The roots of fascism in Ukraine: From Nazi collaboration to Maidan
https://adarapress.com/2022/02/25/the-roots-of-fascism-in-ukraine-from-nazi-collaboration-to-maidan/
In recent years Ukraine has popped up in the mainstream media due to explosive political developments. Starting with the “Orange Revolution” in November of 2004, to the Euromaidan coup d’etat that was carried out by multiple fascists organizations and was propped up and propagated by the US government.
With the recent surge in Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and the rise of fascist groups both within the Ukrainian political sphere as well as the upper echelons of military hierarchy, it is crucial to understand its historical origins, beginning with Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. On June 22, 1941 the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began under the name Operation Barbarossa. The original purpose of the operation was to conquer the western Soviet Union to implement “Lebensraum,” or “living space,” for ethnic Germans to relocate and repopulate former Soviet territories. The Slavic people already living there were to be used as slave labor to aid the Axis powers and to seize the agricultural production available in this portion of the Soviet Union (Norman, 1973). The extermination and genocide of Slavic peoples, due to their designation as “sub-human,” was also to be carried out to facilitate the relocation and repopulation efforts of ethnic Germans in Slavic lands.
Operation Barbarossa was initially highly successful, with the brunt of the offensive being taken by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the beginning of the war the population of Ukraine was at 23.2 million however, in what could accurately be described as Ukraine’s own holocaust, by the end of the war 3,000,000 Ukrainians and other non-Jews had been executed, with an additional 2,300,000 Ukrainians being deported to allow for the “Germanization” of Ukrainian territory (Gregorovich, 1995).
Following the initial opening of Operation Barbarossa, on July 17, 1941 Hitler issued an official decree defining how Nazi-occupied Ukraine would be governed by a Nazi-appointed civilian regime known as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU) and overseen by Nazi Party regional East Prussian branch leader Erich Koch (Eher, 1946). The RKU was tasked with the pacification of Ukraine, the extermination of political dissidents and those who would interfere with the process of Nazi post-war expansion, as well as the general exploitation of the Ukrainian resources and people to further the goals of the Third Reich.
In addition to the establishment of the RKU, Heinrich Himmler personally saw to the formation of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) (Shapiro et. al., 2005). That UAP itself was split into two different categories. The first, known as the “Schutzmannschaft” or “protection team”, was tasked with carrying out anti-Jewish atrocities along with combating pro-Soviet partisan resistance throughout most of Ukraine. The second group was simply referred to as the “Ukrainian Police,” which operated under the guidance of the infamous Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) and was given special autonomy from the RKU (Bewersdorf, 2008). The UAP were the major perpetrators in the portion of the Holocaust that occurred in Ukraine. In the region of Volhynia alone, the Ukrainian police units exterminated 150,000 Jews in addition to the murder and deportation of countless other non-Jewish Ukrainian nationals (Statiev, 2010).
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