German Invasion

Adolf Hitler never intended to adhere to the ten-year Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In his view of the world, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union repre­sented two highly antagonistic ideological and racial systems, which inevita­bly would erupt into a “war of annihilation.” German propagandists defined the Soviet Union as a fusion of Jewish and communist interests (a “Judeo- Bolshevist state”) and the future struggle as a conflict to liberate its citizens “from the burden of communism [and] from the damned Jews.”⁵⁸ In con­formity with this stark assessment, the Nazis would not follow the rules of war in these eastern battlefields.⁵⁹ Hitler wanted to destroy Poland and the USSR as states; liquidate their ruling classes; starve at least thirty million Slavs (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusans) to death and kill millions more; open up vast territories in the east to German colonization by expel­ling the Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe, then exterminate them.⁶⁰

In June 1941, German troops easily sliced through the new Soviet de­fence perimeters and reached the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad by the end of the year.

The German conquest quickly destroyed the local population’s hopes for political change.⁶¹ Despite the OUN-B’s pre-war cooperation with German military intelligence (Abwehr) and the Wehrmacht, the Germans did not honour this organization’s pre-emptive declaration of Ukrainian independence in Lviv on 30 June 1941.

On 16 July 1941 Hitler made his decision. He did not recognize an in­dependent or sovereign Ukraine. Germany had acquired Podlachia from Poland in late 1939. He then divided the Ukrainian-speaking territories under his control into three areas: the General Government, Reichskom­missariat (RK) Ukraine, and the German Military Zone. Galicia became the fifth district of the General Government; Volhynia, Central, Southern, and parts of Eastern Ukraine became RK Ukraine. He allowed Romania, his ally, to rule Bukovina and Transnistria, a part of southwestern Ukraine that included Odessa (not to be confused with the breakaway region in present-day Moldova). He continued to favour Hungary’s 1939 annexa­tion of Carpatho-Ukraine (see map 8). Hitler asserted that he would not permit Ukrainians to have a puppet government, or the right to bear arms.⁶³

Between September 1941 (shortly after the German conquest of Kiev) and 1943, the new administration in the east outlawed the OUN-B and killed or jailed 80 per cent of its leaders.⁶⁴ The Germans tolerated the OUN-M until the winter of 1941-2, when they closed down the various cultural and economic organizations that appeared after the June invasion on the territories of what became Reichskommissariat Ukraine.⁶⁵

The OUN-B and OUN-M differed in their views of Germany and the Germans. The young OUN-B cadres embraced a highly romantic, radical devotion to the Ukrainian nation and aspired to create an independent state immediately.

After the German arrests and executions of OUN-B leaders and mem­bers in the fall of 1941, the survivors had to regroup and rethink their overall strategy and tactics while on the run. By the spring of 1942, they re-established many of their underground networks. But inasmuch as the OUN-B lacked the organizational capacity, the personnel, or resources, it could not radically change events on the ground. Far weaker than the German army, the Red Army, or the Home Army (see below), the OUN-B reacted to events far more than they steered them, primarily because they did not possess any external sponsors or allies in their quest to create an independent state.

According to the OUN-B, the Poles, the Germans, the Soviets, and the Jews who supported the Poles or the Soviets constituted Ukraine’s great­est enemies.⁶⁶ Inasmuch as these groups made up the overwhelming ma­jority of Ukraine’s neighbours and internal minorities, this did not leave much room for manoeuvre except on a temporary case-by-case basis.

In contrast, members of the OUN-M were older, pragmatic realists, committed to a policy of cooperation with Germany, even after the occu­pational authorities unleashed waves of atrocities against the locals.⁶⁷ According to the OUN- M and OUN-B views of the world, only Germany could overturn the political order in East Central Europe and facilitate the creation of an independent Ukraine.

But the Germans invaded the USSR to subordinate the peoples of the Soviet Union to the Nazi new world order, not liberate them from commu­nism. In stark contrast to the German policy regarding the Russian Empire in the First World War, the Nazis “did not seek to foster independence movements in any part of the territory taken from the USSR.”⁶⁸ Instead, they only wanted to exploit the Soviet people and to extract their natural resources. Despite peasant expectations that the Germans would dismantle the collective farms, the cornerstone of the Soviet order, the new rulers did not. Even before the German invasion of the USSR, Hitler imagined that Ukraine would become “a common food-supply base” for the Axis powers, the “only source of calories for Germany and its West European empire, which together and separately were net importers of food.”⁶⁹ Ukraine would serve as Germany’s major geopolitical asset in East Central Europe and as its primary breadbasket. Without Ukrainian grain, Germany could not win the war or establish a secure eastern empire.