Ukrainian Police, Nationalism, and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 13 (2017), pages: 57-79
Publication date: 2017-12-03
Abstract
The Ukrainian police actively participated in the extermination of Ukrainian Jews. While in central and eastern Ukraine a signi????icant percentage of the Jewish population managed to survive the occupation, in its western territories (Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) more than 90 percent of the Jews were murdered. One important difference between western Ukraine on the one hand and central and eastern Ukraine on the other was nationalism. Western Ukraine was the home of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists which in the 1930s and early 1940s transformed into the main Ukrainian fascist movement and in 1943 formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Even though the Germans prevented the OUN from establishing a fascist state modelled on the Independent State of Croatia and arrested its commanders, the OUN sent its members to serve in the police which helped a small number of German functionaries with the ghettoization, appropriation of Jewish property, and extermination of the Jews. The extermination of the Jews was one of the main political goals of the OUN which used the German-controlled police to achieve it.
Keywords
Ukrainian police, Holocaust, Western Ukraine, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), World War II, collaboration, Ukrainian nationalism;
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