by Omer Bartov
Indeed the report found it difficult to concede that Ukrainians and Jews were victims of Soviet repression at all. “The Ukrainian issue,” it insisted, “is strictly connected with the German action against Poland. Ukrainian terrorists, armed and trained by the German military and paid German money, played the role of a fifth column during the Polish-German War in September 1939.” Moreover, since Ukrainians kept hoping “that Hitler would create for them a Ukrainian state,” they had already begun “infiltrating all organs of the Soviet administration, pretending to be ardent Bolsheviks”; they were even helping the Soviet State Political Police (GPU) “draw up lists of people to be relocated,” in which “they listed only Poles,” clearly “with the aim of destroying the Polish element” and thereby clearing the way for a Ukrainian nation-state. At the same time, the report granted that Ukrainians were also being “victimized by Moscow” because “Ukrainian armed groups,” especially members of the OUN, “attacked Bolshevik leaders, soldiers, even Soviet patrols, often killing some of them.” All this led to the bizarre conclusion, clearly the product of wishful thinking rather than hard data, that among “the non-political part of Ukrainians, the conviction has come to predominate . . . that the Ukrainian issue should be solved in a way that would locate the territories of mixed Polish-Ukrainian population within the Polish State.” As a result of such “coexistence of Poles and Ukrainians,” Ukrainians “would be gradually assimilated through cultural influence and well-functioning public services into the Polish State.” Signs of ethnic solidarity had allegedly been observed in the Buczacz district, where “Ukrainians even put up guards to prevent the deportation of Poles,” indicating, to the report writer’s satisfaction, that “even though they did not always express this openly, the lower classes of Ukrainians now definitely missed the previous Polish regime.”37
This renewed articulation of the old pipe dream of Polish nationalists, who viewed their Ukrainian counterparts as traitors and terrorists but the Ukrainian “masses” as potential Poles, merely demonstrated how removed from reality some observers on the ground and certainly politicians in exile had become. As for the Jews, the old prejudices were now given a major boost by allegations of collaboration with the Soviets. As the report underlined, “The Jewish population in general exhibits a hostile attitude toward the Poles, many of them take an active part in the persecution of Poles, and huge numbers of Jews enter the ranks of the Soviet administration.” This was nothing new. “All Poles remember the collaboration of the Jews with the Bolsheviks against the Poles during the Polish-German war in September 1939,” stressed the report’s author, blithely ignoring the service of 100,000 Jews in the Polish Army; hence “their present attitude toward the Poles arouses a great deal of hatred among the Polish population.” Fortunately the Ukrainians too were “dissatisfied with the actions of the Jews,” not least because of “their activities on various levels of the Soviet administration.” Astonishingly this circumstance only evoked “nostalgic memories of the good old Polish times,” since the Ukrainians now said to themselves, “I thought this was Ukraine, but it turns out to be Palestine.” Consequently, despite the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians, “sometimes the Poles become reconciled with the Ukrainians over their mutual agreement in evaluating the behavior of the Jews.” Here, then, was an agenda for Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation.38
These Polish nationalist attitudes toward Jews had a history that dated to the nineteenth century and persisted beyond the Holocaust; the very notion that under the Soviet occupation Jews were given more or less equal opportunities, albeit within the framework of an oppressive and brutal system, obviously played into the Polish understanding of the reality on the ground, a perception so powerful that even after the vast majority of Jews were murdered it allowed for further Polish outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the early postwar years.
Officially, of course, Germany and the Soviet Union were still allies. But within a year of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the partition of Poland, as it became clear that an invasion of Britain would not be feasible, Hitler turned his gaze to the East. For that purpose, Ukrainian nationalists—trained, funded, and armed in the Reich—proved a useful tool in the takeover of Eastern Galicia and the early phases of mass murder. Meanwhile, as they peered across the border into the newly occupied Soviet territories, the Germans could identify a fair degree of overlap between the policies and practices of the two regimes. Here Soviet Jewish policies were of particular interest. That Jews had entered the ranks of the police and administration under Soviet rule surely fit perfectly into the Nazi worldview of Judeo-Bolshevism. But that Jews would also be deported en masse by the allegedly Jewish-dominated Kremlin and NKVD was both odd and a source of glee, without having any effect on their overall perception of Soviet Russia.
In May 1940 the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, wrote the German embassy in Moscow regarding requests by “Jews in former East Poland” for passports and other travel documents. “In principle,” commented Müller, “I have no interest in the emigration of Jews who had been resettled to Poland and subsequently moved to the Soviet sphere of influence, since their further emigration will diminish even more the already very limited emigration possibilities for Jews from the territory of the Reich.” But he nevertheless wanted to know “whether perhaps for internal political reasons the embassy considers the removal of these Jews from the Russian area necessary. In this case,” he promised, “if available, passports could be sent to the embassy expeditiously.” One can only imagine the anxiety of those applying for the documents, caught as they were between Nazi persecution and looming deportation by the Soviets. One of the applicants was Rosa Pohoryles of Buczacz, who indicated her desire to “travel to Warsaw, and from there via Italy to the United States to her husband in New York.” The ambassador to the Soviet Union, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, responded only in late June, visibly annoyed by this as yet unresolved situation: “The embassy would welcome it if a principled decision were reached regarding the treatment of the Jews living in and traveling to Eastern Poland, who are applying in large numbers to the embassy for passports.” From his perspective, it did not matter whether they would all be completely “stripped of their citizenship” (ausbürgert) or would “be issued more or less short-term German travel passports.” However, noted Schulenburg, “the embassy does not consider the removal of these Jews from the Soviet region to be necessary for internal political reasons, since as a result of the unique political situation, and the circumstances here, the Jews in the Soviet Union are more isolated from the rest of the world than in any other country.”39 They were, so to speak, ripe for the picking: no one would know, and no one would care.
Chapter 5
GERMAN ORDER
Skat and schnapps, 1942 (l. to r.): Buczacz Landkommissar Richard Lissberg, railroad administrator Ewald Herzig, post office director, and labor office director. Source: Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (hereafter GLA-K) 309, Zug. 2001-42/877-158.
Strolling through Buczacz on July 4, 1941, roughly two weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union had begun, on June 22, Viktor Petrykevych observed everywhere signs of devastation and anarchy: “The stores have been smashed and plundered,” while “the poor and the peasants are milling around in small groups, hoping to find something to loot.” In one case, “a soldier shot a fellow who was carrying two military overcoats.” The atmosphere of lawlessness, Petrykevych heard, had prompted the Jews to send “a delegation to the Basilian monastery superior, asking him to influence the population and restrain it from attacking the Jews.” There was reason for anxiety, since “leaflets inciting against the Poles and the Jews” were reported. That same day, around noon, the Red Army blew up the railroad bridge and tunnel leading to the city, a Galician engineering marvel and the only one of its kind in the province. The following day, July 5, Petrykevych wrote, “At about 9:45 p.m., Soviet time, horrible . . .” The rest of this entry is missing; we can only speculate what he had
seen. In the mid-1950s, when the KGB dropped in for an unannounced visit after his father’s death, Bohdan Petrykevych tore out a section of the diary. He subsequently explained that these pages depicted the welcome given to the Germans by the Ukrainian population. The last word, horrible, may have referred to anti-Jewish violence by fellow Ukrainians.1
That same day, at 12:30 p.m., the Wehrmacht’s 101st Light Infantry Division reported that it had captured Buczacz, although heavy fighting was still going on in the vicinity of the city. On the following day the 228th Infantry Regiment established its forward command post in the city. Severely damaged by German bombing raids and Soviet demolition, Buczacz was initially occupied by a succession of German and allied Slovak military formations, while much of the area north of the Dniester was temporarily taken over by Hungarian troops. As these formations rolled farther east, reports started coming in of “murders of inhabitants (Ukrainians) in the prisons of Buczacz and Czortków.” At the same time Germany’s 52nd Army Corps reported that in Buczacz “a Ukrainian militia took over security duties until the arrival of German troops in order to prevent plundering.” This militia, called “Sich” as a gesture to the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen of World War I, was in fact a major source of violence during the hiatus between Soviet and German rule.2
The demolished railroad bridge in Buczacz. Source: GLA-K 309 Zug. 2001-42/878-106.
The self-proclaimed Buczacz Sich was rapidly recruited from OUN militants in the district. On June 26 the OUN district commander, Volodymyr Lutsiv, called a meeting at the village hall in Nagórzanka and organized a thirty-man platoon. This was followed several days later by a second platoon, formed in the village of Przewłoka (Ukrainian: Perevoloka) and armed with weapons looted from a Soviet Army camp they had raided. As one of the men recalled, on the night of July 4–5 they “liquidated 18 secret operatives, who included many Jews”; they also seized the prison in Buczacz, only to find that all the inmates had been murdered. The next morning these paramilitaries attacked the retreating Soviets. Although they met with fierce resistance, they captured several Soviet soldiers and arrested a number of Ukrainian Soviet activists. A few Ukrainian fighters were killed and wounded in the fighting, but by late morning “the city was in our hands and our guards were posted everywhere. On the houses the blue-yellow flag was hoisted.” When Lutsiv “proclaimed the Independent Ukrainian State” in Buczacz, “many people came to the gathering, even Poles. In the afternoon German units entered the city.” Soon thereafter a unified Sich for the Buczacz district was formed under the command of the former Prosvita activist Tadei Kramarchuk and Andriy Dankovych. Numbering over one hundred men, this unit engaged in hunting down the remaining Soviet troops and sympathizers. Eventually many of these men were transformed into policemen under German control, but Lutsiv, the local OUN chief, went underground to prepare the local struggle for independence.3
Snapshots of a parade of the “Ukrainian Army” and its local supporters in Buczacz on July 20, 1941. Source: PA.
On July 20 the new administration in Buczacz demonstrated its strength and organization by staging a parade of the “Ukrainian Army” and its local supporters. Led by a well-equipped infantry unit from Koropiec, the procession also featured a mounted squadron in traditional garb, as well as several scores of young women dressed in Ukrainian blouses and skirts and carrying blue-and-yellow banners and tridents decorated with garlands and local embroidery. As these men and women marched past an elevated platform in the market square where German officials framed by swastika flags greeted them with the Nazi salute, the identity of the real holders of power could not be mistaken.4
During those early weeks the Ukrainian militia carried out widespread acts of violence and vengeance against real and perceived local enemies. In one instance, militiamen arrested and summarily shot the Soviet activist Anton Nezhynskyi, the teacher Fedir Shukhevych, and a former member of the communist executive committee in Buczacz, Mikhailo Hrynkiv. The chairman of the village club in Nagórzanka was repeatedly beaten during his incarceration in Buczacz without ever being interrogated or charged, and a former Communist Party member of the same village, sent home after being severely tortured, was assassinated a few weeks later by unknown assailants. Altogether the Buczacz Sich abused about one hundred people before the German security apparatus was firmly established.
Apart from hunting down former Soviet officials, the Sich also enforced local patriotism and harassed Jews and Poles. Villagers recalled being pressured “to attend an assembly of Ukrainian nationalists and to sign a declaration calling for the release of [Stepan] Bandera,” the nationalist leader arrested by the Germans on July 5 after declaring Ukrainian independence. Along with extensive raids on Polish homes in search of weapons and ammunition, the Sich engaged in forcible recruitment of Jewish labor. In one case local OUN leaders forced Jews from Buczacz to build a “memorial mound for the heroes of the Ukrainian revolution” in the adjacent village of Nagórzanka; Jews were also likely forced to erect the memorial mound on Fedor Hill, where later much of the Jewish community was shot and buried. Such arbitrary arrests and abuse demonstrated to the population that one could do as one pleased with Jews.
OUN memorial mound on Fedor Hill, Buczacz, 2006. Photo courtesy of Sofia Grachova.
Toward the end of July, the Germans asserted control over security in the region. Kramarchuk, the leader of the district militia, was replaced by the more compliant Volodymyr Kaznovskyi, a thirty-seven-year-old district attorney. The son of a Greek Catholic priest, Kaznovskyi, a fluent German speaker, had excellent relations with the occupiers and remained in the newly defined position of Ukrainian district police chief until the end of German rule.5 He too had plenty of local scores to settle. One Ukrainian recalled being called to Kaznovskyi’s office, where he “began shouting at me for having joined the Komsomol” and “punched me twice in the face.” Another man related, “Kaznovskyi screamed at me that I was a communist and that he would stamp my forehead with a Soviet star. Since I had already been beaten, I could not stand calmly and erect in front of Kaznovskyi. Kaznovskyi grabbed me by the hair and slammed my head against the wall, so that I lost consciousness and was then brought back into the prison cell.”6
In early August 1941 the Germans released about two-thirds of the prisoners incarcerated by the militia in the Buczacz prison; the remaining thirty-three were executed. The killing set the pattern for what soon became mass shootings of Jews on a far larger scale.
During the early weeks of the German invasion, “Jewish policies” in Galicia were handled mostly by the Einsatzgruppen, the task forces charged with eliminating the Reich’s political and racial foes. Made up of three thousand men recruited from a variety of German police agencies and the SS, and supported by numerous other regular police battalions, Waffen-SS units, Wehrmacht formations, and local militias and auxiliaries, the four Einsatzgruppen sent into the Soviet Union directly behind the Wehrmacht murdered about 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, in less than a year, mostly by shooting. But as these mobile killing squads moved deeper into Soviet territory, they were replaced by Security Police outposts, whose primary goal was to murder the Jews in the areas under their control, deporting some to extermination camps—usually Bełżec in the case of Eastern Galicia—and shooting others in situ. The most intense killing was carried out between spring and summer 1942 and summer 1943; however, surviving Jews, whether still employed by the Germans or in hiding, were being hunted down and massacred by the Germans, their collaborators, independent local elements, bandits, and peasants, until the return of the Red Army the following year.7
On August 15 a district command was established in Buczacz, but the following month it was moved to Czortków, where the district administrative office was also located. Crucially, in the first month of the occupation Buczacz was under control of the Security Police, known by its acronym, “Sipo,” in Tarnopol, but in September 1941 the city was subordinated to the Sipo outpost at Czortków.8 It wa
s the men from Tarnopol who carried out the first killings. As Kaznovskyi testified, the operation began when a dozen Gestapo officials from Tarnopol drove into Buczacz in early August: “The three officers [in charge] . . . entered my office and said they would be carrying out an execution and that a site for it had to be found and a mass grave needed to be dug.” Kaznovskyi assigned several policemen to this task, who then “drove together with the three Gestapo men in their vehicle to the outskirts of the city, in order to select a site for the shooting of the prisoners.” Leaving the Ukrainian policemen to dig the pit, the Gestapo officers returned to Kaznovskyi’s office and presented him “with a list of those selected to be shot.” One of the inmates recalled, “Kaznovskyi came into our cell with another policeman” and called out names of inmates from a list, ordering them “to step out of the cell”; these men, he said, “never came back.” Kaznovskyi stated, “The Germans instructed me to choose a group of policemen who would escort the condemned and take part in the shooting.” The prisoners “formed a column, and the Gestapo men, along with the selected policemen, walked with the convoy through the city to the execution site. I was not at this site,” insisted Kaznovskyi.