Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: John-Paul Himka
Издательство: Автор
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9783838275482
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in this press was quite depressing. The Ukrainians who had followed the Germans out of Ukraine before the Red Army’s advance saw their world collapsing. Not only had the Soviets returned to Ukraine and so many conscious Ukrainians become displaced to the West, but there was plenty of other bad news: communists coming to power throughout Eastern Europe, the suppression of the Greek Catholic church, the famine of 1946, the resettlement of the Ukrainian population in Poland, and the suppression of UPA in Poland and repression of its adherents. The Ukrainians in the camps were overwhelmed by their own memories of suffering and struggle and the bleak prospects for the future. The Ukrainians positioned themselves now as virulently anti-German, their initial flirtation with the Germans being presented as an honest error. And they remained anti-Soviet.

      I was curious if the immediately postwar Ukrainian press continued to publish antisemitic articles and discovered that overt antisemitic statements had almost disappeared, even though many of the same journalists continued to work in the new environment. Although occasionally concerned with Polish-Ukrainian relations, Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the issue of the Holocaust and Ukrainian participation in it were hardly mentioned at all. What was developing, however, was a defense of Ukrainian behavior with regard to the Jews, although, as I’ve said, the issue was rarely treated at all.

      Thus just a few years after the war we see expressions of the kind of argumentation that would be used in subsequent years to defend the record of OUN and UPA during the war. The Germans forced people to participate in anti-Jewish actions (which was indeed sometimes the case). The major offenders were not the Ukrainian educated elite but the lower classes, the rabble. Collaboration in the Holocaust was a matter of individual responsibility and guilt, and Ukrainians cannot be held collectively responsible for what happened. What is important about this formulation is that it excludes from consideration any intermediate actors between individuals and the national community as a whole, such as the occupation press, the local Ukrainian civil adminstration, OUN, UPA, and police and military units in German service. Also, Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s condemnation of the Holocaust and rescue of Jewish children are understood to exonerate Ukrainians as a whole from charges of antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust.

      Disputed Sources

      Critics and defenders of OUN have argued over the authenticity and meaning of some sources, and in what follows I will look at three major controversies that have arisen.

      Yaroslav Stetsko’s Autobiography of July 1941

      As we will describe in more detail later,108 one of the most prominent leaders of OUN-B, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared the renewal of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv on 30 June 1941. OUN-B was hoping to present the Germans with a fait accompli, but they miscalculated, and over the course of July a number of OUN-B leaders were arrested. Stetsko was arrested by the Security Police on 9 July and taken to Berlin; there on 12 July or within a day or two thereafter he wrote an autobiography in two languages, Ukrainian and German. A passage in the Ukrainian version reads:

      I consider Marxism to be a product of the Jewish mind, which, however, has been applied in practice in the Muscovite prison of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic people with the assistance of Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s greatest enemies and bearers of corruptive Bolshevik international ideas.

      The corresponding passage in the German version is:

      Marxism is indeed to be considered as a creation of the Jewish brain, but its practical realization (also with Jewish help) was and is in the Muscovite prison of peoples, brought about by the Muscovite people. Moscow and Jewry are the greatest enemies of Ukraine and the carriers of disintegrative Bolshevik international Ideas.