Hitler's Foreign Executioners (27 page)

For the new Polish government, the idea of a Ukrainian
state
was a joke. They also coveted the oilfields that lay beneath Galicia, close to L'viv. This is why, as the Entente Powers debated the fate of eastern Galicia, the Poles resolved the matter on the ground – by occupying eastern Galicia and neighbouring western Volhynia. Polish farmers seized Ukrainian farms, harassed peasant farmers and provoked violent responses from Ukrainian factions, equipped with arms pilfered from German stock. The ‘Galician question' remained open when the peace negotiators were wrapped up in Paris and the problem was taken up by the new League of Nations. But relentless ‘Polonisation' proved hard to resist and so in 1923, de facto annexation was internationally sanctioned by the League's Council of Ambassadors. Ukrainians, along with the Arabs, were the main losers at a succession of post-war settlements. The old empires had collapsed – but the Ukrainian ethnic territories remained divided between foreign powers. East of the Zbruch River, the Bolsheviks created a new state entity, despised by nationalists as a Soviet puppet: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR). The militant nationalist organisations melted away underground; their leaders fled west to Vienna and Berlin. Here they began to build ties with German and Austrian ultranationalists, including members of Hitler's new NSDAP. Two decades later, Ukrainian nationalists would make a sublimely foolish mistake when they turned for assistance to a resurgent German Reich.

As Sol Littman, one of the first historians to investigate the record of the ‘Ukrainian' SS division, puts it,‘Whatever quarrels existed between nationalists and federalists, Ukrainians and Russians, peasants and aristocrats, hatred of the
zhidy
(the Jews) was common coinage'.
⁴
Ever since the seventeenth century, when Count Bohdan Khelnitsky's Cossacks rampaged through the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement' murdering more than 200,000 Jews, violence fell frequently and hard on the Shtetls of Ukraine. Any social upheaval, whatever its cause, provoked pogroms. It was a pattern repeated at the beginning of the twentieth century after the first Russian revolution, when pogroms flared all across Ukraine and Bessarabia. In Ukraine
after 1917, civil war brought a fresh wave of attacks. Trotsky's Red Guards, White Russian brigades, Nestor Makhno's anarchists, a fledgling Ukrainian army led by Symon Petliura, mobs led by fickle Ukrainian chieftains or ‘Atamans' – all at one time or another took up arms against Ukrainian Jews. Only the Bolshevik officers defended them, inadvertently reinforcing that pernicious axiom that Bolsheviks and Jews were one and the same and that communist Jews planned to enslave the Slavic peoples of the east. It was this chimera of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik', hatched in Paris but nurtured in the court of the Russian tsar, that Alfred Rosenberg brought to Munich and the meagre ideological coffers of the NSDAP. When it came to Jews, Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler's Nazis shared the same currency of hate.

From the mid-1920s, a number of belligerent Ukrainian factions jostled for favour with the German far right. These included Petliura's UNA government based in Warsaw in exile; the so-called ‘Hetmanites' in Berlin, who took their name from Pavlo Skoropadsky who had been briefly installed by the Germans as a puppet Hetman (ruler) in 1918; and the rather obscure Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN. Led by Colonel Ievhen Konovalets, the OUN was to begin with a fierce little splinter group devoted to terrorist attacks on Poles and Jews. It was authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic. But in 1928, an event took place that pushed the OUN to centre stage. On 25 May, Samuel Schwarzbart, who had lost family members in the Ukrainian pogroms, approached Petliura as he walked down a street in Paris and shot him dead. He gave himself up immediately to the police. In court, Schwarzbart pleaded that he was taking revenge for the murdered Ukrainian Jews, including his own kin. In a shock verdict, he was acquitted.
⁵
The news delighted Ukrainian nationalists. It seemed to authenticate both the perfidious power of Jewry and the clout of the Soviet regime. It was widely assumed that the Jewish Schwarzbart was a Russian agent and that his French legal advisors were puppet actors in a global conspiracy. The radical OUN was uniquely placed to take advantage of this surge of anti-Jewish and anti-Russian revulsion that swept through the Ukrainian nationalist movement.‘The Jews are guilty,' ranted OUN spokesman Dmytro Dontsov, ‘horribly guilty because they were the ones who helped secure Russian rule in the Ukraine.'
⁶

Colonel Konovalets convened the First Great Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Vienna that same year, and the OUN noisily unfurled its ideological colours. The OUN was unashamedly a terrorist organisation: violence dominated its vaguely defined ideology, legitimated by the image of the ‘Apostle of Battle' with a sword firmly grasped in his hands.
⁷
Leaders of the OUN's youth movement published ‘Ten Commandments' to guide new recruits. The first commandment was ‘Attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it'. Others were: ‘Regard the enemies of your
Nation with hate and perfidy'; ‘Do not hesitate to commit the greatest crime'. This was murderous occultism rather than ideology. Its source was Dmytro Dontsov, an inspiration still for Ukrainian neo-Nazi skinheads, who advocated strategies that were ‘irreconcilable, uncompromisable, brutal, fanatic and amoral'. He believed on the basis of unspecified scientific ‘measurements' that Ukrainians were biologically superior to other Slavs and thus destined to rule ‘inferior races'.

In 1920, Galicia was absorbed by Poland and suffered an especially vicious bout of ‘colonisation'. The OUN unleashed a terror campaign that would be resumed with ever greater savagery after 1943. Poles bore the brunt of Ukrainian national terrorism but according to Betty Einstein-Keshev, who is quoted by Littman, OUN leaders ‘wanted to finish off all their enemies at once'. Their method of waging war ‘was murder and destruction with no quarter shown. The independent Ukraine promised death and destruction to Jews.' Hatred of Jews dominated OUN thinking; according to OUN ideologue Professor Mycjuk, in a polemic published in 1932, Jews were dangerous because they ‘did business and made children'.
⁸
OUN style nationalists regarded Jews, Poles and Bolsheviks as forming a hydra-headed monster that would be forcefully denied a place in a ‘Ukrainian Nation'. In German, OUN ideology was summarised in a single word:
Pogrompolitik
.

For many OUN activists forced into exile, Vienna and Berlin became sanctuaries of choice. After 1933, German foreign affairs and intelligence experts began to cultivate suitable Ukrainians like the OUN leader Konovalets, who shared German loathing of Poland, and the ‘
mosko-jüdischer Apparat
'. Konovalets had served in the short-lived ‘Ukrainian Army' in 1918, and remained on good terms with officers in the Reichswehr. They provided him with contacts inside the army's military intelligence wing, the Abwehr. Abwehr head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris continues to puzzle historians. He was close to Himmler and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. But Canaris loathed Hitler and allegedly passed secret information to the Allies. Certainly Hitler believed so and in 1944 had him arrested and executed – in the same prison, in the same brutal manner and on the same day as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But Canaris, unlike Pastor Bonhoeffer, was neither honourable nor righteous. Like many other ‘resistors', he was a radical – if not rabid – conservative, and enjoyed fraternising with the nastier species of émigré nationalist. It was said that he liked the ‘smell of reaction' and the OUN clearly emitted just the right kind of odour. Canaris liberally poured Abwehr cash into OUN coffers in exchange for intelligence about the Polish army. In 1938, Konovalets was assassinated by a Russian NKVD agent – but the
flame was swiftly passed to war veteran Andreii Melnyk and his younger rival Stepan Bandera, who was then locked up in a Polish prison cell. Canaris would remain the OUN's staunchest backer. The rest of the Nazi elite proved more fickle. Alfred Rosenberg funded anti-Bolshevik factions through his sham foreign policy think tank, the Foreign Political Office (
Auβenpolitische Amt der NSDAP
), but he distrusted the OUN on the grounds that it was too rooted in ‘Austrian' Galicia. For his part, Hitler had no scruples about trampling over Ukrainian nationalist sensibilities even though, as an Austrian, he was well versed in Galician history. In 1939, his betrayal of the semi-autonomous province of Carpatho-Ukraine made plain his aversion to any kind of Slavic nationalism.
⁹

At the end of the First World War, this splinter of land on the Hungarian border sometimes called ‘Ruthenia' had been granted to Czechoslovakia, but promised autonomy. Carpatho-Ukraine was viewed by the OUN as an embryonic or proto Ukrainian state, but it was also coveted by the Hungarian government, which had close ties to Germany. On 14 March 1939, after months of agitation, the Soym or Diet of Carpatho-Ukraine declared total independence. Before dawn on the following day, Hungarian troops crossed into Carpatho-Ukraine and were met with fierce resistance from the poorly equipped ‘Carpathian Sich' and OUN volunteers. Later that same day, a gleeful Hitler entered Prague at the head of German forces. Meanwhile, the Soym urgently requested protection from the Reich. Hitler refused outright and ordered the Ukrainians not to oppose the Hungarian troops. After five days, the independent state of Carpatho-Ukraine was completely erased.

A handful of OUN fighters later denounced Hitler ‘the well known carnivore … and sworn enemy of the Slavic race', but the Germanophile OUN leadership still refused to properly learn their German lesson. As we saw in Chapter 1, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, Colonel Roman Sushko, encouraged by Canaris, volunteered the services of a Ukrainian brigade of approximately 200 men. Sushko and the OUN leaders hoped that once Poland had been defeated, the Germans would hand over Galicia. The Abwehr secured the release of Ukrainian POWs held in Hungary, then welded them together with OUN exiles based in Germany to form a ‘Nationalist Military Detachment' (
Viis'kovi viddily natsionalistiv
) – known to the Germans as the ‘Bergbauernhilfe'.

On 15 August, training began in Slovakia. Then three days later, OUN leader Andrii Melnyk received a summons from an Abwehr officer to ‘hold himself in readiness in case the political situation would demand' his presence. Melnyk's reaction is not documented – but if he assumed that he was about to be made leader of an independent Ukraine his hopes would have been swiftly dashed. For on 23 August, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow.
The Ukrainians' German sponsors had made common cause with the hated Soviet foe. This was stunning news – and German intelligence agencies received orders to closely monitor the reaction of Ukrainian émigrés, who were forbidden to leave Germany. At the German Foreign Office, Melnyk was informed that the Reich could ‘make no promises'. At their training camp in Slovakia, Sushko's volunteers found themselves being ‘Germanised'. On 1 September, they crossed the Polish border, led by Abwehr colonel Erwin Stolze rather than Sushko. Once they had crossed the old Czech border in September, the Ukrainian legion fought not on the front line but as partisans, knocking out Polish communications and making unpleasant mischief behind enemy lines.

On 12 September, the Wehrmacht high command and Canaris met on Hitler's train (which was stationed at Ilnau in Silesia) to debate the fate of the Polish lands. They discussed a number of alternatives including declaring ‘Galician and Polish Ukraine' independent.
¹⁰
A few days later, Canaris met with OUN leader Melnyk and informed him that a western, i.e. Galician Ukrainian state, was back on the German agenda. Melnyk rushed away to prepare a list of ‘West Ukrainian' government officials, but two days later, the Soviet army advanced into eastern Poland, trampling into the mud all hope of an ‘independent Galicia'. On 27 September, the Polish government capitulated and Ribbentrop dashed back to Moscow to agree additional protocol, establishing a definitive new border: the Narva-Buh-Bug-San line.

Once again, Hitler had dashed OUN hopes. The ‘secret protocols' of the Nazi-Soviet Pact meant that western Ukraine and Belorussia now fell into Soviet hands. Stalin, in fact, unified all the Ukrainian lands as a Soviet republic. The ‘Begbauenhilfe' was hastily disbanded and the Ukrainian volunteers deported to German-occupied Poland. The whole episode was clumsily executed but set a clear pattern. If the Germans had a strategy to deal with military collaborators it went something like this: Armed non-Germans might be temporarily functional but, in the long run, would prove dangerous. The trick was to allow a little growth then apply the pruning shears. As we will see, even that limited relationship was a step too far for Hitler.