Genocide in Volhynia

[henryk]

The map below shows the Ukrainian National Republic, 1917-1920, before it was destroyed following the defeat by the Red Army of the joint Ukrainian -Polish military forces which took over and occupied the territory. Note that Eastern Galicia is not part of it, but Volhynia is. It was Petliura's statemanship which recognized it was more important to establish Ukraine than to pursue making Eastern Galicia Ukrainian.
The map is taken from the book "The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919-1921" by Michael Palij. He retired from the University of Kansas. The book provides an unbiased review of the period, with a 120 page bibliography of his sources, including Ukrainian, Polish and Russian.
Presented here is the book's map as colourized by me.

[Rob - wssob2]

Hi Henryk - thanks for the map! Very useful to have in discussions like these - Rob

[Manweru]

Ukrainian population of Pawłokoma and other villages were massacred by AK. using your own logic you should admit that AK was a criminal fascist organization as it massacred Ukrainian civillians as well as Belarusian and Lithuanian ones.

Your post is a piece of blatant propaganda, although that's hardly anything new coming from pro-UPA Ukrainian posters.

1) AK was officially disbanded in January of 1945. The Pawlokoma massacre happened in March of 1945. Basically you are claiming that AK is responsible for something done after it was disbanded.

2) Unlike UPA, AK never conducted a organised, widespread action of widespread of murder of civilians. In this aspect UPA can be called a criminal organisation, while in the case of AK the guilt can only be attributred to particular units.

3) UPA was the armed force of the fascist political organisation OUN. AK on the other hands had hardly anything to do fascism, one of the reasons for that was that there was another, much more politically extreme Polish guerilla army called NSZ.

4) As for Pawlokoma itself, you are conviniently "forgetting" to mention that the Pawlokoma massacre was an act of retribution for the previous abduction and most likely murder of a number of Polish civilians.

(...)
The anger and resentment created by the way the Polish leaders had treated the Ukrainian people led to the rise of Ukrainian extremism. The great suffering of ethnic Poles in Volhynia in 1943 at the hands of the UPA was the end result of a chain of events that had been set in train by selfish Polish chauvinism in 1918-21.

In my opinion your point of view is quite questionable. It's not absurd, there some logic in what you are writing, but you are conducting severe oversimplification, you are putting emphasis on one part of the context with the exclusion of others.

It's a complex matter and it deserves more coverage than I can give it here, but for example you seem to look at OUN's extremism only in the perspective of Polish-Ukrainian relations. But what about the perspective of the time period, what about the similiarities that OUN shared with other totalitarian movements like the Nazis or the Communists? In short, much would indicate that the OUN extremists were simply misguided, unbalanced people who were literally searching for trouble and they would find it even if the treatment of Ukrainians by Poles would be much better.

Perhaps I should give a quick example of from where my objections to your position come from. As you might know or not know, UPA grew in power when it's ranks were strenghtened by the deserters from the auxiliary police that collaborated with the Nazis. Those men significant because they deserted together with their German-provided weapons, and they were few thousands of them. The problem is that before joining UPA, one of their tasks was helping the Germans in murdering the Jews... which de facto means that UPA absorbed few thousands of war criminals, few thousands of men who were already morally degenerated when they entered UPA's ranks.

Now, if Poles were somehow responsible for the subsequent slaughter of Poles done by the UPA (as you are suggesting), then who is responsible for the slaughter of Jews done by people who later joined UPA's ranks? Don't you think that the presense of few thousand men who were previously Nazi henchmen and who had participated in the "Final Solution" might have more to do with UPA's later war crimes than the pre-war actions of Polish goverment ever did?

Accordingly, it is no accident that the violence of the UPA in Volhynia in 1943 was directed primarily at the Polish colonists, and that it received the support of the dispossessed Ukrainian peasants.

Wrong.

1) It was directed at Poles as such.

2) The colonists were previously hit hard by the Soviets in the early years of WWII, mostly because they were of higher social standing, many of them were soldiers, etc etc. The UPA massacres were commited mostly against Polish peasants who lived there for centuries, who were of lower social standing (thus largely spared by the Soviets) and who usually lived in coexistence with local Ukrainians.

As for Pilsudski's so-called "Prometheism", I get the impression that it was essentially an historical fiction concocted by Charaszkiewicz in 1940, as an attempt to justify Poland's inter-war policies to the Allies.

Absurd. The Prometheism was a theoretically sound strategy aimed at counterbalancing/liming the power of Russia by stimulating and supporting other countries around it.

BTW which of Poland's inter-war policies needed justification in Allied eyes in 1940 and which could be justified by Prometheism?

[David Thompson]

Let's start seeing sources for our readers, gentlemen.

[Askold]

Didn't nottice this old thread was still going on.

AdaOg:

You did not answer my earlier my earlier question:

- What are your proofs that UPA wanted to murder every Pole they could reach. The leaflet clearly indicated the opposite - UPA wanted to reach out to the Polish settler population.

You also did not answer this:

- This kind of question can bring only specultions. What is your criteria for Polish govenrments approach to Ukrainian population in the interwar period? Was the promise in Versaile to mantain and uphold Ukrainian authonomy in Galicia made with an honest intenet or was it a tactical maneuver?

Please answer it before you shower everyone with more "information".

H2Hshake:

Well You didn't notice that I used word Ukrainian NATIONS, not nation.Why?
Because I think that there is no real Ukrainian nation.Before WWII there was no Ukrainians

- A typical shouvenistic approach that is also offensive. I think moderators should remove this post.

Manweru:

1) AK was officially disbanded in January of 1945. The Pawlokoma massacre happened in March of 1945. Basically you are claiming that AK is responsible for something done after it was disbanded.

- Officially disbanned on paper could mean one thing, but groups of Polish nationalists still continued to be functioning.

2) Unlike UPA, AK never conducted a organised, widespread action of widespread of murder of civilians. In this aspect UPA can be called a criminal organisation, while in the case of AK the guilt can only be attributred to particular units.

- Polish government conducted an organized and widepsread adtion against Ukrainian population in the 30's called Pacification. In this aspect Polish governmetn can be called a criminal organization as it waged war against its own citizens.

3) UPA was the armed force of the fascist political organisation OUN. AK on the other hands had hardly anything to do fascism, one of the reasons for that was that there was another, much more politically extreme Polish guerilla army called NSZ.

- If you compare Polish nationalism with Ukrainian nationalism they are very much a like. So I dont' see why one should be facist and the other not.

4) As for Pawlokoma itself, you are conviniently "forgetting" to mention that the Pawlokoma massacre was an act of retribution for the previous abduction and most likely murder of a number of Polish civilians.

- Yes, and Ukrainian actions were retribution for Polish crimes comminted against Ukrainian state, such as occupation, war crimes and oppression.

Perhaps I should give a quick example of from where my objections to your position come from. As you might know or not know, UPA grew in power when it's ranks were strenghtened by the deserters from the auxiliary police that collaborated with the Nazis. Those men significant because they deserted together with their German-provided weapons, and they were few thousands of them. The problem is that before joining UPA, one of their tasks was helping the Germans in murdering the Jews... which de facto means that UPA absorbed few thousands of war criminals, few thousands of men who were already morally degenerated when they entered UPA's ranks.

- Your statement is falce because it assumes that every Ukrainian who joined German police would participate in round up of the jews. If we were to follow your logic, then every Polish collaborationist police peson that later joined AK would also mean that "morally degenerated ranks of AK were joined by thousands of war criminals". Lets be fare and not trow such statements around

2) The colonists were previously hit hard by the Soviets in the early years of WWII, mostly because they were of higher social standing, many of them were soldiers, etc etc. The UPA massacres were commited mostly against Polish peasants who lived there for centuries, who were of lower social standing (thus largely spared by the Soviets) and who usually lived in coexistence with local Ukrainians.

- You are repeating the same old arguments from the older discussion on this matter. Let me clarify again:

1. Polish minority in Volyn' was very small before the influx of Polish colonists
2. The Polish colonists received the land taken from Ukrainian pesants
3. The new Polish settlers were not on the best terms with the Ukrainian population

[AdaOg]

here you can find the answer for every question, useless to copy.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=162249

and here , a very interesting web-site of the Society of the Victims of OUN UPA bandits. Here you will find very detailed data of the exact number of the Poliosh victims of Ukrainian Nationalists' victims, together with some photos - all sorted by regions.
http://www.stowarzyszenieuozun.wroclaw. ... a_spis.htm

Ps. The society undertook the action to create "Garden of the righteous among the nations for those, real Ukrainian heroes who risking their life saved Poles. „Betrayal” (hidding) was punished with the most sophisticated and cruel tortures that one can imagine or even cannot be imagined.

[Askold]

You are still avoiding answering directly. Instead of answering the specific question you spam the topic with more irrelevent info. I dont' care about so called "crimes" or made up "societies" as that is not the issue we are talking about. I want you to answer for your words:


- What are your proofs that UPA wanted to murder every Pole they could reach. The leaflet clearly indicated the opposite - UPA wanted to reach out to the Polish settler population.

and this question:

What is your criteria for Polish govenrments approach to Ukrainian population in the interwar period? Was the promise in Versaile to mantain and uphold Ukrainian authonomy in Galicia made with an honest intenet or was it a tactical maneuver?

[AdaOg]

I just do not have enough time to multiply the same answers in many threads - also for sake of administrators health.

So...., maybe I will take just a few copy paste:

As Timothy Snyder has pointed out, it is one thing to desire ethnic purity, another to create
it.22 Whereas Italian fascism did not execute ethnic cleansing on a large scale, the OUN did.
Per Rudling, Op.cit, page 167

Dutch historian Karel Berkhoff has emphasized that Antisemitism was an important
component in the ideology of both OUN factions and that “wartime documents with regard
to leading Banderites show that during the German invasion, they wanted the Jews, or at the
very least Jewish males, killed, and that they were willing to participate in the process.”23

In a biographical statement handed over to
the German authorities on 15 July the same year, Iarslav Stets’ko, the 29-year-old selfproclaimed
head of the OUN(b) Ukrainian government, stated that “I … support the destruction
of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to
Ukraine.”27 “The Jews help Moscow to consolidate its hold on Ukraine. Therefore I am of the
opinion that the Jews should be exterminated and [see] the expediency of carrying out in
Ukraine the German methods for exterminating the Jews,” Stets’ko concluded.28
Per Rudling, Op.cit, page 167


The extreme anti-Polish attitude of the OUN
surprised even the Germans. The OUN’s treatment of Poles was not dissimilar to the way the
Nazis treated Jews in areas under German control. Poles were forced to wear visible identification
of their ethnicity on their clothes. page 168


The OUN(m) organ, Selians’ka dolia, pushed strongly
for racial or blood-based rights for Ukrainians, and extermination of those who did not qualify
for these ethnic criteria:
JEWS WILL NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO OWN LAND. They will work as common labourers. If
not—as forced labour … He who does not speak our language, who does not call himself a
Ukrainian, or does the peasant wrong—this person is a zaida [a derogatory word for an
outsider] and your enemy and must leave the land or die on it. The Muscovite, the Pole, and
the Jew were, are, and will always be your enemies!32
page 168


Unlike all these
other fascist- or Nazi-influenced movements, UPA went through an official change of heart
on the advent of initiating a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles from Western
Ukraine in 1943–46. These changes appear abrupt and sudden. The third extraordinary
congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists convened in August 1943, following a
massacre of Poles and a purge of the UPA.42 page 169


In
early August 1943, at the time of the Third Congress and before the anti-Polish massacres
had ended, Sluzhba Bezpeki (SB), the internal security organization of OUN(b), carried out a
bloody purge of the UPA and the civilian Ukrainian population. Hundreds of UPA members
were shot or put in a concentration camp near UPA’s headquarters. This purge was
prompted by fear of spies from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in the organization. SB
had concerns about the ideological purity of the UPA.

This policy of lip-service to the principle of ethnic inclusion reached a schizophrenic
point in late 1943 and early 1944 when the few remaining Jews in Ukraine were invited to
fight with the UPA against both the Germans and Soviets for a while, only to be executed by
the UPA as the Soviets were approaching.56 The extermination of the Jews in Western
Ukraine was almost total, with merely 2% of the pre-war Jewish population surviving.57 This
was made possible by the activities of Ukrainian nationalists and prevailing Antisemitic attitudes
among the population.58 There are also indications that OUN(b) and Sluzhba Bezpeki
(SB), the security service of the UPA, carried out orders given to them by the local leadership
to “physically exterminate Jews who were hiding in the villages.”59 The UPA had three
targets: Soviet partisans, Poles and Jewish refugees.

At this time, Germans were the only
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THEORY AND PRACTICE 171
ones exempt from UPA attacks.60 German Reichskommissar Erich Koch reported on 25 June
1943 that “national Ukrainian gangs” released German soldiers while using “The opportunity
to kill, often in a most brutal way, the Poles, Czechs, and ethnic Germans living in the countryside.”
61
As Galicia and Volhynia were all but Judenrein, after waves of mass executions
during the summer of 1943, the UPA turned its focus on the Poles.62


While the Stalinist and Nazi conquerors
systematically and quietly purged these territories of perceived “enemies,” the OUN–UPA
massacres were carried out in an extremely brutal and loud fashion that would incite fear
and panic:
According to numerous and mutually confirming reports, Ukrainian partisans and their
allies burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and
pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. Churches full of worshippers were burned to
the ground. Partisans displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disembowelled
bodies, to encourage remaining Poles to flee. In mixed settlements the UPA’s security forces
warned Ukrainians to flee, then killed everyone remaining the next day.72

The single largest coordinated action of mass murder took place on the night of 11 July 1943,
when the UPA attacked 167 localities.73 At the same time as these mass murders were carried
out, the political leadership of that organization was in the process of drafting its resolutions
for the upcoming Third Congress of the OUN, confirming “equality under the law for all citizens,
including those of national minorities.”
As many families in Volhynia were ethnically mixed, the integral nationalist doctrine of
ethnic purity not only cut right through villages and communities. One common UPA
instruction was to kill one’s Polish spouse and children born out of that union. People refusing
to carry out such orders were often killed along with their entire family. Roman
Shukhevych, the UPA commander, issued the following order on 25 February 1944: “In view
of the success of the Soviet forces it is necessary to speed up the liquidation of the Poles; they
must be totally wiped out, their villages burned … only the Polish population must be
destroyed.”74
Both German and Soviet intelligence reported on these events, using terms such as
“extermination.” In 1943 and 1944, German military intelligence repeatedly used the term
Ausrottung (extermination) when describing the Banderite campaign against the Poles in
Volhynia. In 1943, the Soviet partisan leader of Rivne reported that, despite their public statements
on freedom and rights for all people, the nationalists were involved in “exterminating”
the Poles and “cleansing” western Volhynia of Poles “to a man.” Similar observations appear
in reports by the Soviet Ukrainian leadership. The private correspondence of the leaders of
the Sluzhba Bezpeki referred to the “merciless” destruction of the Volhynian Poles.75 These
Poles, it should be pointed out, were local Poles, part of an ethnic minority that had lived in
these lands for centuries. The hated osadnicy, or military colonizers, were targeted by the
Soviet authorities and removed during the first wave of deportations from Western Ukraine,
on 10 February 1940.76 The OUN–UPA’s treatment of the Poles was harsher than that of the
Soviets. Estimates give that the Soviet deportations east increased these Volhynian Poles’
chances of survival.77
etc etc

[Askold]

This whole article is not very usefull as its:

1. Focuses mostly on the Jewish question

2. Not historically acurate or fare - for example it mentions that UPA was attacking Poles who lived there for centuries - while its a known fact that majority of Poles in Volyn' were post WWI colonists. Both authors do not focus on similar actions of Polish partizans against Ukrainian villages or even try to raise a question as to "why the Poles were attacked"?

3. Thirdly the article is a typical mix of information on Upa activities, mixing info on UPA fighting Jews, Poles and other Ukrainians. Nowhere does it provide proof that UPA wanted to murder "every Pole".

4. I can post similar report of the Polish attacks on Ukrainian villages as use it to back up a statment "Poles wanted to murder every Ukrainian" - its not a very helpfull argument.

5. Where is a factual proof of this statement?

Poles were forced to wear visible identification
of their ethnicity on their clothes. page 168

[RG]

Not historically acurate or fare - for example it mentions that UPA was attacking Poles who lived there for centuries - while its a known fact that majority of Poles in Volyn' were post WWI colonists.

Any sources, please?

[Askold]

I posted the official population stats from 1900's in the earlier pages for the discussion. Please read through the whole thread.

[RG]

I posted the official population stats from 1900's in the earlier pages for the discussion. Please read through the whole thread.

Yes, I read and found that you did not provide reliable data and other members explained it, did not it?

[Askold]

Well I quoted the official statistics of the time, from a period publication. Weather you accept them as real or not, that is your choice.

[RG]

Well I quoted the official statistics of the time, from a period publication. Weather you accept them as real or not, that is your choice.

Nice, with such an approach we may believe in everything we want.

[blackminorcapullets]

Ukrainians killed many Poles just as Poles killed many Ukrainians. My family is of Ukrainian descent but lived for generations in present day Poland in the Carpathian Mountains. They were constantly subjugated by the Poles to the point that they were forced to defer their Orthodox church to the Roman Catholic Church and this happened hundreds of years ago. The Poles at times controlled a greater portion of Ukraine including Lviv where their prisons marked Ukrainians for genocide - see Bereza Kartuska.

Most recently , Poland conducted ethnic cleansing of Ukrianians in Operation Vistula.

http://www.lemko.org/wisla/maslej02.html

Thus, the offenses have not been unilateral.