Once the Red Army had taken Lviv and other major centers in Galicia and Volhynia, the occupiers held Soviet-style elections to the National Assembly of Western Ukraine, which in turn asked Kyiv and Moscow to annex Galicia and Volhynia to Soviet Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev, the newly appointed party boss in Kyiv, insisted that the northern Polisia, including the city of Brest, also be transferred to Ukraine, but Stalin decided to assign that territory to the Belarusian republic. The new authorities made it possible for local Ukrainians and Jews to enter government service and take the positions in educational, medical, and other institutions denied them under Polish rule. They treated local Jews well but often turned those the Germans expelled from Poland back at the border. The authorities launched a comprehensive Ukrainization campaign, turning the Polish-language university, schools, theaters, and publishing houses into Ukrainian ones. They also nationalized large landholdings and distributed the land among the poor peasants. Pro-Soviet sympathies, always strong among members of communist and leftist parties and organizations in the region, grew even stronger.
But the honeymoon in relations between the Soviet authorities and the local Ukrainians did not last long. Never well disposed to organized religion—the institutional basis of Ukrainian identity in the former Polish republic—the Soviets confiscated the landholdings of the Greek Catholic Church and tried to limit the role of the traditional churches, both Orthodox and Greek Catholic, in public life. More surprising was the Soviet treatment of former leaders and rank-and-file members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, who were generally suspected of nationalism and eventually targeted by the Soviet secret police. The same suspicion soon fell on Ukrainian cadres promoted to senior positions in local government and education.
In 1940, the occupation authorities began mass arrests and deportations of the local population to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia. Former Polish government and police officials, members of Polish political parties, and military settlers brought to the region during the interwar period headed the list of “enemies of the people.” In February 1940, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, carried out the first mass deportation of close to 140,000 Poles. Nearly 5,000 deportees did not reach their destinations, dying of cold, disease, and malnutrition on the way. Altogether, between the fall of 1939 and June 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR, the Soviet secret police deported close to 1.25 million people from Ukraine. The NKVD also hunted members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose leaders, including Stepan Bandera, fled to the German-controlled part of Poland. Stalin saw them as a clear and present danger to his regime.
The fall of Paris to the advancing German armies in May 1940 caught Stalin by surprise and made him think that Hitler would soon turn eastward to attack the Soviet Union. The regime had to solidify its control over the newly acquired territories and remove potential “fifth columnists.” Stalin also decided to occupy all parts of eastern Europe assigned to his sphere of influence by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of Romania, which comprised Bessarabia and Bukovyna. The Soviet leader annexed southern Bessarabia and northern Bukovyna, settled largely by Ukrainians, to Soviet Ukraine in August 1940. There the Soviet authorities introduced the same policies as they had earlier in Galicia and Volhynia, including the nationalization of land, promotion of local non-Romanian cadres, and Ukrainization of institutions. Arrests and deportations followed.
Stalin was preparing for an attack by his ally, Adolf Hitler. He expected it to take place in 1942, but it came a year earlier, catching the Soviet dictator by surprise. Hitler needed Soviet resources, including Ukrainian wheat and coal, as soon as possible, especially as he was still at war with Britain, and behind the British lion cornered on its islands loomed the much larger United States—the most powerful economy in the world. Hitler attacked the USSR against the objections of the Reich’s leading economists, who argued that the invasion would solve none of Germany’s problems and become a drain on the German economy. But the military brass preferred war with the Soviets to war with the West, and Hitler was happy to oblige.
In December 1940 he signed a directive ordering preparations for war with the Soviet Union. The operation was code-named Barbarossa after the twelfth-century German king and Holy Roman emperor who had led the Third Crusade. He had drowned while trying to cross a river in heavy armor instead of taking the bridge used by his troops. It was certainly a bad omen, but at the time those in the know paid no attention to historical precedent. Like Barbarossa before him, Hitler was prepared to take risks and cut corners. The planners aimed to defeat the Soviets and drive them beyond the Volga in the course of a campaign that would last no longer than three months. Hitler wanted his armies to take Leningrad first, capture the Donbas coal mines second, and then take Moscow. The Wehrmacht sent German soldiers to the front with no provision for winter clothing. This turned out to be a mistake, although it had the short-term benefit of misleading Stalin, who refused to believe that the Germans would attack without preparing for a winter campaign and was thus caught off guard when they invaded.
The invasion began in the early hours of June 22, 1941, along a front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Germany and its allies, including Romania and Hungary, fielded some 3.8 million soldiers. Germany’s Army Group South attacked Ukraine, advancing from positions in Poland and marching along the ancient route between the northern slopes of the Carpathians and the Prypiat marshes. The Romanians attacked in the south, moving into Ukraine between the southern slopes of the Carpathians and the Black Sea. The Huns had used these routes in the fifth century and the Mongols in the thirteenth when they invaded central Europe. Now the troops moved in the opposite direction, but they proceeded along the same unpaved roads, with mechanized divisions, not cavalry, raising dust. On the Soviet front, the Germans concentrated some 4,000 tanks and more than 7,000 artillery pieces. Over 4,000 aircraft covered the advance. The Germans had almost complete control of the air—a surprise Luftwaffe attack destroyed the bulk of Soviet military planes on the airfields before they could become airborne.
The Red Army had approximately the same number of men on the Soviet western border as the Germans and significantly more tanks, guns, and aircraft. The USSR’s materiel, however, was inferior to the latest German models, and inexperienced officers, who had only recently replaced the more experienced commanders purged by Stalin, led its men into battle. Commanders abandoned their units, while the morale of the soldiers, many of them peasants who had survived the famine and collectivization, was low. It fell further with every passing day as the Germans took advantage of their surprise attack, gained territory rapidly, and inflicted devastating casualties on the retreating Soviet troops. What Stalin had considered his success—the acquisition of new territory after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—turned out to be a trap. In the month preceding the invasion, he had moved his troops west of the defense lines built over the previous decade so as to protect the new borders, and now they had to defend a border that they had had no time to fortify. As envisioned by the planners of blitzkrieg warfare, the German panzer divisions cut through the Soviet defenses, encircling entire armies and creating havoc behind Red Army lines.
In western Ukraine, Red Army commanders launched a major counteroffensive in the region of Lutsk, Brody, and Rivne, sending all their tank formations into battle, only to be outmaneuvered and defeated by a much smaller Wehrmacht tank force. It would be all downhill after that. In three weeks, the Wehrmacht managed to advance eastward anywhere from three hundred to six hundred kilometers. Not only Galicia and Volhynia, recently occupied by Soviet forces, but also large parts of Right-Bank Ukraine were lost. More than 2,500 Soviet tanks and close to 2,000 aircraft were destroyed. Casualties were hard to count. In August, German divisions surrounded and imprisoned more than 100,000 Red Army soldiers near the city of Uman in Podolia, but the
y took the greatest prize near Kyiv the following month. Contrary to the advice of Red Army commanders, including the head of the General Staff, Georgii Zhukov, Stalin refused to withdraw his troops from the Kyiv region, given the city’s symbolic importance, and caused probably the greatest Soviet military disaster of the entire war.
Red Army units led by a native of the Chernihiv region, General Mykhailo Kyrponos, resisted the advance but could do little against German mechanized divisions. Kyiv fell to the Germans on September 19, 1941. General Kyrponos died in battle the next day near the town of Lokhvytsia. The Wehrmacht surrounded and took prisoner more than 660,000 Red Army soldiers in the Kyiv pocket. In October, the same fate befell close to 100,000 men between Melitopol and Berdiansk in southern Ukraine, and another 100,000 surrendered near Kerch in the Crimea in November. By the end of the year, when the Red Army was forced to abandon almost all of Ukraine, more than 3.5 million of its officers and soldiers were in enemy hands. The retreating Soviets followed a scorched-earth policy, removing industrial equipment, livestock, supplies, and people from areas they were about to leave. Altogether, they evacuated approximately 550 large factories and 3.5 million skilled laborers to the east.
Many in Ukraine welcomed the German advance in the summer of 1941, hoping for the end of the terror unleashed by the Soviet occupation authorities in the years leading up to the war. This was true not only for the recently occupied regions of western Ukraine but also for central and eastern Ukraine, where the population never forgave the regime for the horrors of the famine and collectivization. Some expected that “national socialism” would bring true socialism. Others simply hoped for improved living standards. With Soviet salaries insufficient to buy even a pair of shoes, it was not difficult to nourish false hopes and imagine that the “European” Germans would make life better for the population they were “liberating” from Moscow’s control. Many remembered the Austrians of the pre–World War I period and the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, which was benign by the standards of the Stalinist terror. Some saw the return of the Germans as a prelude to the restoration of a Ukrainian state as it had been under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. Those who awaited the Germans with such expectations were soon proved wrong, often dead wrong, irrespective of what had fed their hopes for a better life under German occupation.
The German minister for the occupied eastern territories, Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German educated in Moscow, among other places, originally put together German plans for Ukraine. He wanted to support Ukrainian, Baltic, Belarusian, Georgian, and other Soviet nationalities’ aspirations for independent statehood in order to undermine the Soviet Union. In his vision, a Ukrainian polity independent of Russia would become a client state of the Reich along with a Baltic federation, Belarus, and Finland. Indeed, Rosenberg’s experts advocated the expansion of Ukrainian territory all the way to the Volga. But Rosenberg lost the political contest to head of the German security forces and later minister of the interior Heinrich Himmler, Reichstag president and aviation minister Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders eager to implement their racial ideology and squeeze the newly conquered territories for every economic resource they had. The 1918 Brest-Litovsk vision of eastern European states, Ukraine among them, controlled by Germany gave way in the summer of 1941 to a model, rooted in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, of colonial dismemberment and exploitation.
The Germans divided the Ukrainian territories under their control into three parts: Galicia was lumped together with what had been Western Galicia and the Warsaw region into an entity called the General Government; most of Ukraine from Volhynia in the northwest to Zaporizhia in the southeast, along with southern Belarus around the cities of Pinsk and Homel, became the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; and eastern Ukraine, from Chernihiv in the north to Luhansk and Stalino (Yuzivka, Donetsk) in the south, remained under military command as an area too close to the front lines to be assigned to civilian administration. The division of Galicia and Volhynia and the aggregation of Volhynia with Dnieper Ukraine reflected German thinking about the region in terms of the divide established by the Russo-Austrian border in the late eighteenth century. The partitioning of Ukraine was not the only disappointment that befell those previously terrorized by the Soviets. They would soon discover that the Germans of 1941 were anything but the Germans of 1918.
The first to experience disappointment with the Nazi regime were the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN had split in 1940, soon after one of its most radical leaders, Stepan Bandera, walked out of a Polish prison in September 1939. Bandera led a revolt against the old cadres and soon found himself at the helm of the OUN’s largest faction and most radical members. In February 1941, they made a deal with the leaders of German military intelligence (Abwehr) to form two battalions of special operations forces from their supporters. One battalion, Nachtigall, was among the first German troops to enter Lviv on June 29. The next day it took part in the proclamation of Ukrainian independence by members of the Bandera faction of the OUN. This spelled the end of German cooperation with Bandera’s followers. The Germans, who had very different plans for Ukraine, turned on their former allies, arresting scores of members of the Bandera faction, including Bandera himself, whom they told to denounce the declaration of independence. He refused and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he would spend most of the war. Two of his brothers were arrested as well and died in Auschwitz.
The Bandera faction of the OUN went overnight from the Germans’ loyal ally to their enemy. The more moderate OUN faction, headed by Colonel Andrii Melnyk, tried to take advantage of the German conflict with its competitors and moved its expeditionary groups into central and eastern Ukraine to set up its network, influence the selection of Ukrainian cadres for the occupation administration, and conduct educational work and propaganda among the local population. The faction’s operations came to a halt in late 1941, with the German administration taking ever stricter control over the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Nazi police had hundreds of OUN members shot in Kyiv and other cities and towns of Ukraine. By early 1942, both factions of the OUN were at war with the Germans.
Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners of war sent another signal, this time to the citizens of central and eastern Ukraine, that the Germans of 1941 bore no resemblance to the Germans of 1918. If the former were just occupiers, the latter were colonizers who treated the conquered as subhuman.
Before the war, Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention of 1929 that regulated the treatment of prisoners of war—the USSR was a revolutionary power that did not abide by capitalist rules of conduct. When he tried to do so in the summer of 1941, it was too late: the Germans would not agree to extend to Soviet prisoners the treatment they offered POWs from the West. Whereas they treated the latter with a degree of respect, recognizing rank and providing access to medical attention, as well as to parcels of food and clothing, they denied Soviet prisoners of war all of that. Besides, they did not leave everyone who wanted to surrender alive; many they shot on the spot. On June 6, 1941, more than two weeks before the invasion, the headquarters had issued the order for troops to shoot on capture commissars and Red Army political officers, as well as NKVD men and Jews. Muslims who failed to prove that their circumcision had nothing to do with the Jewish religion also often met their end, as did, occasionally, Red Army commanders who fell into captivity. Those left alive got sent to makeshift concentration camps—old factories, schoolyards, often fields surrounded by barbed wire.
During forced death marches to those concentration camps, guards shot those wounded, ill, and weary prisoners who could no longer walk. The locals tried to feed the exhausted POWs and help them in any way they could, the assumption being that others were feeding and helping their own sons, husbands, and fathers mobilized into the Red Army before the war and probably facing the same ordeals. Once in camp, the prisoners often went without food and water, which caused hunger, starvation, and, ultimately, ca
nnibalism. Disease took care of those who managed to survive on the meager rations. Nazi propaganda portrayed the Soviet POWs as subhuman, and their treatment was inhuman indeed. Ideology was only partly responsible for that. The Germans had not planned on taking hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of prisoners. In the first months of the war, the more people died in captivity, the less trouble there was for the Wehrmacht. Not until November 1941 did the masters of the Reich economy begin to consider the POWs as a workforce, which was in short supply in Germany. In the course of the war, more than 60 percent of those captured on the eastern front died in captivity.
Ukrainians, like members of other Soviet-ruled nationalities of the western USSR, generally fared better in the camps than Russians and Muslims. At first the Germans even allowed them to go free, considering them a lesser threat than the Russians. Thus, in September 1941, the Nazis issued a directive allowing the release of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts. Inmates could leave the camps if a relative claimed them (sometimes women claimed strangers as their husbands) or if they came from a particular region. The policy was reversed in November, but probably tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Ukrainian men drafted into the Red Army and captured by the Germans in the summer and fall of 1941 managed to survive the ordeal and return to their families. Later in the war, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Balts were more likely than Russians to be recruited into police battalions and trained to secure eastern European territory cleansed of local inhabitants and settled by German colonists. The Nazis sent some to guard concentration and extermination camps in Poland once the leadership of the Third Reich realized that the promised German colonial paradise in eastern Europe was being postponed indefinitely.
The Gates of Europe Page 33
