mayor, 1941)
 * Volodymyr Bahaziy (Kiev mayor, 1941–1942, executed by Germans in 1942)
 * Leontii Forostivsky (Kiev mayor, 1942–1943)
 * Mykola Velychkivsky (head of the Ukrainian National Committee in Kiev, dismissed in 1942, later emigrated)
 * Fedir Bohatyrchuk (head of the Ukrainian Red Cross, 1941–1942)
 * Ivan Rohach (journalist, public figure, executed in 1942)
 * Oleksii Kramarenko (Kharkiv mayor, 1941–1942, executed by Germans in 1943)
 * Oleksander Semenenko (Kharkiv mayor, 1942–1943)
 * Paul Kozakevich (Kharkiv mayor, 1943)
 * Aleksandr Sevastianov (Vinnytsia mayor, 1941 – ?)