Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust
Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

Author: John-Paul Himka

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 3838215486

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One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941–44. The extent of OUN and UPA’s culpability in the Holocaust has been a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish communities and Israel. Occasionally, the controversy has broken into the press of North America, the EU, and Israel. Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes
Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes

Author: Trevor Erlacher

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 659

ISBN-13: 0674250931

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The first English-language biography of Dmytro Dontsov, the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Anatomy of a Genocide
Anatomy of a Genocide

Author: Omer Bartov

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 145168455X

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Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Book Prize for Holocaust Research “A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence” (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level—turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another—as seen through the eastern European border town of Buczacz during World War II. For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz—today part of Ukraine—was home to a highly diverse citizenry. It was here that Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews all lived side by side in relative harmony. Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents. In truth, though, this genocide didn’t happen so quickly. In Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn’t occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities. The perpetrators aren’t just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. They are also middle-aged men who come from elsewhere, often with their wives and children and parents, and settle into a life of bourgeois comfort peppered with bouts of mass murder. For more than two decades Bartov, whose mother was raised in Buczacz, traveled extensively throughout the region, scouring archives and amassing thousands of documents rarely seen until now. He has also made use of hundreds of first-person testimonies by victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and rescuers. Anatomy of a Genocide profoundly changes our understanding of the social dynamics of mass killing and the nature of the Holocaust as a whole. Bartov’s book isn’t just an attempt to understand what happened in the past. It’s a warning of how it could happen again, in our own towns and cities—much more easily than we might think.

Complicated Complicity
Complicated Complicity

Author: Martina Bitunjac

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 3110671182

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Complicated Complicity is about the forms taken, motives and spectrum of actions of European collaboration with the Nazis. State authorities, local military organizations and individual players in different countries and areas including France, Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Portugal and the countries of the former Yugoslavia are discussed in the context of the history of World War II, the history of occupation and everyday life and as an essential influencing factor in the Holocaust. New forms of right-wing populism, nationalism and growing intolerance of Jewish fellow citizens and minorities have made such historically sensitive studies considerably more difficult in many countries today. In this time of increasing historical revisionism in Europe, such elucidating discourse is particularly relevant.

Genocide and Rescue in Wołyń
Genocide and Rescue in Wołyń

Author: Tadeusz Piotrowski

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780786407736

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After the 1939 Soviet and 1941 Nazi invasions, the people of Southeast Poland underwent a third and even more terrible ordeal when they were subjected to mass genocide by the Ukrainian Nationalists. Tens of thousands of Poles were tortured and murdered, not by foreign invaders, but by their fellow citizens, who sometimes turned out to be their neighbors, relatives, and former friends. Other Ukrainians took terrible risks to protect Poles from the slaughter, and often paid for their compassion with their lives. The children who survived them vividly remember these atrocities and now, many decades later, tell their tragic tales. These accounts, never before published in English, describe the brutal murders these children witnessed, their own miraculous survival, and the heroic rescues that saved them. Demographic and other statistical information on the area is provided. Also included are appendices listing the Ukrainian victims and providing additional stories from other provinces, as well as ample Ukrainian, Polish, Soviet, German, and Jewish documentation and a comprehensive chronology. An index and bibliography are also included.

Ukrainian Nationalism
Ukrainian Nationalism

Author: Myroslav Shkandrij

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-28

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0300210744

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Both celebrated and condemned, Ukrainian nationalism is one of the most controversial and vibrant topics in contemporary discussions of Eastern Europe. Perhaps today there is no more divisive and heatedly argued topic in Eastern European studies than the activities in the 1930s and 1940s of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This book examines the legacy of the OUN and is the first to consider the movement’s literature alongside its politics and ideology. It argues that nationalism’s mythmaking, best expressed in its literature, played an important role. In the interwar period seven major writers developed the narrative structures that gave nationalism much of its appeal. For the first time, the remarkable impact of their work is recognized.

Harvest of Despair
Harvest of Despair

Author: Karel C. Berkhoff

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780674020788

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“If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot,” declared Nazi commissar Erich Koch. To the Nazi leaders, the Ukrainians were Untermenschen—subhumans. But the rich land was deemed prime territory for Lebensraum expansion. Once the Germans rid the country of Jews, Roma, and Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians would be used to harvest the land for the master race. Karel Berkhoff provides a searing portrait of life in the Third Reich’s largest colony. Under the Nazis, a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide. But it is impossible to understand fully Ukraine’s response to this assault without addressing the impact of decades of repressive Soviet rule. Berkhoff shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, which helps explain why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans. He also challenges standard views of wartime eastern Europe by treating in a more nuanced way issues of collaboration and local anti-Semitism. Berkhoff offers a multifaceted discussion that includes the brutal nature of the Nazi administration; the genocide of the Jews and Roma; the deliberate starving of Kiev; mass deportations within and beyond Ukraine; the role of ethnic Germans; religion and national culture; partisans and the German response; and the desperate struggle to stay alive. Harvest of Despair is a gripping depiction of ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary events.

Heroes and Villains
Heroes and Villains

Author: David R. Marples

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9789637326981

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Certain to engender debate in the media, especially in Ukraine itself, as well as the academic community. Using a wide selection of newspapers, journals, monographs, and school textbooks from different regions of the country, the book examines the sensitive issue of the changing perspectives ? often shifting 180 degrees ? on several events discussed in the new narratives of the Stalin years published in the Ukraine since the late Gorbachev period until 2005. These events were pivotal to Ukrainian history in the 20th century, including the Famine of 1932?33 and Ukrainian insurgency during the war years. This latter period is particularly disputed, and analyzed with regard to the roles of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) during and after the war. Were these organizations "freedom fighters" or "collaborators"? To what extent are they the architects of the modern independent state? "This excellent book fills a longstanding void in literature on the politics of memory in Eastern Europe. Professor Marples has produced an innovative and courageous study of how postcommunist Ukraine is rewriting its Stalinist and wartime past by gradually but inconsistently substituting Soviet models with nationalist interpretations. Grounded in an attentive reading of Ukrainian scholarship and journalism from the last two decades, this book offers a balanced take on such sensitive issues as the Great Famine of 1932-33 and the role of the Ukrainian nationalist insurgents during World War II. Instead of taking sides in the passionate debates on these subjects, Marples analyzes the debates themselves as discursive sites where a new national history is being forged. Clearly written and well argued, this study will make a major impact both within and beyond academia." - Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria

The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv
The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv

Author: Tarik Cyril Amar

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1501700847

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The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv reveals the local and transnational forces behind the twentieth-century transformation of Lviv into a Soviet and Ukrainian urban center. Lviv's twentieth-century history was marked by violence, population changes, and fundamental transformation ethnically, linguistically, and in terms of its residents' self-perception. Against this background, Tarik Cyril Amar explains a striking paradox: Soviet rule, which came to Lviv in ruthless Stalinist shape and lasted for half a century, left behind the most Ukrainian version of the city in history. In reconstructing this dramatically profound change, Amar illuminates the historical background in present-day identities and tensions within Ukraine.