Ukraine During the Second World War

During WWII, Ukraine was raked over by opposing armies yet again. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Russia. The efficient Nazi war machine had control of all of Ukraine by November of that year.

At first, the Ukrainians cheered on the Nazis as liberators from Russia. The American-published newspaper Svoboda was banned for a while in Canada for being so pro-Nazi. Svoboda’s editorial policy changed, though, as news began to filter back about the behavior of the most recent occupiers of Ukraine. A hopeful “Provisional Ukrainian State” was savagely suppressed within days. Ukraine was divided up again between Poland and Romania, and the Nazi Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

The Nazis efficiently murdered 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews over the next four years. The hated collective farms were left in place, now under German management. Ukrainian wheat was on the move yet again, this time back west to Germany. Shockingly, more than two million Ukrainians were conscripted as slave-workers for fields and factories of Germany.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church was the only legal Ukrainian organization left. There were networks of communist cells and Ukrainian activist cells, but they had limited firepower and organizational capacity. By the end of the war, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army—the Ukrayins'ka povstans'ka armiya—had fought against the Soviet Union, the Poles, and the Nazis. The prevailing sentiment among underground political groups moved sharply away from fascist nationalism, and began to articulate a longing for a democratic and inclusive way of government.

In 1943, the Russians defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, and began to push westward again. By October 1944, they had painstakingly retaken all of Ukraine. The Nazis, as they retreated, burned and blew up fields and infrastructure. The Ukrainians were once more left on the ashes of a battlefield. They went into the war with a population of about 45 million. At the cessation of hostilities, they were down to about 36 million. At least five million people had been killed, and about four million displaced. In all, 700 urban centers and 28,000 villages had to be rebuilt from rubble (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022).

During WWII, Ukraine’s borders were redrawn by the communists (who had taken Eastern Europe). Any Polish people in Galicia-Volhynia were forcibly relocated to Poland, and any Ukrainians in Poland were dumped into the chaos of post-war Galicia-Volhynia. Another significant purge was that Stalin deported the entire population of Tatar peoples from Crimea, leaving the land depopulated.

After the latest weary war, though, Ukrainians still wanted the same thing—freedom. Svoboda.