Ukraine's celebration of Nazi Shukhevych conflicts with its desire for democratic ideals - opinion

On June 27-30, 2024, tributes were paid in many places in Ukraine to the war criminal Roman Shukhevych, murderer of Jews and Poles, the nationalist Ukrainian commander who cooperated with the Nazis during World War II.

To provide some historical background, Roman Shukhevych was born in 1907, graduating in 1934 from the Technical University in Lviv (then Lwow, Poland). He lived in Eastern Galicia, a multiethnic region, with a Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian population, which at that time was a part of the newly reborn Republic of Poland. From the beginning of its foundation in Vienna in 1929, he was involved in activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), then mainly directed against the Polish state. He organized and participated in several assassinations of state officials. However, the authorities of Poland dealt with him exceptionally leniently.

Sentenced on June 26, 1936, to three years in prison; with credit for the previous period of pretrial detention, he was released in January 1937. In 1938, Shukhevych began to organize Ukrainian military units in Transcarpathian Ruthenia, and, at the end of September 1939, after WWII started, he arrived in German-occupied Kraków, where he soon took over the leadership of the OUN-B.

Shukhevych became the deputy commander of the Nachtigall battalion, formed by the Germans from Ukrainian nationalists for sabotage and diversion tasks in the Soviet Union. On June 30, 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR, Nachtigall soldiers entered Lviv, together with the German Wehrmacht forces, and took over the Soviet positions without much resistance. These soldiers also participated in several pogroms against Jews that took place at that time.

In October 1941, after the Nachtigall battalion was disbanded, Hauptmann (Cap.) Shukhevych began working for the Germans in a Ukrainian police unit and became a company commander. His unit’s tasks consisted mainly of fighting Soviet partisans and murdering Jews or sending them to death camps. He was twice awarded the Iron Cross, a high military distinction, for his service to Nazi Germany.

Since the beginning of WWII, in Eastern Galicia there had been many cases of mass murder of Jewish and Polish people, conducted by Ukrainian police units in the service of the Nazis. However, these acts of violence did not yet have the character of a planned genocide, resulting from the OUN ideology. Its implementation started in March 1943.

The strategic goal of Ukrainian radical nationalists was to build a homogeneous state in all the so-called “Ukrainian ethnographic territories” as they described the multiethnic region, pretending that such territories inhabited by a homogeneous Ukrainian population ever existed. Their method was to remove all “occupiers” (non-Ukrainians) from these areas, and in particular Jews and Poles, by means of extermination.

Participation in implementation of this criminal ideology

Shukhevych actively participated in the implementation of this criminal ideology. At the 3rd Congress of the OUN-B in August 1943, he was appointed the main commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a military arm of the OUN-B, with the rank of general.

As the commander of the UPA, Shukhevych was directly responsible for the genocide in Volhynia and, particularly, for the ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilian population in the former Polish voivodeships (administered by governors) of Lviv, Tarnopol and Stanisławów, as a result of which some 150,000 Poles were killed, often in most cruel ways. 

Shukhevych said: “The death of one Pole is a meter of free Ukraine; either there will be Ukraine, or Lechite blood up to the knees, Poles to be cut to pieces” and issued an order to accelerate the speed of extinguishing the Polish people before the Soviet army approaching the territory of Eastern Galicia could save then.

Ironically, on October 12, 2007, he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine by Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. This was invalidated by a final ruling of the Donetsk District Administrative Court in August 2011 and then confirmed as illegal by the Supreme Administrative Court. 

However, Shukhevich is still commemorated in Ukraine, despite his crimes against humanity. Celebrating the 117th anniversary of the birth of this murderer of Jews and Poles, rallies and celebrations took place in many places on June 27-30 with the participation of state and local government authorities, representatives of culture, academia and school youth, and UPA veterans and their families. 

There is not much information about these events in the Western media.

Moreover, these pompous celebrations of the birthday of this war criminal did not provoke a single word of protest or condemnation from the Israeli or Polish Foreign Affairs ministries, although they clearly offend the Poles and the Jews and our historical memory. This is especially important since they damage bilateral relations between our countries, and put the continuous international support of Ukraine into question. 

It is worth noting the specific type of message that emerges from the Ukrainian media about Roman Shukhevych, as well as his ideas and actions. Here, there is an almost naive whitewashing of the criminal and the falsification or complete omission of inconvenient facts concerning him. We can read in the media that this Nazi German collaborator, murderer of the Jews and the Poles, and organizer of ethnic cleansing, was: “an outstanding Ukrainian political and public activist, a leading statesman and an extremely brilliant and phenomenal military commander.”

Did this “brilliant” commander win even one battle with the regular army or was his only merit a systematic genocide directed against the Jewish and Polish population of Eastern Galicia? If his role and that of the UPA were to carry out ethnic cleansing, there is no place for him in Ukraine, which aspires to be democratic and free. He should be officially condemned and not glorified. This is particularly important in the context of building good relations between Poland and Ukraine.

After the war, Germany condemned the actions of the Nazis and their crimes. On the other hand, Ukraine, which became independent in 1991, did not condemn OUN’s radical nationalism and crimes of genocide committed by the UPA, its military arm. Moreover, nationalist parties and many Ukrainian historians attempted to disguise, distort, and belittle the truth, and to recast OUN and UPA as parts of a national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. They denied, minimized, or justified their involvement in mass murders of the Poles and the Jews.

The author of many books, Wiktor Poliszczuk, one of the few Righteous Among the Nations who sought true Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, appealed once to the Ukrainian authorities to condemn the OUN, “as an organization of the fascist type... and the UPA, as the one that committed the crimes of genocide.” He also wrote that “there are no criminal nations, but there are criminal ideologies and organizations with criminal plans of action” and recalls that in addition to many thousands Jews and Poles that were murdered by the UPA, they were also Ukrainians. Those were Ukrainians who declined to carry out orders to murder their Jewish and Polish neighbors and instead tried to rescue them.

The radical far-Right exists as a marginal element in many societies, and this was also the case in contemporary Ukraine. But, especially after Euromaidan in February 2014, ultranationalist organizations, such as Svoboda or Right Sector, have gained prominence and become active, not shying away from acts of pressure and violence against politicians, judges, and journalists who opposed their views. Due to their involvement in the coup d’état, in removing president Yanukovych from power, they increased their influence and attained the ability to influence decisions of the government, including that of then newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The result of their activities is the continuous celebrations of radical Ukrainian nationalists, Stephan Bandera (OUN leader) and Shukhevych (UPA Commander), who can be both accused of war crimes in WWII. Instead of their condemnation, there is glorification. In today’s Ukraine, there are many monuments that have been dedicated to Bandera and Shukhevych, and many Ukrainian streets have been named after them. 

However, if Ukraine wants to become a truly democratic and free country, and to receive continuous international support in its resistance to Russia and for its future development, it must find in its history true heroes, brave and just people, and not promote those with a criminal past. Radical Ukrainian nationalism of the OUN type should be banned. 

Ukrainian authorities should condemn OUN as a fascist organization, and offer an official apology to Israel and Poland for OUN-UPA’s crimes against humanity.

The writer is a philosopher and political thinker. He has served as a professor at various universities, including Lady Davis visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the recipient of the Personality of the Year Poland 2020 Award in Science.