The Luck Castle
Wolyn/Volhynia in World War II
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Somosierra
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The Ukrainians more so, as many more of them were under Nazi rule than the Russians, so they bore the brunt of policies directed at the civilan population in occupied Soviet territory.witness wrote:No doubt that Jews and Poles suffered enormously at Nazi hands.I cannot believe that. The Jewish nation suffered far more than the Polish
But how can we forget that the most numerous victims of Nazism were millions and millions of Russians ?
So if to take the absolute numbers then Russians suffered the most.
There is a case to be made for the Chinese as well...
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Somosierra
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You may be interested in reading the article by Taras Hunczak in my post # 957 ("medorjurgen1168", 11/29/01 7:01:42 pm) on the threadKokampf wrote:The Ukrainians more so, as many more of them were under Nazi rule than the Russians, so they bore the brunt of policies directed at the civilan population in occupied Soviet territory.witness wrote:No doubt that Jews and Poles suffered enormously at Nazi hands.I cannot believe that. The Jewish nation suffered far more than the Polish
But how can we forget that the most numerous victims of Nazism were millions and millions of Russians ?
So if to take the absolute numbers then Russians suffered the most.
Non-Jewish victims of Nazi violence
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... D=79.topic
of the old forum.
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Somosierra
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http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/495/davies.html
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Buczacz
'Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead ...'
by Norman Davies
THE DEACONRY OF BUCZACZ. In 1939, this district contained 45,314 Polish inhabitants. Among its 17 parishes, Barycz numbered 4,875, Buczacz 10,257, Koropiec 2,353, Kowalowka 3,009, Monasterzyska 7,175....
In Barycz, a couple of Polish families were murdered by Ukrainians in 1939....One of the Biernackis had a leg severed....But the main attack...took place on the night of 5-6 July 1944, when 126 Poles were killed. Men, women and children were shot, or hacked to death with axes. The 'Mazury' ward of the town was burned down. The attackers were armed with machine guns and shouted 'Rizaty, palyty' [kill, burn]. The survivors fled to Buczacz where they lived through the winter in terrible conditions, in ex-Jewish houses without doors or windows....
The attack on Puzniki followed shortly afterwards. Over 100 Poles were killed and the village burned.
The [Catholic] parish of Nowostawce, though sparsely inhabited was very extensive. It contained three Greek-Catholic parishes within its bounds. The ratio of Poles to Ukrainians was 2:3. In 1939 co-existence was still possible. But conditions worsened after the German Occupation. In 1944, when the German-Soviet frontline passed through, nothing but ruins remained....
The vicar of Korosciatyn reported an attack on his village on 28 February 1944, when only a handful of houses were saved. 78 persons were shot, smothered or axed in the vicarage cellar....Some ninety people had perished in an earlier attack in 1943. Then typhus carried off a further fifty. A curious thing occurred. The village had thirteen so-called 'wild marriages.' All of these couples died except one.
In Koropiec, no Poles were actually murdered. But it was reported that the Greek-Catholic pulpits resounded to calls regarding mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages: 'Mother, you're suckling an enemy - strangle it.'1
Forty years after the event, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland was still trying to document the wartime atrocities, of which Poles and Catholics had been victim. Buczacz was just one of scores of districts in the former eastern Poland that had been terrorized by Ukrainian groups. Buczacz, ninety miles from Lwow [Lviv], lay in the sometime Austrian province of Galicia. As in the neighbouring province of Volhynia, its pre-war population contained substantial Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish communities. The Jews were killed by the Nazis in 1942-43, sometimes with local collaboration. Then the Ukrainian nationalists turned on the Poles, in a classic demonstration of the technique later to be called 'ethnic cleansing.' Estimates of Polish losses in East Galicia and Volhynia range from 100,000 to 500,000. Later, the whole region was annexed to the USSR. Soviet security forces destroyed the Ukrainian organizations in yet another wave of mass terror and 'repatriated' most of the remaining Poles.
Ethnic cleansing in wartime Poland had been launched both by the Nazis, who cleared large districts for resettlement by Germans, and by the Soviets, who in l939-41 deported millions from the East. It was taken up by the nationalist faction of the Polish underground (NSZ), who sought to drive out Ukrainians, and on a much larger scale by various Ukrainian factions, especially the UPA. At the end of the war, it was revived once again by the Soviets and their agents, who sought to cleanse the Ukrainian SSR of Poles and, through Operation Vistula, the 'Polish People's Republic' tried to get rid of Ukrainians in southeastern Poland. Ethnic cleansing was implicit in the policy of the Allied Powers, who agreed to the expulsion of all Germans from east of the Oder.
In post-war eastern Europe, however, all wartime crimes were officially ascribed to the Nazis. Victims from areas like Buczacz - none of whom were Russians - were lumped together in the 'Twenty Million Russian War Dead,'2 or otherwise covered by the veil of silence. The process of honest documentation was only just beginning in the 1980s. The process of reconciliation between Poland and Ukraine could not even start before the collapse of the communist regimes in l989-91.3
The multinational dimensions of the wartime tragedy were not widely appreciated. Historians of all nationalities have been guilty of counting and publicizing their own losses to the exclusion of others. Only occasionally one meets accounts of shared suffering, where the gehenna of one community overlapped with that of another:
Between May and December 1942 more than 140,000 Volhynia Jews were murdered. Some who had been given refuge in Polish homes were murdered together with their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when of 300,000 Poles living in Volhynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukrainian 'bandits.' In many villages, Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe.4
But no general survey of wartime genocide in all its manifestations exists.
Attempts to establish Polish/Catholic losses in the East, for example, inevitably sideline the Jewish and Ukrainian experiences. They naturally stress the role of Jewish and Ukrainian collaborators in the Soviet service, or of Ukrainian police units under German control; but they are not concerned with the activities of German Schupo units from Silesia, i. e. of Poles in German police uniforms, nor with the effects of the Polish Home Army's decision to assist the Soviet campaign against the Wehrmacht. It is not part of their brief to count the UPA's Jewish and Ukrainian victims, still less human losses in the region as a whole. It is a sad truth: in reporting a war of omnes contra omnium, any exercise which only looks at one side, or which suggests a monopoly of suffering, is bound to paint a distorted picture.
Buczacz (Buchach), now in Ukraine, was once the home town of Simon Wiesenthal, 'Nazi-hunter extraordinary. '
NOTES
1 Bishop Wincenty Urban, Droga Krzyzowa Archidiecezji Lwowskiej, 1939-45 [The Way of the Cross of the Archdiocese of Lwow 1939-45] (Wroclaw 1983), 52-55.
2 Norman Davies, "Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead," The Independent, 29 December 1987.
3 In 1993, President Kravchuk of Ukraine was reported as saying: "We will not hide the fact that during the Second World War Ukrainian chauvinists murdered around one half million Poles in the eastern borderlands of pre-war Poland. Even for several years after the war, Polish villages burned and Poles continued to perish....Hence, the qualms of our conscience in relation to the Polish nation."
4 Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (London 1982), 82.
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Buczacz
'Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead ...'
by Norman Davies
THE DEACONRY OF BUCZACZ. In 1939, this district contained 45,314 Polish inhabitants. Among its 17 parishes, Barycz numbered 4,875, Buczacz 10,257, Koropiec 2,353, Kowalowka 3,009, Monasterzyska 7,175....
In Barycz, a couple of Polish families were murdered by Ukrainians in 1939....One of the Biernackis had a leg severed....But the main attack...took place on the night of 5-6 July 1944, when 126 Poles were killed. Men, women and children were shot, or hacked to death with axes. The 'Mazury' ward of the town was burned down. The attackers were armed with machine guns and shouted 'Rizaty, palyty' [kill, burn]. The survivors fled to Buczacz where they lived through the winter in terrible conditions, in ex-Jewish houses without doors or windows....
The attack on Puzniki followed shortly afterwards. Over 100 Poles were killed and the village burned.
The [Catholic] parish of Nowostawce, though sparsely inhabited was very extensive. It contained three Greek-Catholic parishes within its bounds. The ratio of Poles to Ukrainians was 2:3. In 1939 co-existence was still possible. But conditions worsened after the German Occupation. In 1944, when the German-Soviet frontline passed through, nothing but ruins remained....
The vicar of Korosciatyn reported an attack on his village on 28 February 1944, when only a handful of houses were saved. 78 persons were shot, smothered or axed in the vicarage cellar....Some ninety people had perished in an earlier attack in 1943. Then typhus carried off a further fifty. A curious thing occurred. The village had thirteen so-called 'wild marriages.' All of these couples died except one.
In Koropiec, no Poles were actually murdered. But it was reported that the Greek-Catholic pulpits resounded to calls regarding mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages: 'Mother, you're suckling an enemy - strangle it.'1
Forty years after the event, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland was still trying to document the wartime atrocities, of which Poles and Catholics had been victim. Buczacz was just one of scores of districts in the former eastern Poland that had been terrorized by Ukrainian groups. Buczacz, ninety miles from Lwow [Lviv], lay in the sometime Austrian province of Galicia. As in the neighbouring province of Volhynia, its pre-war population contained substantial Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish communities. The Jews were killed by the Nazis in 1942-43, sometimes with local collaboration. Then the Ukrainian nationalists turned on the Poles, in a classic demonstration of the technique later to be called 'ethnic cleansing.' Estimates of Polish losses in East Galicia and Volhynia range from 100,000 to 500,000. Later, the whole region was annexed to the USSR. Soviet security forces destroyed the Ukrainian organizations in yet another wave of mass terror and 'repatriated' most of the remaining Poles.
Ethnic cleansing in wartime Poland had been launched both by the Nazis, who cleared large districts for resettlement by Germans, and by the Soviets, who in l939-41 deported millions from the East. It was taken up by the nationalist faction of the Polish underground (NSZ), who sought to drive out Ukrainians, and on a much larger scale by various Ukrainian factions, especially the UPA. At the end of the war, it was revived once again by the Soviets and their agents, who sought to cleanse the Ukrainian SSR of Poles and, through Operation Vistula, the 'Polish People's Republic' tried to get rid of Ukrainians in southeastern Poland. Ethnic cleansing was implicit in the policy of the Allied Powers, who agreed to the expulsion of all Germans from east of the Oder.
In post-war eastern Europe, however, all wartime crimes were officially ascribed to the Nazis. Victims from areas like Buczacz - none of whom were Russians - were lumped together in the 'Twenty Million Russian War Dead,'2 or otherwise covered by the veil of silence. The process of honest documentation was only just beginning in the 1980s. The process of reconciliation between Poland and Ukraine could not even start before the collapse of the communist regimes in l989-91.3
The multinational dimensions of the wartime tragedy were not widely appreciated. Historians of all nationalities have been guilty of counting and publicizing their own losses to the exclusion of others. Only occasionally one meets accounts of shared suffering, where the gehenna of one community overlapped with that of another:
Between May and December 1942 more than 140,000 Volhynia Jews were murdered. Some who had been given refuge in Polish homes were murdered together with their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when of 300,000 Poles living in Volhynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukrainian 'bandits.' In many villages, Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe.4
But no general survey of wartime genocide in all its manifestations exists.
Attempts to establish Polish/Catholic losses in the East, for example, inevitably sideline the Jewish and Ukrainian experiences. They naturally stress the role of Jewish and Ukrainian collaborators in the Soviet service, or of Ukrainian police units under German control; but they are not concerned with the activities of German Schupo units from Silesia, i. e. of Poles in German police uniforms, nor with the effects of the Polish Home Army's decision to assist the Soviet campaign against the Wehrmacht. It is not part of their brief to count the UPA's Jewish and Ukrainian victims, still less human losses in the region as a whole. It is a sad truth: in reporting a war of omnes contra omnium, any exercise which only looks at one side, or which suggests a monopoly of suffering, is bound to paint a distorted picture.
Buczacz (Buchach), now in Ukraine, was once the home town of Simon Wiesenthal, 'Nazi-hunter extraordinary. '
NOTES
1 Bishop Wincenty Urban, Droga Krzyzowa Archidiecezji Lwowskiej, 1939-45 [The Way of the Cross of the Archdiocese of Lwow 1939-45] (Wroclaw 1983), 52-55.
2 Norman Davies, "Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead," The Independent, 29 December 1987.
3 In 1993, President Kravchuk of Ukraine was reported as saying: "We will not hide the fact that during the Second World War Ukrainian chauvinists murdered around one half million Poles in the eastern borderlands of pre-war Poland. Even for several years after the war, Polish villages burned and Poles continued to perish....Hence, the qualms of our conscience in relation to the Polish nation."
4 Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (London 1982), 82.
Dan wrote :
Compare the numbers -
Roberto wrote
Thanks for including this thread.
Kokampf
1 million Russians died during the siege of Leningrad alone.
Somosierra wrote
might as well give the discussion some additional perspective.
Regards
I am not quite sure about Sepharic Jews. AFAIK those are the Jews from Orienatal countries which were not under the German occupation.As a slightly off topic remark, if you take the Jews as all Jews including Sephardic Jews, I think you would have to take all Slavs together to be a fair comparison
Compare the numbers -
Roberto wrote
Very interesting essay by Christian Streit Roberto.Altogether roughly 17 million victims of Nazi genocide and mass murder. Thereof 5 million Jews and 12 million non-Jews
Thanks for including this thread.
Kokampf
1 million Russians died during the siege of Leningrad alone.
Somosierra wrote
Sorry but I think that comparing the numbers of victims of the Nazi terrorWe have here the topic on Wolyn/Volhynia in World War II, so write only on the topic.
might as well give the discussion some additional perspective.
Regards
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David Thompson
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Somosierra
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In Polish - http://www.genocide-pl.prv.plDavid Thompson wrote:What are the names of the persons -- German, Ukrainian, Polish and Soviet Russian -- who had a leadership role in this Volhynian bloodbath?
(at: "OUN-UPA").
There are names of Ukrainian war criminals (for so many - heroes):
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Stepan Bandera, Andrij Melnyk, Maksym Boroweć, Mykoła Łebed, Wasyl Makar, Wasyl Sydor, Dmytro Klaczkiwśkyj, Roman Szuchewycz, Rostysław Wołoszyn and so-on.
Regards,
Somosierra.
An excellent piece! Since reading about the scale of casualties in the '32-'33 artificial famine, It has amazed me how any nation could survive such massive and brutal human damage twice in such a short period (and WW1 and the Civil War were fought there too). Then I remember Chernobyl and I pity the people who have to live with that worst of Soviet legacies. What psychological effect this must have on a people is hard far me to imagine in England where we have been been spared such immense ruin in our homeland for many centuries.Roberto wrote:You may be interested in reading the article by Taras Hunczak in my post # 957 ("medorjurgen1168", 11/29/01 7:01:42 pm) on the thread
Non-Jewish victims of Nazi violence
http://pub3.ezboard.com/fskalmanforumfr ... D=79.topic
of the old forum.
It's a real tragedy that the hate these Ukrainian extremists stirred up in Volhynia and the blood spilled there should divide Poland and Ukraine, as the mass human experience of both peoples of Nazi and Soviet barbarism, contempt for their nationhood and human dignity and scorched earth practices is very similar in many ways. Poland got the camps, Ukraine and Belarus got the brunt of the Einsatzgruppen and their gas vans. All of them got Dirlewanger and his ilk.
I do wonder at what level and by whom within the UPA and/or other organisations this Volhynian anti-Polish pogrom was organised. I seem to recall some of you have shown how the Soviets tried to arouse the Ukrainian peasants against the Polish minority, and the Germans likewise certainly found it convenient as they found all ethnic rivalries among their subjects a useful tool of policy. Certainly given the literature of the UPA and OUN which I have seen there were clearly influential moderate and broadly socialist voices in there, but there were also brutal extremists going by all this persuasively detailed and horrific evidence from the Poles. The leaders of the Ukrainian independence movement had been imprisoned by the Germans in 1941 after a few days of government. Bandera was in Mauthausen, I believe? A guerilla army is naturally a somewhat chaotic affair and, like with the Chetniks in Yugoslavia, any group of armed peasants or impromptu racial lynch mob in Ukraine could use the name and symbols of the recognised partisan group. The Ukrainians must address this 'blind spot' of historical guilt about what happened in Volhynia but the world also needs to pay more recognition than it does to the repeated appalling exercises in mass totalitarian slaughter and enslavement that both the Poles and the Ukrainians endured last century and not characterise Ukrainians en masse as genocidal collaborators as Soviet propaganda would have had us do.
Maybe it was a bunch of official UPA extremists. Here's another angle - I have no idea how credible this is, but it comes from a rather shakily translated Latvian ex-army/police Schuma account on the activities of the 22 Daugavas Battalion in or around September 1943:
http://www.lacplesis.net/570_latvian_ba ... nd_and.htm"In this area the Communists used Ukraine’s (sic) against the Polish minority. With meetings with the local inhabitants and explaining the situation, conditions improved with the Ukraine Nationalist Partisans."
This may be the Latvians' own experience, , or it may just be what their German masters told them. Soviet-led partisans could certainly have done this. Both the USSR and Germany, as well as the Ukrainian nationalists, had a strong interest in breaking the Polish population in Volhynia, with its many Polish military families. Someone seems to have stirred up people from the local Ukrainian population to engage in ethnic cleansing, and any of them (or all of them) could feasibly have been strongly involved.
I know, I appreciate that the losses of all the nations heavily involved on the Eastern Front are on a scale and of an intensity that is hard for us in the West to comprehend adequately. My Russian housemate has been very enlightening.witness wrote:Kokampf
1 million Russians died during the siege of Leningrad alone.
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David Thompson
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Re: Wolyn/Volhynia in World War II
It's Roman Shukhevich, they couldn't even get the name right.Somosierra wrote:
The Germans create a 4000 strong Ukrainian Police unit under the command of Roman Szmulewicz.
Not to mention the rest of the article.Stepan Bandera was nowhere near the creation of Ukrainian SS Division, nor was he a "founding father". Check you facts before posting.Somosierra wrote: At the same time Stepan Bandera plans to form a Ukrainian SS Division.
The difference between UPA and 14th Ukrainian SS division "Galychina" is as deep as Colorado canyon. In no way the SS "Galychina" and UPA are related. UPA fought both the soviets and germans while 14th SS remained loyal to germans until the very end at Brody pocket.Somosierra wrote: Ukrainian youths flock to join the UPA and there is also a very large influx of recruits to the Ukrainian SS being formed by S. Bandera.
Again Bandera did not form 14th division. It had a german commander.
I doubt the number of actual volunteers but from my records, there were many poles there as well.Somosierra wrote: To be precise over 80.000 Ukrainians volunteered for the 14 SS Grenadier Division.
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michael mills
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Somosierra wrote:
Nothing in any of my posts has expressed hatred for any ethnic group. Indeed, I have said that at various times the different ethnic groups of Eastern Europe have been both perpetrators and victims of persecution and violence.
Somosierra, by contrast, has expressed great prejudice against Ukrainians, calling them criminals.
I suggest Somosierra follow his own advice.And stop your propaganda of hate.
Nothing in any of my posts has expressed hatred for any ethnic group. Indeed, I have said that at various times the different ethnic groups of Eastern Europe have been both perpetrators and victims of persecution and violence.
Somosierra, by contrast, has expressed great prejudice against Ukrainians, calling them criminals.
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Somosierra
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ISU-152,
Some obvious misspellings according to names are just mistakes – that’s all.
It was my aim to post the entire article – there are some websites with short “lives”. For example I do not agree with all statements of 'Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead ...' by Norman Davies – but I have posted it.
And „there were many poles there as well”… - I would say many (or even all) of those war criminals from the UPA had Polish citizenships, so they were Poles?
Some obvious misspellings according to names are just mistakes – that’s all.
It was my aim to post the entire article – there are some websites with short “lives”. For example I do not agree with all statements of 'Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead ...' by Norman Davies – but I have posted it.
And „there were many poles there as well”… - I would say many (or even all) of those war criminals from the UPA had Polish citizenships, so they were Poles?
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Somosierra
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“I suggest Somosierra follow his own advice”. – I am a Roman Catholic, so my heart is free of hate. I love even you, my brother…michael mills wrote:Somosierra wrote:
I suggest Somosierra follow his own advice.And stop your propaganda of hate.
Nothing in any of my posts has expressed hatred for any ethnic group. Indeed, I have said that at various times the different ethnic groups of Eastern Europe have been both perpetrators and victims of persecution and violence.
Somosierra, by contrast, has expressed great prejudice against Ukrainians, calling them criminals.
“Nothing in any of my posts has expressed hatred for any…” – Hatred may looks as a question mark, also. Just one guy asks another: Is it true your mother is $#!@!? Just a question, not hate – right, my brother?
“Somosierra, by contrast, has expressed great prejudice…” – Another false statement, but I will expose my second cheek to you my brother… I wrote on Ukrainians who were in UPA and SS Galizien and other similar organizations. Yes, they are war criminals. I am very far to call all people. The guilt is always personal – all Poles know that very well, but not every brother, unfortunately…
And again – write on the topic. The thread is not for your the 700 post…, you are not an athlete, I suppose?