Chelm/Kholm and the Volhynian Massacres

Shortly after the 1941 German invasion, the Poles and Ukrainians in Poland’s former eastern territories became involved in one of the most ferocious conflicts of the war. These merciless clashes built on the hostili­ties generated in interwar Poland and in the first few weeks of the German- Polish War.

This mass communal violence built on the enormous demographic, re­ligious, and political transformations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which aroused the residents of this mixed Polish-Ukrainian ter­ritory on the frontiers between Poland and the Soviet Union. Located west of the Bug (Buh) River, the Kholm Region bordered on the Polish Lublin region to the west, Volhynia to the east, Podlachia to the north, and Galicia to the south. In the nineteenth century, this region belonged to the Russian Empire. In 1875 the tsarist authorities brutally converted its pre­dominantly Greek Catholic, Ukrainian-speaking population to the Orthodox faith. Shortly after 1905, when Tsar Nicholas II issued a decree on religious tolerance (which still outlawed the Greek Catholics), almost one-third of the 450,000 “new Orthodox” believers converted to Roman Catholicism. These religious transformations reinforced the process by which the Ukrainian-speaking population acculturated (then assimilated) themselves to the Polish language and culture.

By 1914, nearly one-half of the total residents (841,800) of the newly created tsarist gubernia of Kholm identified themselves as Ukrainians, nearly one-quarter as Poles, and 15 per cent as Jews. As the German- Russian front moved eastward after the outbreak of the war, the Russian authorities evacuated the overwhelming majority of its Ukrainian- speakers to the interior of their empire.

The Treaty of Riga assigned Eastern Galicia, Western Volhynia, Podlachia, and the Kholm Region to Poland. The Ukrainians now consti­tuted less than one-half of the Kholm Region’s total population. Taking advantage of this situation, the new Polish government actively sponsored efforts to transform the Ukrainian minority into loyal Poles and to con­vert the Orthodox faithful to the newly created “Roman Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite.” Hoping to Polonize the entire Ukrainian population, the authorities demolished, desecrated, or converted half of the total num­ber of Orthodox churches to Roman Catholic ones in this area in 1937-8.

Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the victors occu­pied all of the Kholm Region and Podlachia, which became a part of the General Government’s Lublin district. As in Galicia, the German occupa­tional authorities allowed the creation of the Ukrainian Central Committee and Ukrainian-language schools. They also tolerated the emergence of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, modelled on the church the Soviets destroyed in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s.¹⁵⁵ Although they considered all Slavs Untermenschen, the Germans favoured the Ukrainians over the Poles, which infuriated the latter. The limited empowerment of the Ukrainians came with the disempowerment of the Poles. By raising the political status of the Ukrainians over that of the Poles, the Germans am­plified the fears, resentments, and hatreds between these two groups.¹⁵⁶

In the spring of 1942, escaped Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, and pro-Soviet Polish units arrived in the Kholm Region and began to at­tack Ukrainian “collaborators” in the local administration, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and the Germans. While these irregulars justified their actions as anti-German ones, the local Ukrainian population interpreted them as anti-Ukrainian in nature, especially when the Germans indiscriminately re­taliated by burning down entire Polish and Ukrainian villages.¹⁵⁷ In late November 1942, the Germans launched General Plan Ost, an ambitious plan to Germanize the Polish lands and those beyond by expelling the na­tive populations and replacing them with German colonists.

This game of musical chairs produced rivers of blood. Those forcibly evicted from their small plots of land encountered not only physical and psychological displacement, but also increased competition for scarce food and shelter, and the possibility of death in an unfamiliar environment. During the German anti-Polish operations, a large number of Poles fled to the forests, where they supplied the Peasant Battalions (Bataliony Chlopskie), the Home Army, and the Soviet partisans with new recruits. Many of these refugees dealt with their humiliations by striking back at their neighbours who acquired their property or that of their compatriots. The Polish underground forces sided with their fellow countrymen and started to target the German colonists and the Ukrainian minority, burning down their villages and at times murdering some, if not all, of their inhabit­ants. The Germans retaliated by indiscriminately executing those they sus­pected of aiding the Polish and Soviet partisans, Ukrainians as well as Poles.

In creating colonies and in displacing and mingling the local populations in the nationally mixed areas, the Germans, in effect, provoked the Poles, who then attacked the Germans and Ukrainians. By killing a small number of German settlers, the Home Army prompted the Germans to introduce brutal countermeasures against the Ukrainians.¹⁵⁹ All in all, the Poles and the Germans killed nearly four thousand Ukrainian civilians in this region.¹⁶⁰

In response to this carnage, at least ten thousand Ukrainians from the Kholm Region fled to neighbouring Volhynia and spread stories of Polish atrocities.

The Polish Home Army and the Soviet partisans also operated in German- occupied Volhynia. As the Germans’ control weakened, the Home Army decided to reassert the Polish Government-in-Exile’s authority over this area and protect its communities. But in light of the small number of Poles scattered across a sea of Ukrainians, pursuing both of these goals at the same time led to an impasse. To proclaim a return to the pre-1939 Polish borders only enraged the Ukrainians and endangered the Polish popula­tion. At the same time, OUN-B’s goal to wrest this area from the Poles and to create an independent Ukraine only inflamed the Poles.

Since September 1939, the Poles had seen their state destroyed and their national minorities win limited support from the Germans, their hated en­emies. In turn, the Ukrainians - who had experienced a dramatic decline in population in the Kholm Region, had encountered extensive discrimina­tion during the period of the Second Polish Republic, and who suffered violence in the Kholm Region - decided to stand their ground in Volhynia. Both the Polish as well as Ukrainian nationalists interpreted their reality in similar terms.

In late 1942 and early 1943, Poles and Ukrainians began frequent ex­changes of gunfire. The first major mass killings of Poles by Ukrainians broke out in April 1943, marking the start of a major OUN-B ethnic cleansing campaign to rid the area of its large Polish population.¹⁶³ Who gave the order to spark this conflagration: the entire leadership of the OUN-B Western Ukrainian Territorial Executive Committee? Some fac­tion of it? The OUN-B regional commander? Others?¹⁶⁴ Even decades after the start of this conflict, the identity of those who issued these com­mands remains unclear, but once the slaughter started, it could not stop.

Although OUN-B leaders designated Russia as enemy number one and recognized that this distant enemy was fast approaching and that its meth­ods were far more brutal than those the Poles employed in the 1930s, they had to deal with the threat at hand.¹⁶⁵ In Volhynia and Galicia, the Poles lived in villages and communities adjacent to Ukrainian ones or in mixed Polish-Ukrainian villages. Many Poles, now official allies of the USSR, cooperated with Soviet partisans against the local Ukrainian population, oftentimes provoking the Germans to annihilate Ukrainian villages.

Most importantly, the OUN-B challenged the Polish Government-in- Exile and the Home Army, which fought to restore the Polish Republic within its pre-1 September 1939 frontiers. Poles claimed Western Volhynia (and the Kholm Region and Eastern Galicia) as part of Poland’s patrimony; Ukrainians insisted that these territories belonged to the Ukrainian home­land. Both sides claimed that Western Volhynia represented their native soil and only their native soil.

The Germans stirred this cauldron of brutality in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, stoking it to unprecedented levels. Once the Germans ar­rived in Volhynia in the summer of 1941, they established a local police force (Schutzmannschaft) and staffed it with Ukrainians.¹⁶⁶ At first, the new regime relied on volunteers. But with the appearance of Soviet parti­sans in the Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusan borderlands in 1942, the Germans radically expanded the size of its membership. Since Soviet Ukraine con­stituted the largest single administrative region in the German-conquered east, most of its new Schutzmänner came from there. In order to fill its ranks, they had to procure young men. By the end of 1942, far more police recruits were coerced into service than volunteered.¹⁶⁷

Each recruit, whether coerced or not, possessed a different reason for joining and remaining in the ranks of the Schutzmannschaft. Some men may have wanted to avenge the deaths or deportations of family members or friends from the Soviet era. Others may have enlisted for nationalistic reasons, infiltrating the German police in order to acquire weapons and some training. But most enrolled for more mundane reasons. In serving the German authorities, they avoided forced labour conscription to Germany and received food, regular pay, and protection, a modicum of security in uncertain times.¹⁶⁸ In addition to those who sought to survive and provide for their families, the local police also attracted the ambitious, the unsa­voury, and even criminals.¹⁶⁹

If the statistics for one district in Belarus are representative of all Schutzmänner, approximately 90 per cent of the Ukrainian policemen would have been thirty-five years old or younger, men of prime military age.¹⁷⁰ Since most able-bodied men of military age under occupation raised German suspicions, young men had to choose one of three options to se­cure their physical future, however precarious: (1) paid service in the police force; (2) forced labour in Germany; or (3) enrolment in Ukrainian or Soviet units in the forests. Of these unpalatable opportunities, many settled on police service, which “may have seemed the more attractive of the pos­sible alternatives.”¹⁷¹ Most the conscripted policemen had no overall loy­alty to the Germans or an ideological predisposition to fascism.¹⁷² As most young men sought to make the best of their limited options, they should not be condemned for joining the police. But they should be judged and condemned for any and all heinous actions committed after donning German uniforms, especially the mass killing of unarmed Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian civilians.

Once Soviet partisans began to penetrate Volhynia in the fall of 1942, the German authorities assigned some of the conscripted local policemen to assist SS and military units in punitive missions against suspected Soviet partisan supporters, in addition to special “actions” against ex-communist activists, Jews, Soviet ex-prisoners, and members of the Polish intelligen­tsia.¹⁷³ The Germans introduced draconian measures against the civilian population suspected of helping Soviet partisans. Often arbitrarily imple­mented, the severe reprisals against possible partisan sympathizers hit “the patriotic Ukrainian peasantry as frequently as they did communist sympa­thizers.” Increasingly, some policemen (not all) became reluctant to sup­press their fellow Ukrainians or to round up young men and women for the Ostarbeiter program.¹⁷⁴

But they were stuck, enmeshed in a set of arrangements beyond their immediate control. They could not disobey their superiors. But at the same time, some could not participate in the mass killings of their compa­triots or - in some cases - their neighbours. By the fall of 1942, they could not voluntarily leave the ranks of the Schutzmannschaft. If they did, the Germans would shoot them for desertion. Even if the Germans allowed them to return to their former lives, the Soviet partisans would not neces­sarily forgive them for working for the Germans.

Then, in response to a call by the OUN-B leadership in March 1943, approximately six thousand Ukrainian policemen abandoned the Germans with their weapons and headed for the forests.¹⁷⁵ Many joined the OUN-B- led Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and now fought against three foes - the Germans, the Poles, and the Soviets. Others fell in with the Soviet partisans (in the 1920s and 1930s the Communist Party of Western Ukraine attracted a large number of sympathizers in Volhynia); others went home.

In retaliation, the Germans killed the families of Ukrainian police offi­cers who deserted and destroyed the villages of those who fled with their arms. Using newly recruited Polish policemen to replace the Ukrainians, the Germans promptly carried out these reprisals. “Many who joined the UPA from the German police instantly lost their homes and families,” ac­cording to Timothy Snyder, “and found a new reason to hate the Poles.”¹⁷⁶

By the summer of 1943, the OUN and UPA used the local Polish alli­ance with the Germans as a justification for cleansing Western Volhynia of the Polish population. That summer the UPA gained control of the Volhynian countryside from the Germans and began to murder and expel its 200,000-300,000 Polish inhabitants and the remaining Jews.¹⁷⁷ Volhynia suffered mass murder, mutilation of bodies, and the burning of entire vil­lages along with their residents. The overwhelming majority of the victims were unarmed Polish civilians. Polish policemen, self-defence forces, and the Home Army struck back, also indiscriminately killing Ukrainian men, women, and children. Both sides engaged in asymmetrical violence. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” quickly escalated to “Several eyes for an eye, and several sets of teeth for a tooth.” More so in Western Volhynia than in the Chelm/Kholm Region or Galicia, the horrors Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian civilians suffered rivalled the brutalities German peasants endured during the Thirty Years War.¹⁷⁸

Scholars in Poland, Ukraine, the United States, and Europe estimate that in 1943 and 1944 the members of the OUN-B and UPA killed be­tween 25,000 to 70,000 Poles in Western Volhynia, and then another 20,000 to 70,000 in Eastern Galicia. In the same period, the Home Army and other Polish underground units killed 2,000 to 20,000 Ukrainians in Western Volhynia and another 1,000 to 4,000 in Galicia. In both nationally mixed regions, between 50,000 to 100,000 Poles and 8,000 to 20,000 Ukrainians died by violent means.¹⁷⁹ The German authorities did little to stop these ethnic cleansings, and oftentimes provoked them.

As the turbulent waves of emotions produced in this Polish-Ukrainian conflict generated wildly different ways the survivors remembered these events (the Rashomon effect), the range of these estimates is very broad and must be treated with considerable caution. Scholars will need to con­duct more research before they can narrow their appraisals of the Polish and Ukrainian civilian casualties to statistics that can be cited with reason­able confidence in order to build a consensus on the overall number of Polish and Ukrainian victims. It is tempting to split the difference between the high and low estimates or to use the highest number of civilian victims to rationalize claims of ethnic cleansing or genocide. The truth of the mat­ter is more complex and difficult to delineate precisely.

In light of the number of Polish and Ukrainian victims in relation to the overall number of Poles and Ukrainians living in the Kholm Region, Western Volhynia, and Eastern Galicia, this Polish-Ukrainian War repre­sented a broad and ferocious ethno-national conflict, an effort by both the OUN-B/UPA and the Home Army to expel the other’s compatriots, with one side winning and the other losing, and with both sides engaging in atrocities against civilians. The communal violence in the Kholm Region, Western Volhynia, and Eastern Galicia parallels the violence of the Algerians against the French colonialists, of Irish nationalists against the British, of Jewish nationalists against the British and Palestinians, and Palestinian nationalists against Israelis. In each case, radical nationalists attacked and killed members of other nations who held political power or controlled contested territory. Their methods were criminal and often­times abominable, but the years of pent-up fears, private resentments, and public humiliations fuelled the spontaneous rage.¹⁸⁰ Despite the efforts of the Ukrainian Central Committee, the Ukrainian Catholic bishops, and the leaders of the Ukrainian community, peace could not be restored.

Regrettably, in light of the high stakes involved (post-war Polish con­trol of the kresy vs local Ukrainian control of the Kholm Region, Western Volhynia, and Eastern Galicia), it was impossible to reconcile these two diametrically opposed goals without the application of mass violence. Because of the savagery involved, both sides could frame this conflict as a struggle between good and evil. Although the OUN-B and UPA killed more Poles than the Home Army killed Ukrainians, both groups were responsible for the violence that broke out in this area. In this war, no group was blameless or absolved from responsibility in killing civilians. Each group contained victims as well as perpetrators, and oftentimes vic­tims became victimizers and victimizers became victims. Although there were many casualties from different political, ethnic, national, or religious persuasions, there were far fewer innocents.

Despite the wide range within these above-mentioned statistics, they possess two common denominators. First of all, in any given region where the Poles or Ukrainians were a minority of the population, its civilian population suffered more than its enemies. Second, in light of the panic this mass violence provoked in the Polish and Ukrainian communities, it produced more violence in terms of scope and intensity.

Atrocities, exaggerations, widespread unverified rumours, and hysteria on both sides mark the Polish-Ukrainian armed struggle of 1942-4. In response to the anti-Ukrainian actions taken in the Kholm Region, refu­gees fled to Volhynia. Their accounts of the horrors they experienced pro­voked extensive and brutal anti-Polish massacres in Volhynia. Thousands of Poles then fled Volhynia for Galicia, where they activated the Polish underground to prepare punitive measures against the Ukrainian popula­tion. ¹⁸¹ The OUN and UPA struck back. Even after the war in Europe ended, the Polish-Ukrainian conflict continued in a new theatre of opera­tions in southeastern Poland (Zakerzonnia), which contained a large Ukrainian minority. Once set into motion, this epidemic of mass violence could not be easily quarantined or totally eliminated.

Far more so than the first Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-19, or the Polish- Ukrainian violence in interwar Poland, this second Polish-Ukrainian War, like the Croatian-Serbian War in German-occupied Yugoslavia in 1941 to 1944, destabilized entire societies and poisoned the relationships between neighbours. At the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands, the war acceler­ated the destruction of the local elites. In addition to the 200,000 Jews massacred in this region, at least 100,000 Polish and Ukrainian non­combatants died during this struggle. It embittered and permanently di­vorced Ukrainians and Poles from each other, decimated the Jewish population, and solidified the Ukrainian identity among the survivors in this region, but only for a short period of time.¹⁸² Many of the Ukrainian survivors would eventually be deported or killed after the war. The demo­graphic Ukrainization of these borderlands after the war came at the ex­pense of the Jewish and Polish populations living there.