Nazi Rule in Ukraine

The opinion of Alexander Dallin and other specialists on the Second World War on the eastern front is that “of all the Eastern areas conquered by the Third Reich, the Ukraine was by far the most important.

Map 25 Ukraine under German rule 1941–44

As the only member of the Nazi leadership who had firsthand knowledge of Eastern Europe, Rosenberg initially appeared to be the man who would formulate Nazi policy in the newly conquered lands. His appointment as head of the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories strengthened this impression. Rosenberg had an understanding of the aspirations of the region’s stateless peoples (which did not preclude their economic exploitation by Germany). His well-known conviction that the most effective way of dealing with Russia, Germany’s most dangerous rival, was to break up its multinational empire gave the Ukrainian integral nationalists reason to believe that they could come to an understanding with the Nazis. What the integral nationalists did not realize, however, was that Hitler had a low opinion of Rosenberg’s theories in general and of his plans for Ukraine in particular.

Nazi racial doctrines held that all Slavs were subhumans (Untermenschen) and that their only role was to serve the German master race. Hitler and most of his party associates viewed Ukraine as the primary area for German colonial expansion (Lebensraum) and Ukrainians as the future slaves of the German colonists. His early victories encouraged Hitler in his view that concessions to the Ukrainians were unnecessary. Consequently, when the time came to appoint the Nazi ruler of Ukraine, Hitler chose Erich Koch, a notoriously brutal and bigoted administrator known for his personal contempt for Slavs. Koch’s attitude toward his assignment was evident in the speech he delivered to his staff upon his arrival in Ukraine in September 1941: “Gentlemen, I am known as a brutal dog. Because of this reason I was appointed as Reichskommissar of Ukraine. Our task is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of the Ukrainians. Gentlemen, I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the native population.”⁴ On another occasion, Koch emphasized his loathing for Ukrainians by remarking: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”⁵ This was the man who more than any other was instrumental in turning Ukrainians against the Germans.

Nazi attitudes toward the Ukrainians were soon reflected in their policies. In August 1941, completely ignoring Ukrainian national aspirations, Hitler ordered the breakup of Ukraine into separate administrative units. The largest of these, which included the Right Bank and much of the Left Bank, was called Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and was placed in the hands of Koch. Refusing to establish his “capital” in Kiev, the traditional Ukrainian center, Koch chose instead the small provincial Volhynian city of Rivne. In a move that was deeply resented by its Ukrainian inhabitants, Galicia became a district of the General Government of Poland rather than being attached to the rest of Ukraine.

The structure and extent of the German civilian administration in Ukraine left no doubt that the Nazis intended to retain total control. An unusually large number of officials were assigned to Ukraine. But because it was one of the last countries to be conquered, Ukraine received only the dregs of German officialdom. Consequently, German arrogance was often compounded by ineptitude. An inviolable principle of Nazi rule was that all important administrative and economic positions down to the county level should be staffed by Germans. Ukrainians were allowed to hold only the lowest administrative positions, such as village elders, mayors of small towns, and auxiliary policemen.

Early indications of the nature of the Nazi regime were its treatment of Jews and prisoners of war. Because the Soviets had made no special effort to evacuate Ukraine’s Jewish population (and remained silent about its persecution), most Jews fell into the hands of the Nazis, who established 50 ghettos and over 180 large concentration camps in Ukraine. Within months of their arrival, the Nazis, and especially the SS execution squads (Einsatzsgruppen), killed about 850,000 Jews. In Kiev about 33,000 Jews were executed in Babyn lar (Babi Yar) in two days alone.

Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners of war was almost as inhuman. In the first six months of the war, millions of Red Army men had surrendered, many willingly, to the Germans. Confident of victory and anxious to eliminate “surplus” Slavs, Nazi authorities herded the prisoners into open-air camps encircled by barbed wire and allowed them to die of exposure, disease, and hunger.

In August-September 1941, the Germans began to introduce policies that had a profound impact on Ukraine’s population as a whole. Disregarding the advice of Rosenberg and his staff, Koch decided that the exploitation of Ukrainian agriculture – his main economic goal – could be conducted most efficiently if the collectives were maintained, albeit under German supervision, in somewhat altered forms, and under different names. The Ukrainian peasantry was thus quickly disabused of its dream that the new regime would abolish the collective farms. At the same time that Koch lowered the peasants’ income, he demanded that they work from dawn to dusk. These viciously exploitative measures help to explain why about 85% of the food supplies Nazi Germany obtained from occupied Soviet territories came from Ukraine.

Anti-German feelings increased even more when the Nazis decided to use Ukraine not only as a major supplier of food, but also as their main source of forced labor for the undermanned industries and farms of Germany. Initially, Ukrainians had volunteered to work in the Third Reich in order to escape poor conditions at home or to learn a trade. However, as word spread about the harsh labor discipline, humiliating treatment of Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), and ridiculously low wages, people tried to avoid the labor drafts by all means possible. By early 1942, Koch’s police had to stage massive manhunts, rounding up young Ukrainians in bazaars or as they emerged from churches or cinemas and shipping them to Germany. The extent to which Ukrainians were “favored” for this type of onerous work is evident from the fact that out of the 2.8 million Soviet Ostarbeiter in Germany at the end of the war, 2.3 million were from Ukraine.

The staggering brutality of Nazi rule was also evident in the cities and in the treatment of the intelligentsia. Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population. Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw 120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed and about 80,000 starved to death during the course of the war.

Under the circumstances, the educational opportunities of Reichkommissariat Ukraine’s inhabitants were severely limited. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that “the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia should be decimated.”⁷ Koch believed that three years of grade school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as to curtail medical services in order to undermine “the biological power of the Ukrainians.”⁸ German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen.

In order to gain a proper perspective on Nazi rule in Ukraine, it is important to understand that it was in Reichskommissariat Ukraine that the Nazi regime exhibited its most extreme form. Although similar conditions existed in other areas of German-occupied Ukraine, these regions were also marked by appreciable differences in administrative practice. In Galicia, for example, which became a district of the General Government of Poland, German rule was less severe than in the eastern regions. It is true that many of the most hated policies, such as conscription of labor, expropriation of food from the villages, and semi-starvation of the cities, were also implemented there.

To protect the Ukrainian population from repression, the expanded UCC adopted a policy of avoiding confrontations with the Nazis and concentrated on strengthening the Ukrainian presence in the cities and on developing a modern labor force. However, when the need arose, the UCC vigorously defended Ukrainian interests. For example, when several Ukrainian villages were wiped out in a German operation in February 1943, Kubijovyč, the head of the UCC, boldy protested to the Nazi authorities, remarking to Frank: “One has finished executing Jews and is now beginning to execute Ukrainians.”⁹ Another advantage that the Ukrainians in the General Government enjoyed was the existence of an extensive elementary, secondary, and vocational system of education. They also were able, on a limited scale, to maintain their cooperatives and to engage in cultural activities. As was customary, the Germans monopolized all the key administrative positions in Galicia. But Ukrainians were generally favored over Poles in appointments to positions in the local administration. This policy exacerbated the already deteriorating relations between the two communities, much to the satisfaction of the Germans.

In the easternmost regions of Ukraine, which remained under military jurisdiction, conditions were similar to those in Reichskommissariat Ukraine except that police terror was less prevalent and some Ukrainian civic organizations, notably the one led by Volodymyr Dolenko in Kharkiv, were allowed to exist. Compared to German occupation, that of the Romanians in southwestern Ukraine (Transnistria) was relatively lax. The Romanians delivered Jews to the Nazis rather than exterminating them themselves, refrained from widespread political terror, and allowed free trade. But they vigorously repressed all manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism, banned Ukrainian publications, and tended to favor pro-Russian groups.

Nazi policies in Ukraine were brutal and irrational. Rarely has an occupying power managed to turn an initially friendly, or at least expectant, populace against it so quickly and completely as did the Nazis in Ukraine. The extent to which the Nazis allowed their theories of racial superiority to cloud their perception of political realities will always remain puzzling. Even some high-ranking officials of the Third Reich seemed to be taken aback by the magnitude of German blunders. For example, as early as 1942, a close associate of Rosenberg, Otto Brautigam, admitted that “the forty million Ukrainians who greeted us joyfully as liberators are today indifferent to us and are already beginning to swing into the enemy camp.”¹⁰ But even when they admitted their mistakes, the Nazis did little to correct them. In the view of many modern historians, this Nazi failure to utilize effectively the non-Russian nationalities, and particularly the Ukrainians, against the Soviet regime was one of their greatest political blunders in the war. Collaboration

In dealing with the Nazis, the Ukrainians had two alternatives: to obey or to resist. As throughout all of German-occupied Europe, the vast majority chose obedience. And when obedience went beyond the limits of the passive fulfillment of German commands, it usually became collaboration. In Western Europe, where loyalty to one’s state was taken for granted and the Nazis were the one and only enemy, collaboration with the Germans was generally viewed as a form of treason. But in Ukraine, collaboration was a much more complicated issue. It was, first of all, unclear as to how much loyalty Ukrainians owed to Stalin’s regime or to the Polish state that had mistreated them. Who was the primary enemy? Was it the Stalinist system, which inflicted such great suffering in the 1930s, or the Nazi regime, which was currently (but perhaps only temporarily) in power? Finally, given the extreme ruthlessness of both regimes in Ukraine, collaboration was often the price of survival for many Ukrainians.

For Ukrainians the war posed the problem of how to make the best of what was essentially a no-win situation. From an average individual’s point of view, success generally meant the preservation of one’s life. For Ukrainian leaders and their organizations in German-occupied territories the goal – or rather, the puzzle – was how to preserve Ukrainian interests from both the Nazis and the increasingly stronger Soviets. Distasteful as it was, some Ukrainian leaders decided to side with one totalitarian system in order to withstand the other. Because the Soviets appeared to be the greater long-term threat, almost all Ukrainian organizations in the Third Reich collaborated with the Germans at one time or another, but always to a limited degree and for strictly tactical reasons. As a people without a state of their own, Ukrainians operated from a position of weakness. They were unable to formulate policy or influence events. Consequently, Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis was insignificant compared to that of Germany’s allies. Finally, although there were opportunists, anti-Semites, and ideological fanatics among the Ukrainians, there is no evidence indicating that their number was proportionately greater than among other nationalities.

On the individual level, collaboration with the Germans usually took the form of participation in the local administration or the German-supervised auxiliary police. Motives for taking such positions varied. In Western Ukraine, where, before the war, Poles had excluded Ukrainians from even the lowest administrative positions, the desire to have at least a minimum of authority in Ukrainian hands and to turn the tables on hated rivals was often a major motive. The need to find employment or to satisfy personal ambitions was, as always, an important consideration. The most notorious form of collaboration was to act as a concentration camp guard. Invariably, guard positions were held by Soviet prisoners of war, who had the difficult choice of accepting the task or perishing in the camps.

Given the lowly position of Ukrainian collaborators in the Nazi apparatus and the SS monopoly on the actual extermination of Jews, Ukrainian participation in the massacres was neither extensive nor decisive. When it did occur, it usually took the form of auxiliary policemen herding Jews into ghettos. However, there were also many Ukrainians who risked the death penalty by aiding Jews. Metropolitan Sheptytsky was an outstanding example: not only did he shelter hundreds of Jews in monasteries but he also used his sermons to decry the Nazi slaughter of Jews. In 1943 an ss report to Himmler stated that the metropolitan was adamantly opposed to the Nazi anti-Semitic outrages and that he had come to consider nazism to be an even greater evil than communism.¹¹

Aside from the abortive interlude between the OUN and the Germans in the early days of the war, the most important case of Ukrainian cooperation with Hitler’s regime on the organizational level was the formation of the SS volunteer Galicia Division. In spring 1943, after the stunning German defeat at Stalingrad, Nazi authorities belatedly decided to recruit non-German “easterners” into their forces. Consequently, Otto Wächter, the governor of Galicia, approached the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) with a proposal to form a Ukrainian division in the German army. After much debate and despite opposition from the OUN-B, Kubijovyč and his associates agreed. Their immediate reason for the creation of such a division was the hope that it might help to improve German treatment of the Ukrainians. The specter of 1917–20 was also extremely influential in persuading the UCC leadership, for Kubijovyč and his associates (as well as Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself) were convinced that it was the lack of a well-trained army that had prevented Ukrainians from establishing their own state after the First World War. Realizing that the defeat of Germany was probable, they were determined that this time Ukrainians would not be caught in the ensuing chaos without a regular military force. It should be emphasized that both the Ukrainian organizers of the division and its members were motivated primarily by patriotic and anti-Soviet motives, not by pro-Nazi sympathies.

In the negotiations leading up to the formation of the division, the UCC insisted that the unit fight only against the Soviets. Wachter, on Himmler’s instructions, demanded that the entire higher divisional command be German and, in order not to irritate Hitler, that the division be called Galician rather than Ukrainian. When the UCC called for volunteers in June 1943, over 82,000 men responded. Of these, 13,000 eventually became members of the SS Volunteer Galicia Division.

The men of the Galician Division were not the only Ukrainians in Hitler’s armies. Scattered among the approximately 1 million former Soviet citizens who wore German uniforms in 1944 were about 220,000 Ukrainians (most of the others were Russians). To put these numbers into perspective, it should be remembered that about 2 million Ukrainians fought on the Soviet side and that large numbers also fought in Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, American, and Canadian forces. Such was the fate of a stateless people.