*Eric C. Jacobson: Nazism in Ukriane - Then and Now

It is a matter of record that Nazis residing in the former USSR “came out of the woodwork” quite visibly in Ukraine when it gained independence in 1992-1993. Fanatically anti-Communist western-Ukrainian nationalists had evidently absorbed Nazi ideology and revisionist history through family and regional lore (and their proverbial “mother’s milk&rdquo throughout the period of Soviet control.

When freed from Soviet autocracy in the early 1990s, these western-Ukrainian nationalists began methodically sanitizing the sordid history of Ukrainians’ perpetration of mass pogroms both individually and in collaboration with Nazi Germany’s military’s operations in World War 2 which targeted Ukraine’s Jewish population for genocidal slaughter, first manually at places such as Babi Yar and then industrially.
See generally “The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives.

In wartime, where often “truth is the first casualty” it is useful to advert to unassailable historical accounts such as that compiled by scholar Delphine Bechtel in her monograph in the above collection titled “1941 Pogroms as Represented in Western Ukrainian Historiography and Memorial Culture.”

Bechtel writes at p. 2: “Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, pogroms took place in virtually every Galician town or village, from the capital Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv to provincial towns such as Zloczew/Zolochiv, Tarnopol/Ternopil, Zólkiew/Zhovkva, Drohobych/Drohobycz, Boryslaw/Boryslav, Brzezany/Berezhany, Sambor/Sambir, Stryj, Kolomyja, Obertyn, and others, as well as in dozens of villages and hamlets in which the Jewish population was simply wiped away by its peasant neighbors.”

Bechtel then fairly recounts the manner in which some semi-mainstream Ukrainians in the 1990s had “awkwardly” engaged in semi-honest historiography about the Ukrainians’ mass participation in the Holocaust and their collaboration with the Third Reich. Writing in 2013, before the Feb. 2014 Nazi-led Maidan coup against the democratically elected Yanukovych government (an overthrow deplorably and bizarrely supported by the Obama-Biden Administration), Bechtel recounts how hardline Ukrainian Nazis had already overbore the vestiges of such honest historiography:

“[L]ocal authorities and historians in Western Ukraine have taken a more radical stance and have begun even to rehabilitate local nationalists and Nazi collaborators, transforming them into national heroes. [footnote omitted] This process was followed by many municipal museums, starting with the well-known L’viv History Museum located in the “Black House” on the Old Market square.

“The rooms that once celebrated Soviet partisans have gradually been turned into a display of extremist nationalists and sometime war criminals. Among those individuals and groups featured are the theoretician Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, and collaborationist units including Bataillon Nachtigall and the expeditionary groups (pokhidni grupy) that entered Galicia in June 1941 with the Wehrmacht; the Ukrainian Insurrectional Army (UPA), which was responsible for ethnic ‘cleansing’ actions against Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Galicia; and the Division SS-Galizien, formed of Ukrainian volunteers under Nazi command.” (Emphasis added.)
+++

[counterpunch.org]