Anomie

Reichskommissariat Ukraine built on the Soviet heritage of mistrust and enforced passivity which undermined solidarity with others. The prom­ising social experiments of the 1920s, the New Economic Policy and Ukrainization, started to build a civil society in the first fifteen years of Soviet power, but Stalin’s collectivization, industrialization, famine, and massive purges shut down this process.

Between 1918 and 1939, many Ukrainians living in Galicia, Volhynia, and Bukovina embraced integral nationalism and its ultimate goal - the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state. Proponents of this high­ly authoritarian ideology claimed that this end justified all means used to realize it; many - although not necessarily the majority - approved this interpretation. In his criticism of this immorality, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky called this belief “a politics without God,” the attitude that “politics frees a person from the obligation of Divine Law and justifies crime.”¹⁹⁹ But depending on the circumstances, true believers of integral nationalism were not necessarily more likely to absorb this moral break­down and accommodate the occupiers than the non-believers.²⁰⁰

In their assessment of the recent past, nationalist ideologists claimed that Ukrainians failed to establish their own independent state in 1917-20 for two reasons.

All integral nationalists understood subconsciously - if not consciously - that in a world of competitive powers the Ukrainians needed a powerful ally, not a domineering protector along the lines of imperial Germany, which intervened in the internal affairs of the Ukrainian National Republic and quickly undermined its credibility with the peasants. These integral nationalists were revolutionaries who wanted to overturn the status quo in East Central Europe and to carve out an independent Ukrainian state from the territories claimed by Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the USSR. They aspired to turn their dreams into reality by means of their own political will and with their own forces; hence, their interest in military formations (the Carpathian Sich, Nachtigall, Rolland, the UPA, the Galicia Division, and the infiltration of the Schutzmänner). The acquisition of military training and arms, in whatever way possible, became their primary priority. They recognized that in light of European geopolitical realities, they needed ex­tensive external help to do so. The Great Powers appeared far more hostile to new entrant states on the European continent than they did decades earlier. Inasmuch as Poland and the USSR, the two most powerful coun­tries in East Central Europe, opposed this goal, the enemies of their ene­mies (such as Germany) now became their only potential allies.

The OUN-B always insisted that no contradictions existed between their proclamations of the necessity of possessing “our own forces (“ nashi syly”) and their willingness to accommodate themselves with Germany, but the reality was always murkier than they hoped.

The OUN-B hoped to cooperate closely with Germany but did not blindly follow the Germans. They sought to rely on their own assessment of their own interests and with their own forces. When the Third Reich turned against the OUN in mid-summer 1941, the OUN-B went into the underground and introduced limited defensive measures against them. After Stalingrad, the OUN-B sought to rekindle the German-Ukrainian nationalist pre-war relationship, primarily because - even in retreat - Germany remained the strongest revisionist power in Europe. Pragmatic, not ideological, considerations drove the Ukrainian nationalists.

This attempt to establish a pragmatic relationship with the Germans did not necessarily imply “collaboration with the enemy,” if one defines col­laboration, as does Jan Gross, as “an uneven partnership in which one par­ty operates under duress or even worse, betrays the interests of its own group.”²⁰² Defined in this manner, collaboration is the very opposite of resistance. Stefan Korbonski, one of the Home Army’s primary leaders in Warsaw, described how the Polish underground authorities set guidelines for the behaviour of all Poles under German occupation. At its very core, the basic instructions that the Home Army formulated demanded that the Polish population resist the occupying power at all times, either by passive or active means.²⁰³

Despite the best intentions of those resisting Nazi or communist occupa­tion, very few could consistently apply this moral clarity during the war and occupation in the ethnically mixed Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, if anywhere at all.

In wartime, all belligerents believed that the expediency of victory always trumped moral principles. Like other guerilla units fighting in Volhynia and East Galicia, OUN and UPA units also engaged in authorized and unau­thorized efforts to coordinate their operations with the Germans against the Poles.²⁰⁵ This did not necessarily denote collaboration.

But collaboration or resistance did not constitute the only possible re­sponses to foreign occupation. Other possible responses included passivity, withdrawal and/or neutrality, passive resistance, passive cooperation, alli­ance seeking, or merely the wish to survive, oftentimes a contingent mix of these reactions. Not everyone could consistently or consciously resist over a long, brutal occupation. Most people do not and did not engage in heroics; most sought to do the best they could under trying and dangerous circumstances. In the wild East, anyone who stood out could be arbitrari­ly detained or shot.

In the course of the war, the relationship between the OUN-B and the Germans (depending, of course, on whether the Germans in question were diehard Nazis like Erich Koch or more reasonable senior army and military intelligence officers) fluctuated. This was an uneven relationship, one that could easily change and unexpectedly decimate the leadership of the OUN and a significant number of its members.

The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians most likely did not interpret this informal relationship with the Germans as collaboration. Having lived in interwar Poland or Romania, they did not see themselves as full-fledged citizens of Poland or Romania, nor were they treated as such. Once the Ger­mans or Soviets rolled in, they did not believe that they had any obligations of loyalty to the states they despised and which despised them. Individuals and groups made choices based on their perceptions of the contrast between Soviet and German occupational policies in their localities, the strength of Ukrainian national identity and nationalism before the war, accumulated so­cial strains, and the situation on the eastern (and western) fronts.²⁰⁶

In order to overcome Ukraine’s statelessness, the OUN-B aspired to be­come allies of Germany as part of their long-term strategic calculations. In light of this organization’s overall weaknesses, cooperation with the Germans promised “higher payoffs than fighting” them.²⁰⁷ Just as Ukrainian nationalists hoped against hope that the German political leadership would help them in their struggle against the USSR, the Polish Government-in- Exile wished to become the USSR’s equal ally against Nazi Germany. Poles and Ukrainians assessed their political environments and took calculated risks allying themselves with one of the Great Powers or the other.

Most of the relationships between the Ukrainians and the Germans in Ukraine was not driven by ideological motivations. Most stemmed from individual and group efforts to respond to the traumatizations of the past and present, an effort to survive the most brutal war in human history. Whether at the official political level (OUN-B-German relations), at the elite level (the Greek Catholic Church and the German occupational au­thorities), or at the popular level (Ukrainian Schutzschaften), most Ukrainians had to deal with the Germans, whether they wanted to or not.

The Nazi occupation created the environment in which certain types of criminal behaviour flourished, and also special conditions for Ukrainians. The Nazi elite imagined that “the Ukrainians (and the Baltic nationalities) were particularly anti-Bolshevik and therefore anti-Semitic, and more­over, sufficiently primitive to perform whatever dirty work was required.” In addition to persuasion, Nazis used coercion to encourage Ukrainians to assume the role of perpetrators.²⁰⁸

The police auxiliary units are a case in point. The Germans recruited approximately one million men from among the terrorized and starving population in the areas they controlled on the eastern front to reinforce their army and local police.²⁰⁹ Many joined to get food and a small salary, to survive. The Germans selected many of the Soviet Ukrainian POWs Hitler released in 1941 to serve as concentration and death camp guards and assigned the local Ukrainian police to participate in Jewish ghetto clearings and mass executions. The men who worked these “actions” com­mitted heinous and unforgivable crimes against a defenceless civilian pop­ulation. Even if they possessed some empathy with fellow human beings at the beginning of the war, these feelings quickly disappeared. Prolonged subjugation and the routinization of mass killings numbed their senses and intoxicated the powerless men with the thrill of invincibility, the “sen­sation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”²¹⁰ Ideological or politi­cal considerations did not enter into the picture. These men served in these functions because they had little choice in the matter. As released POWs, they already wore the mark of Cain. Thus, according to Snyder, “some of the survivors of one German killing policy became accomplices in another, as a war to destroy the Soviet Union became a war to murder the Jews.”²¹¹ With Soviet victory, they became the walking dead.

Through no fault of their own, they had surrendered to the Germans and experienced release when most of their Soviet compatriots did not. This permanently branded them. Having few outlets to survive, they served the Germans, who manipulated them. The Nazis “used persuasion and force to facilitate recruitment. They took advantage, too, of the Ukrainians’ opposition to and brutalization by Soviet rule.” In doing so, the Germans aspired to reduce the overall social inhibitions against mass murder. The June 1941 Soviet massacres of political prisoners not only “desensi­tized the local population to the extermination of the Jews, but also re­duced taboos inhibiting participation in the extermination process.”²¹² Officially sponsored anti-Semitic ideologies, personal animosities against the Jews, and Soviet and Nazi brutalizations undermined the social re­straints of the past and led many to dehumanize others as they had been dehumanized. In the ferocious struggle to create an independent Ukrainian state, the OUB-B and the UPA killed large numbers of unarmed Jewish and Polish civilians and morally compromised their legacy.

The choices that people made during this turbulent time are far more complex than the narratives that neatly divide those who collaborated from those who did not suggest. Very few of those living under the condi­tions of Soviet or German occupation could maintain an uncompromised moral clarity.