The importance of leaving this work to professionally trained historians is brought home by Lozynskyj’s confusion of the person of Mykhailo Kolodzinsky with the UPA division named after him, which was part of Army North.
The book of reports from that unit includes explicit accounts of the murder of Jewish survivors in the forests.
There is not room to respond to all the points in Lozynsky’s syllabus errorum, so I will just limit myself to the evidence about the Lviv pogrom of 1941.
Although in April 1941 the Bandera faction of OUN had repudiated pogroms, it was obliged to revise its stand when Reinhard Heydrich explicitly called for such “self-cleansing actions” on June 17.
At that time, OUN was coordinating its military activities with the Germans. On June 25, Yaroslav Stetsko wrote to Stepan Bandera that OUN had “formed a militia to remove the Jews” (usuvaty zhydiv). A week later, on July 1, the pogrom took place.
The head of the OUN underground, Ivan Klymiv, issued leaflets that were affixed to walls in Lviv on July 1. One of them said that revolutionary tribunals would punish enemies of the Ukrainian movement, applying “family and national responsibility for crimes against the Ukrainian State and Ukrainian Army.” Another said: “Nation! Know! Moscow, Poland, Hungarians, Jews are your enemies. Destroy them.”
At this time, OUN was setting up its own Ukrainian state, heralded as a ”Ukraine for Ukrainians.”
The head of the OUN underground, Ivan Klymiv, issued leaflets that were affixed to walls in Lviv on July 1. One of them said that revolutionary tribunals would punish enemies of the Ukrainian movement, applying “family and national responsibility for crimes against the Ukrainian State and Ukrainian Army.” Another said: “Nation! Know! Moscow, Poland, Hungarians, Jews are your enemies. Destroy them.”
Eyewitness testimony identifying the OUN militia as arresting Jews for pogrom activities includes Jewish survivor accounts recorded by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland right after the war as well as videotaped interviews collected all over the world by the Shoah Foundation in 1994-2002.
In addition to testimony in these two large collections, other Jewish memoirs and testimonies, written or recorded in different times, places, and circumstances, confirm that Ukrainian militiamen were playing the leading role in the Lviv pogrom. There are also Polish witnesses to the active participation of the Ukrainian militia.
Films and photographs document Ukrainian militiamen on the scene of and taking part in the pogrom. A film of the exhumation of NKVD victims at Brygidki prison shows a Ukrainian militiaman, identifiable by his armband, beating one of the Jews pressed into the “prison action.” A film screened at the Nuremberg trial shows a militiaman in uniform holding a half-clad woman by the hair and beating her with her baton. The film, focussing on the events at Zamarstyniv St. prison, has largely deteriorated over the intervening decades, but stills were salvaged. Another photo shows a uniformed militiaman with his armband on his left upper arm taking part in the arrest of Jews on a Lviv street.
In the days following the pogrom, the Germans organized large-scale executions of Jews in which thousands were shot. Again, testimonies of those who were lucky enough to survive this action identified “Ukrainians” and sometimes specifically Ukrainian militiamen as the ones who rounded them up. Moreover, German documentation shows that the Ukrainian militia in Lviv was subordinated to the SS on 2 July when the executions began.
In addition to these documentary proofs, there are many arguments that can be made contextually. For example, the Germans always worked through local organizations in planning “spontaneous” anti-Jewish violence. This we know from Tomasz Szarota’s comparative study of pogroms and other antisemitic excesses in Warsaw, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Kaunas. If not OUN, who was the Germans’ partner in the Lviv pogrom? We have German documentation that the OUN militia was the organizer of the pogrom in nearby Zolochiv.
In short, OUN’s role in the anti-Jewish pogrom that took place in Lviv on July 1, 1941, cannot be questioned by an objective and competent scholar, but I am quite sure that Lozynskyj will stick to his own view of this matter.
John-Paul Himka is the author of “Ukrainians, Jews and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories” (Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2009).
