German and Romanian Occupation

As the largest and most populous of the four administrative units divid­ing up the Ukrainian territories, Reichskommissariat Ukraine possessed approximately fifteen to seventeen million people living in a 340,000- square-kilometre area.

Despite the merciless methods employed to gather Ukraine’s natural re­sources, the Germans fell short of their assigned goals. Even with grain surpluses in 1942 and 1943, agricultural deliveries to Germany “turned out much smaller than [they] had budgeted for, while [their] attempts to revive the Donbass, Krivyi Rih, and other industrial areas, became a complete failure; the Germans actually sent coal to the Ukraine from Germany.”¹⁰⁴ Not only did the extractors experience a shortage of skilled and unskilled labour in those areas with an abundance of natural resources, they also encountered the local population’s passive resistance to the entire German colonial project. As these plans miscarried and the Germans started to lose the war on the eastern front, they abandoned all restraint and ignited a kill­ing spree, reminiscent of Belgian King Leopold’s crimes against humanity in the Congo at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹⁰⁵

Within the General Government’s jurisdiction, Ukrainians did not expe­rience the viciousness their compatriots experienced in Reichskommissariat (RK) Ukraine.

Although both the Poles and Ukrainians suffered from the harsh war­time conditions (especially the scarcity of food, the spread of infectious diseases, forced requisitioning, the Ostarbeiter program, the expropria­tion of housing), the Ukrainians enjoyed a preferential status in the public, national, and cultural spheres. They now staffed and headed the local gov­ernment, local judicial offices, and auxiliary police. The German autho­rities actively discriminated against and brutally repressed the Poles, especially their intelligentsia, and started to round up Polish Jews, placing them into makeshift ghettos and then exterminating them. With the intro­duction of food rationing, the Germans restricted the foodstuffs the Poles could consume; Jews received even lower rations and starved to death in their ghettos and labour camps.¹⁰⁷

Under the leadership of the geographer Volodymyr Kubijovic, the Ukrainian Central Committee in Cracow (the only officially recognized Ukrainian organization in the General Government or in Reichskommis­sariat Ukraine) served not only as a social welfare agency, but also as the centre of the Ukrainian community. Despite various restrictions, this committee expanded the number of Ukrainian-language schools from 2,510 in 1939 to over 4,000 in 1942, enlarged the cooperative movement in the countryside, and sought to expand its political and administrative powers on behalf of Ukrainians.¹⁰⁸ Although it could not play a significant role in helping Ukrainians in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Ukrainian Central Committee did play a major role in the creation of the SS-Waffen Division Galicia in 1943.

Even before the German loss at Stalingrad, the Waffen-SS, the official designation for combat units of the SS, started to create military detach­ments of non-Germans who did not meet SS racial standards. Separated into special national formations, these SS field formations spent the entire war under the tactical command of the army and “may be considered a defacto branch of the Wehrmacht,” not the SS.¹⁰⁹

Three months after Stalingrad, on 28 April 1943, German occupation authorities in Galicia, in cooperation with the Ukrainian Central Committee and the tacit approval of the Greek Catholic Church, issued a call for Ukrainian volunteers for a new “Galician” SS division, which would recognize the distinctiveness of Galicia, but not necessarily support Ukrainian national aspirations.¹¹⁰ Members of this new military formation would “fight Bolshevism” and participate in the struggle “for faith and fatherland, for family and native soil” and “for a fair new order of the vic­torious young Europe,” a well-understood reference to the Nazi-led struggle against the communist cause.¹¹¹ Many Ukrainians in Galicia real­ized that the tide had turned against the Germans and that Soviet troops would inevitably arrive at their doorstep. Very few wanted a return to the oppressive and anti-Ukrainian environment of 1939-41. To check this on­slaught, many young men enlisted, including an unknown number of those who served as auxiliary policemen.

The response exceeded all expectations. Nearly 100,000 Ukrainians vol­unteered; fewer than 30,000 were accepted.¹¹² Although Ukrainians consti­tuted its rank and file (Poles and Jews need not apply), the overwhelming majority of its officers and non-commissioned officers consisted of Germans, many who entertained negative racial stereotypes of Ukrainians.¹¹³ Apart from politically conscious Ukrainians who hoped that their military service would help defend Galicia from the future Soviet onslaught and that their unit could become the nucleus of a national army under the right political circumstances, men who hoped to escape duty in construction battalions or labour service in Germany also joined.

The Polish underground, communists, and members of the OUN-B (who called the Galician Division “a German colonial unit”) opposed the division’s formation.¹¹⁵ Even Erich Koch, the head of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, openly questioned the division’s reliability before it completed its training.¹¹⁶ For Koch, the ideological consideration that Ukrainians were and always would be Untermenschen overshadowed the pragmatic necessity to compromise in order to win the war.

In May 1944, the division completed its training in Germany. Redesignated as the 14th Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS (galiz. Nr. 1), its 15,290 men were sent to the eastern front, to the Brody-Tarnow pocket in Galicia. After several days of heavy fighting in July, only three thousand broke out of their encirclement by Soviet troops and survived.¹¹⁷ The Germans recon­stituted the division at Neuhammer and sent it to Slovakia to quell the communist-inspired Slovak Uprising.

On 12 March 1945, when the Soviet army almost reached Berlin, the German minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, recognized the Ukrainian National Committee as the sole representative body of the Ukrainian people. He promised that all Ukrainians serving in various formations of the German army would now constitute a Ukrainian National Army, which would renew the fight for Ukrainian statehood.¹¹⁸ The Galicia Division would become the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army. Another regiment, formed around Berlin, would become the nucleus of the UNA’s Second Division.

Those encased in bombarded bunkers for days at a time in Berlin obvi­ously did not realize the reality of the situation at hand.

Romania, an ally of Germany’s during the Second World War, received Hitler’s blessings to administer the territory of Transnistria on 30 August 1941. Located between the Dniester and the Bug/Buh Rivers, this 40,000-square-kilometre area contained 2.25 million people. Tiraspol served as its first capital, Odessa as its second. Governed by G. Alecsianu (1941-4), the Romanian authorities sought to exploit the territory economically and favoured the small Romanian minority. They banned all Ukrainian cultural activities. In 1941-3, the Romanian government deported over 101,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina and over 23,000 Gypsies (Roma) from Romania to Transnistria, where most died. Soviet military forces regained Transnistria in March 1944.¹²⁰