The role of the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Nazi war on the USSR and the Holocaust

 James Clayton, Roger Jordan, Keith Jones

This is the third in a five-part series. The first part introduced Canadian imperialism’s long-standing alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalism. Part two investigated the origins of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi record of Krakivski Visti, which was edited by Mikhailo Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Part four will examine how the Canadian state provided a safe haven to the Nazis’ fascist OUN (M) and OUN (B) collaborators, assisted them in whitewashing their crimes, and used them and far-right Ukrainian nationalism as instruments of its imperialist foreign and domestic policy.

Although bitterly divided over how to most effectively cooperate with the Nazis in bringing about an “independent Ukraine,” the rival Melnyk and Bandera wings of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—respectively the OUN (M) and OUN (B)—hailed and participated in the Nazi’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and served as the Nazis’ henchman in the Holocaust.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR was conceived of, from the start, as a “war of extermination” aimed at establishing German imperialist domination over colonies stretching to the Urals. It was characterized by unprecedented brutality and savagery.

 Under the “Generalplan Ost,” developed by state institutions and the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, the peoples living in Eastern Europe or Russia were to be exterminated or transformed into colonial slaves. As the bloody violence unleashed by this crusade gathered pace, Hitler and his closest collaborators moved in late 1941 to implement their “final solution” for Europe’s Jews, i.e., the planned and systematic extermination of 6 million people in the Holocaust.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), other contemporary right and far-right Ukrainian nationalists who promote, defend and whitewash the OUN, and their imperialist sponsors in Ottawa, Washington, London and Berlin make a series of self-serving, utterly fantastic claims about the OUN’s record in World War II. All of them are a pack of lies.

They claim that the OUN and the Banderite Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were a “national liberation movement.” In reality, they were fascists, subservient to Nazi Germany and later to British and US imperialism. They claim the OUN and UPA fought “both the Nazis and the Soviets.” This despite the Ukrainian fascists having eagerly served in the June 1941 invasion of the USSR and their having continued to fight the Soviets, either directly under Nazi command or in coordination with them, until they were forced to flee in 1945 to the final Nazi redoubts in Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.

In particular the UCC and Ukrainian far-right venerate the genocidal record of the UPA—a force whose leadership and fighters were largely comprised of fascists who, under Bandera’s orders, had previously served the Third Reich’s war machine and the SS. Finally, the present-day defenders of the Ukrainian fascists claim that they played no part in the Holocaust. Were we not speaking of the extermination of well over 1 million Ukrainian Jews, this would be laughable. 

Numerous OUN documents and publications, during and even well before the outbreak of World War II, advocated mass violence against the Jews. Recent historical research has documented in chilling detail the OUN and UPA cadres’ participation in the Holocaust—including in the rounding up of Jews, their mass slaughter and the staffing of the death camps—as well as the murder of more than 100,000 Poles in ethnic cleansing operations and tens of thousands of Soviet Russian and Ukrainian partisans. The greater the evidence against the Ukrainian fascists, the louder their contemporary defenders scream. But they cannot cry loud enough to silence objective historical facts.

Canadian historian John Paul Himka, himself once a promoter of the myth of Bandera as “national liberation fighter” and a life-long liberal promoter of one form or another of Ukrainian national identity politics, has been forced to admit, through a confrontation with these facts, that the OUN was a criminal organization which participated in the genocide of European Jewry and in the ethnic cleansing of Poles. In his recent book, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944, Himka summarizes the OUN-UPA role in the Holocaust:

There were three major phases in which the nationalists contributed to the mass murder. ...

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