Anatomy of a Genocide

by Omer Bartov

  Polish hegemony was also maintained in the Buczacz district through employment and educational discrimination of the kind identified in the British parliamentary report on Eastern Galicia. For instance, in 1931 the entire district had only three Ukrainian judicial employees out of a total of thirty-eight (including one Jewish judge) and only one Ukrainian railway employee out of twenty-two. (There were no Jewish railway employees.) Where national minorities had to be employed, such as in schools, their political affiliations and activities were closely scrutinized. Most important, perhaps, teaching in Ukrainian was increasingly restricted. Since the primary language in bilingual schools was Polish, and the number of public Ukrainian schools had greatly diminished, the only way to preserve Ukrainian-language instruction was in private schools, supported by the Native School Society (Ridna Shkola); remarkably, by 1938 an extraordinary 40 percent of Ukrainian students were studying in such private secondary schools and colleges.44

  Transforming Ukrainian schools into bilingual ones depended on plebiscites, in which parents declared their children’s national-linguistic affiliation. But this process was open to government manipulation. In 1933 one such plebiscite was held in the Buczacz district, collecting 4,500 declarations of Ukrainian-language use from sixty-seven communes. Displeased with this outcome, the authorities pronounced almost half of the declarations invalid, leading the prefect to conclude that the plebiscite would not “affect Ruthenian society in any significant manner.” Indeed he considered the entire undertaking “somewhat harmful, because this periodic raising of the Ruthenian population’s awareness of the need for Ruthenian language instruction in the schools arouses some antagonism between the Polish and Ruthenian populations and makes it impossible for these two nations to coexist in harmony.”45

  Another way of overcoming demographic realities involved culture and biology. A Polish study published in 1931 argued that since a third of male and a quarter of female Roman Catholics married Greek Catholics in the Tarnopol province, the competition over national predominance was transformed into “conflicts within the family.” Here, then, “victories depend on which party in mixed marriages more often transfers his or her nationality to their offspring.” Unsurprisingly the study asserted that in this sphere too “Poland is the more victorious party.” Polish self-deception about the progress of integrating Ruthenians appeared immune to factual evidence; even after the outbreak of war the exiled Polish Ministry of the Interior asserted that “the coexistence of Poles, Ruthenians, and Ukrainians had improved from year to year” during the 1930s. This was, pronounced the ministry, because “from the side of the government everything had been done to guarantee for the minorities, in accordance with the constitution, protection of life, freedom, and rights over property, equality before the law and access to public offices, the cultivation of language and of national minorities, the establishment of charitable, religious, and social associations, and schools with the right to use their own language.” No wonder that “almost 50 percent of all marriages were mixed,” that “there were no particularly hostile attitudes,” and that “the two Catholic confessions regularly collaborated during the holidays.”

  This fantasy of interethnic harmony was not extended to the Jews, who were acerbically depicted as not feeling “tied to national and state matters, irrespective of which nationality they coexisted with in any given region.” Instead Jews’ “political action was determined by their egoistical striving to plunder the regions they inhabited and to exploit the labor performed in all those areas that promised the greatest material gain.” Many others turned to subversion, as shown by the fact that “the Communist Party of Western Ukraine was made up mostly not of Ukrainians but of Jews,” who sought “to fight against Jewish capitalists, and thereby cause harm to the Polish State.” Hence, while in the case of Ukrainian-Polish relations there were purportedly “no problems that separated these two social groups from each other,” the “coexistence of Poles as well as Ukrainians with the Jews was never distinguished by honesty and warmth, since the practice of merciless exploitation by the Jews had made it impossible to establish open relationships.”46

  Wartime rhetoric about past Polish-Ukrainian harmony notwithstanding, ethnic Poles retained firm control over Buczacz and other such cities throughout the interwar period. In 1936, for instance, the eleven thousand inhabitants of Buczacz, the majority of whom were Jews, were governed exclusively by Roman Catholic Poles. Jews held only subordinate positions, although many of the city’s attorneys and physicians were Jewish. As for Ukrainians, there appears to have been little effort to appoint them to official posts and likely much to dissuade them; they were also far less well represented in white-collar occupations than either Jews or Poles.47

  Assertions of religious harmony between Roman and Greek Catholics were similarly often and increasingly belied by events on the ground. In 1933, for instance, the Greek Catholic priest of the village of Medwedowce (Ukrainian: Medvedivtsi) allegedly incited three young Ukrainian women to paint the statue of St. Joseph in the center of the village with the yellow and blue Ukrainian colors, unleashing “great anger” among the Polish residents. Prefect Adam Fedorowicz urged his superiors to remove the priest from the village, warning that his presence might “incite serious feuds between the Polish and Ruthenian populations that may be detrimental to the interests of the state.” In the village of Porchowa (Ukrainian: Porokhova) the Greek Catholic priest “condemned mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages and threatened not to bless such marital unions.” Going one step further, a priest in Nowostawce (Ukrainian: Novostavtsi) “condemned all signs of Ukrainian fraternization with Poles.”48

  These were all troubling signs that religion and nationalism were being fused together to produce an ideological and psychological climate ripe for widespread violence once the constraints on social order were removed or altered. By 1934 no Ukrainian organizations in the Buczacz district agreed to celebrate Polish Constitution Day, and many Greek Catholic priests even “neglected to say prayers for the state’s success,” while their congregations “went to the fields in the morning in order to avoid participation in the festivities.” Members of “the Ukrainian intelligentsia and Greek Catholic clergy who had the courage” to organize interethnic events were said to “face the disdain of the general public, which condemns them and treats them as traitors to the nation.” Even innocent socializing was sanctioned. In one instance, a Greek Catholic priest ejected two young women, a Ukrainian and a Pole, from a Prosvita-sponsored dance merely because they had spoken Polish with each other. As one parish priest near Jazłowiec put it, referring to the 1935 “normalization” accord between the UNDO and the government, “The Polish-Ukrainian agreement may exist in Warsaw, [but] there never was and never will be any agreement in the districts.”49

  Following the death of Piłsudski in 1935 and the disappearance of the last remnants of Polish democracy, and faced with an escalating international crisis over Nazi Germany’s growing territorial demands, all political factions in the country were undergoing a process of progressive radicalization. By the late 1930s a “wave of extreme nationalism” permeated “a considerable part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia,” which made up the bulk of “the UNDO party’s local organizational cells,” and began “washing over” all other “institutions influenced by the UNDO.” This made for “numerous scuffles between the youth united in these institutions and Polish youth” and illustrated that the “idea of peaceful Polish-Ukrainian coexistence” was “sinking under the nationalist currents”; simultaneously, political radicalization led to “increasing anti-Jewish feelings in both Polish and Ukrainian society,” as noted by officials in Tarnopol.50 On one issue everyone seemed to agree, namely, that the Gordian knot of internal interethnic conflict and looming international war could be cut only with the sword.

  In Polish political circles anti-Jewish feelings were running high in the last few years before the war. The replacement of the defunct Government Party with a new Camp of N
ational Unity in 1937, intended to ward off the extreme nationalists, only led to a further tilt to the right of the entire political establishment. Officially opposed to anti-Jewish violence, the Camp of National Unity depicted Jewish citizens as a separate national group and insisted that the “Jewish question” could be solved only by emigration. From Buczacz the local police reported that the Jews “displayed an utterly negative response” to their depiction “as second-class citizens” or “complete outlaws” and protested that they “had done whatever Polish interests demanded, especially here in the borderlands.” The police were also concerned that nationalist agitation had given rise to “some anti-Semitic feelings,” which “could at any moment turn into hooliganism.” At a rally of over two thousand supporters of the nationalist People’s Party in Buczacz in March 1937, the party’s leader demanded that Jewish “emigration to Palestine be facilitated.”51 The emerging consensus suggested that this minority should simply be removed from the country.

  Talk of violence and removal was everywhere. If Jews were increasingly viewed as an unwanted burden and nuisance, Ukrainians were increasingly uniting around the urge to liberate themselves from Polish rule. As paramilitary organizations took on a transparently militant demeanor, countless meetings, rallies, and gymnastic-cum-military displays manifested Ukrainian strength and determination. In September 1937 seven hundred male and female Luh members from twenty-one branches converged on Buczacz. Marching into town in close formation, they began the day with a mass open-air religious service, then paraded through the town and performed gymnastic and military exercises, paying no heed to the massive police presence on the streets. Sympathetic observers “left the site with the firm conviction that the education of our village lads is on the right path.” The prefect of Buczacz responded a few weeks later by banning three local Luh branches for “spreading hatred against people of Polish nationality and undermining the security and public order by assaults on the Polish population.” But the rising tide of Ukrainian nationalist and militant sentiments could not be stemmed.52

  A grim Polish assessment of Ukrainian nationalist organizations in the Tarnopol province on the eve of the war found that while 70 percent of the population still supported the UNDO, the real political influence and mobilizing capacity was in the hands of such associations as Prosvita, Luh, and Sokil, which together boasted hundreds of branches, subbranches, and reading clubs, as well as the “clandestine revolutionary-military organizations,” of which the OUN was the most important. This elaborate network constituted a comprehensive effort “to completely engage Ruthenian society in every respect and to make it independent of the influences of Polish society and the Polish state,” offering instead “a breeding ground for anti-state activities,” the “propagation of separatist education,” and “defense training for exclusively Ruthenian purposes.”53

  Watching from the sidelines, some Germans tried to make sense of the tumultuous politics across their eastern border. In summer 1938 the German ambassador to Warsaw, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, reported to the newly appointed foreign minister in Berlin, Joachim von Ribbentrop, on the termination of the “normalization” agreement. The UNDO, he explained, had demanded territorial autonomy for the Ukrainian regions of Poland and recognition of Ukrainians as a separate nation under international law. The demands were modeled on those of the Sudeten German nationalists in Czechoslovakia, who claimed to be speaking “in the name of the seventy-million strong German bloc” in the Third Reich. But, noted the ambassador, since the Ukrainians did not have an equivalent foreign “protector,” they could hardly expect their demands to be met, considering that even Polish opposition parties sided with their government on this issue. Hence Ukrainian leaders had acted “for tactical reasons,” both “in view of public opinion among the Ukrainians themselves, and in the interest of keeping the Ukrainian question alive abroad.” As German policymakers were keenly aware, Ukrainian nationalists were looking first and foremost to Hitler’s Reich for political and military support.

  With the German annexation of the Sudetenland in October, and the Hungarian takeover of southern Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus the following month, a short-lived autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine came into being, whose very existence, as Moltke reported to Berlin, gave “the national consciousness of the Ukrainians a powerful boost.” Interethnic tensions in Galicia were now running so high, he wrote, that the heavily attended religious services in Lwów, held to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of independent Ukraine, “were perceived by the Polish population as a provocation” and thus came under “planned and organized attacks by the Polish side against those attending church.” In response “the Ukrainians established their own defense organization, which, however, did not limit itself to defending Ukrainian assemblies but also went on the attack against the Poles.” Still, as a well-placed informant reported to Moltke, UNDO leaders “believe it would be impossible to resolve the Ukrainian question without foreign help” and had therefore decided to preserve their forces until “the emergence of a favorable foreign political constellation,” namely, a German invasion. Meanwhile this Ukrainian “national awakening” was being met with what Hitler’s ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union called, without a hint of irony, “violent measures of all types geared to ruthlessly repress all yearnings for freedom.”54

  In late 1938 a German News Agency representative named Brandt reported to the German Foreign Ministry on a recent visit to Lwów. The Ukrainians’ “ever more openly demonstrated irredentist sentiments,” he wrote, had “unleashed measures by the Polish authorities that the Ukrainians described as ‘Asiatic terror.’ ” These “terroristic” measures, in Brandt’s words, included wanton destruction of property and mass arrests, often involving police brutality, along with bloody confrontations on city streets. In response Ukrainian villagers began torching police stations and Polish farms and hunting down all Polish speakers. This compelled the government to call in the army, which set out on a “punitive military expedition” to “pacify the countryside.” Repressive measures included mass arbitrary arrests in the villages, in which women, children, and old people were at times chained to each other and paraded through their villages, as well as torture of prisoners by the police and abuse of women. The military also confiscated grain and livestock, and in several cases burned entire Ukrainian farms to the ground, all intended “to intimidate the Ukrainians, bludgeon the resistance movement and eradicate the irredentists.” Instead, however, the repression drove the insurgents to carry out “innumerable acts of desperation,” in which “Polish military personnel were also killed and wounded.” Altogether, Brandt estimated, hundreds of activists and insurgents were killed between October and December 1938 and thirty thousand people were arrested, although no figures were reported publicly.

  Brandt saw the OUN, “often also called the Ukrainian Fascist Secret Organization,” as the main opposition to state repression. Insisting on “unconditional obedience” and the pledge of every activist to “give his blood and treasure to it,” the OUN recruited members “from all existing Ukrainian organizations” and had “representatives all the way up to the leadership circles, not excluding the clergy.” As “a secret military organization” it was dedicated to the “physical” struggle for independence, including “the establishment of terror groups and their effective deployment.” Most important, it had taken up “the task of preparing a general insurgency movement” that “at the right moment” would “unleash the war of liberation.” Spiritually, added Brandt, the OUN was motivated by “the ideologue Dr. [Dmytro] Dontsov,” an avid student of all the dictators of that time, who identified racial purity as the distinguishing mark of master nations and envisioned an ethnically homogeneous future Ukraine. Aiming at the destruction of “the Muscovite-Jewish plague” and the “cleansing of Ukraine from the superfluous multiethnic elements,” the OUN sought to unite all Ukrainian lands in a state stretching “from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea” to the heart of Eastern Europ
e.

  OUN members and agents of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Buczacz district. Source: PA.

  As Brandt saw it, the OUN’s idea of freedom—clearly borrowed from the Nazi worldview—had to do with racial rather than political liberation. It was the task of the organization’s youthful activists to disseminate this idea “from village to village, house to house,” and “to always be prepared for the war of defense, to persevere despite the bloody punitive expeditions, and to hold fast to their hatred of the Poles.” In this, Brandt believed, the OUN had clearly succeeded: “Today almost every Ukrainian, at least of the young generation, finds it shameful to speak Polish, to buy in Polish shops, to have intercourse with Poles and to be married to a Pole.” In this accomplishment Ukrainian irredentists “have greatly benefitted” from “the numerous threads that run between the Reich and Polish Ukraine,” threads that “strengthen the view of the Ukrainians that National Socialist Germany stands in support of the idea of freedom. Adolf Hitler,” he concluded, “is seen by the Ukrainian peasants as the man who would bring them freedom.”55