Different Responses

Ukrainians, Russians, ethnic Germans native to Ukraine, Jews, and Poles occupied different positions within the Nazi racial hierarchy and respond­ed differently to German rule. Not unlike the experiences of the Poles and the Polish Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, the various national groups in Ukraine confronted “different fates in the same war.”¹²¹ Pressed by the urge to survive the most violent war in human history, members of each group also reacted in various ways.

The Ukrainian reaction to the German invasion varied. Ukrainians from the countryside, those middle-aged, and from the recently annexed Western Ukrainian territories embraced the Germans more than urban and young Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine - at least initially.¹²³ Having lived in complete isolation from the outside world and distrusting the Soviet pro­paganda claims made about the Nazi regime, rural Ukrainians misunder­stood Hitler’s true intentions. As many anticipated that the Germans would liberate them from communism, they spontaneously recreated the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian national and religious life in some areas shortly after the Soviet withdrawal, but before the arrival of the Germans. Many Ukrainians took over the civil and district administrations in some areas and created voluntary associations, schools, churches, theatres, sports organizations, and newspapers and publishing companies.

Organizations that engaged in political activities, such as the OUN-M- led Ukrainian National Rada soon came to the notice of the Germans, who arrested its leaders.

Many (not all) peasants in Soviet Ukraine initially greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional form of greeting. They imagined the Germans as liberators, so they shared their food with them and tended to the wounded. Their memories of the Holodomor, the Soviet “scorched earth” policy (which adversely affected those left behind after the Soviet retreat), and the mass execution of political prisoners by the Soviets framed their responses to the Germans. The overwhelming majority of peasants wanted a period of decompression, stability, and depoliticization.

To the relief of many, the German occupational authorities did allow the expression of religion. According to one scholar, “40 percent of the churches closed after 1917 were reopened during the German occupation, and by its end, 5,633 Orthodox, 2,326 Uniate, 500 Ukrainian Autocepha­lous and 652 Roman Catholic churches operated in the entire territory of Ukraine.”¹²⁴ With the opening of churches, mass baptisms took place.¹²⁵

In October 1941, peasant leaders re-established the All-Ukrainian Cooperative Union, which existed until 1928-9, and recreated other eco­nomic institutions serving the countryside.¹²⁶ Most peasants hoped for an end to collectivization, but the Germans did not dismantle the collective farms. Like the Soviet leadership before them, the new overseers believed that collectivized agriculture produced more than private agriculture.¹²⁷ Desperate for food, the new rulers raised the 1941 Soviet quotas of obliga­tory agricultural deliveries, and in some regions even doubled them.¹²⁸

The Germans, moreover, did not reciprocate the goodwill they received.

In contrast, young urban Russians and Ukrainians, born in the 1920s and early 1930s, retained a “strong faith in Soviet communism and rarely lost it under the Nazis.”¹³¹ Having lived their entire lives under the Soviet system, they believed in communism, but not necessarily in Stalin. Even the Holodomor of 1932-3 did not disillusion them. This should not be surprising. The Soviet authorities killed or exiled the overwhelming ma­jority of the actual or potential opponents of the Soviet system in the 1930s; these young men and women matured as beneficiaries of the Soviet system.¹³² By conforming to the Stalinist order, they received good educa­tions and jobs, establishing stable (if not always predictable) careers for themselves. As urban residents, they had access to rationed food (not much by Western standards, but far superior to what those living in the countryside received in the 1930s). Yes, they believed in Soviet commu­nism, but their choice - inasmuch as they possessed any choice - to work in the Stalinist system predisposed them to support the regime whole­heartedly. They, in short, possessed incentives to adapt politically.

As a consequence, urban residents - the better educated and the benefi­ciaries of the system - expressed greater scepticism of the Germans than the peasants.

Because Nazi ideology condemned the cities as centres of political con­tamination and the German army and air force did not level them as Hitler intended, “starvation of the inhabitants became the default option.”¹³⁴ The Germans refused to supply the larger cities, especially Kiev, with the nec­essary food and fuel for heating purposes. Malnutrition, exposure, disease, and mass starvation rapidly followed (Dovzhenko’s father died during the enforced starvation of Kiev). The population of Kiev, for example, dropped from 850,000 in June 1941 to 400,000 in October 1941 to 50,000 in November 1943, when the Soviet army liberated the city. During the German occupation, 70-80,000 residents of Kharkiv died of famine.¹³⁵

Germany’s eastern worker (Ostarbeiter) program also alienated the people. Because the Nazi leadership did not completely transform its economy into a total war economy until 1943, Germany experienced ma­jor labour shortages during the first few years of the war. In order to over­come these deficits, its rulers imported prisoners of war and foreign workers from Nazi-occupied Europe to the Reich. By the fall of 1941, the entire German economy had become “heavily and irreversibly dependent on foreign labor.”¹³⁶ The Germans - despite serious misgivings - then started to recruit Soviet civilians in November 1941. Hundreds of thou­sands volunteered in the spring of 1942. Most imagined that their lives would improve dramatically within the borders of the Reich.

Instead, they encountered the opposite. Transported to Germany with­out food, water, or the proper sanitary facilities, they worked long hours and received poor rations, low wages, inadequate housing (oftentimes be­hind barbed wire), meagre clothing, and insufficient medical care.

By the end of 1944, foreign workers - nearly 7.6 million in all - ac­counted for 20 per cent of Germany’s entire labour force. Nearly 1.9 mil­lion prisoners of war and 5.7 million civilian workers comprised this group. These outsiders constituted almost 50 per cent of all those employed in German agriculture and in the munitions factories and approximately one- third of the workers in the metal, chemical, construction, and mining in­dustries. They encompassed nearly 250,000 Belgians, 590,000 Italians, 1.3 million French men and women, 1.7 million Poles, and 2.8 million Soviet citizens. The overwhelming majority of the latter, nearly 2.2 mil­lion, came from Ukraine; of those, 200,000 to 400,000 from its western areas.¹³⁸ Females, with an average age of twenty, composed more than half of the Polish and Soviet civilian workers.¹³⁹

After the Allies introduced round-the-clock bombing of Germany’s major industrial centres in 1944, the eastern worker’s miserable living con­ditions worsened. Housed in barracks close to the mines and factories where they worked, they did not receive access to adequate air-raid shel- ters.¹⁴⁰ Many lost their lives during the last two years of the war.

Rumours about horrible working conditions for easterners reached Ukraine in the summer of 1942 and caused the volunteer pool to dry up. Desperately needing more workers, the Nazi authorities mandated a two- year labour service in Germany for all men and women in Ukraine be­tween the ages of eighteen and twenty.¹⁴¹ The Germans also introduced brutal recruitment expeditions, surrounding central squares in towns and cities, arbitrarily selecting large numbers of men and women, and immedi­ately transporting them to Germany.

Although the authorities started to treat the eastern workers in Germany better in 1943, these changes came too late. For most of these workers, life in Germany constituted a long, unending nightmare. The ruthless labour recruitment drives in Ukraine, the twentieth-century equivalent of past nomadic slave-hunting expeditions in the steppe, continued unabated.

Nazi racial policies, the German treatment of Soviet POWs, wide- scale arbitrary violence, starvation of the cities, and involuntary labour recruitment divorced many of the Ukrainians from the Germans they may have enthusiastically greeted months before. The Ukrainian popu­lation now responded with passive and later with active resistance.¹⁴² All opposition to the Germans, including helping partisans or hiding Jews, provoked brutal reprisals, which decimated entire families and neigh­bourhoods. Despite these dangers, this spontaneous growth of popular resistance assumed one of three forms: the organized communist move­ment; the Ukrainian nationalist movement; and a clearly anti-German, but politically unaffiliated movement. The first two movements elimi­nated the third.

Following Stalin’s first major radio address after the outbreak of the war on 3 July 1941, the Communist Party started to organize Soviet partisans and an underground network behind enemy lines. Until mid-1943 the partisans (which grew into a force of approximately 250,000) operated pri­marily in Belarus, on the extreme northern border of Soviet Ukraine, and in the northern parts of the occupied RSFSR. Central and Southern Ukraine’s distance from the front, its unsuitable steppe terrain, and the absence of large numbers of Red Army men cut off by the rapid German advance accounted for the weak partisan movement there. Approximately 80 per cent of the partisans in these northern areas identified themselves as Belarusans or Russians.¹⁴³ Until mid-1943, the partisans did not present a Ukrainian face.¹⁴⁴ A communist underground, composed of clandestine CP(b)U and the Komsomol cells, also emerged - primarily in the cities.

The communist partisan movement relied on manpower from para­chuted detachments of specially trained and well-armed men, sent into Ukraine from behind the Soviet lines. One of the most famous Soviet par­tisans, Sydir Kovpak, a Ukrainian from Poltava, led a regiment of 3,500 and embarked on two long-range raids in 1942-4 in northern and western Ukraine. He fought against both the Germans and Ukrainian nationalist units before the Germans pulverized his forces in 1944.¹⁴⁵

Although these “irregular warriors” did not play a critical role in the Soviet victory over Germany, they “physically controlled] the lives and destinies of a small group of civilians” in some areas and harassed the Germans. But, most importantly, they sought to restore, if not expand upon, the pre-1941 Soviet borders. In doing so, these partisans projected Soviet power beyond the territories controlled by the Red Army, frequent­ly “reminding the population of the continual presence and watchful eye of the Soviet regime.”¹⁴⁶ Soviet guerrilla activities behind the front lines fright­ened many people under German occupation and inspired them to hide their anti-Soviet attitudes in public.¹⁴⁷ These underground fighters also in­tentionally provoked German reprisals against the local populations.¹⁴⁸

In response to these Soviet partisans, various local Ukrainian self-defence units emerged in Western Volhynia and Polissia, areas conducive for gue­rilla warfare. Taras Bulba-Borovets (who worked with OUN-M) orga­nized armed Ukrainian groups in these areas in the spring of 1942. He sought to defend the local population from the Germans and from Soviet partisans who had begun to infiltrate Ukraine and who provoked brutal German reprisals. By mid-1943 members of the Bandera wing of the OUN absorbed Bulba-Borovets’s group, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Despite OUN-B’s initial hesitations about confronting the Germans (the Soviets remained their primary enemy), this group escalated their attacks on the occupiers who requisitioned grain from local peasants and who col­lected slave labourers. By the fall of 1943, the UPA emerged as one of the strongest anti-German resistance movements outside of Soviet borders. Only Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, the Polish Home Army, the French Resistance, and Soviet partisans attracted more fighters.¹⁴⁹

The year 1943 emerged as a turning point on the eastern front and in the battle for Ukraine. After its victory at Stalingrad in February, the Soviet army captured Kharkiv on 23 August and Kiev on 6 November. By the end of April 1944, all of heretofore German-occupied eastern and central Ukraine fell. The Soviet army then conquered Lviv on 27 July and Transcarpathia on 10 October. Despite the inevitability of Soviet victory, not all acquiesced to a return of Soviet rule.

In a very short span of time, the political realities of East Central Europe changed, then changed again. In the 1930s, the Soviets, the Germans, and the Ukrainian nationalists aspired to remake the political map of Europe, but for different reasons. The Soviets and the Nazis wanted to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, enhance the power and the territories of their own already-existing states, and create their own new orders in their spheres of influence. In contrast, the OUN wanted to establish an independent Ukrainian state near the heart of Europe, a project the Soviets and the Poles (who represented a status quo power) vehemently opposed.

In light of the European balance of power in the 1930s and 1940s, Ukrainian nationalists viewed the Germans as their only potential strategic partner against the USSR and Poland. Nevertheless, they did not blindly follow a pro-German orientation. Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism remained their primary commitment. In light of their ideological fervour, OUN-B members resembled the Bolsheviks in many respects. In light of their limited options, they felt they had to play the pro-German card, whatever the outcome. Encouraged by their contacts with the German military intelligence, which viewed the OUN favourably, they down­played the hostility of the Nazi leaders, who did not recognize Ukrainians as colleagues or as equals, much less humans. For members of the OUN-B, it made perfect sense, strategically and tactically, to ally themselves with Germany, which opposed Poland as well as the USSR, and which helped set up the secessionist puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia.