Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists takes over the task of controlling Ukrainian political thought, the education and training of the leading cadres, and the upbringing of the whole nation.”[811]
“Struggle and Activities” also emphasized the “upbringing and organization of the entire student, worker, and peasant youth.”[812] Although the authors occasionally mentioned non-military organizations, the establishment of military and paramilitary formations was to have the highest priority in the OUN-B state.[813] The OUN-B wanted to recruit its new members and the future citizens of the state with the help of the youth organization Iunatstvo, which would take care of every child from the age of six. At that age, children would join the Virliata; at the age of ten the Stepovi Orly; at fourteen Plastuny; at eighteen Zaporozhtsi. At the age of twenty-one, after fifteen years of nationalist brainwashing and paramilitary training, they would be ready to join the OUN. For those young Ukrainians who decided not to join the OUN, it had other paramilitary, sport, and cultural organizations, all controlled by the OUN.[814] This system would allow the OUN to reproduce itself during future generations. The OUN would thereby control the Ukrainian state, not only during the lifetime of their revolutionary leaders but as long as it educated and disciplined Ukrainian youth and recruited its future cadres. This political situation would ideally endure for the unlimited future, especially if the OUN reached the point at which every citizen of the Ukrainian state would be a member. The boundary between Ukrainian society and the OUN would blur and society would consist only of “FIGHTERS AND FANATICS.”[815]
In the Ukrainian state controlled by the OUN-B, one of the main tasks of the court system would be to punish “not only enemies, traitors of the nation, but also all thieves of government property, speculators etc., with death.”[816] Generally, however, leaders of the OUN-B did not want to replace the Soviet justice system with a more democratic one. It was easier and more effective for them to replace the term “class” with “nation” and retain the Soviet system:
Because the existing [Soviet] law was written from the perspective of class struggle, of destroying the class enemy and exterminating Ukrainians as a nation, it may be possible to replace the terms and to use all these [methods], all these shootings and the Cheka against the enemies for everything that harms Ukraine.[817]
The OUN-B further planned to restore the Church and to use it in building the state. Freedom of speech would be “permitted as long as it corresponds with the good of the state,” which would mean that it did not hurt the good name of the OUN. In particular, the “newspapers ... radio, theatre, films etc. ... can be only nationalistic. ... All popular publications in which nationalistic ideas and slogans are not popularized have to be forbidden.” In the schools the “teaching should be only about liberation, revolution, the history of Ukraine ... the true Ukraine, Her Heroes, the dignity of the man, the OUN.”[818]
In addition to preparing the revolution on paper and developing plans for the future Ukrainian state, the OUN-B also made a range of preparations with the Abwehr in the General Government, and in Soviet western Ukraine where it controlled the nationalist underground. In the General Government, the OUN-B collaborated with such Abwehr officers as Wilhelm Canaris,[819] Theodor Oberländer,[820] Hans Koch,[821] and Alfred Bisanz.[822] The Abwehr provided the OUN-B with resources to train and arm its members in the General Government and in the underground in Ukraine. The Germans expected the latter to attack the Soviet army from the rear, after the beginning of Barbarossa.[823] Further, the military collaboration resulted in, among other things, the formation of the Abwehr battalions, Nachtigall with 350 soldiers, and Roland with 330. Both were made up of Ukrainian soldiers, led by German and Ukrainian officers. The Ukrainians called the battalions Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (Druzhyny Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv).[824] The OUN-B also provided an espionage service for the Abwehr, using its organizational structure in western Ukraine and working as soldiers, spies, and translators in the Abwehr.[825] The OUN-B was associated with the Security Police School in Zakopane, at which Ukrainian policemen and the Security Service, or SB (Sluzhba Bezpeky) of the OUN-B, were trained. The OUN-B was also associated with other police academies in Cracow, Chełm, and Rabka, at which Ukrainian police forces were recruited.[826]
Those OUN-B-members who did not join the Nachtigall and Roland battalions received military training for three or four months at the Ievhen Konovalets’ military school in Cracow and were engaged in the task forces (pokhidni hrupy).[827] These units most likely included 800 OUN-B members.[828] The task forces consisted of small groups, whose role was to follow the German army and, together with OUN members from the underground, to organize the administration in the liberated territories and to familiarize the local communities with OUN-B-propaganda. Month-long military courses were also organized by the Abwehr in the General Government for OUN members who came from eastern Galicia and Volhynia, which had been absorbed into Soviet Ukraine. After a course they would return to Ukraine and remained there in the underground. Because the OUN members from Soviet Ukraine tried to cross the German-Soviet border in large and armed groups, many of them were detected and killed by the Soviet border guards. Soviet documents speak about the detection of thirty-eight groups, a total of 486 people.[829]
The underground OUN-B forces in Ukraine were more numerous than in the General Government. According to Ivan Klymiv’s estimate, prepared for OUN-B leaders close to the start of the revolution, these forces numbered about 20,000 members in 3,300 locations.[830] Of these members, 5,000 were in Volhynia, 13,000 in eastern Galicia, and 1,200 in Lviv.[831] In addition, the OUN-B youth group Iunatstvo counted 7,000 members in the underground in April 1941, and an unknown group of sympathizers.[832]
The OUN had an average of six members in each locality, and substantially more in Lviv than in any other city. All in all, this was enough to mobilize the population for the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” to seize power in many of the western Ukrainian localities, and to motivate the population to ethnic and political violence. In eastern Ukraine the structure of the OUN-B ranged from weak to non-existent. In early May 1941, Bandera’s courier brought Klymiv ten copies of “Struggle and Activities.” This document provided Klymiv and other leading OUN-B members in eastern Galicia and Volhynia with a set of detailed and comprehensive directives for the coming uprising.[833] Klymiv finished nominating candidates for the regional revolutionary administrations (Oblasni Ukraїns’ki Natsional’ni Revoliutsiini Provody) and the district revolutionary administrations (Raionni Ukraїns’ki Natsional’ni Revoliutsiini Provody) as early as 20 March 1941.[834] On 7 June 1941, Bandera’s courier informed Klymiv exactly when the German invasion of the USSR would begin.[835]
Shortly before OUN-B member Bohdan Kazanivs’kyi left for Ukraine, he met with Bandera in the General Government. Kazanivs’kyi noticed that his superior possessed the aura of the Ukrainian Providnyk, and that he was a living propaganda weapon:
There was no solace in his [Bandera’s] words and no promises of a comfortable life in the underground. ... Although the outlook was not rosy, the order of the Leader [Providnyk] was holy for us, and we were prepared to walk into a fire for the great idea of liberating Ukraine. The words of the Leader [Providnyk]: “I believe you will not disappoint my expectations toward you!” were for us a sign and enabled us later to hold out a lot.[836]
Kazanivs’kyi remembered that he was never before in his life as impressed by someone as he was in that moment by the Providnyk. Another OUN-B member Luka Pavlyshyn noticed at about the same time that even the high-ranking OUN-B member Riko Iaryi addressed Bandera as “Vozhd’” and did not dare to sit next to him while talking to him. According to Pavlyshyn, Iaryi once said to Bandera:
We need to create a strong and disciplined national organization that would “keep Ukraine in its hands.” ... Ukrainians are inherently anarchists, prone to Cossack freedom [vol’nytsia], and with such people you cannot build an independent nation. We need an “authoritarian leader [avtorytarnyi vozhd’]” and self-sacrificing “executors of the leader’s will.”[837]
Bandera was pleased with the idea that the German attack on the Soviet Union might allow the OUN-B to create a Ukrainian state and thus enable him to become its leader. In conversation with other OUN-B members at that time, he expressed the idea that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”[838]
During the period when the OUN-B was preparing for the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” western Ukraine was exposed for twenty-one months to Sovietization on all cultural, political, and social levels. The Soviet power legitimized its occupation with the idea that western Ukraine had been liberated from Polish occupation. The Soviet authorities established a congress of the people and, with the help of fake elections held on 22 October 1939, unified western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR.[839] Soviet politicians thereby achieved what the Ukrainian nationalists called sobornist’ (unification) and had failed to achieve from the very beginning of their existence. The Soviet authorities replaced numerous Polish and Catholic emblems in schools and offices, such as the portraits of Piłsudski, and crucifixes, with portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Ukrainian nationalists hated the new portraits no less than the previous ones.[840]
Soviet politics were class oriented but class was interlinked with ethnicity. The Sovietization of western Ukraine was accompanied by Ukrainization. After September 1939, Ukrainian became the official language at Lviv University. The number of Ukrainian and Jewish students and Ukrainian professors increased and the number of Polish students and professors declined. Newcomers from Soviet Ukraine, local Ukrainians and Jews, and Jews who had fled from German-occupied territory replaced Poles in administration and other profitable positions. In 1940, the Lviv city soviet counted 476 members, including 252 Ukrainians, 121 Poles, seventy-six Jews, and twenty-seven members of other nationalities.[841]
Sovietization relied on terror and repression, directed against various social, political, economic, and ethnic groups, such as the former Polish political elite, Polish military settlers, Jewish refugees from Polish territories occupied by the Germans, Jewish Bundists and Zionists, and Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.[842] As a result of three major deportations into the interior of the USSR in 1940, and one in 1941, between 309,000 and 327,000 people were deported in freight cars from the eastern parts of the previous territory of the Second Republic. Of those, at least 140,000 were deported from eastern Galicia, including 95,000 permanent inhabitants of eastern Galicia (80 percent Poles, 10 to 15 percent Ukrainians, and 5 to 10 percent Jews), and 45,000 Jewish refugees from central or western Poland. In addition, the Soviet authorities arrested between 45,000 and 50,000 people in eastern Galicia.[843] After arrest, many of them were tortured during their investigation, sometimes until they lost consciousness.[844] Eastern Ukrainians, on the other hand, had experienced the harshness of the Soviet policies already before. In 1932‒1933 they suffered under the artificial famine, and in 1937‒1938 many were killed during the Great Terror.[845]
After the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the NKVD carried out further mass arrests of political opponents in western Ukraine. Because the German army was moving fast, the Soviet authorities could not evacuate these prisoners and decided to kill them. According to Soviet documents, 8,789 prisoners were executed in the Ukrainian SSR,[846] 2,800 of these in Lviv.[847] The order to execute them was issued by Lavrentii Beriia, the chief of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, NKVD).[848] On the morning of 24 June 1941, the NKVD chief in Lviv received it in the form of a radio telegram from Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.[849]
The Ukrainian nationalists, in particular the OUN, were an important enemy of the Soviet Union. In western Ukraine, the policies of the Soviet authorities forced the Ukrainian nationalists to become an underground movement. Between October 1939 and December 1940 alone, the Soviet authorities arrested 4,435 nationalists, killed 352 of them, and confiscated hundreds of rifles, which had belonged to the nationalists. In order to frighten the Ukrainian population and to discourage it from supporting the OUN, the Soviet authorities organized trials of OUN members. In the first trial, which was held in November 1940, ten of the eleven OUN members who were tried, among them leaders from the homeland executive, were sentenced to death and executed. In January 1941 in Lviv, forty-two nationalists, out of fifty-nine on trial, were sentenced to death. Among them were eleven women. Of the forty-two sentenced to death, twenty were actually executed. The remainder were sent to Gulag. Among those sent to the Gulag was Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi, who would play a very significant role in 1943 in preparing and conducting the ethnic cleansing against Poles in Volhynia. In Drohobych, sixty-two people were brought to trial, of whom twenty were executed. On another occasion in Drohobych, thirty-nine people were brought to trial.[850]
The Soviet terror also affected the Bandera family. On 23 March 1941, the Soviet police arrested Stepan’s father Andrii and his daughters Marta and Oksana, either simply because they were related to Stepan Bandera or because OUN member Stefanyshyn, who was wanted by the Soviet authorities, was hiding in the house. The Soviet regime had detailed information about Bandera’s father from the NKVD agent “Ukrainets,” who spied on the OUN-B in the General Government. Andrii Bandera was placed in a prison in Stanislaviv for five days and then transported to a prison in Kiev, where a military tribunal sentenced him to death on 8 July 1941. He was shot two days later. Marta and Oksana were deported to Siberia.[851]
In the final weeks before the German attack on the Soviet Union, there was no consensus amongst Ukrainian politicians in the General Government concerning the possible creation of a Ukrainian state. Hitler and other leading German politicians did not permit the OUN-B or any other Ukrainian group to establish a state in the territories which would be released from the Soviet occupation. The Abwehr might have discussed such political issues with the OUN-B or the OUN-M but it was not empowered to allow such plans. In a document concerning the activities of the Ukrainian politicians from 21 June 1941, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police) noticed that the Ukrainian emigrants in the General Government tried to unite themselves and to establish a council which could become the basis for a future Ukrainian government. Ukrainian emigrants were, however, according to the Germans, divided into at least two camps: one around Volodymyr Kubiiovych, the head of the UTsK, who leaned toward the views of Mel’nyk and the OUN-M, and one surrounding Bandera. The Germans considered Kubiiovych to be more loyal to them and thus more appropriate for a Ukrainian leader, but Kubiiovych considered Mel’nyk to be the right personality for a Ukrainian leader. Regarding Bandera, they did not know if he would accept German superiority. In order to avoid political complications in the territories that they would occupy after 22 June 1941, the Gestapo took measures to prevent the departure of the leading Ukrainian politicians from the General Government to the “newly occupied territories” and forbade some of them including Bandera to go there.[852]
The “Ukrainian National Revolution”
The “Ukrainian National Revolution” began simultaneously with Operation Barbarossa, in the early hours of 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany—supported by troops from Finland, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia—attacked the Soviet Union. About 800 OUN-B activists in four task forces, which were divided into groups of five to twelve members, followed the German army eastward through the Ukrainian territories. Bandera did not go to Ukraine but stayed in the General Government, close to the border of the “newly occupied territories,” and, with the help of couriers, coordinated the activities of the task forces.[853] The alleged 20,000 OUN-B activists who had remained underground in western Ukraine began to seize power, together with the activists from the task forces, just as “Struggle and Activities” had instructed them. Klymiv, who called himself the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army, also acted according to the directives elaborated by Bandera, Lenkavs’kyi, Shukhevych, and Stets’ko in “Struggle and Activities.” One of the orders issued by Klymiv, shortly before or after the German attack on the Soviet Union said, “I am introducing mass (family and national) responsibility for all offences against the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian Army, and the OUN.” Given the OUN-B understanding of “offences against the Ukrainian State” at that time, this and similar orders must be interpreted as direct incitements to ethnic and political violence, which, during the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” took mainly the shape of anti-Jewish pogroms.[854]
After 22 June 1941, the OUN-B activists sporadically harassed the withdrawing Soviet forces, shooting at them from ambush, for example in Lviv on 25 June.[855] More frequently however, they waited until the Soviet soldiers had left, and they then took control. They organized meetings, at which they familiarized the local population with their aims and proclaimed statehood, reading the proclamation and making the assembled population swear an oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian state and the Providnyk, Stepan Bandera.[856] They carried with them portraits of Stepan Bandera and distributed them among Ukrainians during the propaganda meetings.[857]
While organizing the administration of the state, the OUN-B activists also organized units of the Ukrainian National Militia, which were to protect the established administrative organs and to kill the “undesirable Polish, Muscovite [Russian or Soviet], and Jewish activists” who were on the blacklists compiled before the outbreak of the “revolution.”[858] Like Operation Barbarossa, the “Ukrainian National Revolution” soon became an event of mass violence, in particular anti-Jewish violence. To incite the population to engage in pogroms, German soldiers and OUN-B activists used the bodies of prisoners killed by the NKVD units and left in the prison cells or buried in mass graves next to the prison buildings. The local Jews were held responsible for the NKVD massacres. The organization of the state and the pogroms overlapped. On the way to Lviv in a task force on 25 June 1941, Iaroslav Stets’ko, strongly antisemitic at the time of the revolution, wrote to Stepan Bandera from the village of Mlyny: “We are setting up a militia that will help to remove the Jews and protect the population,” and continued “Father Lev Sohor has already organized a militia and has a written mandate from the OUN for this, and the village has accepted this. So have them [the Jews] come here to meet the militia, and it will eliminate those Jews and so forth.”[859]
Stets’ko’s message to Bandera confirms that the OUN-B was acting according to “Struggle and Activities” and suggests that the militia would be used to incite and conduct anti-Jewish violence. On 17 June 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, Director of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), gave instructions concerning the encouragement of “self-cleansing actions [Selbstreinigungsaktionen]” to dozens of SS and police personnel. On 29 June, he sent his instructions to the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, who were to use Vorkommandos (advance units) to effect the “self-cleansing actions.”[860] Günther Hermann, a commander of Sonderkommando IV, received, according to Erwin Schulz, the leader of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C, an order from Otto Rasch, the commander of the Einsatzgruppe C, to support the Ukrainian militia.[861] Even if these measures were not coordinated with the OUN both groups shared similar intentions toward the Jews and developed similar plans concerning their annihilation.
Pogroms, Proclamations, and National Celebrations in Lviv
For the OUN-B, the first and most important step was the proclamation of statehood. The leadership decided not to wait until the German troops reached the Ukrainian capital Kiev, but to proclaim the state in Lviv, the largest city of western Ukraine. The OUN-B might have decided to proclaim the state in Lviv because it wanted to pre-empt the OUN-M, which anticipated a similar plan, or because it wanted to see how the Germans would react, or because Lviv was more familiar to the OUN-B than Kiev and eastern Ukraine in general. The proclamation in Lviv was not as impressive as it would have been in Kiev but was significant enough to be taken seriously by the Germans and by the western Ukrainian population.[862]
In deciding to proclaim the state after seizure of the territory by German troops, the OUN-B followed the examples of the Hlinka Party in Slovakia, and their clerical fascist leader Father Jozef Tiso, and the Croatian Ustaša. The HSLS had proclaimed a Slovak state on 14 March 1939, after Nazi Germany had dismantled Czechoslovakia. The Ustaša had proclaimed theirs on 10 April 1941, four days after the Wehrmacht entered Yugoslavia. Both states were recognized by Germany and other Axis powers. They were not independent states, as the Hlinka Party and Ustaša claimed, but satellite states of Germany. In both states, other political parties were banned, and Jews and other groups, such as Gypsies, were denied rights. Like the OUN-B, both the Hlinka Party and the Ustaša were devoted to the notion of “ethnic” purity, which they wanted to introduce in the multi-ethnic territories that they claimed as theirs. Just as the OUN-B regarded Poles and Russians as the occupiers of Ukraine, so the Hlinka Party regarded the Czechs as the occupiers of Slovakia, and the Ustaša regarded the Serbs as the occupiers of Croatia. All three movements regarded the Germans as liberators and allies. The Slovak example inspired the Ustaša, just as both of them inspired the OUN-B. They caused the OUN-B to believe and hope that Germany would accept the Ukrainian state proclaimed by the OUN-B, just as it had accepted the Slovak and Croatian states. The OUN-B leadership was aware that Ukraine was different from Slovakia and Croatia, but they believed that Ukraine was no less important for the “New Europe” than the other two new states, and that Germany would accept its independence.[863] The OUN-B member Volodymyr Stakhiv wrote in an official memorandum, which he sent on 23 July 1941 to Hitler:
Since 1938, two new states have appeared in Europe: Slovakia and Croatia. Notwithstanding the difference in area and size of the population of these countries, the Ukrainian problem has a much greater significance, because to solve it, fundamental changes will be realized in the political and economic structure of the European continent, and in the raising of a problem of intercontinental significance. And the further course of German-Ukrainian relations will not only depend on the ultimate resolution of the problem, but also on the methods that will be applied at the outset.[864]
Kost’ Pan’kivs’kyi, an older Ukrainian politician, who collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War but was not a nationalist extremist, wrote that, at the time of the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” the OUN activists appeared as:
people who for years had 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 toward Berlin and Rome. ... Those whom our community regarded as German partners and potential leaders of the national life.[865]
When the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists entered Lviv on 30 June, there were 160,000 Jews in the city, 140,000 Poles, and 70,000 Ukrainians. The number of Jews in Lviv had increased significantly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, as Jewish refuges escaped from the territories of the Second Republic occupied by Germans, to those occupied by the Soviet Union.[866] Among the German units entering the city was the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion, which formed part of the 1st. Battalion of the special command regiment Brandenburg 800.[867] When they marched into Lviv, the soldiers of this battalion shouted “Slava Ukraїni!” to the local people who welcomed them enthusiastically.[868] Ukrainians in Lviv were very excited at the sight of the Ukrainians in German uniform. When the battalion marched into the market square, people not only welcomed the soldiers with flowers but also genuflected and prayed.[869] In the ecstasy of the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” Ukrainians called the Nachtigall battalion the “Stepan Bandera battalion.”[870]
Statehood was proclaimed at eight o’clock in the evening on 30 June 1941, in a meeting room in the building of the Prosvita Society. The meeting was announced as a liberation ceremony.[871] The OUN-B had wanted to deliver the proclamation in the state theater, a more imposing building, but it had already been requisitioned by the German army.[872] Stepan Bandera, the most important figure in the revolution, was not able to proclaim statehood himself. Bandera, according to Stets’ko, had been “confined” by the Germans on 29 June 1941.[873] Shortly before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa the RSHA released directives to prevent Bandera from entering the “newly occupied territories.”[874]
After the Second World War, Lebed’ stated that Bandera had stayed in Kholmshchyna, the region of Chełm (Kholm), and had coordinated the “Ukrainian National Revolution” from there.[875] Statehood was therefore proclaimed by Bandera’s representative, Iaroslav Stets’ko, who tried to represent both the national will and German interests. During the meeting in the Prosvita hall, after saluting the absent Bandera, Stets’ko read the formal statement:
In accordance with the will of the Ukrainian people, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera declares the reestablishment of the Ukrainian State, for which entire generations of the best sons of Ukraine have sacrificed themselves.[876]
The declaration further stated that the independent Ukrainian authority would guarantee order to the Ukrainian people, that the Ukrainian state coming into being in western Ukraine would later be subordinated to the authority in Kiev, and that the Ukrainian state would closely cooperate with the “National Socialist Great Germany, which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world, and is helping the Ukrainian nation liberate itself from Muscovite occupation.”[877]
The text of the OUN-B proclamation resembled the one used by the Ustaša on 10 April 1941. Like the OUN-B state, the Ustaša state was proclaimed by the deputy-leader, the Doglavnik Slavko Kvaternik, and not by the Poglavnik Pavelić in person. Kvaternik, however, had not gone as far as Stets’ko and had not introduced Hitler into the proclamation text. He referred only to “the will of our allies.” The Ustaša proclamation text said:
People of Croatia! The providence of God, the will of our allies, the century-old struggle of the Croatian people, our self-sacrificing Leader [Poglavnik] Ante Pavelić and the Ustaša movement, within and outside the country, has decided that we today, on the eve of the resurrection of the son of God, will also witness the resurrection of our Croatian state.[878]
According to the minutes of the meeting on 30 June 1941 in the Prosvita hall, after the reading of the declaration by Stets’ko, people in the hall broke into applause several times. The Greek Catholic Church was represented at the gathering by Iosyf Slipyi. Another clergyman, Dr. Ivan Hryn’okh in Abwehr uniform, represented the Nachtigall battalion. The gathering finished with salutes addressed to Stepan Bandera, Adolf Hitler, and Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, and with the singing of the national anthem “Ukraine has not yet perished” (Shche ne vmerla Ukraїna).[879]
Two German officers, Hans Koch and Wilhelm Ernst zu Eikern, also came to the meeting, although they arrived late. Koch said that he welcomed the meeting, but only for celebrating the liberation from the Bolsheviks, not for proclaiming statehood. The officers reminded those assembled that the war was not over, and that this was not an appropriate time to proclaim statehood. They also stated that the only person who could decide whether a Ukrainian state would come into existence was Adolf Hitler.[880] After the proclamation ceremony and also at 11.00 a.m. the next morning, OUN-B activists made use of a radio station which, after the retreat of the Soviet troops, was occupied by the Nachtigall battalion and renamed the “Ievhen Konovalets’ Station.”[881] They broadcasted, both in Ukrainian and German, about the proclamation ceremony and the existence of the Ukrainian state. A soldier spoke emotionally about his arrival in Lviv and about the fraternal relations between the German and Ukrainian sides, especially their leaders. He also sang German and Ukrainian songs and informed listeners of the existence of the “Ukrainian Wehrmacht.”[882] The OUN-B also familiarized radio listeners with a pastoral letter written by the head of the Greek Catholic Church, Sheptyts’kyi, who announced that Stets’ko’s government and the Ukrainian state had come into being by the will of God, and that “we welcome the German army as an army which liberated us from the enemy.” In the same letter to the “Ukrainian nation” Sheptyts’kyi also suggested that he supported the OUN-B’s plans for statehood, but not ethnic violence: “We expect from the government established by him [Stets’ko] wise, just leadership, and measures that would take into consideration the needs and welfare of all citizens who inhabit our land, without regard to what faith, nationality, and social stratum they belong.”[883] One of the OUN-B radio speakers on 1 July 1941 was Hryn’okh. On 30 June, he had visited Sheptyts’kyi together with Stets’ko and had obtained the Metropolitan’s “consent and blessing” for the declaration of the state.[884]
On 1 July 1941, while Hryn’okh and other soldiers from the “Stepan Bandera battalion” were singing German and Ukrainian military and revolutionary songs on the radio, a pogrom took place in the city. Germans and the Ukrainian militia, established and controlled by the OUN-B, were killing Jews en masse and inciting the local population to do the same.[885] The militia in Lviv had been formed on 30 June 1941 in the courtyard of the Metropolitan’s palace on St. George’s Hill, by Ivan Ravlyk, who came to Lviv together with Stets’ko in the second task force, and by local OUN-B members.[886] During the first days, Bohdan Kazanivs’kyi and Omelian Matla played an important role in the militia.[887] Both of them had been imprisoned and tortured by the NKVD.[888] In his post-war memoirs, Kazanivs’kyi wrote that while under torture by the NKVD he thought about Bandera who, “chained to the wall in a dark cell [of a Polish prison] for a year, without sleep, did not surrender.”[889] Shukhevych, the Ukrainian commander of the Nachtigall battalion, was also involved in appointing the militia leadership. In the morning of 30 June, he went with his division of the Nachtigall battalion to the Saint George Cathedral where he, together with Kazanivs’kyi, inspired those present to “revolutionary deeds” while informing them publicly that the OUN-B will proclaim the Ukrainian state.[890] After 2 July, the militia in Lviv was, according to Hans Joachim Beyer, a high official of the SD and an adviser to the Einsatzgruppe C, subordinated to the SS and was thereafter known as the Ukrainian police.[891] Stets’ko, however, still regarded the police as the militia of the Ukrainian government.[892] The first head of the militia was the OUN-B member Ievhen Vrets’ona, replaced some weeks later by Volodymyr Pitulei.[893]
In accordance with “Struggle and Activities,” the militiamen were to wear either a yellow-and-blue armlet, or a white armlet with the inscription “National Militia.” However, a number of the militiamen were acting clandestinely and therefore did not wear them.[894] The historian Jeffrey Burds, who compared photographs of the pogrom with the photographs in the identification cards of the Ukrainian militiamen, noticed that some of the pogromists could be identified (Figs. 13–16). Because of their armlets, others were recognized as militiamen by many victims, survivors, and bystanders, not only in Lviv but also in other cities, towns, and villages where pogroms occurred.[895] Some Ukrainian militiamen in Lviv put on olive-green
Fig. 13. Ukrainian militiamen with one of their victims during the Lviv pogrom. Wiener Library.
Fig. 14. Ukrainian militiamen with one of their victims during the Lviv pogrom. Wiener Library.
Fig. 15. A militia ID of a militiaman on figure 13. DALO, f. R12, op. 1, spr. 130, 1.
Courtesy of David Alan Rich.
Fig. 16. A militia ID of a militiaman on figure 14 and 13. DALO, f. R12, op. 1, spr. 130, 6.
Courtesy of David Alan Rich.
uniforms, which had previously been used by the Soviet militia. They removed the Soviet emblems from these uniforms and wore them with the yellow-and-blue armlets and mazepynka caps.[896] The OUN-B tried to eliminate elements from the militia that were not loyal to the organization.[897] During their recruitment, the militiamen received ethical training, which included swearing an oath to Stepan Bandera and independent Ukraine.[898]