8. OUN, Ukrainian for, Orhanizatsiia Ukraïns’kykh Natsionalistiv

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had been founded in the 1920s.

We have been talking about the Orange Revolution and then the Euro-Maidan in 2014. I in no way say that the Soviet Union didn’t mistreat these people before, (and all people). That is another discourse that we are not considering here. It can be your call; what are the justifications in the cycle of HURT-HATE-&-REVENGE? But let’s go back further than the Maidan to investigate who are the major players, the OUN, and the Ukrainska Povstancha Armia, or Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Here we go into so many details, there can be no doubts that they are exaggerations. 6,500 words, and 2,800 more words in the notes. (9,300 in all)

Screwed at Versailles

What is going on here? Hitler-idolizing Nazis as a major political and military force in Europe in the 21st century? Where do these people even come from? The World Wars, of course.

Perhaps the analogy to the cold peace at Versailles is even more apt in the case of Ukraine, since they were victims of the post-World War I order in much the same way they have become victims of the post-Cold War order. The League of Nations turned predominantly ethnic Polish Galicia in western Ukraine—nearly seven million people—over to Poland after the war at the Conference of Ambassadors of the allied powers in 1923. The minority ethnic Ukrainians’ new Polish rulers then outlawed the use of the Ukrainian language in local government documents and proceedings, shut down schools and gave away their property to returning Polish war veterans. These policies helped set the stage for Ukrainian nationalist revenge when the tables turned in the next war.

The OUN

When the Germans and Soviets made their deal to conquer and divide Poland in 1939, the USSR also conquered all the land in between, including the Baltics and Galicia, subjecting those territories to the horrors of communism for two years until Hitler changed his mind and betrayed Stalin instead.

When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many in Ukraine, Crimea,[559] the Baltics[560] and other places took the opportunity to join the German side to throw off their Communist oppressors.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, Ukrainian for Orhanizatsiia Ukraïns’kykh Natsionalistiv) had been founded in the 1920s,[561] originally for the purpose of killing any Polish or Ukrainian leaders who favored compromise on the issue of ethnic Ukrainians living in Poland.[562] Their campaign of terrorism against Polish and Jewish civilians and officials continued through the 1930s.[563]

The group formed two major factions: the OUN-B, headed up by radical nationalist agitator Providnyk (Leader) Stepan Bandera, and the slightly less-murderous OUN-M under Andriy Melnyk.[564] In 1934, Bandera and his partner Mykola Lebed assassinated the Polish interior minister, Bronisław Pieracki, and were sent to prison.[565] It was during this trial that OUN leaders coined their still-used salute, “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”).[566] They were allowed to escape when the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland five years later.[567] The two led the radical faction after the split, serving the Germans in the SS (Schutzstaffel) and occupation police forces.[568]

Bandera organized the Nachtigall (“Nightingale”) squadrons, while Lebed went to Gestapo training school. The Nazis poured in money for the two years between the joint invasion of Poland and the German invasion of the USSR.[569] They were avowed fascists. Writing in the OUN’s journal Rozbudova Natsii in 1929, author Iurii Mylianych described Ukrainian Jews as “an alien and predominantly hostile body within our national organism.” The journal’s editor, Volodymyr Martynets, later said Jews were “parasitical,” “morally damaging,” “corrupting,” a “hostile element” and “racially unsuited for miscegenation and assimilation.” He urged for all Ukrainian Jews to be “totally isolated” from the rest of the population, assuring they would emigrate or starve.[570]

OUN ideologist Iaroslav Orshan wrote that “Ukrainian nationalism uses the term nationalism in the same way German and Italian nationalisms use the terms ‘National Socialism’ and ‘Fascism,’” saying they were just “different national expressions of the same spirit.”[571] Their doctrine held that different “species” of humans, by which they meant nationalities, are in “a constant struggle.” And they demanded ethnic purity, vowing to ban all inter-ethnic marriage, stating: “We regard their very existence and the making of such unions a crime of national treason.”[572] They also built links with other fascist groups across Europe, from Italy to Germany to Serbia and Croatia, and attended the Fifth Congress of National Socialists Abroad in Stuttgart, Germany in 1937.[573] OUN Nazi collaborator Kost Pankivsky later wrote that for years before the war, the OUN “had contacts with the Germans, who were ideologically linked with fascism and Nazism, who in word and in print and in deed had for years been preaching totalitarianism and an orientation on Berlin and Rome.”[574]

One of their chief ideologists, Dmytro Dontsov, wrote that the rights of the state must remain “above the life of any given individual, above the blood and deaths of thousands, above the wellbeing of a given generation, above abstract mental calculations, above universal human ethics, above any imaginary concept of good and evil.”[575] He compared Hitler to Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc.[576] Historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe wrote that “Dontsov became one of the main propagators of anti-Semitism among Ukrainian ideologists. On the one hand, he attacked Jews as a ‘race.’ On the other hand, he adapted anti-Semitism to the Ukrainian situation by associating Jews with the Soviet Union which he viewed as the main occupier of Ukrainian territory and main enemy of Ukrainians.”[577]

Bandera’s OUN-B adopted Dontsov’s position outright. When they published their tract, “Resolutions of the Second Great Assembly of the OUN,” they repeated his accusations “almost verbatim,” according to Rossoliński-Liebe.[578]

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the OUN wrote up a new constitution for Ukraine in which the state was to be a totalitarian dictatorship, with one great leader holding a lifetime appointment, which defined statehood in an ethnic sense and so guaranteed citizenship only to ethnic Ukrainians. All other political parties would be banned—“One nation, one party, one leader,” they wrote.[579] The OUN killed thousands of Poles especially, but also Jews and other political opponents in Galicia and Volhynia (area near the borders of Poland Ukraine and Belarus), during this period.[580]

Just before the Nazi invasion, in April 1941, the OUN-B proclaimed they would “combat Jews as supporters of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime.” They demanded “Ukraine for the Ukrainians!” and declared “Death to the Muscovite-Jewish commune! Beat the commune, save Ukraine!”[581]

In May, their manual on The Struggle and Activities of OUN in Wartime, written by Bandera and other top leaders of the OUN, including Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko,[582] identified their enemies as “Muscovites,” “Jews,” “Asiatics” and “Poles.”[583] Historian John-Paul Himka noted that Bandera’s call for interning all Jews did not come to pass, because they were simply murdered instead.[584]

On orders from Nikita Khrushchev, who was then first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine,[585] the Soviet NKVD massacred at least 15,000 political prisoners in Galicia as they withdrew in the face of the Germans’ invasion, enraging the population, and especially their fascist enemies.[586] Since the individuals responsible had withdrawn with the rest of the Red Army, it was local Jews who took the blame and the punishment for this atrocity when the Nazis arrived.[587]

Once the Third Reich reached Galicia in June, the OUN did not tell people to resist the invaders, but instead distributed leaflets across Lviv urging people to murder their own civilian countrymen: “Don’t throw away your weapons yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy . . . People!—Know this!—Moscow, the Hungarians, the Jews—these are your enemies. Destroy them.”[588]

Declaring a State

Bandera attempted to declare his new state on June 30, 1941, seeking recognition by their “natural allies,”[589] Hitler’s regime, and announced that they would “cooperate closely” with the Germans. “The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Moscovite occupation.”[590]

A few days later, Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko promised the new state would “cooperate closely with National Socialist Greater Germany . . . under the Führer Adolf Hitler.” He sent letters to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Croatian Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić, declaring himself loyal to the new order of fascist Europe.[591] They hung up banners across Lviv proclaiming, “Long Live Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler.”[592]

Premeditation

Though Bandera specifically said that Ukrainian Nationalism was Ukraine’s version of “Hitlerism,” this evidently did not fit with the German dictator’s plans. He meant to colonize Ukraine, not ally with it.[593] After the Nazis demanded the OUN withdraw the declaration,[594] Bandera eventually surrendered to “honorary detention.”[595] However, he and the other OUN leaders remained partners with the Germans and were allowed to continue their organizational work from house arrest in Berlin until August 1942, when Bandera was moved to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. While there, he was held in far better conditions than the other prisoners.[596] Bandera’s partner Mykola Lebed escaped to lead the OUN-B at war.[597] Instructions to their militia said the war was their opportunity to start murdering civilians: “In the time of chaos and confusion it is possible to permit the liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite, and Jewish activists, especially supporters of Bolshevik-Muscovite imperialism.” They continued, “Destroy the officer staff, shoot the Muscovites, Jews, NKVD men, the political instructors, and all who want war and our death!” They had explicit orders for how Jews and Poles were to be removed from their jobs “to avoid sabotage” and said if they needed to enslave a Jew to work, “one of our militiamen must be placed over him, and should liquidate him for the slightest transgression. Only Ukrainians, not foreign enemies, can be leaders in the various branches of life.”[598]

The Ukrainian nationalists identified Jews with the Communists and the terror of the Holodomor.[599] Omer Bartov, Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote that “in part, the fact that Jews were indeed proportionally overrepresented among the Communists encouraged this view; and in part, it also reflected the reality that Soviet rule had provided opportunities for Jews—young Jews especially—that the anti-Semitic Polish state had blocked.” He added, “The consequences of this perception were of course disastrous when the Nazis made the Jewish population the main target of persecution and murder.”[600] Bandera’s partner Yaroslav Stetsko had written, weeks after the torture and murders in the initial pogroms in Lviv had begun, “I . . . support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.” According to author Marco Carynnyk, “The Council of Seniors (Rada Sen’ioriv), which had been established in Lviv on 6 July 1941 to advise the Stets’ko administration, took up the question of Jews and other ‘minorities’ in Ukraine at a session on 18 July.” At the meeting, the OUN-B’s Oleksa Hai-Holovko said, “Jews are very insolent. . . . They have to be treated very harshly. . . . We must finish them off. . . . I like the German view very much.” The OUN-B’s propaganda chief, Stepan Lenkavs’kyi, agreed. “Regarding the Jews,” he said, “we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.”[601]

Bandera’s competitor in the OUN-M, Andriy Melnyk, was no less slavish in his devotion, writing, “We collaborate closely with Germany and invest everything in this collaboration. . . . Because we believe that Adolf Hitler’s new order in Europe is the real order, and that Ukraine is one of the avant-gardes in Eastern Europe, and perhaps the most important factor in strengthening this new order. . . . Ukraine is the natural ally of Germany.”[602]

In June 1941, when the Germans sacked Lviv, the OUN distributed pamphlets to the city’s Jews which read, “You welcomed Stalin with flowers. We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet as a grave.”[603] And that is exactly what they did.

Helping the Holocaust

The OUN ultimately helped the Germans kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Poles and Jews in Volhynia (an area by the intersection of the borders of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine), and Eastern Galicia in the Holocaust, butchering men, women and children in some of the cruelest ways imaginable.[604] Historian John-Paul Himka wrote that the OUN were the “key actors” in the first phase of the Holocaust in Ukraine, just after the invasion, rounding up Jews, murdering them or turning them over to the Germans to be enslaved in work camps or executed.[605] In the first two days of July, they launched a massive pogrom against the Jews of Lviv in the name of avenging those prisoners slain by the NKVD during their retreat. Between 7 and 8 thousand were beaten, humiliated and otherwise tortured, raped and murdered. The OUN-B and members of the Nachtigall Battalion participated.[606] They did it again in late July, killing another 1,500.[607]

Professors Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda are co-authors of U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis[608] and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, both based on declassified CIA and Army records. They wrote in the latter, “Indeed pogroms in East Galicia in the war’s first days killed perhaps 12,000 Jews.” Back in Berlin, Stetsko reported it all to Bandera.[609] Historian Per Anders Rudling, a professor at Lund University in Sweden and researcher on Ukrainian extremists, documented the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust in detail. He says credible estimates of their murders of Jews in the summer of 1941 range between 13,000–35,000. “The Nachtigall Battalion, consisting almost exclusively of OUN(b) activists serving in German uniforms under [Roman] Shukheyvch’s command,” he writes, “carried out mass shootings of Jews near Vinnytsia in July 1941.”[610] In Volhynia and Bukovina, it was the same way. The OUN participated in as many as 100 pogroms against Jews that summer, killing thousands.[611] Historian Alexander Kruglov estimated that between 38,000–39,000 Jews were killed in pogroms across Galicia and Volhynia that summer.[612]

In August 1941, in Kamianets-Podilskyi, in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, the SS, with help from local nationalists, rounded up and executed 23,600 Jews.[613] Just weeks later, in September,[614] the Nazis massacred more than 33,000 Jewish civilians over two days at the Babi Yar (or Babyn Yar) ravine outside of Kiev. Ukrainian auxiliary police, predominantly members of the OUN, participated.[615] Kruglov writes that between 61,000 to 62,000 Jews were shot by the OUN and especially the Germans in August 1941; another 136,000 to 137,000 in September.[616] That was only the beginning.

The National World War II Museum notes, “Before the killing centers opened at Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, more than 1.5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies, and local collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, and other USSR republics.”[617] Some estimate an equal number of them were killed just in Ukraine,[618] half in Galicia and Volhynia in the west.[619]

The OUN then joined the police in Galicia and Volhynia, where they helped round up thousands more Jews for deportation to the death camp at Belzec, or just took them out to be shot by them or their German masters.[620]

At the end of 1941, the Germans organized the Ukrainian National Militia into the new auxiliary police, the Schutzmannshschaften der Ordnungsoolizei (or Schuma).[621] Early the following year, they enforced the transfer of Jews from Galician and Volhynian cities into new ghettos, murdering thousands along the way, then took jobs as guards outside the ghettos and work camps. From the fall of 1941 through the summer of 1943, the Ukrainian police, heavily infiltrated by the OUN,[622] helped round up Jews for the SS to massacre, or to be shipped off to Belzec to be murdered there. And they participated in plenty of massacres themselves too.[623] It was also their business to hunt down and kill individual Jews hiding in basements, sewers and forests to turn over to the Germans or just murder themselves.[624] Historians Alexander Prusin and Gabriel N. Finder called them “the institutional epicenter of Ukrainian collusion with the Nazis in this region in the destruction of the Jews,” and all to create “Ukraine for Ukrainians.”[625]

The Nazi occupation converted the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army into the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS, or the “Galicia Division,” in early 1943. Its members swore allegiance directly to Hitler.[626] Over 800,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered by the Germans and their agents, such as the OUN and Galicia Division during the war—machine-gunned to death or buried alive.[627] Virtually the entire Jewish population of Eastern Galicia was killed, about a quarter of a million of them in camps, another quarter million shot in their own towns, “often in sight and with the willing collaboration of their gentile neighbors,” according to Professor Bartov.[628] In total, the OUN directly helped the Third Reich murder tens of thousands of Jews and Poles from 1941 to 1943.[629]

Justin Trudeau Toasts the SS

The Galician SS became a small controversy when in 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Parliament honored an old war veteran named Yaroslav Hunka who, the speaker read out, had “fought against the Russians” in World War II.[630] They had seemingly forgotten that Canada proudly fought as allies of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in that war, at the cost of 45,000 of Canadian lives,[631] and did not realize that Hunka, a veteran of the First Ukrainian Division, a.k.a., the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS,[632] was a likely war criminal whose unit had participated in the Holocaust while serving Heinrich Himmler and his Führer.[633] In 2011, Hunka described 1941 to 1943 as the “happiest years of my life.”[634] The Poles immediately moved to have him extradited to be prosecuted for war crimes.[635]

Ukrainian SS veterans were so prosperous in Canada they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to various universities in the country, including the Volodymyr and Daria Kubijovych Memorial Endowment Fund at Alberta University. Rudling said Kubijovych was a “chief collaborator” with the Nazis, making Hunka look insignificant in comparison.[636]

It was shown in 2017 that Chrystia Freeland, the former Financial Times reporter, deputy prime minister of Canada and anti-Russia hawk, had spent a lifetime citing the political influence of her maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak.[637] It turned out he was a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist during the war who wrote for the Bandarist weekly, Krakivski visti,[638] a publication that blamed the Jews for Soviet Communism and called people to join the German Nazis to fight the “Jewish-Bolshevik threat.”[639] She then lied and claimed this was Russian disinformation,[640] but it was not, and she knew it, having helped her uncle write an article about it years before.[641] It also was later revealed that Freeland herself got her start writing for The Ukrainian Weekly, a nationalist paper which glorified Bandera and the Galician SS.[642]

Perhaps this should not be surprising since Canada accepted thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s SS after World War II and to this day maintains monuments to their legacy.[643]

The UPA

The Galician SS and OUN, under the leadership of German officers,[644] created the Ukrainska Povstancha Armia, or Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), in 1942. Rudling writes that the new leadership consisted of ruthless OUN(b) activists, most of whom were trained by Nazi Germany, and many were deeply involved in the Holocaust.” He added, “The Ukrainian gendarmerie, Hilfsfreiwillige (volunteers), and, in particular, the so-called Schutzmannschaften [‘guard units,’ actually death squads], had been central to the implementation of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Belarus,” and this included “the commanders or chiefs of staff in at least nine out of eleven military districts.”[645]

According to the Holocaust survivor and academic historian Philip Friedman, “Sometime in the winter of 1942–1943 the various Ukrainian partisan groups began an intense fight against all non-Ukrainians. Jews who escaped from the ghettos were seized on the highways, in villages, or in the forests, and were put to death.”[646] In the second half of 1942, the Nazis began liquidating all the Jewish ghettos. The people were sent to Belzec or shot. Ukrainian police made themselves useful the whole time, rounding up Jews from lists and making sure no one escaped, and participating in massacres along with the Germans.[647]

After the tide of the war turned against the Germans at Stalingrad and Kursk in February and July 1943, large numbers of police left to join up with the OUN-B and -M in preparation for the coming insurgency against the returning Soviet Union.[648]

After another massive round of ethnic “cleansing” in 1944,[649] it is estimated that the OUN-UPA murdered more than 100,000 civilians,[650] and assisted in the killing of hundreds of thousands.[651] Breitman and Goda wrote in Hitler’s Shadow, “Banderist guerrillas in western Ukraine often killed Jews. Historian Yehuda Bauer writes that Banderists ‘killed all the Jews they could find,’ surely ‘many thousands’ in all.” They continued, “Moshe Maltz, a Jew living in hiding in Sokal, heard from a friendly Polish contact ‘about 40 Jews who were hiding out in the woods near his home . . . the Bandera gangs came and murdered them all.’” Once the Soviets had forced a German retreat and had retaken eastern Galicia in the fall of 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 in the heroic act of killing a Jew. They literally slash Jews to pieces with their machetes.’”[652]

“We slaughtered the Jews, we’ll slaughter the Poles, old and young, every one; we’ll slaughter the Poles, we’ll build Ukraine,” went the OUN slogan. “Death, death, death to the Poles/Death to the Moscow-Jewish commune/The OUN leads us into bloody battle . . . Each tormentor will face the same fate/One gallows for Poles and dogs,” they chanted as they marched.[653]

Historian Timothy Snyder, more famous for his fanatical support of Ukraine in the 2022– war, wrote in 2010 that after the Soviets started winning, the local police who had served the Germans “mass killing . . . west Ukrainian Jews,” then “went into the forest.” These men, many of them from the OUN-B, then formed the core of the UPA. “Two leaders of Bandera’s organization, Mykola Lebed and Roman Shukhevych, brought the UPA under the control of the OUN-B.” They spent the rest of the war killing Polish and Jewish civilians as much as fighting an anti-Soviet insurgency, slaughtering them by the tens of thousands, “most of them women and children,” Snyder wrote.[654]

Murdering with “scythes, knives and pitchforks,” he added that the UPA would ruthlessly butcher their Jewish and Polish victims, crucifying, disemboweling and disfiguring their corpses to terrorize their victims’ survivors and neighbors.[655] They forced Ukrainian members of mixed Ukrainian and Polish families to slaughter their own kin.[656] They also cited Moshe Maltz, a Jew who was living underground in Sokal: “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.” Breitman and Goda wrote, “On a single day, July 11, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities killing perhaps 10,000 Poles.”[657]

In 1943, under Nazi protection and leadership, Bandera participated in a conference organized to set up an “anti-Bolshevik front” which they later named the Supreme Liberation Council.[658] The Nazis released him from protective custody in 1944, and he went right back to work for them.[659] As the Germans retreated, they left thousands of tons of arms and ammunition behind, which the OUN-UPA used to help delay Soviet forces on their run to Berlin.[660] Bandera escaped to Austria, then West Germany.[661]

Insurgency

After the Germans’ defeat, the OUN-UPA kept fighting an insurgency and assassination campaign against the Soviets for nearly a decade from hideouts in the Carpathian Mountains with help from the American military and the new Central Intelligence Agency, which were impressed by defectors’ claims that they still had as many as 100,000 men under arms.[662] The Soviets’ answer was to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands from the civilian population out of which the insurgency was based.[663] Stalin’s NKVD also engaged in genocidal “cleansing” and relocation campaigns during and after World War II, killing 200,000[664] and moving 700,000 Poles out of Ukraine’s western Galicia region.[665]

Rossoliński-Liebe notes that by incorporating Galicia and Volhynia into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and cleansing the remaining Poles, Stalin was ironically accomplishing the nationalists’ goals for them, as well as helping set the stage for further conflict.[666] Stalin also moved pro-Russian Ukrainians out of Galicia and into the eastern Donbas region after the war.[667] Migrant laborers moved to the Donbas from all over the USSR after World War II. They mostly spoke Russian.[668]

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt

Reinhard Gehlen had been Hitler’s chief of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) in the later part of World War II, and therefore in charge of all military intelligence in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Historian Carl Ogelsby wrote: “FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s east. These included Stepan Bandera’s ‘B Faction’ of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B).” Soon Gehlen had effectively consolidated power as Nazi Germany’s intelligence chief.[669]

With certain defeat looming, Gehlen came up with a scheme to keep himself off the gallows. Since the U.S.-Soviet alliance would be sure to collapse after the war, he would offer his intelligence services to the new Western superpower in exchange for his freedom. Admiral William D. Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief of staff and national security adviser, General Edwin Siebert, the head of Army intelligence in Europe, General “Wild” Bill Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and Allen Dulles, the OSS station chief during the war and founding director of the new CIA, among others, bought into it.[670] As Ogelsby points out, it was only three and a half months after the war in Europe had ended, and just a week after the end of the war in the Pacific, that Gehlen made his deal with the Americans to keep himself and his SS friends in business.

Ogelsby says it remains unknown whether President Truman knew anything about the deal, though historian Christopher Simpson wrote that the fact of the involvement of such high-level officials, plus Stalin’s complaints about it at Potsdam, make it unlikely that he was unaware.[671] Gehlen himself later described the arrangement in detail in his memoir, The Service. They would reactivate their old networks to be the basis of a new German intelligence agency to work “with,” not “for,” the Americans once the West German government was ready, while the U.S. would pay for it all and receive all the intelligence. And they agreed that “should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would consider the interests of Germany first.”[672]

Gehlen wrote that this was not a problem for the Americans since their interests and those of West Germany were so closely aligned.[673] After almost a year in America, Gehlen was sent back to Germany and got to work for the new BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), the West German intelligence agency, rehabilitating SS war criminals, such as Franz Six, Emil Augsburg and Klaus Barbie, the SS “Butcher of Lyon,” and giving them missions behind Warsaw Pact lines.[674] That included supporting Ukrainian nationalists fighting the Soviets in a brutal insurgency and counterinsurgency war[675] beginning in 1946[676] and continuing through at least 1953.[677] A 1948 White House intelligence study, NSC-50,[678] advocated increased relations with resistance groups in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, which resulted in further cooperation with Gehlen in an attempt to infiltrate spies into Russia.[679] “He is on our side, and that is all that matters,” new CIA Director Allen Dulles said.[680] The operation was run by the Office of Policy Coordination and cost $100 million per year.[681] By 1954 they had trained and deployed as many as 5,000 agents. The State Department had to intervene to allow at least 200 with Nazi connections to enter the U.S. on national security grounds between 1948 and 1950.[682] Gehlen admitted in his memoirs that Bandera and UPA forces had worked for him after the war.[683] Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in Munich in October 1959.[684] The project only heightened tensions, leading George Kennan, the architect of Operation Rollback, to lament, “The political warfare initiative was the greatest mistake I ever made.” He added, “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.”[685]

Lebed and the CIA

This did not affect America’s Eastern European policy since Washington preferred Mykola Lebed’s faction and, though they had protected him after the war,[686] they had abandoned Bandera by the early 1950s.[687] Historian Christopher Simpson wrote, “The convicted assassin Mykola Lebed emerged after the war as one of the United States’ most important agents inside the OUN/UPA.”[688] At first the U.S. military ignored Lebed. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) reports from 1945 and 1946 described him as “a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans,” and called him a thief and a murderer. But in 1947 they gave in to his promises to reveal all about the inner workings of the USSR. Simpson noted that when Lebed was secretly smuggled from Rome to Munich, the operation was managed by the same American CIC agents who were “running Klaus Barbie and Emil Augsburg’s network of fugitive SS men.” They brought him to the United States in 1949.[689] At least 75 OUN agents were parachuted into Ukraine between 1949 and 1954, though due to deep infiltration by Communist agents, they were quickly neutralized or turned.[690]

The OUN continued with an assassination and murder campaign based out of West Germany that lasted well into the 1970s.[691] Lebed’s relationship with the CIA continued the entire length of the Cold War. Breitman and Goda wrote in Hitler’s Shadow, “In Project ICON, the CIA studied 30 groups and recommended operational cooperation with the [Ivan] Hrinioch-Lebed group as the organization best suited for clandestine work.” They concluded that “compared with Bandera, Hrinioch and Lebed represented a moderate, stable, and operationally secure group with the firmest connections to the Ukrainian underground in the USSR.” The Americans gave them “money, supplies, training, facilities for radio broadcasts, and parachute drops of trained agents to augment slower courier routes through Czechoslovakia used by UPA fighters and messengers.” While Hrinioch remained in Germany, Lebed moved to New York, got U.S. citizenship and began the covertly CIA-supported Prolog Research and Publishing Institute. Breitman and Goda added, “In 1977 President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the program [supporting Prolog] owing to what he called its ‘impressive dividends’ and the ‘impact on specific audiences in the target area.’”[692]

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigated Lebed, and was told by Ukrainian expatriates that he was “one of the most important Bandera terrorists . . . [responsible] for wholesale murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [people] . . . in all these actions, Lebed was one of the most important leaders.” At then-Assistant CIA Director Allen Dulles’s insistence, the INS, which had been prepared to deport him, suspended their investigation, eventually allowing Lebed to become a naturalized citizen.[693] According to Eric Lichtblau, author of The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,[694] after serving the U.S. in the Cold War, “many, many thousands of Nazi collaborators . . . got visas to the United States while the survivors did not.” This was officially sanctioned “even though they had been, for instance, the head of a Nazi concentration camp, the warden at a camp, or the secret police chief in Lithuania who signed the death warrants for people.”[695]

A secret CIA history, declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, called Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists, says that “according to an OSS report of September 1945, Bandera had earned a fierce reputation for conducting a ‘reign of terror’ during World War II.” Despite common spin about how the OUN and UPA fought against both the Nazis and the Communists, the CIA history admits about their allies: “Even though OUN’s enthusiasm diminished after the Nazis failed to support Ukrainian statehood, many Ukrainians continued to fight alongside the Germans until the end of the war.”

Regardless, the CIA went right into business with them, receiving official orders to go ahead in 1949. They gave them radio and cipher training along with cash. The first CIA airdrop into Ukraine in September 1949 was a bust, but got CIA leadership interested and convinced them to double down in their support of Lebed’s forces, while the British still supported Bandera’s faction.[696] Though the CIA ceased its airdrops to the UPA in 1953, the CIA’s own historian Kevin C. Ruffner wrote in a declassified history that “the Agency, however, maintained an operational relationship with the Ukrainians that proved to be not only its first, but also among its most resilient projects with, anti-Communist émigré groups. Under Mykola Lebed, whom the CIA brought to the United States in 1949, the ZPUHVR [a wing of the Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR)] turned to other forms of resistance activity.” He added, “With Agency funding, the Ukrainians established a research institute in New York and published a number of anti-Soviet publications, including Suchasnist.”[697]

But they were still Nazi terrorists. Their idea of fighting communism was murdering and maiming civilians. But their tactics made the population resent them as much as their Bolshevik overlords.[698] Nonetheless, for a decade the CIA still backed them, planning to use the UPA’s Carpathian Mountain stronghold as a base for an insurgent army to take on the Reds in World War III.[699]

“Your struggle is our struggle, your dream is our dream,” President Reagan told Yaroslav Stetsko, who led the OUN-B after Bandera’s death at the hands of the KGB in 1959, at a meeting in the Oval Office in 1983.[700]

While in exile during the first Cold War, Western emigres descended from the OUN-UPA had constructed their own nationalist historical narratives about Ukrainian victimhood, the heroic sacrifices of their members and the righteousness of the nationalist cause. During Premier Gorbachev’s perestroika (“restructuring”) policy in the 1980s, they began exporting their narratives and agendas to willing audiences in the ethnic Ukrainian west.[701]

Continuity

The Social National Party (SPNU), which was later renamed Svoboda, (“Freedom”, The Social National Party), was founded in 1991, and is directly descended from the OUN.[702] Their militia, Patriot of Ukraine, later became the core of the Azov Battalion.[703] On June 30, 1991, Polish professor Georgiy Kasianov reports, they held their first mass celebration of the anniversary of Bandera’s declaration of statehood from 1941. For the rest of the year, local authorities across western Ukraine sanctioned monuments to Bandera, Shukhevych and “OUN and UPA heroes.” They also opened several Bandera museums portraying him as a great national hero.[704] The next year they produced new student textbooks that celebrated the OUN-UPA as national liberators. “Preferring to create façade structures for political and cultural activities,” as Kasianov put it, the OUN created the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1992, which worked through the 1990s and 2000s to rehabilitate the image of the OUN-UPA.[705] Its founder was Slava Stetsko, Yaroslav Stetsko’s widow, who had taken over the OUN in 1991. Rossoliński-Liebe wrote, “In Kiev, OUN-B émigrés set up the Stepan Bandera Centre of National Revival.” OUN leadership and their most important newspaper and journal soon moved their operations there.[706]

A State Department cable from 2008 confirms that the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) was “[o]riginally a coalition of nationalist groups that venerated Mussolini.” Founded in 1990 “by Yuriy Shukhevych, son of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) commander Roman Shukhevych,” it supported Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution of 2004.[707] The Seattle Times also documented the UNA-UNSO’s role in “providing much of the muscle behind the weeks of protests in support of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko” during the Orange Revolution, writing that “group member Andriy Bondarenko said it was a key element right from the start. . . . They coordinated the weeks-long blockade of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma’s office. It also provided men to serve in Yushchenko’s personal security detail.” Their reporter said that “the presence of the group . . . underlines the concerns of Yushchenko’s foes that his leadership will enflame nationalism and intense anti-Russian sentiment.”[708]

In Ukraine, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Communist Leonid Kravchuk had, much like his Russian counterparts, allowed the full-scale looting of his country by other former Communists-turned-oligarchs.[709] In 1994, President Kravchuk and his allies accused his opponent Leonid Kuchma, George Soros’s man,[710] of wanting to rejoin Russia and give away Sevastopol.[711] Out west, and in Kiev,[712] the Nazis started coming out to rally for the current government. They threatened civil war after Kuchma won,[713] and though they did not follow through that time, it was a portent of things to come.[714]

Ten years later, the Orange Revolution coincided with a considerable rise in violence by avowedly racist groups against Jews, Roma and other minorities, while the government obfuscated and shut down the committees and departments in charge of monitoring them.[715]

Supreme Rada member Oleh Tyahnybok became the leader of the Social National party in 2004 and changed the name to Svoboda (“Freedom”, The Social National Party), which was supposed to be a softer presentation of the same fascist ideology.[716] Still, their website makes their ethno-nationalism clear: “We are not America, a mishmash of all sorts of people. . . . The Ukrainian needs to stay Ukrainian, the Pole—Polish, the Gagauz—Gagauz, the Uzbek—Uzbek.” Tyahnybok’s adviser Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn has said the Holocaust was “a bright episode in European civilization.”[717] Proving their rebranding was just for show, Tyahnybok got in trouble later that year when he denounced the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” actually using the more derogatory phrase Moskaly-Zhydy, which he claimed “ruled” Ukraine.[718] He stood by the statement in 2012.[719] A U.S. State Department officer explained in a leaked cable that Svoboda spin-off group Patriot of Ukraine had “protested against Kharkiv court rulings making Russian the second official language in the city,” adding, “Its official ideology is Social Nationalism, a cult of the nation within a state, which is anti-immigrant . . . anti-capitalist and anti-globalist.”[720]

In 2009, five years before the second Maidan coup, the Svoboda Party was already establishing ties with ethno-nationalist groups across Europe, officially joining the Alliance of European Nationalist Movements. That same year they won their first parliamentary election in Ternopil in far-western Galicia.[721] In May 2010, Tyahnybok was awarded the golden cross “for his service to Ukraine” from the Canadian Brotherhood of the Veterans of the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army—the Galician SS.[722]

When Patriot of Ukraine’s Andriy Biletsky founded the Azov Regiment in 2015, he did so explicitly invoking the name of the UPA.[723] Other Azov-related Nazi groups include Tradition and Order, Karpatska Sich, Wotanjugend, Freikorps and NordStorm.[724]

2,800 words in the NOTES:

[559] Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Donald Rayfield: A Seditious and Sinister Tribe—the war-torn history of Crimea’s Tatars,” Financial Times, August 8, 2024, https://ft.com/content/93b50116-0cc5-4a25-a48d-1ab6c58d6307.

[560] Arūnas Bubnys, et al., “The Baltic States: Auxiliaries and Waffen-SS soldiers from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,” in Jochen Böhler and Robert Gerwarth (eds), The Waffen-SS: A European History (Oxford: Oxford Academic, 2016), https://academic.oup.com/book/1399/chapter-abstract/140732828; Joseph Berger, “Some in Estonia Greeted Nazis in ’41 as Liberators,” New York Times, April 22, 1987, https://nytimes.com/1987/04/22/world/some-in-estonia-greeted-nazis-in-41-as-liberators.html.

[561] John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 70.

[562] Timothy Snyder, “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev,” New York Review of Books, February 24, 2010, https://nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev.

[563] Himka, 136–37; Rossoliński-Liebe, 72–73.

[564] Petro, 60; Himka, 143–44; Rossoliński-Liebe, 167.

[565] Rossoliński-Liebe, 117–51.

[566] Rossoliński-Liebe, 139.

[567] Himka, 143; Rossoliński-Liebe, 166.

[568] Joe Conason, “To Catch a Nazi,” Village Voice, February 11, 1986, https://villagevoice.com/2020/02/26/to-catch-a-nazi.

[569] Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on the Cold War, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Collier Books, 1989), 161.

[570] Volodymyr Martynets, Zhydivs’ka problema v Ukraїni (London: Williams, Lea & Co., 1938), 10, 14–15, cited in Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust.”

[571] Iaroslav Orshan, “The Age of Nationalism,” in Al’manakh Avanhardi (Paris: 1938), 41.

[572] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[573] Rossoliński-Liebe, 74–77; Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[574] Himka, 146.

[575] Petro, 60.

[576] Rossoliński-Liebe, 78.

[577] Rossoliński-Liebe, 79–80.

[578] Rossoliński-Liebe, 107.

[579] Rossoliński-Liebe, 83, 177.

[580] Rossoliński-Liebe, 168.

[581] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[582] Himka, 219.

[583] Himka, 225.

[584] Himka, 226.

[585] Rossoliński-Liebe, 193.

[586] Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl (eds.), The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 – A Sourcebook (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/53241/9789048526826.pdf; Staff, “The 1941 NKVD Prison Massacres in Western Ukraine,” National World War II Museum, June 7, 2021, https://nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/1941-nkvd-prison-massacres-western-ukraine; Himka, 194–97; Kai Struve, Deutsche Herrschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), 219–21, 278–88, cited in Himka, 195. A year before, the Soviet regime had slaughtered 22,000 Polish military and civilian leaders in a mass execution in the Katyn Forest, a crime which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt were well aware of and covered up, blaming the atrocity on the Germans: “Records Relating to the Katyn Forest Massacre,” National Archives, June 5, 2023, https://archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-massacre; Staff, “Memos show US helped cover up Soviet massacre,” AP, September 10, 2012, https://cbsnews.com/news/memos-show-us-helped-cover-up-soviet-massacre.

[587] Himka, 203, 232, 255, 260–61; Simpson, 164.

[588] Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 39, No. 3 (May 2011), 332–33, https://researchgate.net/publication/233467822_Foes_of_our_rebirth_Ukrainian_nationalist_discussions_about_Jews_1929-1947; Rossoliński-Liebe, 215.

[589] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[590] Stepan Bandera, “Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Samostiyna Ukraina, June 30, 1941, https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/9105859.

[591] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160; Himka, 208–09.

[592] Rossoliński-Liebe, 216.

[593] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1 (Munich: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1925), 584; Petro, 62; Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008), 44–45.

[594] Rossoliński-Liebe, 246.

[595] CIA Report on Stepan Bandera, December 5, 1951, https://cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA%2C%20STEFAN_0016.pdf; Rossoliński-Liebe, 247.

[596] Himka, 227; Rossoliński-Liebe, 285.

[597] Richard Breitman, et al., US Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250.

[598] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[599] Himka, 157–72, 191–94.

[600] Omer Bartov, “On Eastern Galicia’s Past & Present,” Daedalus, Fall 2007, https://amacad.org/publication/eastern-galicias-past-present.

[601] Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, January 1999, https://researchgate.net/profile/Marco-Carynnyk/publication/283606261_The_Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists_and_Its_Attitude_toward_Germans_and_Jews_Iaroslav_Stets%27ko%27s_1941_Zhyttiepys/links/5728f1b308ae2efbfdb7ebf3/The-Organization-of-Ukrainian-Nationalists-and-Its-Attitude-toward-Germans-and-Jews-Iaroslav-Stetskos-1941-Zhyttiepys.pdf; Himka, 238, 241.

[602] Rossoliński-Liebe, 242.

[603] Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien: Der Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941–1944 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), 113; Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (January 1999), 149–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41036794; Himka, 238, 241.

[604] Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (September 16, 2019), 221–40, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325419831351; Himka, 301, 302.

[605] Himka, 13, 199, 201, 241–55.

[606] Rossoliński-Liebe, 205–13.

[607] Rossoliński-Liebe, 218–19.

[608] Breitman, et al.

[609] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 2012), https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf, 75.

[610] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[611] Himka, 256–85, 286–303.

[612] Alexander Kruglov, “Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 274.

[613] Himka, 217.

[614] Larry Luxner, “New center sheds light on previously unknown details of Holocaust’s Babyn Yar massacre,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 29, 2020, https://jta.org/2020/09/29/global/new-center-sheds-light-on-previously-unknown-details-of-holocausts-babyn-yar-massacre.

[615] Hahn, 39; Karel C. Berkhoff, “Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving the Babi Yar Massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian Records,” in Brandon and Lower, 293, 301, 302–03, 309.

[616] Kruglov, 274–75.

[617] Jennifer Popowycz, “The ‘Holocaust by Bullets,’ in Ukraine,” National World War II Museum, January 24, 2022, https://nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/ukraine-holocaust.

[618] Brandon and Lower, 11.

[619] Rossoliński-Liebe, 241.

[620] Himka, 13.

[621] Himka, 308.

[622] Himka, 339–51.

[623] Himka, 321–33; Philip Friedman, “The Destruction of the Jews of Lwów,” in Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, edited by Ada June Friedman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 263.

[624] Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 101–20; Himka, 333–37.

[625] Alexander Prusin and Gabriel N. Finder, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia: The Ukrainian police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2 (December 2004), 95–118, https://researchgate.net/publication/233073604_Collaboration_in_Eastern_Galicia_The_Ukrainian_police_and_the_Holocaust.

[626] Rossoliński-Liebe, 255.

[627] Conn Hallinan, “The Dark Side of the Ukraine Revolt,” Foreign Policy in Focus, March 4, 2014, https://fpif.org/dark-side-ukraine-revolt.

[628] Omer Bartov, “On Eastern Galicia’s Past & Present,” Daedalus, Fall 2007, https://amacad.org/publication/eastern-galicias-past-present.

[629] Himka, 13; Rossoliński-Liebe, 241–42.

[630] Rob Gillies, “Zelenskyy speaks before Canadian Parliament in his campaign to shore up support for Ukraine,” AP, September 22, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/zelenskyy-trudeau-canada-ukraine-parliament-b0f23d207592031cedb030292eb3ae01.

[631] “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National World War II Museum, https://nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war.

[632] Yaroslav Hunka, “Photo,” Combatant’s News, October 29, 2010, https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2010/10/blog-post_4610.html; Yaroslav Hunka, “Photo,” Combatant’s News, October 31, 2010, https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2010/10/blog-post_31.html.

[633] Lev Golinkin, “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis,” The Forward, September 24, 2023, https://forward.com/fast-forward/561927/zelenskyy-joins-canadian-parliaments-ovation-to-98-year-old-veteran-who-fought-with-nazis.

[634] Yaroslav Hunka, “My Generation,” Combatant’s News, March 21, 2011, https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_21.html.

[635] Ellen Francis, “Polish official wants Canada to extradite Ukrainian veteran of Nazi unit,” Washington Post, September 27, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/27/poland-ukrainian-nazi-veteran-canada-extradition.

[636] Lev Golinkin, “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis,” The Forward, September 24, 2023, https://forward.com/fast-forward/561927/zelenskyy-joins-canadian-parliaments-ovation-to-98-year-old-veteran-who-fought-with-nazis.

[637] Chrystia Freeland, “My Ukraine,” Brookings Institution, May 12, 2015, http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2015/myukraine.html.

[638] David Pugliese, “Chrystia Freeland’s granddad was indeed a Nazi collaborator – so much for Russian disinformation,” Ottawa Citizen, March 8, 2017, https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/chrystia-freelands-granddad-was-indeed-a-nazi-collaborator-so-much-for-russian-disinformation; Jeremy Appel, “Canada’s Future Prime Minister Needs to Come Clean About Her Nazi Collaborationist Grandfather,” Tablet, May 12, 2022, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/chrystia-freeland-needs-to-come-clean-about-her-nazi-collaborationist-grandfather.

[639] Rossoliński-Liebe, 254–55.

[640] Alan Freeman, “Russia should stop calling my grandfather a Nazi, says Canada’s foreign minister,” Washington Post, March 9, 2017, https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/09/canadas-foreign-minister-says-russia-is-spreading-disinformation-about-her-grandfather.

[641] Freeland’s uncle, Chomiak’s son-in-law, is historian John-Paul Himka, author of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The OUN and UPA’s Participation of the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry 1941–1944, which is dedicated to her; John-Paul Himka, “Krakivski visti and the Jews, 1943: A Contribution to the History of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Second World War,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1–2 (1996); Robert Fife, “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” Toronto Globe and Mail, March 7, 2017, https://theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/freeland-knew-her-grandfather-was-editor-of-nazi-newspaper/article34236881.

[642] Max Blumenthal, “Canada’s honoring of Nazi vet exposes Ottawa’s longstanding Ukraine policy,” Grayzone, September 26, 2023, https://thegrayzone.com/2023/09/26/canadas-ukrainian-nazi-ottawas-policy; Tweet by Max Blumenthal, May 7, 2023, https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1655314116360151041.

[643] Rossoliński-Liebe, 316; Robert Scheinberg, “Canada knowingly admitted SS members after World War II,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 5, 1997, https://jta.org/1997/06/05/lifestyle/canada-knowingly-admitted-ss-members-after-world-war-ii.

[644] Prados, Safe, 70.

[645] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[646] Philip Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, Vol. 12 (1959), 184, https://degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110970449.358/html.

[647] Rossoliński-Liebe, 258–60.

[648] Himka, 352–56.

[649] Rossoliński-Liebe, 266–79.

[650] Colborne, 23.

[651] Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Survivor Testimonies and the Coming to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (September 16, 2019), 221–40, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325419831351.

[652] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 2012), https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf, 75.

[653] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[654] Timothy Snyder, “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev,” New York Review of Books, February 24, 2010, https://nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev.

[655] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 169.

[656] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160; Rossoliński-Liebe, 268.

[657] Breitman and Goda, Hitler’s Shadow, 75.

[658] Prados, Safe, 70; Breitman, et al., 250–25.

[659] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[660] Simpson, 162–63.

[661] Rossoliński-Liebe, 288.

[662] John Prados, The Ghosts of Langley: Into the Heart of the CIA (New York: The New Press, 2017), 81; Prados, Safe, 70–71.

[663] Hahn, 41–42; Rossoliński-Liebe, 296–97, 316.

[664] Piotr Zychowicz, “The Polish Operation,” Institute of National Remembrance, March 3, 2021, https://ipn.gov.pl/en/digital-resources/articles/7150,The-Polish-Operation.html.

[665] Rossoliński-Liebe, 291.

[666] Rossoliński-Liebe, 291–93.

[667] Peter Nimitz, “Roots of the Donbas Wars,” Nemets, March 4, 2023,

https://nemets.substack.com/p/roots-of-the-Donbas-war

[668] Konstantin Skorkin, “A Counter-Elite Takes Power: the New Leaders of the Donbas,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 16, 2018, https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/75549.

[669] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-an-article-by-carl-oglesby.

[670] Simpson, 40–42.

[671] Simpson, 43.

[672] Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (New York: Popular Library, 1972), 122.

[673] Gehlen, 123.

[674] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-an-article-by-carl-oglesby.

[675] Rossoliński-Liebe, 295–309.

[676] Simpson, 46.

[677] Kevin C. Ruffner, Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists, Central Intelligence Agency, January 1, 1998, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/cold-war-allies-the-origins-of-cias-relationship-with-ukrainian-nationalists.

[678] “NSC 50,” Report by Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of Defense Johnson to the National Security Council, July 1, 1949, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d384.

[679] John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1986, 1996), 55.

[680] Simpson, 53.

[681] Rossoliński-Liebe, 310–11.

[682] Prados, Presidents’, 56.

[683] Joe Conason, “To Catch a Nazi,” Village Voice, February 11, 1986, https://villagevoice.com/2020/02/26/to-catch-a-nazi; Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (New York: Popular Library, 1972), 241.

[684] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-an-article-by-carl-oglesby; Rossoliński-Liebe, 252.

[685] Peter Grose, Operation Rollback, America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001), 98.

[686] Rossoliński-Liebe, 321.

[687] Rossoliński-Liebe, 327, 331.

[688] Simpson, 163.

[689] Simpson, 166, 168.

[690] Rossoliński-Liebe, 332–33.

[691] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011), https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[692] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 2012) https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf.

[693] Breitman, et al., 252–55.

[694] Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

[695] Dave Davies, “How Thousands Of Nazis Were ‘Rewarded’ With Life In The US,” NPR News, November 5, 2014, https://npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-nazis-were-rewarded-with-life-in-the-u-s.

[696] Grose, 180–82.

[697] Kevin C. Ruffner, Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists, Central Intelligence Agency, January 1, 1998, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/cold-war-allies-the-origins-of-cias-relationship-with-ukrainian-nationalists.

[698] Grose, 45, 46.

[699] Simpson, 172.

[700] President Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Ceremony Marking the Annual Observance of Captive Nations Week,” White House, July 19, 1983, https://reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-ceremony-marking-annual-observance-captive-nations-week.

[701] Georgiy Kasianov, “Nationalist Memory Narratives and the Politics of History in Ukraine since the 1990s,” Nationalities Papers (2023), 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.10.

[702] Paul H. Rosenberg, “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret, An interview with Russ Bellant, author of Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party,” Foreign Policy in Focus, March 18, 2014, https://fpif.org/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret; Moss Robeson, “Ally of the Month – The far-right Svoboda party,” Bandera Lobby Blog, March 6, 2023,

Ally of the Month

[703] Andreas Umland, “Irregular Militias and Radical Nationalism in Post-Euromaydan Ukraine: The Prehistory and Emergence of the ‘Azov’ Battalion in 2014,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January 2019), https://researchgate.net/publication/331360561_Irregular_Militias_and_Radical_Nationalism_in_Post-Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Battalion_in_2014.

[704] Rossoliński-Liebe, 480–92.

[705] Georgiy Kasianov, “Nationalist Memory Narratives and the Politics of History in Ukraine since the 1990s,” Nationalities Papers (2023), 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.10.

[706] Rossoliński-Liebe, 465–66.

[707] Amb. William Taylor, “Ukraine’s Main Extremist Groups,” US State Department, November 26, 2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV2323_a.html.

[708] Aleksandar Vasovic, “Far-right group flexes during Ukraine ‘revolution,’” Seattle Times, January 3, 2005, https://seattletimes.com/nation-world/far-right-group-flexes-during-ukraine-revolution.

[709] Yuriy Gorodnichenko, “Ukraine’s economy went from Soviet chaos to oligarch domination to vital global trader of wheat and neon – and now Russian devastation,” The Conversation, March 21, 2022, https://theconversation.com/ukraines-economy-went-from-soviet-chaos-to-oligarch-domination-to-vital-global-trader-of-wheat-and-neon-and-now-russian-devastation-178971.

[710] See above.

[711] Taras Kuzio, Ukraine Under Kuchma: Political Reform, Economic Transformation and Security Policy in Independent Ukraine (Birmingham: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, 1997), 55–56, 60.

[712] “Chronology of Events: March 1994–August 1995,” UN Refugee Agency, November 1, 1995, https://refworld.org/reference/countryrep/irbc/1995/en/97463.

[713] Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,” New York Times, July 14, 1994, https://nytimes.com/1994/07/14/opinion/ukraines-great-divide.html.

[714] Andrew Higgins, “Nationalists in Ukraine braced for a new enemy,” Independent, July 14, 1994, https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nationalists-in-ukraine-braced-for-a-new-enemy-1413915.html.

[715] Staff, “Violent Hate Crimes in Ukraine,” Human Rights First, October 2010, https://upr-info.org/sites/default/files/documents/2013-10/hrfuprukrs142012humanrightsfirste.pdf.

[716] Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Creeping Resurgence of the Ukrainian Radical Right? The Case of the Freedom Party,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2 (2011), 203–28, http://jstor.org/stable/27975531.

[717] Per Anders Rudling, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right – The Case of VO Svoboda,” in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.), Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 228–55, http://academia.edu/2481420.

[718] Hahn, 149.

[719] Oksana Faryna, “Extreme Choices: Svoboda plays nationalist card,” Kyiv Post, October 18, 2012, https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/extreme-choices-svoboda-plays-nationalist-card-314617.html.

[720] Amb. William Taylor, “Ukraine’s Main Extremist Groups,” US State Department, November 26, 2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV2323_a.html.

[721] Hahn, 150–51.

[722] Per Anders Rudling, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right – The Case of VO Svoboda,” in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.), Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 228–55, http://academia.edu/2481420.

[723] Andriy Biletsky, “The Current War in Donbas is a War of Two Civilizations,” Informant, April 25, 2015,

; Colborne, 15.

[724] Colborne, 74–77.

.