Sunday, March 16, 2014

Hidden History of Right-Wing Ukrainian Nationalism--Part 2

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 1987 book by Douglas S. Tottle, titled Fraud, Famine and Fascism, revealed the following information about the hidden anti-democratic history of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism during World War II:

"On June 30, 1941, the Nazi army entered Lviv, capital of Western Ukraine. In its vanguard came the German-uniformed Nachtigall Battalion of Ukrainian Nationalists, under the command of Roman Shukhevych. With the collusion of the Nazi Abwehr, the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN] immediately set up a so-called `Government of Western Ukrainian Lands,' headed by Yaroslav Stetsko who had accompanied the Nazi invaders to the city. A pogrom of the Lviv area's Jewish population at once was launched...

"American writer Saul Friedman, who undertook extensive research on the historical persecution of Jews by Ukrainian nationalists, states in his book Pogromchik:

"`During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigall Battalion, composed almost entirely of Ukrainians under the direction of the Gestapo, slaughtered 7,000 Jews in the vicinity of Lwow (Lemberg)...'

"Under the Banderite Nationalist clique posing as a government, many of Lviv's non-Jewish writers, intellectuals and professionals known to be hostile to Nazism were also slaughtered...

"Historian Reuben Ainsztein has chronicled the widespread and voluntary help given by the Ukrainian Nationalists to the Nazi exterminations in Western Ukraine. In his classic Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, he states that at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the OUN leaders: `Stetsko and Bandera proclaimed the creation of a "free Ukraine" and organized a 31,000 strong militia...The militia played a most important part in making it possible for the Einsatzkommando to carry out their task of genocide and terror until the middle of August [1941]...The militia was then disbanded and 3,000 cut-throats were allowed to enroll in the Ukrainian Auxilliary police which was to play such an abominable role in the annihilation of the Jews in Eastern Europe.'

"In the first eight months of Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine, 15 percent of Galician Jews--100,000 people--were slaughtered by the joint actions of the Germans and Ukrainian Nationalists. Nahum Kohn describes the Ukrainian fascist role in the holocaust in Ukraine's Volyn region: `...whenever Jews were slaughtered, 4 or 5 Germans would participated "helped" by 100 or 200 Ukrainian Nationalists..."

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