Ukrainian beasts remain on a pedestal

 

(...)

By April of 1943, Soviet partisans, who were no choirboys themselves after witnessing many atrocities, were horrified to report:

“A hundred members of the national army have been tasked with destroying Poles in Tsuman District. The local population was slaughtered and settlements in Zaulok, Galinovsk, etc. were burned down. On March 29, 18 people were hacked to death in the village of Galinovk.  The rest fled into the forest. Bandera nationalists were led to a Polish doctor by his wife, and they cut off the doctor’s ears and nose. Up to 50 Poles were shot in the village of Pundynki.”

After a short discussion, the leadership of the OUN approved the mass extermination of Poles. The key instigator of this purge was Dmitry Klyachkovsky, aka ‘Klim Savur’, who had previously been arrested for extremism in both Poland and the USSR. Having escaped from a Soviet prison during the Wehrmacht offensive, he now became the architect of the massacre as one of the key commanders of OUN forces.

The attacks were preceded by primitive propaganda campaigns. One of the rioters, Juhim Orlyuk, later told the USSR’s secret police during interrogation:

“In approximately May or June of 1943, two people arrived in the village of Mogilnoye. There was one named Vladimir Volynsky who the villagers called ‘Iron’. He was from the village of Ostrovok, which is about 1 kilometer from the mountains. I didn’t know the other person. They gathered all of Mogilnoye’s Ukrainian residents at the village school and announced that they had been sent by the Ukrainian insurgent army. Next, ‘Iron’ asked those present if they wanted to or were willing to fight the enemy (against whom specifically, he did not say). Those present replied that they were ready. He went on to say that the Germans would lose the war, that a revolution would break out in Germany, that the Red Army would only reach the old border, and that, at that time, the Ukrainian insurgent army, which had a lot of people in it, would rise up, and an independent Ukrainian state would be created.”

Volhynia was not a major area of activity for either Polish or Soviet partisans. The partisan forces in Volhynia were small. The Poles had few weapons, and the Russians were mainly focused on other areas. The Soviet partisan detachments were waging a desperate war against the Germans, and the appearance of a new front was an unexpected problem for them. The Poles created self-defense detachments called plyatsuvki, as well as mobile partisan groups to aid them. Groups of ethnic Poles also operated in Volhynia as part of the Soviet partisan movement. However, all these forces suffered from a severe shortage of weapons and ammunition and were often simply powerless to stop the killers. The Soviet partisans focused mainly on sabotage against German military installations and did not have enough forces or equipment to protect villages. To make matters worse, there was a distinct lack of trust between the Soviet and Polish partisans.

Meanwhile, events were rapidly developing. The incident that kicked off what would later be called the Volyn massacre is considered to be a raid on the village of Paroslya on February 9, 1943. The militants did not waste bullets: Poles were hacked to pieces with axes. A number of villages were dealt with in a similar fashion. In March, the village of Lipniki was destroyed. Among the survivors was a one-and-a-half-year-old baby, who had been accidentally overlooked. The infant, whose grandfather had been stabbed with a bayonet, was found the next morning by chance, lying in the snow among the dead and dying. He would grow up to become the first Polish cosmonaut, Miroslav Germashevsky.

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The blood was intoxicating, and the carnage became more and more ferocious. Polish women were raped, and many Poles were brutally tortured before being killed. The murders were mainly carried out using farming equipment or other improvised means. As is often the case, political violence begot criminal violence. The most unscrupulous of peasants tried to appropriate other people’s land by nefarious means, often employing the simplest method – killing the owners. In addition, the nationalists bound ordinary peasants together by blood. They drove prisoners into a pile and forced the Ukrainian peasants to kill them.

The Nazis used the massacre with truly diabolical ingenuity. Police detachments made up of Polish collaborators who had already killed Ukrainians were brought into Volhynia, so many peasants took the Germans’ atrocities to be revenge by the Poles.

The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia went on for several months, gradually shifting from east to west. The experience the killers had acquired in punitive operations with the Nazi police was not wasted: the massacre was carried out methodically, with the discipline of an army operation. For example, it was characteristic of the Nazis to gather villagers in one building and then burn them alive, and about forty Poles were killed in Guchin in the same manner. A Ukrainian who had hidden a Polish woman was executed along with the Poles. Another common technique was to appear friendly to the Poles at first, so they would not immediately flee, and later gather the victims together in one place under some plausible pretext.

Victims were thoroughly robbed, houses were burned. The murderers tried not only to execute the people but destroy their cultural values as well. After about a hundred Poles had been shot en masse in Poritska, nationalists blew up an 18th-century church with the help of an artillery shell and then set fire to what was left of the building. The commanders did not hesitate to personally participate in the killings. For example, Pyotr Oleinik, aka ‘Aeneas’, who led the OUN forces near Rivne, executed captured Poles himself.

Gender and age were no protection – 438 people were killed in the village of Ostrovki, of whom 246 were children under the age of 14. “The entire Polish population, including infants, was destroyed (cut and chopped up). I personally shot 5 Poles there who were fleeing into the forest,” a captured militant later told Soviet investigators during interrogation about his participation in an attack on another village.

As a rule, the main murder weapons were peasant tools – axes, pitchforks, knives, and hammers. In some cases, places were swept a second time to find people who had managed to hide during the first attack and returned to the ashes. The Poles’ attempts to organize negotiations failed. The Home Army sent Sigmund Rummel, an officer and poet who spoke Ukrainian well, to parlay with the leaders of the OUN. He, as well as the officer and guide accompanying him, were seized and tortured to death.

The peak of the atrocities fell on July 11, 1943, when nationalists ravaged up to a hundred Polish villages at once – villages were cordoned off, after which designated groups entered and carried out reprisals

The killings continued on a smaller scale until the winter of 1944. According to various estimates, from 40,000 to 60,000 Poles were killed in total. Up to 7,000 people escaped by joining Soviet partisan detachments or taking refuge in cities where OUN detachments were not active. In addition to Poles, almost a thousand ‘disloyal’ Ukrainians, more than a thousand Jews, and about 135 Russians were killed. In addition, the forces of the Polish Home Army, as well as pro-German collaborators, killed more than 2,000 Ukrainians.

In the 1944 campaign, the Wehrmacht was defeated, and Volhynia was liberated by the Red Army. For the Soviet government, the OUN and the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA), which had been formed during the Volyn massacre, became a major headache, as the numerous armed groups posed a serious problem. By 1945, the main forces of the nationalists had been defeated. The Volyn massacre was certainly a crime from the standpoint of the Soviet authorities. Consequently, Yuri Stelmaschuk, who had been one of the key OUN commanders during the massacre in Volhynia, was arrested in January of 1945 and brought before a tribunal.

At the trial, Stelmaschuk tried to dodge the charges, claiming that he had tried to sabotage Klyachkovsky’s order to massacre the Poles. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of murdering 5,000 Poles, sentenced to death, and shot. Pyotr Oleinik, the commander of the OUN forces near Rivne, was shot during a special NKVD operation in February of 1946. Finally, Dmitry Klyachkovsky, the leader and organizer of the massacre, was eliminated thanks to the capture of Stelmaschuk, who revealed his hiding place under interrogation. A large NKVD detachment surrounded and defeated Klim Savura’s detachment, and the executioner himself was mortally wounded during the pursuit.

For modern Ukraine, the Volyn massacre is an inconvenient story. Ukrainian nationalists of the Second World War are considered national heroes, and the fact that these people stained themselves with horrific crimes creates a serious problem – especially since the victims were Poles, and modern Poland is seen as an ally and even a patron of Ukraine. However, this hero worship is unlikely to change anytime soon. Ukraine’s entire public agenda is heavily influenced by nationalists who revere the OUN, so the murderers are destined to remain on a pedestal for now.

Evgeny Norin
https://www.rt.com/russia/548672-ukrainian-murdered-poles-wwii/amp/

Ukrainian genocide was characterized as a rule by tortures of the utmost barbarity. These reached back to the Cossack traditions of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (the Khmelnitsky Uprising12 and the uprising of 1768 called "kolistchyzna"13), with the methods in use at that time - hacking Poles and Jews with axes, throwing wounded victims into wells, sawing people alive, horse-dragging, eye-gouging, pulling out of tongues, and other atrocities14. Such acts of barbarity were not as a rule employed by the Germans or even the Soviets. Of course there were beatings and frequently bestial cruelty during interrogations15 or in concentration camps (where this was accompanied by starvation and backbreaking work, sometimes criminal medical experimentation in German camps, etc.), but it was not usual for the murder thal took place there to be combined with the cutling off or pulling out of parts of the body, sawing, ripping open of the stomach, disembowelment, and so on16.

Let us add that on a European scale, as far as dreadful tortures go,the genocide commitled by the Ukrainians on the Poles is only comparable, to a certain extent, to the Croatian genocide (by the Ustasi of Ante Pavelic) against the Serbs during World War II from the spring of 1941. However, what was also practiced there on a big scale were mass expulsions, or "conversion" to Catholicism, which meant that a large majority of the Serbs who were within the boundaries of the Croatian state formed in April of 1941 (with acceptance by Germany and Italy) could survive17. But in the case of the genocide by Ukrainians, the practice was to murder absolutely all the Poles who fell into their hands. The fact is that despite the fabrications of the Ukrainians, there were no "calls to leave" Volhynia directed at the Poles, or simple "deportations". This is totally debunked by the Siemaszko work. Quite the reverse, it was very often the case that Poles who wanted to run away before the genocide already being committed in neighbouring districts reached them were encouraged to remain, with "guarantees" that they would be safe. Or they were subjected to threats that their running away would be considered as treason against lhe Ukrainians. All this was aimed at ensuring that they would all be killed right where they were. This aspect will be pursued later.  (...)

special mention must be made of the viciously criminal stance taken in cases of mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages. In such cases the Ukrainian assassins often murdered, wherever possible, whole families, including the children, or, at least, the Polish partner. Not only this, but there were instances where the Ukrainian husband (or even the wife) was forced to kill the Polish partner with his own hands20. Such barbarity was never applied in similar cases of mixed marriage, by the Soviets21, or in the case of mixed German-Jewish marriages by the Germans. Among these latter, despite the almost total Ausrottung of the German Jews, most of these couples, though severely persecuted and forced into starvation, nevertheless managed to survive the war22.
A characteristic example of this would be the well-known case of Prof. Karl Jaspers, who was married to a Jewess. The couple lived for the years of the war in a tragic state of Suizidbereitschoft (readiness to commit suicide), but neverlesess survived23. Ordering a German man or woman to kill his or her Jewish pariner was unthinkable.

Fifthly, in the case of German or Soviet genocide against the Poles, the crimes were committed by an occupying force - whereas the genocide by Ukrainians was conducted by Ukrainians who were citizens of Poland, inhabitants of these lands during the II Polish Republic, who did not display even the slightest vestige of loyalty24. But, let us add, when there was profit to be gained by it, these same Ukrainians continued to refer readily to their Polish citizenship25. In many cases, using identification documents robbed from murdered Poles, and under their names, they "repatriated" to Poland, or went abroad to the West26.

Sixthly, Ukrainian genocide was usually accompanied by a barbaric scorched earth policy. After their property and livestock were robbed, the houses and other buildings of the killed Poles were usually burnt down (sometimes even their orchards were destroyed), and public buildings, eg. schools, were also often destroyed. As part of this, there was also total destruction of a large number of historical Polish country houses, with their farm buildings and gardens, as well as Catholic churches and chapels27. This form of additional barbarism was not usually demonstraled by either lhe Germans or the Soviets28.

https://nawolyniu.pl/english.htm