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‘They Defended Ukraine’: The 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited
Abstract
In recent years there has been an increased interest in the legacy of the Fourteenth Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS, known as the Waffen-SS Galizien, a Ukrainian volunteer formation formed in 1943. In Ukrainian ultra-nationalist mythology the unit is depicted as freedom fighters who fought for an independent Ukraine, its collaboration with Nazi Germany dismissed as “Soviet propaganda.” There is a widening gulf between the myth and the picture that emerges from the archival materials. This article revisits the history of the unit, with a particular focus on aspects of its history which the myth makers omit or deny: its ideological foundations, its allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and the involvement of units associated with the division in atrocities against civilians in 1944.
... At the same time, in spring 1943, the Division SS "Galicia" was formed through the mobilization of Ukrainian volunteers and members of the police battalions (Rudling, 2012b). Regarding the formation of the Division and the recruitment of the Ukrainian population, initially the OUN-UPA did not express a consistent position. ...
... Regarding the Division SS "Galicia", it may be said that it is known not so much for its battles at the front, as for the fact that its units participated in punitive operations against the Polish civilian population. For example, in February 1944, the 4th regiment of the division killed between 6 and 800 people in the process of the "pacification" of the village of "Huta Pieniacka" in the territory of Western Ukraine (Motyka 2014:164-167;Rudling 2012b). ...
The present study provides analysis of the institutionalization of historical revisionism in Ukraine and examines the impact of this revisionism on the formation of modern Ukrainian criminal policy. The characteristics of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, will be determined, and their role during World War II will be analyzed, with special emphasis placed on their involvement in crimes against humanity. The study focuses on the fact that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army have all the features of profascist organizations, and in this regard, the institutionalization of their heroization not only creates the prerequisites for modern glorification of Nazism, but also constitutes a legal basis for the decriminalization of glorification of Nazism, as well as for the criminalization of behavior disputing this glorification.
... już niemal nie słychać w Kanadzie otwartej gloryfi kacji OUN/UPA, a pokolenie bezpośrednio zaangażowane w ich działania oraz w działalność SS "Galizien" odchodzi (por. Rudling 2011Rudling , 2012Rossoliński-Liebe 2012). Również kanadyjska wersja ukraińskiego patriotyzmu uległa przemodelowaniu wraz z powstaniem i okrzepnięciem niepodległej Ukrainy. ...
The book is dedicated to the migratory experience of Ukrainian immigrants
from Poland to Canada, their practices and narrations of memory, and communication
between migrants and Poland. The empirical basis derives from
ethnographic field studies conducted in 2014–2016 in Edmonton and Toronto
in Canada. In total, the research lasted 12 months, during which I conducted
a long-term participant observation, ethnographic unstructured interviews
and narrative interviews, typical for the biographical method. In addition,
private correspondence, newsletters, and websites of diasporic organizations,
as well as materials posted by the respondents on social media were analyzed,
and the results of field and internet research were integrated as part of
the whole analysis.
The subject of my attention was a group of people of Ukrainian descent
who came from Poland to Canada in the 1980s. I tried to show the phenomenon
of migratory memory and its impact on the formation of diasporas with
regard to this group of Ukrainian descent. My intention was also to fill the
gap in anthropological research on migration and diasporas and in research
on emigration overseas from Poland in the 1980s.
У статті розглядається поточний російсько-український конфлікт із точки зору класичної теорії тріадичного зв’язку Роджерса Брубейкера. Ми протиставляємо нову політику пам’яті, освіти та мови в Україні після Євромайдану офіційній російській критиці з її широкими посиланнями на, серед іншого, нацизм та «етноцид», міжрегіональну напруженість всередині України, а також спільне «героїчне» минуле росіян і українців. На перший погляд, риторичне та політичне загострення між Україною та Росією у 2014-2019 роках виглядає як типовий тристоронній конфлікт між постколоніальною державою-націоналізатором, етнічною меншиною та її зовнішньою батьківщиною, за концептуалізацією Брубейкера. Проте на основі історичної контекстуалізації ми робимо висновок, що класична теорія тріадичного наступу може лише частково пояснити причинно- наслідкові механізми ескалації російсько-українського конфлікту. Ідеологія та політика. http://www.ideopol.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/3.-Fedorenko-Umland.pdf
During the Second World War, approximately 1000 Christian chaplains accompanied Wehrmacht forces wherever they went, from Poland to France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. Chaplains were witnesses to atrocity and by their presence helped normalize extreme violence and legitimate its perpetrators. Military chaplains played a key role in propagating a narrative of righteousness that erased Germany's victims and transformed the aggressors into noble figures who suffered but triumphed over their foes. Between God and Hitler is the first book to examine Protestant and Catholic military chaplains in Germany from Hitler's rise to power, to defeat, collapse, and Allied occupation. Drawing on a wide array of sources – chaplains' letters and memoirs, military reports, Jewish testimonies, photographs, and popular culture – this book offers insight into how Christian clergy served the cause of genocide, sometimes eagerly, sometimes reluctantly, even unknowingly, but always loyally.
This paper analyzes the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers and Ukrainian and Polish governments policies offered different and often divergent theories and narratives of this case of political violence. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish war, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a Ukrainian-Polish war or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.
Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovene (Abstract in Slovene and English, Summary in English) Key words: Second world war, Lower Styria, Waffen-SS, national-liberation army and partisan detachments of Slovenia, collaboration, third reich Abstract: Article is dealing with the (combat) performance of the 14th Grenadier Division Waffen-SS in Slovenia against partisans in two different time periods, in the last year of the Second World War. As one of the Waffen-SS divisions, formed from non-German(ic) soldiers, was involved in frontline fighting against the Soviet Red Army and against Slovakian and Slovenian partisans. In Slovenia it was primarily used in the area of Lower Styria and it's most known for the operation on Menina Plateau, but the parts of the division were also sent against partisans in Lower Carniola and Upper Carniola regions. Despite its size, rather good weaponry and previous combat experiences, Galician division didn't gain any major victories against the Slovenian national-liberation movement.
The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.
The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second
World War. Nearly half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations and
at least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.
What analytical framework do we need in order to study villages shaped by intensive and long-lasting migration processes? The author tackles this question by scrutinizing the history of a Western Ukrainian village from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in a case study. Migrants and non-migrants alike were closely interconnected to each other by manifold networks. This kind of interconnectedness proved to be amazingly persistent and did not lose its function even decades after the migration processes themselves had come to an end due to economic or political caesurae. In order to fully grasp this phenomenon, it is necessary to synthesize migration and village history, striving towards a ‘micro history of the globally connected village’.
This paper analyzes the war in Ukraine as an outcome of multilayered rivalry combined with unintentional mistakes committed by all possible sides. The first layer of competition concerns domestic differences visible between the Western and Eastern part of Ukraine. The second layer covers the regional rivalry between Poland and Russia, which has significantly contributed to the instability of Eastern Europe for several centuries. Finally, the third layer concerns the geopolitical game for influence between the West, led by the United States, and Russia along with several satellite states. Ukraine proved to be just another object of this competition, composed of such events as the Kosovo intervention, the Orange Revolution, the Caucasus war in 2008 and the Syrian chemical crisis.
This is the first systematic pan-European study of the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who fought — either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures — for the Waffen-SS (or auxiliary police formations operating in the occupied East). Building on the findings of regional studies by other scholars — many of them included in this volume — The Waffen-SS aims to arrive at a fuller picture of those non-German citizens (from Eastern as well as Western Europe) who served under the SS flag. Where did the non-Germans in the SS come from (socially, geographically, and culturally)? What motivated them? What do we know about the practicalities of international collaboration in war and genocide, in terms of everyday life, language, and ideological training? Did a common transnational identity emerge as a result of shared ideological convictions or experiences of extreme violence? In order to address these questions (and others), The Waffen-SS adopts an approach that does justice to the complexity of the subject, adding a more nuanced, empirically sound understanding of collaboration in Europe during World War II, while also seeking to push the methodological boundaries of the historiographical genre of perpetrator studies by adopting a transnational approach.
The historical region of Galicia was appropriated successively by the Habsburg Imperium, Independent Poland, the USSR, Hitler Germany, and Communist Poland and the USSR. It is presently divided in to two by the border between Poland and Ukraine, the EU and the belt of post-Soviet states. Its multicultural past has been eradicated through genocide, ethnic cleansing, and deportations by Hitler and Stalin as well as various interethnic conflicts between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. From 1989 on, pilgrims, survivors, root tourists, and also religious, political, and community activists have started to rediscover it. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, as well as Russian and Western travelers cross the borders to remember their childhood places, the locus of their deportation or survival, or the cradle of the family history, or just a province lost. Their expectations are partly met, or sometimes ignored, by municipal and regional authorities, travel agencies, private businesses, and locals, who all contribute to form a network of touristic infrastructures. The memory of WW2 and of the subsequent deportations looms large in the personal agendas of tourists and community activists. However, Poland and Ukraine envision local, historical, and identity tourism in the region variously. While Western Ukraine tries to convey a strongly nationalistic and monoethnic image of the region, Poland, under the influence of EU guidelines and subsidies, has opened to a more multicultural and postmodern concept. Transnational tourism across the border participates in the reassertion of conflicting national identities.
The international study of fascism has, over the last 25 years, experienced considerable consolidation. Inspired by influential theoretical publications of Roger D. Griffin and others, a new sub-discipline, " comparative fascist studies, " has emerged that proceeds from a largely common conceptualization of fascism. It explicitly includes and particularly promotes the cross-cultural, as well as inter-epochal investigation into ultra-nationalisms outside Central and Western Europe after the year 1945. The concepts, approaches and hypotheses of this new sub-discipline are well-suited to be applied to the study of inter-war and post-Soviet right-wing radicalism in Eastern Europe. However, before comprehensive classification and informative comparison becomes possible, the putative fascist phenomena of Eastern Europe need more thorough descriptive analysis, field research, and empirical investigation by researchers, in the region.
This essay contextualises the recent controversy about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which opened in September 2014 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by documenting the background shadowing the campaigns spearheaded by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress against CMHR advisory board plans to install a permanent gallery devoted to the Holocaust. Their history demonstrates how these ultranationalist lobbies have glorified the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, its militant wing (UPA), and the Waffen-SS Galizien while rationalising or occluding their roles in Second World War period massacres of Jewish and Polish civilians.
The article examines how Ukrainian history textbooks dealt with the Holocaust between independence and 2006. The analysis reveals two major, conflicting narratives about the Holocaust, though both externalize and relativize the Holocaust. As a template for understanding genocide, the Holocaust was applied to the Soviet-imposed 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. The emphasis placed on the famine in both narratives partially obscures the Holocaust and in propagating the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, turns Jews into leading perpetrators of the Holodomor. In the Ukrainian case, the complex relationship among history, historical culture, and contemporary politics is compounded by the familiar tension between national history and the international reality of the Holocaust. The historical Sovietization of Holocaust victims was attacked by historians in the Ukrainian diaspora who resented the accusations that Ukrainians were collaborators and fascists. They sought to replace the Soviet historical narrative with one that made Ukrainians the central victims, not perpetrators. Ukraine's own nationalization of the Holocaust functioned in much the same way as the Sovietization of the Holocaust. Nationalization, obfuscation, and an implicit competition among victim narratives all contribute to the relatively complicated place of the Holocaust in Ukrainian historical narratives.
This paper analyzes the involvement of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Nazi genocide during World War II in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these organizations became one of the central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The research question is whether leaders and members of the Bandera faction of the OUN (OUN-B) and the UPA were involved in the Nazi-led genocide. This article devotes particular attention to Volhynia where the UPA was established by the OUN-B in 1943. The study analyzes the biographies of 329 OUN-B and UPA leaders and documents concerning the OUN-B and the UPA, local police, and Nazi mass executions of Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles from the State Archive of the Volyn Region, the State Archive of the Rivne Region, the Archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine in the Volyn Region, the Archive of the State Security Service of Ukraine, the National Archives in the US, and other archives. This paper shows that large proportions of leaders and members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army served in various police and militia formations, collaborated with security and intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, and took part in the Nazi genocide, primarily in assisting roles during mass executions of Jews in the first two years of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.
This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.
Heroes and Victims explores the cultural power of war memorials in 20th-century Romania through two world wars and a succession of radical political changes - from attempts to create pluralist democratic political institutions after World War I to shifts toward authoritarian rule in the 1930s, to military dictatorships and Nazi occupation, to communist dictatorships, and finally to pluralist democracies with populist tendencies. Examining the interplay of centrally articulated and locally developed commemorations, Maria Bucur's study engages monumental sites of memory, local funerary markers, rituals, and street names as well as autobiographical writings, novels, oral narratives, and film. This book reveals the ways in which a community's religious, ethnic, economic, regional, and gender traditions shaped local efforts at memorializing its war dead.
Despite the Holocaust’s profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe. This volume of original essays explores the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Devoting space to every postcommunist country, the essays in Bringing the Dark Past to Light explore how the memory of the “dark pasts” of Eastern European nations is being recollected and reworked. In addition, it examines how this memory shapes the collective identities and the social identity of ethnic and national minorities. Memory of the Holocaust has practical implications regarding the current development of national cultures and international relationships. © 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
Canadians of Ukrainian descent constitute a significant part of the population of the Albertan capital. Among other things, their presence is felt in the public space as Ukrainian monuments constitute a part of the landscape. The article studies three key monuments, physical manifestations of the ideology of local Ukrainian nationalist elites in Edmonton: a 1973 monument to nationalist leader Roman Shukhevych, a 1976 memorial constructed by the Ukrainian Waffen-SS in Edmonton, and a 1983 memorial to the 1932–1933 famine in the Ukrainian SSR. Representing a narrative of suffering, resistance, and redemption, all three monuments were organized by the same activists and are representative for the selective memory of an “ethnic” elite, which presents nationalist ideology as authentic Ukrainian cultural heritage. The narrative is based partly upon an uncritical cult of totalitarian, anti-Semitic, and terroristic political figures, whose war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and collaboration with Nazi Germany the nationalists deny and obfuscate. The article argues that government support and direct public funding has strengthened the radicals within the community and helped promulgate their mythology. In the case of the Ukrainian Canadian political elite, official multiculturalism underwrites a narrative at odds with the liberal democratic values it was intended to promote. The failure to deconstruct the “ethnic” building blocks of Canadian multiculturalism and the willingness to accept at face value the primordial claims and nationalist myths of “ethnic” groups has given Canadian multiculturalism the character of multi-nationalism.
In Tony Judt's historical essay on postwar Europe's political myths, Austria serves as a paradigmatic case for national cultures of commemoration that successfully suppressed their societies’ involvement in National Socialism. According to Judt, the label of “National Socialism's First Victim” was applied to a country that after the Anschluss of March 1938 had, in fact, been a real part of Nazi Germany. “If Austria was guiltless, then the distinctive responsibilities of non-German nationals in other lands were assuredly not open to close inspection,” notes Judt. When the postwar Austrian myth of victimhood finally disintegrated during the Waldheim debate, critics deemed the “historical lie” of the “first victim” to have been the basis for Austria's failure to confront and deal with its own Nazi past. Yet, one of the paradoxes of Austrian memory is the fact that soon after the end of the war, the victim thesis had already lost much of its relevance for many Austrians.