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Chapter 8 The Ethnic

Cleansing of Western Ukraine

(1939–1945)

Everything changed when the Polish state was destroyed by Nazi Ger-

many and the Soviet Union in September . For two years Poland’s

territory and citizens were divided between Hitler and Stalin. Between

 and , while the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact held,

most of Poland’s Ukrainians fell under Soviet rule, while most Poles

were ruled by the Nazis. In June  Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet

Union, occupying Galicia, Volhynia, and Soviet Ukraine along the way.

For the next three years all of Poland’s territory and citizens were at the

mercy of Hitler. Nazi Germany established the Reichskommissariat

Ukraine (which included Volhynia) but added Galicia to the Generalgo-

uvernement (as its administration of the parts of Poland not absorbed

into the Reich was known). In February , after the largest battle in

history, Paulus disobeyed Hitler and surrendered at Stalingrad. In

spring  the Red Army went on the offensive. In summer  the

Soviet Union forced the Germans from Ukraine, and redrew the Pol-

ish-Ukrainian border. By spring  all of Poland’s territory and citi-

zens were at the mercy of Stalin. Galicia and Volhynia suffered a triple

occupation: Soviet in , Nazi in , then Soviet again in .

At every stage, the Second World War was far more brutal in Ukraine and

Poland than on the Western Front. Between  and , Soviet and Nazi oc-

cupiers destroyed local societies and deported and murdered elites. After ,

German soldiers on the Eastern Front were ordered to live off the land, and in-

doctrinated to believe that the Slavs were Untermenschen. Unlike the western

campaign of , the eastern campaign of  was fought as a war against in-

ferior races.

Between  and , organs of German power carried out the

Holocaust of the Jews, often before the eyes of (and sometimes with the assis-

tance of) locals. After  Soviet power returned, this time with the new mis-

sion of creating homogenous national spaces. War, occupation, hunger, repri-

sals, deportations, and genocide deﬁned the situation within which Poles and

Ukrainians lived and died for six long years.

Ukraine and Poland both suffered enormously during the war, and the So-

viet Union and Nazi Germany were enemies of both. Nevertheless, at every

point, the war divided rather than united Ukrainians and Poles. The prewar

disagreement about who had the right to rule Galicia and Volhynia was like a

point which, in , became the peak of a triangle: from which opinions di-

vided, rolled downward with ever greater speed, ever further from each other,

hitting bottom with a barrier between them. The previous chapter brought us

to this initial point; the purpose of this one is to demonstrate how war gave na-

tional disagreement the new shape of national war. Before , the disagree-

ment about legitimate rule of territory was of limited practical importance. In

wartime, it led to quarrels which were not only intractable in principle but

which provoked each side to infuriate the other. It led important Ukrainian

nationalist partisans to conclude, by , that the future of Ukraine could best

be secured by the ethnic cleansing of Poles. The implementation of this pro-

gram brought about tens of thousands of civilian deaths, created the conditions

for a Ukrainian-Polish civil war within the larger world war, and totally recast

Ukrainian-Polish relations.

How a political dispute over the legitimate rule over territory of  led to

the ethnic cleansing of people from territory by  is the main question of

this chapter. It is one thing to wish for ethnic purity; it is quite another to cre-

ate it. Although rhetoric about the removal of peoples was common in the

Poland (and the Europe) of the s, the experience of war rendered such a

program plausible, and the attrition of war brought ethnic cleansers to the fore.

The escalation from rhetoric to action can be explained by three consequences

of war: () the reopening of the question of legitimate rule over Galicia and Vol-

hynia; () the implementation of massive programs of ethnic cleansing and

Ethnic Cleansing of Western Ukraine

155

genocide designed by Stalin and Hitler; and () the decapitation of local soci-

eties, Polish and Ukrainian alike. Before we shift to a narrative account of the

ethnic cleansing of Poles from what became Western Ukraine, let us consider

these three factors.

LEGITIMATE RULE OVER TERRITORY

Once the Polish state was destroyed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,

the natural presumption in its favor disappeared, and differences of opinion

about its legitimacy began to matter. As of September , only sixteen years

had passed since the Entente had approved Poland’s eastern border. The foot

soldiers of the – West Ukrainian-Polish war were still men in their prime.

For Ukrainian national activists, Galicia and Volhynia were still subject to a

compelling Ukrainian claim, which now could be satisﬁed. People who saw

Polish rule as an occupation now worked to establish a Ukrainian state in its

place. People of Ukrainian culture who took less radical views still could see no

particular reason, after , why Poland should reestablish its power over them.

Although the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had been await-

ing such a moment, it still faced a daunting task. The creation of states is inher-

ently harder than their restoration: it gains fewer international allies; it ﬁts

poorly into international legal regimes; it seems to require revolutionary means.

Precisely because it is so difﬁcult, it gives rise to greater temptations. Ukrainian

nationalists had a political motive to collaborate with the Nazis, since Ukraini-

ans (unlike Poles) could see Germany as an ally in the struggle for independence.

Whereas politically active Ukrainians wished to create a new state to include

the formerly Polish territories of Galicia and Volhynia, politically active Poles

wished to restore Poland within its borders of . For their part, Poles found

it hard to forget that Ukrainian villagers had greeted the Wehrmacht with

bread and salt in September .

In the Generalgouvernement, the surplus of

educated Ukrainians found visibly rewarding careers as journalists, teachers,

professors, and bureaucrats.

The collaboration of Ukrainian elites with Ger-

man authorities, arguably rational from the perspective of those who wished to

found a Ukrainian state and build a Ukrainian nation, was treason in the eyes

of the Polish resistance. It was easier for the Polish resistance to execute collab-

orating Ukrainians than Germans, as this was less likely to bring German repri-

sals against Polish civilians. It goes without saying that it was easier for a Polish

resistance movement to target Ukrainian collaborators than fellow Poles.

Collaboration leaves a lasting stain. Ukrainians who welcomed Soviet rule in

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156

 often changed their minds: but Poles could not forget initial joy at the de-

struction of the Polish state. Ukrainian nationalists who joined in the Nazi in-

vasion of the Soviet Union in  were quickly disillusioned: but that they had

served in German uniforms was not easily forgotten. Yet one must not imagine

that only Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis, especially in what had been

eastern Poland, in lands taken by the Soviet Union in  and occupied by

Germany only in . After two years of Soviet rule, many had some reason to

receive the German invasion of the Soviet Union as a liberation. (Although this

seems impossible now, in summer  some Jews imagined that German rule

could be no worse than Soviet. It is possible that Soviet deportations had, pro-

portionally, touched Jews more than anyone else; collectivization was especially

hard on traders and small businessmen; the Final Solution had not yet begun.

During the Soviet occupation, thousands of Jews had actually ﬂed Soviet rule

for German rule.) Among Poles in Galicia and Volhynia, subject to Soviet rule

between  and , collaboration with the Germans never had the same

stigma as in central and western Poland. Although Ukrainians were granted al-

most all positions of authority in Galicia, Poles played an important part in the

German administration of Volhynia.

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157

Fig. . A failed attempt to cross the Bug/Buh River, from Soviet to Nazi occupation,

probably in . Tens of thousands of citizens of interwar Poland crossed the river in both

directions, believing that the other occupation regime could not be worse.

Some of these tensions inhered in occupation, some were provoked by the

occupiers. Both occupying powers divided in order to rule.

Soviet occupation

provoked conﬂict between Poles and Ukrainians in , to create the condi-

tions of “revolution” which ostensibly justiﬁed extending the Ukrainian SSR

west to include what had been Polish territories.

The Nazis allowed a Ukrai-

nian Central Committee to operate in Cracow; nominally a relief organization,

it was the quasi-ofﬁcial center of Ukrainian political life. Ukrainian members

of the Central Committee wished to use German power to remove Poles and

Jews from Ukrainian “ethnographic territory.”

In Volhynia after , the Ger-

man occupier offered Ukrainians a chance to persecute Poles (–), and

then Poles a chance to do the reverse (–). These were usually attempts to

preserve order—division is a means to ruling, not an end in itself—although

they had the effect of enlarging and arming national partisans. Attempts to im-

plement Nazi ideology had similar nationalizing consequences. Unbelievably

ambitious projects to create Lebensraum for Germans set Poles against Ukraini-

ans. German attempts to colonize the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands near Za-

mos´c´ in –, in which the Ukrainian Central Committee played an orga-

nizational role, were designed such that they had to worsen Ukrainian-Polish

conﬂicts.

CLASSIFICATION AND ELIMINATION

OF GROUPS

As this suggests, what Ukrainians did to Poles, and what Poles did to Ukraini-

ans, cannot be reduced to an escalation of events concerning only those two

groups, and so cannot be understood within narratives of national history.

Most fundamentally, how Poles and Ukrainians treated each other was trans-

formed by their contact with the practices of occupiers, both of whom classiﬁed

individuals and deported or killed according to classiﬁcation. Both the Soviets

and the Nazis issued identity cards to everyone beginning in , a seemingly

banal policy with enormous consequences. The  Lwów/L’viv joke had it

that “a person is composed of body, soul, and passport”; as we shall see, identity

documents issued in  very often determined whether body and soul held

together.

Before the implementation of the Final Solution in , the Nazis

moved hundreds of thousands of people in and out of occupied Poland accord-

ing to bizarre schemes which were never completed. These provided a model:

in December  some Ukrainian activists in the Generalgouvernement as-

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158

sumed that mutual ethnic cleansing would resolve Ukrainian-Polish disputes.

The leader of the Ukrainian Central Committee actually proposed future pop-

ulation exchanges “on the German model” to Poles.

The Soviets deported at

least four hundred thousand Polish citizens, disproportionately Jews and Poles,

between  and .

This represented about  percent of the population in

these lands. These deportations ended only with the German invasion of June

. As German troops advanced into Ukrainian territory, the Soviet NKVD

hastily executed thousands of political prisoners, most of them Ukrainians.

This was presented by Ukrainian nationalists as an injury at the hands of Jews.

At this moment of great vulnerability arrived the Nazis, who treated the

NKVD murders as cause for Ukrainians to take revenge upon Jews. Character-

istically, this propaganda was false, but effective.

The years – should be seen as the ﬁrst stage in the general acceptance

that individuals can be classiﬁed into groups and treated accordingly. From

, the Final Solution brought to public attention the idea that a group could

be physically eliminated.

In late  and throughout  several thousand

Ukrainians participated as policemen in the Final Solution in both Galicia and

Volhynia.

The Final Solution was carried out before the eyes of Poles.

The

central fact of the Holocaust in Galicia and Volhynia was the cold-blooded

murder of local Jewry. In certain historiographical traditions, the Holocaust (or

Shoah) put an end to the continuous history of Jews in Europe and created the

conditions for a Jewish state elsewhere. It is easy to understand this point of

view. Other historiographical traditions marginalize the Holocaust from a

larger narrative of progress: of communist revolution, or of national develop-

ment. These are harder to spot, but easier to criticize. To clear the way for a crit-

ical history of wartime and postwar Eastern Europe, one must gain some dis-

tance on both of these traditions, and imagine the Final Solution within a

sequence of events, and its consequences on societies that watched or took part.

It bears repeating that the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in summer  was

the second imposition of totalitarian practices in three years. It was formative

for many young Ukrainian men, but it was not their baptism into political

power. Many of the young Ukrainians who joined the Nazi auxiliary police

(Hilfspolizei ) in  had served as militiamen under Soviet rule since .

They were trained then to see Ukrainian-Polish differences as a class struggle

with a national solution: the deportations of the professional classes, which

were largely Polish. That said, from  collaboration in the Final Solution

changed the collaborators, transformed Ukrainian boys in Volhynia into the

Ethnic Cleansing of Western Ukraine

159

kind of men they could never have become otherwise. Ukrainians who joined

the German administration and the German police in  were acting on sev-

eral motives: to continue a career they knew, to have inﬂuence over their own

affairs, to steal property, to kill Jews, to gain personal status, to prepare later po-

litical actions. Because the Ukrainian state had to be created, while the Polish

state only had to be restored, Ukrainian nationalists had a political motive to

collaborate with the Germans and to encourage Ukrainian youth to join Nazi

organs of power. Yet in daily practice cooperation with the Nazis had little to do

with this political goal, which the Nazis opposed, and much to do with killing

the Jews, a major Nazi policy. To repeat, the greatest change in Volhynian soci-

ety was the murder of . percent of Volhynian Jews.

Yet our purposes re-

quire us to keep in view the consequences of the Holocaust for the collabora-

tors. The Nazis trained Ukrainian policemen not only in the use of weapons,

but in the hatred of Jews. From the SS young Ukrainian recruits received anti-

Semitic indoctrination in their own language.

Understanding all this, Metro-

politan Sheptyts’kyi wrote to Heinrich Himmler asking that Ukrainian police-

men not be used to murder Jews. In November  Sheptyts’kyi issued a

pastoral letter, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

The message Sheptyts’kyi had read

from the pulpit of every Greek Catholic church was that no earthly end can jus-

tify murder.

By this time, a few thousand Ukrainian men had already committed politi-

cal murder for a cause that was not even their own: the Thousand Year Reich of

Adolf Hitler. The Final Solution had already taught them that the mass murder

of civilian populations may be achieved by way of precise organization and the

timely presence of men willing to shoot men, women, and children. Although

extermination camps such as Sobibor were quite close, in Volhynia in late 

and throughout  Jews were not transported by trains to camps but

marched into open ﬁelds, and killed not by gas but by bullets. Village by village,

town by town, an ancient civilization was removed from the face of the earth.

Recall the Volhynian town of Ostróg, discussed earlier as a center of early mod-

ern controversies concerning Christian Reform. It was also a historical center of

Jewish learning: the Khmel’nyts’kyi rebellion of , which brought to an end

the East Slavic renaissance in the old Commonwealth, was recorded by a grad-

uate of the Ostróg yeshiva. Nathan Hanover’s Abyss of Despair (Yeven metsulah)

was, horribly, prophetic. Ostróg was one of the ﬁrst Volhynian towns touched

by the Final Solution. Two-thirds of its Jews had already been killed by the end

of , before ghettoes were established.

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160

Ethnic Cleansing of Western Ukraine

161

Fig. . Inhabitants of interwar Ostróg. The town is today Ostroh, Ukraine. Though an

early modern center of Christian study and disputation, the town was heavily Jewish before

.

Once the surviving Jewish population had been enclosed in ghettoes, the

German SS carried out the major actions during the second half of , with

the assistance of the Ukrainian and German police. Urban Jews were led from

their ghettos to pits a few kilometers away, stripped of the clothes and belong-

ings, forced to lie down, and machine-gunned by SS men. The Ukrainian po-

lice’s duties included the murder of Jews who sought to escape the ghetto as it

was liquidated, the murder of Jews who sought to escape along the way, and the

murder of Jews who survived the machine-gun salvos. The Final Solution in

smaller towns and villages is less well documented, but here the Ukrainian po-

lice played a greater part. All in all, about twelve thousand Ukrainian police-

men assisted about fourteen hundred German policemen in the murder of

about two hundred thousand Volhynian Jews. Although their share in the ac-

tual killing was small, these Ukrainian policemen provided the labor that made

the Holocaust possible in Volhynia.

They worked right through December

.

The next spring, in March–April , virtually all of these Ukrainian po-

licemen left the German service to join the Ukrainian partisans of the UPA

(Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia, Ukrainian Insurgent Army).

One of their

major tasks as UPA partisans was the cleansing of the Polish presence from Vol-

hynia. Poles tend to credit the UPA’s success in this operation to natural

Ukrainian brutality; it was rather a result of recent experience. People learn to

do what they are trained to do, and are good at doing what they have done

many times. Ukrainian partisans who mass-murdered Poles in  followed

the tactics they learned as collaborators in the Holocaust in : detailed ad-

vance planning and site selection; persuasive assurances to local populations

prior to actions; sudden encirclements of settlements; and then physical elimi-

nation of human beings. Ukrainians learned the techniques of mass murder

from Germans. This is why UPA ethnic cleansing was striking in its efﬁciency,

and why Volhynian Poles in  were nearly as helpless as Volhynian Jews in

. It is one reason why the campaign against Poles began in Volhynia rather

than Galicia, since in Volhynia the Ukrainian police played a greater role in the

Final Solution. This links the Holocaust of the Jews and the slaughter of the

Poles, since it explains the presence of thousands of Ukrainians in Volhynia

with experience in genocide. But why did Ukrainian nationalists decide to

eliminate Poles from Volhynia? How did people with such plans come to be in

a position to order the ethnic cleansing of Poles in ? In  Ukrainian po-

licemen took orders from Germans to kill Jews; from whom did UPA partisans,

largely the same people, take orders in  to kill Poles?

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162

THE DECAPITATION OF CIVIL SOCIETY

The demoralization and decimation of Ukrainian and Polish elites was perhaps

the most important cause of Ukrainian-Polish conﬂict. The ﬁrst Soviet occupa-

tion (–) decapitated Polish and Ukrainian society by deporting and

murdering elites. Poles and Jews were more likely to be deported or killed than

Ukrainians; but then there were few educated Ukrainians. At least four hun-

dred thousand Polish citizens were arrested and deported from Poland’s former

eastern territories to Kazakhstan or Siberia. Priority in deportation was given to

state ofﬁcials and professionals, thus leaving many settlements with no author-

ity ﬁgures and no moral compass. Stalin had the NKVD murder more than

twenty thousand educated Polish citizens whom the Red army took prisoner in

, including almost half of the Polish ofﬁcer corps. Seven to nine hundred of

these were Jews, reﬂecting among other things the presence of Jewish Polish of-

ﬁcers. These are the crimes associated with the Katyn´ Forest, but they took

place at other sites as well. As the Soviet Union withdrew from Galicia and Vol-

hynia after the German invasion of , the NKVD shot thousands more local

Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews.

After , on the German side, in the General-

gouvernement, the Nazis murdered the Polish intelligentsia and imprisoned sus-

pect Ukrainians. German repression also created the conditions for unforgetta-

ble injuries: as when Polish Kapos killed the two brothers of Ukrainian nationalist

leader Stepan Bandera in Auschwitz.

Poles in the Chelm region liquidated

 leaders of Ukrainian society on grounds of collaboration. As Ukrainian na-

tionalists reported, this nationalized the Ukrainian-speaking population of the

region.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in , it arrested Ukrai-

nian elites, including Ukrainian nationalists, in Galicia and Volhynia. The OUN’s

proclamation of Ukrainian independence in June  led to dozens of arrests.

In at least one case, the Germans were provoked by Soviet partisans into mur-

dering several hundred educated Volhynian Ukrainians.

Especially after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in , the destruction

of elites coincided with the militarization of Ukrainian and Polish civil society.

During the war, the bearers of authority on both sides were no longer political

institutions such as parties or governments, but military organizations such as

partisan armies or self-defense militias.

Although the Polish Home Army was

an impressive organization in many respects, its command structure was vul-

nerable. The Gestapo arrested its commander, General Stefan Rowecki, in June

. Other Polish partisan armies were loosely subordinated to the Home

Army but represented particular political currents (such as the Peasant Battal-

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