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Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany took place during theoccupation of Poland and theUkrainian SSR,USSR, byNazi Germany during theSecond World War.[1]
By September 1941, the German-occupied territory of Ukraine was divided between two new German administrative units, theDistrict of Galicia of the NaziGeneral Government and theReichskommissariat Ukraine. Some Ukrainians chose to resist and fight the German occupation forces and joined either theRed Army or the irregularpartisan units conducting guerrilla warfare against the Germans. Some Ukrainians worked with or for the Nazis against the Allied forces.[2][3]Ukrainian nationalists hoped that enthusiastic collaboration would enable them to re-establish an independent state. Many were involved in a series of war crimes andcrimes against humanity, includingthe Holocaust in Ukraine, and themassacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.[4]
Russians, including Belarusians, Tatars and other ethnicities,[5] who collaborated with Nazi Germany did so in various ways including participating in local administrations, in the German-supervisedauxiliary police,Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, or as guards in theconcentration camps.
Ukrainians were viewed asuntermenschen by the Nazis due to being Slavic[6] and were slated for extermination and enslavement inGeneralplan Ost, but in practice, manpower issues on the Eastern Front required Nazi Germany to use locals for various tasks. While Hitler surmised that a small number of Ukrainians were descendants of ethnic Germans who settled in the region,[7] Ukrainians were generally never deemed non-Slavic like other Slavs inNazi Germany's racial hierarchy, such asBulgarians andCroatians. Most of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders who collaborated with Nazi Germany were used for antisemitic and anti-Polish action, but were later arrested for their pro-Ukrainian views.
Stalin, the ruler of the USSR, andHitler, the ruler of Nazi Germany, both demanded territory from their immediate neighbour, theSecond Polish Republic.[8] TheSoviet invasion of Poland in 1939 brought together Ukrainians of the USSR and Ukrainians of what was then EasternPoland (Kresy), under a single Soviet banner. In the territories of Poland invaded byNazi Germany, the size of the Ukrainian minority became negligible and was gathered mostly around UCC (УЦК [uk]), formed inKraków.[9]
Less than two years later, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The GermanOperation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941. Operation Barbarossa brought together native Ukrainians of the USSR and the prewarterritories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. By September the occupied territory was divided between two new German administrative units: to the southwest, theDistrict of Galicia of the NaziGeneral Government, and the northeast,Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which stretched all the way toDonbas by 1943.[8]
Reinhard Heydrich noted in a report dated July 9, 1941 "a fundamental difference between the former Polish and Russian [Soviet] territories. In the former Polish region, the Soviet regime was seen as enemy rule... Hence the German troops were greeted by the Polish as well as theWhite Ruthenian population [meaning Ukrainian and Belarusian] for the most part, at least, as liberators or with friendly neutrality... The situation in the current occupied White Ruthenian areas of the [pre-1939] USSR has a completely different basis."[10]
Ukrainian nationalist partisan leaderTaras Bulba-Borovets gathered a force of 3,000 in summer 1941 to help the Wehrmacht fight the Red Army. In September 1942, Borovets entered into negotiations with the Soviet partisans ofDmitry Medvedev. They tried to attract him to the struggle against the Germans but could not reach an agreement. Borovets refused to obey the Soviet command structure and feared German retaliation against Ukrainian civilians. Still, until the spring of 1943 neutrality was maintained between the Borovets detachments and the Soviet partisans.[11] Parallel to the negotiations with the Soviets, Borovets continued to try to reach an agreement with the Germans. In November 1942, he met withObersturmbannführer Puts, the head of thesecurity service of Volhynia andPodolia general district.
In November 1943, during negotiations with the Germans, Borovets was arrested by theGestapo in Warsaw and incarcerated inSachsenhausen concentration camp.[12] In the autumn of 1944, the Nazis, looking for Ukrainian support in a war they were by then losing, freed Borovets.[13] He was forced to change his nom de guerre toKononenko and under this name he led the formation of a Ukrainian special forces detachment of around 50 men under theWaffen-SS. This detachment was to be dropped in the rear of theRed Army for guerrilla warfare. Those plans never came to fruition.
At the end of the war Hitler's Ukrainian nationalist allies demanded transfers away from the Eastern Front so that they could surrender toAllies rather than Soviet forces. Borovets' detachment surrendered to the Allies on May 10, 1945, and was interned inRimini, Italy.[14][8] Because of the fluid nature of these allegiances, historianAlfred Rieber has emphasized that labels such as "collaborators" and "resistance" have been rendered useless in describing the actual loyalty of these groups.[8] However, in the newly annexed portions of western Ukraine, there was little to no loyalty towards the Soviet Union, whose Red Army had seized Ukraine during the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Nationalists in western Ukraine hoped that their efforts would enable them to re-establish an independent state later on. For example, on the eve of Operation' Barbarossa, as many as 4,000 Ukrainians, operating underWehrmacht orders, sought to cause disruption behind Soviet lines. After the capture ofLviv, a highly-contentious and strategically important city with a significant Ukrainian minority,OUN leadersproclaimed a new Ukrainian State on June 30, 1941, and encouraged loyalty to the new regime in the hope that the Germans would support it. In 1939, during the German-Polish War, the OUN was "a faithful German auxiliary".[15]
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Despite an initial warm reaction to the idea of an independent Ukraine (seeUkrainian national government (1941)), the Nazi administration had other ideas, particularly theLebensraum programme and the total 'Aryanisation' of the population. It played the Slavic nations against one another. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages to try to exterminate Polish populations or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory.[15] This culminated in themass killings of Polish families in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
According toTimothy Snyder, "something that is never said, because it's inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian Communists collaborated with the Germans, than did Ukrainian nationalists." Snyder also points out that very many of those who collaborated with the German occupation also collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s.[16]
The elimination ofJews duringthe Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. TheUkrainian Auxiliary Police, which formed mid August 1941,[17] assisted byEinsatzgruppen C, andPolice battalions rounded up Jews and undesirables for theBabi Yar massacre,[18] as well as other later massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such asKolky,[19][20]Stepan,[21][22]Lviv,Lutsk, andZhytomyr.[23]
During this period, on 1 September 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaperVolhyn wrote, in an article titled Zavoiovuimo misto" (Let's Conquer the City):
"All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must beeradicated. We are at this very moment resolvingthe Jewish question, and thisresolution is part of the plan for the Reich's total reorganization of Europe.",[24][25][26] "The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocable be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people".[27]
Reinforced by religious prejudice, antisemitism turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[28] TheNKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police while they retreated eastward were blamed on Jews. Theantisemitic canard ofJewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultranationalistUkrainian People's Militia, which accompanied GermanEinsatzgruppen moving east.[28] InBoryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd, which had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square, 24 hours to act as they wished againstPolish Jews, who were forced to clean the dead bodies and to dance and then were killed by beating with axes, pipes etc. The same type of mass murders took place inBrzezany. DuringLviv pogroms, 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, led by theUkrainian People's Militia.[28][29][30] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[31]
While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given a choice to enlist for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps because of ongoing close relations with the UkrainianHilfsverwaltung.[32] In total, over 5,000 native Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army signed up for training with the SS at a specialTrawniki training camp to assist with theFinal Solution.[33] Another 1,000 defected during field operations.[33]Trawniki men took a major part in the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews duringOperation Reinhard. They served at allextermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of theWarsaw Ghetto Uprising (see theStroop Report) and theBiałystok Ghetto Uprising among other ghetto insurgencies.[34] The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted and so were always overseen byVolksdeutsche.[35] Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.[36][37]
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In May 2006, the Ukrainian newspaperUkraine Christian News commented, "Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command ofFriedrich Jeckeln. The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine".[38]
In total, the Germans enlisted 250,000 native Ukrainians for duty in five separate formations including the Nationalist Military Detachments (VVN), the Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN), theSS Division Galicia, theUkrainian Liberation Army (UVV) and theUkrainian National Army (Ukrainische Nationalarmee, UNA).[8][39] By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 native Ukrainian police and 15,000 Germans, a ratio of 1 to 16.[40]
The 109th, 114th, 115th, 116th, 117th,118th,201st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft-battalions participated inanti-partisan operations in Ukraine andBelarus. In February and March 1943, the 50th Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft Battalion participated in the large anti-guerrilla action «Operation Winterzauber» (Winter magic) inBelarus, cooperating with several Latvian and the2nd Lithuanian battalion. Schuma-battalions burned down villages suspected of supportingSovietpartisans.[41] On March 22, 1943, all inhabitants of the village ofKhatyn in Belarus were burned alive by the Nazis in what became known as theKhatyn massacre, with the participation of the118th Schutzmannschaft battalion.[42][43]
According to Paul R. Magocsi, "Ukrainian auxiliary police and militia, or simply "Ukrainians" (a generic term that in fact included persons of non-Ukrainian as well as Ukrainian national background) participated in the overall process as policemen and camp guards".[44]
On 28 April 1943, the German Governor of theDistrict of Galicia,Otto Wächter, and the local Ukrainian administration officially declared the creation of theSS Division Galicia. Volunteers signed for service as of 3 June 1943 and numbered 80,000.[45] On 27 July 1944, the division was formed into theWaffen-SS as14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Ukrainian).[46]
Sol Litman of theSimon Wiesenthal Center states that there are many proven and documented incidents of atrocities and massacres committed by the unit against Poles and Jews during World War II.[47] Official SS records show that the 4, 5, 6 and 7 SS-Freiwilligen regiments were underOrdnungspolizei command during the accusations.[46][48] See14th Waffen Grenadier Division of SS, the 1st Galician: Atrocities and war crimes.
In March 1945, the Ukrainian National Committee was set up after a series of negotiations with the Germans. The Committee represented and had command over all Ukrainian units fighting for the Third Reich, such as theUkrainian National Army. However, it was too late, and the committee and the army were disbanded at the end of the war.
Pavlo Shandruk became the head of the National Committee, whileVolodymyr Kubijovyč, the head of theUkrainian Central Committee [pl;ru;uk], became his deputy. The Central Committee was the officially recognized Ukrainian community and quasi-political organization under theNazi occupation of Poland.
Both occupying regimes [Poland and the USSR] imposed their own language and government... For the majority of Ukrainians in the east, Soviet rule was even more repressive
However, from the very beginning, and that is true, some local residents, Ukrainians -- not only ethnic Ukrainians but also Russians, Tatars, and others -- collaborated. Some people from each ethnic group collaborated.
The implementation of the decision to kill all the Jews of Kiev was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a. The unit consisted of SD men (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) and Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; Sipo); the third company of the Special Duties Waffen-SS battalion; and a platoon of the No. 9 police battalion. The unit was reinforced by police battalions Nos. 45 and 305 and by units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Ukraine differs from other parts of the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, whereas the local administrators have formed theHilfsverwaltung in support of extermination policies in 1941 and 1942, and in providing assistance for the deportations to camps in Germany, mainly in 1942 and 1943.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of September 2025 (link)