Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

by Anna Reid

By 1941 the Ukrainians seem to have believed that a declaration of Ukrainian independence would be welcomed by Germany, or at least accept...

Though some senior Nazis – among them von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Ostministerium – did indeed advocate establishing a Ukrainian puppet-state as a buffer against Russ...

The first sign that the Germans regarded their Ukrainian alliance as no more than a marriage of convenience was the débâcle known as the ‘Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine’. In...

Germany encouraged OUN-led Ukrainian nationalists in Transcarpathia, a sliver of ethnically Ukrainian territory attached to eastern Czechoslovakia, to declare autonomy. This they duly did, winning reluctant recognition from the tottering Czechs. But when Germany overran Czechoslovakia...

As the Hungarians marched in, the Ukrainians proclaimed complete independence and sent a telegram to Hitler asking for acceptance as a German protectorate. No help came: the Republic of...

Much the same thing happened when Germany invaded Ukraine itself. When the Wehrmacht attacked in June 1941, it was joined by two 600-strong OUN units, ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’, recruited and drilled under the approving eye of German military intelligence. Nachtigall, clad in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, marched into Galicia; Roland, in the uniform of the First World War Ukrainian Sich, into the southern steppe from Moldova. OUN also organised ‘march groups’ of young activists, who raced forward into...

But almost immediately, the Ukrainians ran up against the limits of German tolerance. A few days after entering Lviv, a leader of OUN’s Bandera faction, Yaroslav Stetsko, called a ‘national assembly’ in the old Prosvita building and proclaimed a ‘Sovereign All-Ukrainian State’.51 The announcement was broadcast from the city radio station, together with a message ...

The arrest and execution of dozens more OUN activists followed, and Nachtigall and Roland were both withdrawn from the Ukrainian front and se...

A variety of partisan groups sprang up, the largest being the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, controlled by the Banderivtsi. Fielding up to 200,000 men, for a few months in the autumn and winter of 1943 it controlled most of north-west Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and hospitals. Even more remarkably, small UPA guerrilla units carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign against the Soviet Union for years after the end of the war.

UPA’s methods were every bit as ruthless as those of the SS and the NKVD. During the German retreat, it massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia.

partisans would pounce on Polish houses and kill everyone from the youngest to the oldest . . . There was an incident in our village when one of the men, Petro Vasylchyshyn, refused to join in and went home to his parents. A week later, the USB [OUN’s secret police] took him to the woods and shot him. And when the USB found out that his parents were complaining, they shot them too.52

Fighting continued in the Bieszczady mountains of south-eastern Poland until the spring of 1947, when UPA was rounded up by the Polish army. Over the next months Ukrainian villages in the area were systematically demolished, and their inhabitants forcibly deported to the ex-German ‘recovered territories’ in the north and west, or to the Soviet Union.

‘Es ist alles vorüber, es ist alles vorbei/Drei Jahre in Russland, und nichts ponimai’ – ‘Everything’s over, everything’s past/Three years in Russia, and we don’t understand a thing.’

Germany’s suppression of the OUN-led partisans affected only a relatively small group of committed, even fanatical nationalists. What turned the population as a whole against Nazi rule, initially welcomed as a deliverance from Stalinism, were two other policies: its treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the mass deportation of civilians to Germany as slave-labourers.

During its initial advance, the Wehrmacht captured vast numbers of prisoners – over 60,000, according to German records53 – in its pincer movement on Kiev alone. Partly because the number of surrenders was so huge, partly because Slavs were Untermenschen undeserving of even basic care, few preparations were made for their reception. Instead, the Wehrmacht herded hundreds of thousands of men into ‘cages’ – bare enclosures surrounded with barbed-wire.

The Jews and political commissars among the prisoners were executed, and since deciding who was Jewish was left up to officers’ ‘intuition’, so too were tens of thousands of circumcised Muslims from the Caucasus and Crimea. It sufficed, according to one observer, ‘for a man to h...

Ravaged by typhus, beaten and starved, the remaining prisoners died like flies. At no camp was the death rate less than 30 per cent, and i...

The bodies were left lying for weeks on end, the guards only entering the verminous compounds in order to incinerate the dead and dying with flame-throwers. Cannibalism made its appearance: ‘After having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots,’ Göring joked with the Italian foreign minister, ‘they hav...

Altogether, of the 5.2 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by Germany during the war, 2 million are recorded as having died in camps, and another 1.3 million fell into the catch-all category of ‘escapes, exterminations, not accounted for, deaths and disappearances in transit’. Taking only the most conservative figure of 2 million deaths, the Eastern Front’s prisoner-of-war camps killed over a third as many people again as the entire Holocaust.

Germany’s treatment of its prisoners also gave Soviet soldiers, many of whom had little or no enthusiasm for Stalinism, the best of incentives not to change sides. After the initial German advance, numbers of deserters dropped sharply – ‘because’, as a Soviet officer explained, ‘most of the prisoners have been disappointed . . . days without food; only cursing and beating; shootings without reason, often only because the prisoner cannot understand what the Germans want from him .

Worst of all, from the average civilian’s point of view, was the Nazis’ programme of forced labour. Between the spring of 1942 and the summer of 1944, Germany deported 2.8 million Soviet civilians – 2.1 million of them Ukrainian and just over half women59 – to the Reich as Eastworkers or Ostarbeiter.

Initially recruitment was voluntary, but as news of atrocious work conditions got back home, the Germans resorted to violence, piling people into lorries as they left churches or cinemas. Thirty-eight thousand Kievans – over 10 per cent of the city’s population – were delivered to the Ostarbeiter programme in the first ten months of occupation.60

Once in Germany, they were forced to wear badges embroidered with the letters OST, barred from fraternising with Germans and from public transport, subject to p...

Escapees were executed or sent to concentration camps. As the more pragmatic of Hitler’s henchmen repeatedly but vainly pointed out, one of the chief results of the Ostarbeiter scheme was that more and more Ukrainians fled to the forests to join the partisans.

Back home in Kiev – after a train journey during which officials ‘collected all photos and postcards and made us throw them away so we couldn’t show anyone what life was like in the West’ – things were not much better.

The returning Ostarbeiter were treated like pariahs. ‘I couldn’t get a job. The managers kept saying – were you in Germany? Then get out! They really hated us, despised us. Even now I’ve got a neighbour who keeps saying I’m a fascist – why? – because I was in Germany, that’s all.’