The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine
Looks like at least some people in Soviet Ukraine were really happy when Nazis arrived to their land in 1941. Just see this selection of Ukrainian people showing hospitality to the Soviet enemy - German Wermacht soldiers.The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. The Soviets, during their hasty retreat, shot their political prisoners and, whenever possible, evacuated personnel, dismantled and removed industrial plants, and conducted a scorched-earth policy—blowing up buildings and installations, destroying crops and food reserves, and flooding mines. Almost four million people were evacuated east of the Urals for the duration of the war. The Germans moved swiftly, however, and by the end of November virtually all of Ukraine was under their control.
Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for the attainment of their independence. The illusion was quickly shattered. The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B, who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers of this action were arrested and interned in concentration camps (as were both Bandera and, later, Melnyk). Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis in August attached Galicia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
Ukrainian Nationalists during a parade for the German Nazi invadersIn the occupied territories, the Nazis sought to implement their “racial” policies. In the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar (Ukrainian: Babyn Yar) in Kiev, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. The Nazis were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local population.
In the Reichskommissariat, ruthlessly administered by Erich Koch, Ukrainians were slated for servitude. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of the peasantry, were left intact, industry was allowed to deteriorate, and the cities were deprived of foodstuffs as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”). Cultural activities were repressed, and education was limited to the elementary level. Only the revived Ukrainian Orthodox Church was permitted to resume its work as a national institution. Somewhat better was the situation of Ukrainians in Galicia, where restricted cultural, civic, and relief activities were permitted under centralized control.
Under such conditions of brutality, Ukrainian political activity, predicated originally on cooperation with the Germans, increasingly turned to underground organizational work and resistance. The OUN groups that streamed eastward in 1941 were soon subjected by the German authorities to repressive measures, including execution, so they propagated their nationalist views clandestinely and, through their contact with the local population, began to revise their ideology in a more democratic, pluralist direction. In eastern and central Ukraine, secret Communist Party cells maintained an underground existence, and a Soviet partisan movement developed in the northern forests. Early in 1942 began the formation of nationalist partisan units in Volhynia, and later in Galicia, that became known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia; UPA). As well as conducting guerrilla warfare with the Germans, the Soviet partisans and the UPA fought each other.
The
UPA emerged in 1942 as one of several partisan armies in German-occupied Ukraine. At its peak, the faction claimed nearly a quarter of a million followers. Fiercely nationalist, the group’s raison d’être was to establish a free and independent Ukrainian homeland. While it directed much of its energy to combatting the Axis invaders, the
UPA always kept its eye on what it considered the real enemy: the communists. And as the fortunes of war on the Eastern Front shifted in favour of the Soviets, the faction suspended hostilities against the Germans (Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and SA combat groups) to fight off the resurgent
Red Army. The movement also orchestrated
a fearsome campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting western Ukraine’s Polish minority whom they considered also to be among their people’s historic enemies. ( Source:
militaryhistorynow.com/2014/03/03/stuck-in-the-middle-the-forgotten-and-bloody-history-of-the-ukrainian-insurgent-army/ )
A "wreath" of murdered Polish children tied with barbed wire by the Ukrainian nationalists of UPAUkraine reunited under Soviet ruleAfter their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive westward. In mid-1943 the Germans began their slow retreat from
Ukraine, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered
Kiev. With the approach of the front,
guerrilla activity in western Ukraine intensified, and bloody clashes that claimed
large numbers of civilian victims occurred between
Ukrainians and
Poles. In spring 1944 the
Red Army began to penetrate into
Galicia, and by the end of October
all of Ukraine was again under Soviet control.
Vinnytsia residents welcome Soviet soldiers-liberators. Vinnitsa city was under German occupation from July 21, 1941. Was released on March 20, 1944 the troops of the 38th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front during Proskurovo-Chernovtsy operation.The Soviet victory,
the Red Army’s occupation of eastern Europe, and Allied diplomacy resulted in
a permanent redrawing of Ukraine’s western frontiers. With compensation of German territories in the west,
Poland agreed to the cession of Volhynia and Galicia; a mutual population exchange—and
the subsequent deportation of the remaining Ukrainian population by Poland to its new western territories—created for the first time in centuries
a clear ethnic, as well as political, Polish-Ukrainian border.
Northern Bukovina was reoccupied in
1944 and recognized as part of Ukraine in
the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. Transcarpathia, which had reverted from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in 1944, was ceded to Ukraine in 1945 by a Czech-Soviet government agreement. In 1945 Ukraine became a charter member of the United Nations and subsequently became a signatory of peace treaties with Germany’s wartime allies—Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was perhaps the only underground movement in World War Two to fight against both the Axis and the Allies.Ukraine’s human and material losses during World War II were enormous. Some 5 to 7 million people perished. Even with the return of evacuees from the east and the repatriation of forced labourers from Germany, Ukraine’s estimated population of 36 million in 1947 was almost 5 million less than before the war. Because more than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages had been destroyed, 10 million people were left homeless. Only 20 percent of the industrial enterprises and 15 percent of agricultural equipment and machinery remained intact, and the transportation network was severely damaged. The material losses constituted an estimated 40 percent of Ukraine’s national wealth.
Remembering the UPA
While still damned by Russians as counter-revolutionaries, fascists and terrorists, the
UPA is widely and openly acclaimed inside
Ukraine. Since national independence in 1992, there have been calls to formally commemorate and even compensate surviving members of the movement in much the same way other Second World War veterans are honoured. Many ethnic Russians in Ukraine have resisted such attempts however; they remember the UPA as fanatical thugs. In addition, the group’s bloody massacres of Poles have long been a sore point between Kiev and Warsaw, one that has only recently started to be reconciled. Despite this, many Ukrainians celebrate the resistance and its leaders. Parades marking the anniversary of the army’s formation occur annually in Ukraine, UPA merchandise is available online and one of the group’s founders,
Roman Shukhevych, was posthumously made a national hero of in 2007.
Roman-Taras Yosypovych Shukhevych (Ukrainian: Рома́н-Тарас Йо́сипович Шухе́вич, also known by his pseudonym Taras Chuprynka, 30 June 1907 – 5 March 1950) was a Ukrainian politician, military leader and general of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).The
UPA was invoked by anti-government demonstrators throughout
Ukraine in late 2013, with protestors waving not only the blue and yellow national flag, but also
the red and black UPA standard.
Ukrainian Freedom Party Flags, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) Banners, and a giant portrait of Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera
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