Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

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wm
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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#31

Post by wm » 16 Nov 2022, 21:41

Lvov. At the beginning of 1940

The attitude of the Jews toward the Bolsheviks a regarded among the Polish populace as quite positive. It is generally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are basically communists, that they crossed over to the Bolsheviks with flags unfurled. In fact, in most cities the Jews greeted the Bolsheviks with baskets of red roses, with submissive declarations and speeches, etc., etc.
[...]
However, there are worse cases, where they [the Jews] denounce the Poles, Polish nationalist students, assail Polish political figures, when they direct the work of the Bolshevik police force from behind their desks or are members of the police force, when they falsely defame the relations (between Poles and Jews] in former Poland.
Unfortunately, it is necessary to state that such incidents are quite common, more common than incidents which reveal loyalty toward Poles or sentiment toward Poland.
...
In principle, however, and in their mass, the Jews have created here a situation in which the Poles regard them as devoted to the Bolsheviks and - one can safely say - wait for the moment when they will be able simply to take revenge upon the Jews. Virtually all Poles are bitter and disappointed in relation to the Jews; the overwhelming majority [first among them of course the youth] literally look forward to an opportunity for "repayment in blood."
Jan Karski
The Ringelblum Archive
Accounts From the Borderlands
Account of Salomea L. (a mathematics student at the University of Warsaw) on the situation of the Jewish population ... in Białystok and Lwów.
...
Jews penetrated all areas of employment in the city - for example, in Bialystok industry, where they had previously been employed in large numbers - and occupied public offices and positions in state enterprises. ...
The Ringelblum Archive
Accounts From the Borderlands
After 8 December 1941, Warsaw, ghetto.
Anonymous testimony of a refugee from Warsaw regarding the pogrom in Lviv following the German troops' arrival in the city

The Germans marched into Lvov on 30 June 1941. It was a sunny, cloudless day. The vast majority of the Ukrainian population greeted the arriving detachments with enthusiasm. The parks were completely stripped of flowers. The Polish population was indifferent.
...
The pogrom atmosphere intensified with the rumours about Bolshevik cruelty. The entire city was shocked [hearing about] "corpses of people tortured to death in (GPU) prisons."
... The Germans used that. ...
They had the graves in the prisons dug up. Enormous crowds flocked there as for a pilgrimage. "Martyrs of the nation tortured to death by the Jewish NKVD torturers". The numbers of a few dozen corpses suddenly swelled to about a hundred or even a few hundred or a thousand or more. The most horrible rumours were circulating, as only the human imagination is capable of making up: cutting off limbs, crucifixions, ripping out of intestines, particularly cruel torture of Christian children and women conducted by the Jewish torturers.
Everybody had seen that with their own eyes, swore to God, and added incredible details. Bigoted women were running from house to house and from queue to queue, sharing their stories with eager listeners, sending shivers down spines.
So in Lvov it wasn't "a "desire to grab Jewish property" or a "political threat."
It was so called moral panic triggered by the Germans.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#32

Post by Steve » 17 Nov 2022, 03:37

Revenge for perceived collaboration with the communists was clearly a motivation for many of the people who participated in the massacres of June 1941. I recall reading that many Jews in Lwow were made to sing Soviet songs before being killed. The OUN identified Jews with communism. The violence against Jews in June 1941 is astonishing and I doubt it came about without a very long build up. To blame it on the inter war period you must show that something extraordinary had been taking place during those years. Attacks on Jewish areas were regularly accompanied by the looting of Jewish property and this was a way for many people to enrich themselves. German troops also took part in the looting. In August 1941 the head of Ukrainian Central Committee in West Galicia Kubiyovych asked Hans Frank that Jewish property obtained by “illegal means” be distributed among Ukrainians. There was certainly an economic motivation but it may have been of secondary importance.

To decide whether Jews collaborated with the Soviets in greater numbers than Poles or Ukrainians you have to have the equivalent numbers for these groups. Jews were 12% of the population in the Bialystok region and 4% of cadres in the communist party. Let us suppose that Jews were also 12% of the population in the Western Ukraine and also comprised 4% of communist party cadres. If Poles were maybe 20% of the population in the W.U. and were joining the communist party in the same percentage ratio as the Jews we would see 6.6% of communist cadres being Poles and the same with the other nationalities. If the Poles were over 6.6% then we could say they were more pro communist than the Jews and if less than 6.6% we could say they were less inclined to communism than Jews. You need the percentages for all ethnic groups.

If the attacks were aimed at a minority that was perceived to be a “political threat” why were they aimed at the Jews. When had they been a political threat? They had lost the dominant position they held in the professions and many trades due to the Soviet nationalisation of everything. Why did Ukrainians who it would appear were the main perpetrators of these attacks in the W.U. not also attack the Poles in the same way? Until recently the Poles had been the dominant group and they were still claiming that Western Ukraine was Polish. If you believe this theory then surely the only way the Jews could become a political threat is through collaboration with the communists and therefore they were seen as communist collaborators. That the Jews were seen as an economic threat or as undesirable competitors would be a more plausible theory.

Is the figure of 91% of towns not experiencing a pogrom for the Western Ukraine (East Galicia) or for other regions as well? I find it unbelievable that Jews were fairly safe if they lived in towns in the Ukraine.


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wm
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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#33

Post by wm » 17 Nov 2022, 12:14

Looting is irrelevant. Looting is universal; people loot at any opportunity, especially in hard times (for example, Warsaw was thoroughly looted by the Poles after the Warsaw Uprising.)

And it wasn't about the fact that in 1941 Jews held 40 percent of the top leadership and secretariat of the NKVD ("Becoming Soviet Jews" by Elissa Bemporad) because ordinary people could have been only vaguely aware of that.
They were maybe more aware that:
No other Soviet nationality was as top-heavy, in class terms ...; as heavily represented at the Soviet top;
No other ethnic group was as good at being Soviet, and no other ethnic group was as keen on abandoning its language, rituals, and traditional areas of settlement.
No other nationality, in other words, was as Mercurian (all head and no body) or as revolutionary (all youth and no tradition).
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine
Although:
During the 1940s, the role of Jews in punitive organs remained highly visible, coming to the end only in the postwar years during the campaign against cosmopolitanism.
Two Hundred Years Together by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But the main reason was that when the Soviets arrived and attempted cultural genocide of the conquered territories, arrested and deported by hundreds of thousands, and executed by tens of thousands, it wasn't done by anonymous strangers from distant Moscow or the Kazakhstan Republic.
It was their neighbors, people who lived among them and knew everything about them and their lives.

In fact, in testimonies during their post-war trials of the perpetrators, you could find statements like "three peasants returned from prison and, with others, attacked the Jews."

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#34

Post by Art » 17 Nov 2022, 12:46

wm wrote:
17 Nov 2022, 12:14
And it wasn't about the fact that in 1941 Jews held 40 percent of the top leadership and secretariat of the NKVD ("Becoming Soviet Jews" by Elissa Bemporad)
According to Petrov and Skorkin the percentage of ethnic Jews among leadership of central and regional apparatus of the NKVD decreased from about 40% prior to 5.5% on 26.02.41. The percentage of Ukrainians BTW increased almost threefold from 5 to 15%, percentage of Russians and Georgians - nearly twofold:
http://old.memo.ru/history/nkvd/kto/stattab4.htm

In other words the idea of "Jewish" NKVD is not actually confirmed by anything, at least when it comes to 1941. I suspect that the perception of mass employment of Polish Jews in NKVD/NKGB apparatus was also strongly exaggerated similarly to the "Jews killed the Tsar" idea which triggered pogroms of 1881. People could genuinely believe in that, but you need some hard data rather than perceptions if you are interested in historical facts.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#35

Post by wm » 17 Nov 2022, 13:03

The popular perception was it was a Jewish NKVD. In 1941, nobody was aware of the changes; it wasn't like you could have read about them in newspapers.

Stalinist Russia, they say, was a land of cliques, and Stalin seriously disliked it (some say the 1938 purges were at least partially directed at the cliques.)
In 1941 Stalin liquidated the Jewish cliques in the NKVD; similarly, earlier, he liquidated the Jewish clique in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
Last edited by wm on 17 Nov 2022, 17:14, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#36

Post by wm » 17 Nov 2022, 16:09

It should be noted the territories were inherently brutal, especially Ukraine. They were actually called slaughtering lands in pre-war Poland.
The peasants weren't nice guys either. Crime was massive among them: murders (usually of neighbors), neighborhood feuds, banditry, robbery, theft, punitive attacks on people who wronged them (for example, local landowners.)

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#37

Post by Orlov » 17 Nov 2022, 20:36

Steve wrote:
17 Nov 2022, 03:37
Revenge for perceived collaboration with the communists was clearly a motivation for many of the people who participated in the massacres of June 1941. [...] Is the figure of 91% of towns not experiencing a pogrom for the Western Ukraine (East Galicia) or for other regions as well? I find it unbelievable that Jews were fairly safe if they lived in towns in the Ukraine.
He doesn't offer you emotions and beating yourself with stanchions - just facts. Read this book that is a different interpretation - not going with the main flow of the Western historical narrative.
Revenge was possible thanks to the German consent to carry it out as part of "Selbstrenigungsaktionen".
Art wrote:
17 Nov 2022, 12:46
According to Petrov and Skorkin the percentage of ethnic Jews among leadership of central and regional apparatus of the NKVD decreased from about 40% prior to 5.5% on 26.02.41. [...] People could genuinely believe in that, but you need some hard data rather than perceptions if you are interested in historical facts.
You are absolutely right - what you have given has long been proven that the overrepresentation of Jews is a myth. Of course, there were people from Jewish communities who, however, by resigning from Judaism, ceased to be Jews in the religious and ethnic sense - only national socialists and anti-Semites did not accept this. The number of victims of Soviet repression against Jews (red anti-Semitism in the form of the fight against Trotskyism and cosmolitism) - huge. Another symbol of the victims was the right-wing Zionist-revisionist politician from Poland, Menachem Begin, who later served in the Polish II Corps, the future Prime Minister of Israel.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#38

Post by wm » 17 Nov 2022, 20:46

Yes, the Germans could have easily prevented all that. In fact, many accounts say the first days were peaceful, with German (frontline) soldiers acting friendly toward the Jews.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#39

Post by wm » 17 Nov 2022, 20:52

More. It's a story of massive (grassroots and organized) Polish and Ukrainian resistance, and Jewish collaboration.
The Ringelblum Archive
Accounts From the Borderlands
March 1942, Warsaw, ghetto.
Anonymous account of a refugee, a Zionist from Warsaw, on the situation under the Soviet occupation in Luck and Lvov


How did the Jewish population receive the Red Army?
Ordinary Jews - coldly; some even with hatred. A large part of the youth showed great enthusiasm, kissed the soldiers, climbed on tanks, and cheered.
Even before the Red Army arrived in the city, some of the Jewish youth had organized meetings and demonstrations.
(For us Jews, it wasn't very clever politically that part of the Jewish population acted very rudely towards the Polish population and Polish troops.)

The first major political campaign began as early as November 1939.

It is a fact that l00% of Jews voted in the elections. …
Up to 85% of Poles also voted in the elections, … but they ventured to add demonstrative comments on the ballot papers.

The Ukrainian (albeit nationalistic) intelligentsia was very much fussed over; in general, Ukrainian nationalistic transgressions were deliberately overlooked. The Ukrainians exploited the situation skilfully since, under the covers, the nationalist movement was growing.

Nationalization took place in the provinces immediately after the elections to the "Lvov assembly.” …The authorities implemented the nationalization using almost exclusively local Jewish Commies, who carried it out ruthlessly.

It was thanks to Jewish craftsmen that the Russian occupation authorities managed to organize small industries and achieve a quite considerable production in a relatively short time.
They succeeded only with the help of Jewish artisans because, to the very end, both Ukrainian and Polish craftsmen refused to be drawn into the production movement.

At the end of 1940, … the occupation authorities began to set up kolkhozes. … As a result, the rural population, suddenly torn away from its small holdings became even angrier and more discontented, and the Ukrainian nationalist circles knew how exploit that discontent to their own advantage.

Many Jewish teachers were transferred from towns to villages in order to conduct agitation in favour of joining a kolkhoz, and their teaching skills were exploited for propaganda purposes. This gave the peasantry the impression that, in this case too, the Jews were to blame.

State institutions:
Jews are strongly represented in the state apparatus, which, as well as the political and military authorities, covers the whole of economic life. One has the feeling that the top leadership is disposed to make the greatest possible use of Jewish skills in that area.
Thus cases of Jewish managers or bookkeepers in the State Bank are by no means exceptional. Bank clerical staff in the occupied territories was 90% Jewish.
The same situation prevails in all "trusts" and "markets". In a word, Jews are strongly represented in state economic institutions.

The situation of the Poles:
Following the collapse of the Polish state, the economic life of the Poles increasingly fell apart, and as Poles were also subjected to heavy political persecution, their social life was strongly affected.

At the same time, Polish church life grew rapidly. On Sundays and Christian holidays, the churches were full to overflowing, and there was a feeling that it was kind of a political demonstration.

There was no organized form of Jewish social aid for the Poles, not because of any lack of compassion, but because all such organized activity had a counter-revolutionary character.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#40

Post by Orlov » 17 Nov 2022, 21:14

Understand at last wm-historical ignorance. I don't have the strength to argue with you - you know the story inside out, you keep revealing your emotions and nationalistic resentments. Don't notice my posts, don't harass me, find yourself other admirers - you've ridiculed yourself many times on this forum - (think about the nonsense you write -
wm wrote:
17 Nov 2022, 12:14
[...] for example, Warsaw was thoroughly looted by the Poles after the Warsaw Uprising.)
Write about OUN in 1941, not Jewish activities in 1939-1941 - and stop your other absurdities not related to the topic of discussion, which are a manifestation of your hatred for other nations and countries.
I answer you the last time and I'm not interested in any of your jumping in the sandbox - disappear in this your fog.
You break with every discussion - with your resentments - come back to the subject: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#41

Post by wm » 18 Nov 2022, 01:00

Mr. Orlov, don't tell me what I'm or I'm not.
My family lived in the middle of that shit. The Ukrainians murdered my grand-grandfather and some other family members too.
And then the entire town had to flee (helped by German gendarmes, actually), and those who didn't (about a hundred of them) were burned to a cinder in the church by the same Ukrainians.
I have no respect for your unsupported, low-information opinions.

As a kid, I heard about the Ukrainians and what happened literally every freaking day.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#42

Post by Steve » 18 Nov 2022, 01:12

The OUN apparently considered all Jews to be communists. The claim is regularly made that the Jews had welcomed the communists and no doubt some had but so had Ukrainians and Byelorussians. it is worth trying to work out if claims of Jews in particular being communist sympathisers have any foundation in fact.

There seems to be a lack of empirical evidence but I would not argue against Jews being over represented in the Soviet bureaucracy set up after the incorporation of Western Ukraine into the USSR. I would also not argue against them being over represented in the NKVD. This is what you would expect from the Soviets since the Jews were a minority in the territory and often persecuted. To give an example, when the British organised a native army in their colony of Uganda they did not recruit from the large tribes they recruited from small tribes who made up a minority of the population. The small tribes had been dominated by the large tribes and were unlikely to side with them if they staged an anti British revolt.

However, the Soviets could have found a large number of Jews willing to co-operate with them in the former Polish territories. The pre war communist party of Western Ukraine KPZU and the communist party of Byelorussia KPZB operated from within the communist party of Poland. During the inter war period Jews in the three organisations constituted on average 40% of the membership. Unfortunately unless you know whether 40% means a 100 people or 10,000 people it doesn’t help much. It does tell us that Jews who made up about 10% of the population were over represented in the Polish communist party.

If you want to know who voted communist in pre war Poland this link will tell you.
https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/faculty.s ... munist.pdf

I am sure this link will interest you Orlov.
https://archive.org/stream/GrzegorzRoss ... 4_djvu.txt

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#43

Post by wm » 18 Nov 2022, 01:38

Are you going to argue with opinions against facts presented by Jewish scholars (Elissa Bemporad)?
Or testimonies of Jewish eyewitnesses recorded in the Ringelblum Archive?

Actually, in 1945, it repeated once again.
In the Ministry of Public Security (basically a Polish Gestapo), Jews made up 19% of the ministry's workforce and held half of the managerial positions ("Revisiting Jewish Role in Polish Security Service" by Batya Knebel).
Btw Batya Knebel is a Jewish scholar too.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#44

Post by wm » 18 Nov 2022, 02:07

The second link is a one-sided Polish propaganda piece.
Stephan Bandera was arrested three weeks after the Germans liberated Ukraine.
He was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and his government to Auschwitz.
Where they actually collaborated with the Polish Underground against the Germans.

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Re: Ukrainian National Organizations 1941

#45

Post by Steve » 19 Nov 2022, 03:56

Here are some quotes from the article published in the Slavic Review (link previously given) for those who may not have read it. This hopefully puts to bed the idea that most Jews supported the Communists in pre war Poland. Of course there could have been a big turnaround by June 1941 in the Western Ukraine but I doubt it given how the Soviet nationalisations of property and busineses would have hit them. I won’t comment on the methodology used as it is above my pay grade except to say it sounds convincing. Apparently the Byelorussians were the biggest communist supporters pre war.

“Only 7 percent of Jewish voters supported the communists in 1928.”

“For Poland as a whole roughly 14 percent of the communist vote
came from Jews. By contrast, again for Poland as a whole, 18 percent of
the communist vote came from Catholics.”

“Moreover, 49 per-cent of Jews voted for Pilsudski's pro-government bloc in 1928.” ……. “Catholics themselves, overwhelmingly of Polish nationality, gave only 16 percent of their vote to Pilsudski's bloc. Thus, quite contrary to expectation, the Jews were not only among the biggest supporters of the government among minorities, they were three times as supportive as the Poles themselves.”

“In the six years between the two elections, Poland's Belarusans opted largely for revolutionary communism,”

“Unwilling to choose the revolutionary internationalism of the Soviet Union or the assimilating nationalism of Poland, the Ukrainians turned increasingly to the "voice“of ethno-nationalist politics”.

“Roughly 93 percent of Jewish voters supported non-communist parties in 1928, and only around 14 percent of the communists' electoral support came from Jews. Thus not only were most Jews not communists, but most communists were not Jews.”

That Bandera and his government collaborated with the Polish underground is not something I have heard about before, could you give more detail wm.When the Soviets set up a militia the OUN it would seem extensivly infiltrated the organisation does anyone have any information on the Soviet militia.

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