Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust
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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.
The main enemy of Ukraine is not Jewry, but Moscow, which has subjugated Ukraine; Muscovite imperialism is not to be confused with the disintegrative assistance of the Jews. Nevertheless the role of the Jews is not to be underestimated. I am of the opinion that in the struggle against Jewry in Ukraine German methods are to be employed.110
These passages were first published in the KGB-produced book Lest We Forget “authored” by Michael Hanusiak, and Western scholars were reluctant to rely on them.111 But after the archives were opened in the 1990s, Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk published the full texts of Stetsko’s autobiography with extensive commentary in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. In a subsequent issue of that journal, Taras Hunczak cast doubt on the autobiography’s authenticity.112 Hunczak was a professor at Rutgers Newark who had made some solid contributions to the study of modern Ukrainian history, mainly of an editorial and compilatory nature. As a child during World War II, he had served as a courier for OUN, and later in the emigration he was associated with the Lebed group, the dviikari. He was also a passionate defender of Ukrainians against accusations of antisemitism; for example, he wrote an article exonerating Symon Petliura of responsibility for the pogroms that raged in Ukraine in 1919113 and an account of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during World War II intended as a response to Judge Jules Deschênes’ Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada.114 So it is not unusual that he would take up the issue of the Stetsko memoirs and conclude that they were forgeries.
I will examine Hunczak’s major arguments and then offer some additional considerations. First, he wondered why the memoirs were found in Ukraine rather than in Germany; he raised the question in order to buttress his final conclusion, which was that the autobiography “was written in the offices of KGB functionaries.” At present, there is no precise answer to Hunczak’s question. But there is a general answer: the Soviets took German records that interested them. Thus records of the RSHA are in Moscow and the records of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg are in Kyiv; the Soviets also took records of the secret police and intelligence units. The best informed specialist on Soviet archives, Patricia Grimsted, explained:
The seizure of Nazi records was specifically ordered by Allied Control Commission laws and paralleled similar seizures by the Western Allies. The only difference was that the Western Allies worked together with seized Nazi records, while Soviet authorities refused to cooperate....[B]y the 1960s, the Western Allies had agreed to return to West Germany almost all the Nazi records they had seized (with the exception of some military and intelligence files), following analysis and microfilming. Soviet authorities, by contrast, never even made known which Nazi records they had retrieved.115
His second argument was that Lest We Forget was untrustworthy and outright deceitful. This was an accurate assessment, but it does not follow logically that therefore everything in the book was manufactured. Hunczak was able to show that “Hanusiak” deliberately distorted and misrepresented sources, but not that he used fake evidence. For example, he analyzed a photograph of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky that Hanusiak claimed was a picture of the churchman receiving a swastika during a military exercise in 1939; in fact, Hunczak had found the original of the photo in the Lviv archives and determined that Sheptytsky was receiving a scout (Plast) badge at a scouting camp in 1930. Thus the photo was real, but the meaning the KGB wanted viewers to derive from it was not. As the saying goes, even the devil can quote scripture.
The third argument he brought to bear was linguistic. He maintained that the spelling of the adjective pidpol’nyi was “a transparent Russian variation of the Ukrainian pidpillia.” But if he had checked the spelling used by Lviv’s major newspaper, Dilo, in the 1930s, he would have found the supposed “transparent Russian variant” pidpol’nyi employed frequently.116 Hunczak’s major linguistic argument was that the spelling in the autobiography uses an h (г) “where an individual from western Ukraine, particularly in 1941, would have used the letter g” (ґ). An example he cites is “propahanda instead of propaganda.” But the legal newspaper under the German occupation, L’vivs’ki visti, used the spelling propahanda in 1941, and Stetsko himself used the spelling propahanda.117 The linguistic arguments, in sum, fail.118
In Hunczak’s opinion, “the ultimate fraud” was a statement in the autobiography that Stetsko edited the journal Ideia i chyn in 1939-40. Again, Hunczak made an error, confusing the Ideia i chyn of 1942-46, in which Stetsko indeed had no role, with a periodical that bore the same title, but came out earlier and was in fact edited by Stetsko.119 Thus none of Hunczak’s proofs of fabrication hold up.
On the other hand, there are solid arguments in favor of the authenticity of the autobiography. For one thing, we know of no other example of the KGB seeding secret archives with false documents. We certainly know of Soviet falsifications, but not of falsifications that they secreted in archives that were basically closed to researchers. Moreover, the autobiography is an oddly preserved document. There is no full text of the German version; instead, there is a draft of the first page and then a fair copy of the rest of the pages, but some text missing in between. And there are also some discrepancies between the German and Ukrainian texts; for example, the German version notes that Stetsko was born in a priest’s family, but the Ukrainian version omits that information. Would the KGB have put together such a sloppy document? These odd features smack of the irregularity of a genuine archival document.
Moreover, there was nothing unusual in the substance of the anti-Jewish passage of the document. As Berkhoff and Carynnyk pointed out when they published it,120 and as we will see for ourselves in the next chapter, what Stetsko had to say in his autobiography of July 1941 was very similar to what other OUN leaders were saying at the same time and what Stetsko himself had been saying about Jews in previous years. In fact, the autobiography uses verbal formulations quite characteristic of Stetsko, as we can see by comparing it to an antisemitic article he published in 1939 in a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper in Canada, “Zhydivstvo i my” (Jewry and Us). The short article of 1939 uses the same vocabulary as the two paragraphs on Jews in the autobiography of 1941. (See Table 1.)
Table 1
“Жидівство і ми” 1939 Життєпис 1941 Москва є головним ворогом головним ворогом—Москву закріплювач (грали ролю закріплювача ворожого стану посідання) закріповувати (помагають Москві закріпо[ву]вати Україну) виключення всякої асиміляції виключаючи її асиміляції московський азіят московсько-азіятський народIn conclusion, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the 1941 Stetsko autobiography.121
The Book of Facts
In 2008 the SBU released with great fanfare a document, The Book of Facts,122 that it said exonerated OUN, and specifically its battalion Nachtigall, from participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the summer of 1941. As presented at that time, the Book of Facts was “essentially a chronicle of the activities of OUN during March-September 1941.”123 The relevant passage on the pogroms is interesting and short enough to present in full:
4-7 July 1941
Representatives of Gestapo units, who came to Lviv in great number, by various paths approached Ukrainian circles that the Ukrainians should organize a three-day pogrom of the Jews. “Instead of organizing demonstrative funerals for political prisoners murdered by the Bolsheviks,” they said, “it is better to execute a major revenge action against the Jews. Neither German police nor military authorities will interfere in this.”
The leading personnel of OUN, when they learned of this, informed all members that this was a German provocation in order to compromise the Ukrainians by pogroms, in order to provide a pretext for the German police to intervene and “restore order,” and—most important—to divert the attention and energy of the Ukrainians in general from political problems and the struggle for independent statehood towards the slippery road of anarchy, crimes, and plunder.
Already the Second Great Assembly of OUN expressed itself decisively against any Jewish pogroms,124 condemning such tendencies as the attempts of occupiers to divert attention of the popular masses from the root problems of the liberation struggle. Now, in the first days of the German occupation, these decisions were realized in practice, prohibiting participation in the pogroms of Jews and counteracting German provocations. Only thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities, in spite of the tremendous wave of indignation called forth by the Bolsheviks’ murder of 80 thousand Ukrainian political prisoners and in spite of the numerous provocations of the German Gestapo to incite Ukrainians to slaughter Jews.
After the publication of the text, both Marco Carynnyk and I raised questions about the status of the document. Both of us pointed out that it was no contemporary chronicle of 1941 but was in fact a chronological compilation put together some time after World War II was over.125 We did not claim that The Book of Facts was a falsification, but rather that its presentation as a chronicle proving that OUN did not participate in the pogroms of July 1941 was a deception. Since our initial articles, the entire text of The Book of Facts has become available, and a well-researched study confirms that the book was compiled after the war, namely by OUN-UPA in Poland (Zakerzonnia) in 1946-47.126
Thus The Book of Facts was prepared after the Germans lost the war and after the crimes of the Holocaust had come to public attention throughout the world as a result of the Nuremberg trials. It belongs in the same category as the postwar OUN publications of the diaspora: it proves nothing about 1941, only about the postwar self-presentation of OUN. A good indication of how factual The Book of Facts is its assertion that “thanks to the decisive attitude of the OUN cadres there did not result in the first days after the retreat of the Bolsheviks a massive slaughter of Jews in Lviv and in other Ukrainian cities....”
Although patently unreliable, The Book of Facts served as a primary source for an exhibition on the Shoah in Lviv at the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv in 2013.127
The Stella Krenzbach Memoirs
In 1954 Ukrainian publications in Toronto and Buenos Aires published the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Stella Krenzbach (Krentsbakh), who had served as a nurse in UPA, both near the end of World War II and after the war, during the anti-Soviet insurgency. Her memoir said she was brought up in a small Galician town, in a family that spoke only perfect Hebrew among themselves, and her closest girlfriends were Ukrainian. She did not look like a typical Jewish girl of the region: in fact, she was a natural blond with cornflower blue eyes. Later she moved to Lviv to study. She hoped to go to medical school, but her application, along with the applications of thirty-eight Ukrainians, was rejected; she was the only Jewish girl not accepted. She studied philosophy instead, earning a doctorate. But that was in 1939, when war broke out.
Her experiences with the Bolsheviks were negative. She was arrested by the Soviet militia, who, she said, had orders to send all Jews to Siberia, but she managed to escape from them through a bathroom window. She claimed to be the only Jew who welcomed the Germans, since she thought they would build Ukraine. She was quickly disabused, obtained false papers with a Ukrainian last name, and worked in Ukrainian homes as a seamstress. She hated the passivity with which other Jews marched to their death. Having finished with the Jews, the Germans began to arrest the Ukrainians, shooting some, sending others to concentration camps. “But the Ukrainians were not meek, like the Jews: they repaid blood with blood, death with death.” She heard rumors about UPA in Volhynia and suspected that one of her friends had connections with them. Her friend arranged for her to join the insurgent army. She said not to worry about her Jewishness, since the soldiers of UPA “do not divide people by races but by whether they are honest or not.” She was given a six-month nursing course and served in an UPA hospital. Eventually the Bolsheviks decimated her unit, and the remainder fought their way into the American zone of Austria in the fall of 1946. From there she went to Israel.128
Only a few years passed before this beautiful tale was exposed as a fabrication. Friedman made an investigation into the memoir. When it was republished in Buenos Aires in 1957, a prominent Melnykite, Dmytro Andriievsky, filled in a bit more of Stella Krenzbach’s life story. In Israel, he wrote, she went to work as a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs.129 She first published her memoirs in the Washington Post, and a few weeks later she was murdered. Here is what Friedman discovered: “I checked the Washington Post of that period and did not find the memoirs. At my request, Dr. N.M. Gelber of Jerusalem made inquiry in the foreign ministry there; the reply was that the ministry had never had an employee by that name and that such a case of homicide was entirely unknown. Moreover, a careful analysis of the text of the ‘memoirs’ has led me to the conclusion that the entire story is a hoax.”130 One of the dviikari, Bohdan Kordiuk, also looked into the Stella Krenzbach question. His conclusion was very similar. He asked the UPA veterans he knew if they had known or heard of her; none had. In his opinion, “the tale of Dr. Stella Krenzbach has to be considered a mystification.”131
But decades passed, Ukraine became independent, connections with the Ukrainian diaspora intensified, and some Western Ukrainians were calling for the rehabilitation of OUN and UPA. Not surprisingly, then, in 1993, a periodical connected with the Vasyl Stus Memorial Society in Lviv, Poklyk sumlinnia, reanimated Stella Krenzbach by republishing her memoir. The memoir fit perfectly with Zhanna Kovba’s goal to give the lie to stereotypes of antisemitic Ukrainians and communist Jews, and she accepted it as good coin.132 Volodymyr Viatrovych also cited her memoir in his 2006 book on OUN and the Jews to demonstrate the presence and acceptance of Jews in UPA.133 Then as the controversies around OUN and UPA heated up near the end of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, the Ukrainian-language Jewish poet Moishe Fishbein did a great deal to publicize the Krenzbach story. He gave a conference paper, frequently reprinted/reposted at the time, entitled “The Jewish Card in Russian Operations against Ukraine,” which used the Krenzbach memoir to counter Russian claims that UPA was antisemitic. He also put the Krenzbach memoirs on his website in Ukrainian and in English translation.134 Fishbein’s efforts took in many people.135
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The controversies over the legitimacy of sources reaffirm the need to treat sources with care. In our survey, we saw the limitations and problems with every kind of source we looked at. The German documents do not constitute, as earlier Holocaust scholars believed, the touchstone of truth; instead they are marred by deep biases. Soviet documents are formulated using an ideological vocabulary and, more important, sometimes tailored information to serve the needs of the state. Internal OUN documents are much more reliable than documents produced for external consumption. Moreover, the researcher has to be careful about deliberate misrepresentation and even falsifications by OUN. Crucially, official documents of every provenance need to be triangulated, whenever possible, with other evidence, primarily eyewitness testimony, but also when relevant with photographs, films, and the periodical press. Jewish testimony is often marked by trauma and Ukrainian testimony by evasion. All sources need to be treated with care. Some sources, moreover, have imbedded problems as products of criminal practices: German documents and photographs are components of the atrocities they report on, and Soviet interrogations have their origins in torture. Questions around sources are not simple, but it is hoped that this survey has armed the reader with sufficient understanding to make reasonable judgments about the utility and reliability of the various sources and about the historical processes which they reflect.
1 There is actually a wonderful finding aid prepared along these lines: Berkhoff, “Ukraine under Nazi Rule.”
2 Ilnytzkyj, Deutschland und die Ukraine 1934-1945.
3 Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 39 n. 29.
4 Friedman, Philip. “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 181, 196 n. 15. EM, no. 126, 27 October 1941; translation from Einsatzgruppen Reports, 210.
5 OUN v svitli postanov.
6 See below, 163, 165, 170-71, 225-26.
7 Berkhoff and Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,” 177 n. 30.
8 Zlochyny komunistychnoi Moskvy.
9 Yevhen Stakhiv has related that in December 1941 he passed on a letter from the leader of one faction of OUN, Stepan Bandera, who was then imprisoned by the Gestapo in Berlin, to the underground head of OUN-B in the Homeland, Mykola Lebed, instructing OUN not to antagonize the Germans and to try to repair relations with Germany. About forty years later, Stakhiv reminded Lebed, who was then the leader of the dviikari, of Bandera’s instructions, but Lebed claimed not to remember them. Again about five years later Stakhiv raised the subject with Lebed, and this time he allegedly answered: “Yes, I remember. But I didn’t want you to tell people about it. It is not necessary for history to know the truth.” Stakhiv, Kriz’ tiurmy, 99-100. Although this story does seem to characterize the dviikari’s attitude to history, I lack faith in Stakhiv’s reliability as a memoirist. The incident has been accepted as genuine, however, by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” 106; Stepan Bandera, 41.
10 Kurylo and Himka, “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv,” 259.
11 http://resource.history.org.ua/cgi-bin/eiu/history.exe?&I21DBN=ELIB&P21DBN=ELIB&S21STN=1&S21REF=10&S21FMT=elib_all&C21COM=S&S21CNR=20&S21P01=0&S21P02=0&S21P03=ID=&S21STR=0013098, accessed 23 October 2018.
12 Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 287 and 428 n. 63.
13 See above, 31-38.
14 See above, 52.
15 Serhiichuk, OUN-UPA v roky viiny, 311-12.
16 Artizov, Ukrainskie natsionalisticheskie organizatsii.
17 There is a very interesting book on the RHSA: Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation.
18 Headland, Messages of Murder.
19 DALO, fond R12, op. 1.
20 For more context on this, see Himka, “Legislating Historical Truth.”
21 USHMM, Acc. 1995.A.1086, RG-31.001M.
22 I am grateful to David Alan Rich for sharing a copy of the militia files with me.
23 There are also regional SBU archives that I have not consulted, but the younger generation of Ukrainian historians (e.g., Marta Havryshko, Roman Shliakhtych, and Andrii Usach) has been making good use of them in their publications.
24 This problem is fleshed out more fully in Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.
25 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency, 247-48. We now have an excellent account of the methods used by the NKVD during the late 1930s in Soviet Ukraine based on NKVD interrogators’ own admissions of “violations of socialist legality”: Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. See also a wrenching study of Stalinist interrogations in postwar Poland that was able to explore the issue more from prisoners’ perspectives: Chodakiewicz, “The Dialectics of Pain.”
26 This comes out very clearly in Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial.
27 Bohunov, Mytropolyt Andrei Sheptyts’kyi.
28 Dumitru, “Analysis.”
29 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 54-55.
30 Prusin, “‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!’” 18.
31 Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial,” 21. See also Penter, “Collaboration on Trial.”
32 Comments of Tanja Penter in Coleman, “Roundtable,” 235-37.
33 This is the same period in which the Soviets published the English-language tracts that appeared under the name Valerii Styrkul. See above, 42.
34 Himka, “‘Skazhite, mnogo liudei vy rasstreliali?’”
35 Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 118, 121.
36 YVA, r.g. M.52, file 245.1 (6412889), frames 86-88; originally from DALO, 3/1/278. Extraordinary Commission documents.
37 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.
38 The Commission’s investigation of Hrymailiv is found in GARF, fond 7021, opis 75, delo 94, ff. 1-4, 14-34v; USHMM RG-22.002M, reel 17.
39 Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Lfd. Nr. 698, Lübeck 2 Ks 1/67 (vol. 31 of the printed edition), 483.
40 Solonari, “Patterns of Violence,” 55.
41 Kovba, Liudianist’ u bezodni pekla, 213. A photocopy of the complete testimony is online: https://training.ehri-project.eu/a10-1946-philip-friedman-recalls-pogrom-lviv (accessed 15 January 2019). Kovba gives a different archival location and says the testimony was to the Extraordinary Commission. But the online testimony, which seems to be an identical text, was to the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War. I assume the same testimony was used for both commissions. I want to thank Alexander Melnyk for first turning my attention to this and providing me with information on the Commission for the Study of the History of the Great Patriotic War.
42 Philip Friedman, “The Destruction of the Jews of Lwów,” 246. Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” 183, 198 n. 24.
43 On the Vinnytsia mass murders, see Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror.”
44 Korzen, “The Extermination of Two Ukrainian Jewish Communities,” 311 (quote). Yad Vashem Studies, which published Bingle’s testimony in 1959, apparently accepted this as good coin. Unfortunately, the publication of the testimony did not specify to which Soviet body the testimony was given.
45 The title of the collection is “Selected Records from Former Archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine, 1919-1937; 1941-1962; and 1965.” USHMM RG-31.026 Acc. 2003.260; the documents are originally from TsDAHO. I would like to thank Vadim Altskan at USHMM for directing me to this collection.
46 For example, in 2017 an aluminum milk can full of well preserved OUN-UPA documents was found in the Yaniv woods near Lviv. The can had been buried in mid-1951. “Vidkopaly arkhiv UPA.” Even more recently, in autumn 2019, OUN-UPA documents from 1945-46 were found in woods near Rohatyn in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. Prystans’ka, “U lisakh Ivano-Frankivshchyny.”