Hidden History of Right-Wing Ukrainian Nationalism--Part 1

In recent weeks, the Democratic Obama-Kerry administration has apparently been promising U.S. government backing for a recently set-up Ukrainian nationalist regime that includes representatives of right-wing Ukrainian nationalist groups like Svoboda and Right Sector. Yet, ironically, a 2005 book by Wendy Lower, titled Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, revealed the following information about the hidden anti-democratic history of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism during World War II:

"... Ukrainian nationalists of both leading factions established ties and even trained with Wehrmacht and SS intelligence personnel in preparation for Operation Barbarossa. Such German-Ukranian cooperation signaled to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that their goal of independence might be condoned, if not supported...

"...Among the thousands of Ukrainians who did work in the German administration--that is, the mayors, collective farm supervisors, postal workers, messengers, and clerks--a minority, albeit an influential one, did systematically hunt and brutalize the Jews: the Ukrainian police...

"Not surprisingly, the clearest case of a Ukrainian role in the `Final Solution' can be found among the German records of their Ukrainian auxiliary police units...

"German military commanders and officers of the SD commanders used...Ukrainians (and ethnic Germans) in a number of so-called security tasks, including the identification of the Jews from among the local population and sunbsequent anti-Jewish measures. For example, in Shpykiv, south of Vinnytsia in the Romanian border (the Bug River), the very first order issued by the Ukrainian commander of the `Ukrainian National People's Militia' (who wore the nationalist trident on his uniform) was that all Jews over seven years of age must wear the white star...

"...In a village near Chudniv, the Jewish survivor Galina Efimovna Pekerman recalled, the Germans arrived at the end of July [1941] and enlisted local Ukrainians to massacre first the Jewish children of the village and then the rest of the Jews (about 800 persons), who were seized and gunned down at the local park. In general, German officials instigated the pogroms, but they preferred not to bloody their own hands since local militiamen (Ukrianian and ethnic Germans), anti-Semites, and plunderers were so obliging...

"Local police and civil commissars relied on the Ukrainians to assist them with nearly every step of the `Final Solution' leading up ot the point of execution. They needed the locals to identify the Jewish population, to distribute the armbands, to collect special anti-Jewish taxes, and then to go from house to house, seize the identified Jews, guard them, escort them to their execution, and beat any who tried to resist.

"Several thousand Ukrainians in Zhytomy's German administration (largely in the police) carried out anti-Jewish measures under the watchful eyes of their German supervisors. There were also cases in which Ukrainians in and outside the administration came willingly to the Germans and denounced Jews, whose fate no one could doubt after the summer of 1941. As more than one of Zhytomyr's Jewish survivors remarked, for every one Ukrainian who helped a Jew, there were many more who denounced Jews to the Germans...

"Both factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists espoused anti-Semitism, and their concept of a Ukrainian state was not a multiethnic one. In April 1941, Stepan Bandera's Second General Congress at Cracow issued a resolution to fight the Jews, whom he branded as the `vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine.' A month later, as Bandera's leaders trained their task forces for their role in Operation Barbarossa, they prepared a 70-page set of guidelines titled `Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.' According to scholars Karel Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, the OUN-B document states that `at a time of chaos and confusion liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite and Jewish activists is permitted, especially supporters of Bolshevik-Muscovite imperialism.'...According to the OUN-B's prewar instructions, these enemies should be made `harmless when the new revolutionary order is being established in Ukraine.' In the future autonomous Ukraine, assimilated Jews were also not welcome. In July 1941, the head of the newly declared Ukrainian state, Iasoslav Stets'Ko, wrote in his autobiography: `Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expediency of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.'

"Stets'ko's writings and recently discovered documents from Ukrainian nationalists attached to Bandera's movement demonstrate that OUN-B leaders supported Nazi anti-Jewish actions...

"...As a political movement, Ukrainian nationalism continues to be tainted by its wartime history: Eastern Ukrainians remain suspicious of Galician-based nationalism and condemns the OUN for its collaboration with the Nazis and perpetration of atrocities against Poles and Jews..."