The following are research notes outlining basic facts about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists prior to the Nazi's forming the Ukrainian SS "1st Galicien" Division in 1943. Sources include scholarly articles; Canadian, British and American newspapers; and declassified OSS/CIA and other American government materials.
OUN founding and Nazi collaboration
OUN was founded in Weimar Germany in 1929. Through connections stemming back to the 1918-1920 Ukrainian wars, it was immediately supported with resources by the German military brass also involved in secret rearmament in the late 1920s.
OUN remained based out of Berlin through the 1930s and received continued support from the Nazi regime during its ongoing terrorist and assassination campaigns in Poland whose control of Ukrainian majority regions in its southeast was awarded by the Versailles Treaty. OUN paramilitaries played a role in the Nazi dismembering of Czechoslovakia in 1938, although they failed to establish a new state in Carpatho-Ukraine.
OUN battalions and the Lviv Pogrom
In 1940, the OUN split into two factions (which would wage a bloody war against each other) both of which collaborated openly with the Nazis. Leader of the OUN-B, Stepan Bandera, lobbied for and was granted permission to form two Ukrainian battalions of OUN-B recruits. The Nachitgall Battalion and Roland Battalion were formed in early 1941 and served under Nazi command.
The two battalions were part of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Nachtigall Battalion entered Lviv (aka: Lemberg, Lwow, Lvov) on June 29, 1941. A day later, Stepan Bandera and his second in command, Jaroslav Stetsko, declared their Ukrainian independence in Lviv - the same day the Lviv Pogrom began which resulted in the murder of 4,000-5,000 Jews.
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| Paid advertisement in the Kingston Whig-Standard, July 9 1986 |
The Hetman and German/Nazi collaboration
The German relationship with the Ukrainian nationalist forces is even older. In the spring of 1918, there was a German invasion of the Ukrainian People's Republic that had been declared in January 1918. The Germans facilitated a coup in Kyiv (Kiev) against the independent People's Republic and installed Skoropadski as a king, or "Hetman" (the highest Cossack rank).
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| Montreal Gazette, May 17 1918 |
With the revolution against the German Kaiser, the Germans withdrew in November 1918. A general armed uprising by numerous militias and political factions forced the Hetman to abdicate. Skoropadski was exiled to Germany where he led the "Hetmanites", also known as monarchists or royalists, as a powerful Ukrainian nationalist faction in the 1920s and 1930s. During his time living in Hitler's Germany, he was generously financed by the Nazi government to live luxuriously and pursue his work organizing the Ukrainian nationalist movement. He died from his wounds in an Allied bombing raid in early 1945 Nazi Germany.
Captured Nazi documents declassified by the United States reported Skoropadski was more interested in his own personal wealth and fame, resulting in the once strong royalist faction of Ukrainian nationalists to lose power to the OUN by the late 1930s. Liberal and social democratic Ukrainian nationalists, alongside Ukrainian Communists, were suppressed in Poland and Germany in the 1930s while the Nazis supported both the royalist and fascist (OUN) factions of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Konovalets and Petliura
Those who took power after overthrowing Skoropadski claimed to be reviving the short-lived People's Republic formed in January 1918. However, it was in fact an unelected "Directorate" that never re-assembled the elected Rada. Its leader was Symon Petliura. Under Petliura's reign, the pogroms in Ukraine became a full-blown genocide of more than 100,000 Jews. Only the Holocaust killed more Jews.
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| New York Herald, December 19 1919 |
When the Directorate allied with Poland against the advancing Red Armies, sections of his nationalist supporters turned against Petliura, including his most important military leader, Yehven Konovalets, who had been an Austro-Hungarian soldier in its war against Tsarist Russia, and had led a special combat unit for Skoropadski's regime. Konovalets would eventually escape to Germany after serving time in a Polish Prisoner of War camp after the defeat of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1920. While in exile, Konovalets committed himself to the armed liberation of Ukraine and formed a paramilitary organization which became the basis for launching the OUN in Germany in 1929.
Petliura was assassinated in Paris in 1926 by a Ukrainian Jewish anarchist-Bolshevik named Schwartzbard. Petliura was effectively put on trial for the pogroms and Schwartzbard, whose family was murdered under Petliura's regime, was exonerated.
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| The Guardian, November 4 1927 |
The
entire case was a huge outrage for Ukrainian nationalists. Petliura was
rehabilitated by the OUN after his death. Konovalets was assassinated
by a Soviet bomb in Rottderdam in 1938, leaving the Bandera and Melnyk
factions to fight for control of the OUN, resulting in the 1940 split
and war.
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| New York Daily News, May 30 1938 |
Canadian connections
The
clipping below is from the Waterloo Record, January 22 1968. It was a
paid advertisement from the Kitchener branch of the Canadian League for
the Liberation of Ukraine, which was an OUN-B/Banderite
organization formed in 1949. Banderites are not excluded from the
Ukrainian Canadian Congress and have longed played an important and
influential role in the organization. Jaroslav Hunka, the Ukrainian SS
veteran who twice received a standing ovation in Canadian Parliament,
was invited to Parliament based on the UCC's recommendation.
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| Waterloo Record, January 22 1968 |