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CHAPTER FIVE
Collaborators: Allied Intelligence and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
Newly released Army and CIA records have many thousands of pages on Nazi collaborators during and after World War II. The records are especially rich con- cerning Allied relationships with Ukrainian nationalist organizations after 1945. This section focuses on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under Stephen Bandera and the exile representation of the Ukrainian underground government (ZP/UHVR), which was dominated by Bandera’s one-time followers- turned-rivals, including Mykola Lebed. The level of detail in the new records al- lows a fuller and more accurate picture of their relationships with Allied intelligence over several decades.1
Background
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929 by western Ukrainians from East Galicia, called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine. Its prime enemy was Poland, which then controlled the ethnically mixed regions of East Galicia and Volhynia. The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the murder in 1936 were young OUN activistsStephan Bandera and Mykola Lebed
.2 The convicted Ukrainians escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.
Eventually the OUN/B dominated the Ukrai- nian Insurgent Army (UPA), a guerrilla force originally formed in 1942 to engage all political and ethnic enemies including Germans and Soviets. Eastern Ukraini- ans later claimed that the Bandera’s group took over the UPA by assassinating the original leaders.6 By 1944 the terms “UPA” and “Baderovsty” became interchange- able, though not all UPA fighters came from the OUN/B. The OUN/B relationship with the Germans in western Ukraine was complicated.
A Banderist proclamation in April 1941 claimed that “Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful supportof the ruling Bolshevik regime and the. vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine.”7. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”8 At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews “have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.”10 Indeed pogroms in East Galicia in the war’s first days killed perhaps 12,000 Jews.11 Back in Berlin, Stets- ko reported it all to Bandera.12
Nazi authorities mobilized Ukrainians into auxiliary police units, some of which cleared ghettos. Few such auxiliary police belonged to Bandera’s group, which operated independently. But Banderist guerrillas in western Ukraine of- ten killed Jews. Historian Yehuda Bauer writes that Banderists “killed all the Jews they could find,” surely “many thousands” in all.13
When the Soviets reconquered East Galicia in November 1944, there were few Jews there left alive. But Maltz recorded that, “When the Bandera gangs seize a Jew, they consider it a prize catch. The ordinary Ukrainians feel the same way…. they all want to participate inthe heroic act of killing a Jew. They literally slash Jews to pieces with their machetes….”15
Lebed proposed in April to“cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,” so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.16
Ukrainiansserving as auxiliary policemen for the Germans now joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Maltz recorded that “Bandera men … are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages….
Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill,the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles.
They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day … you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug.”17 On a single day, July 11, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities killing perhaps 10,000 Poles.18