History is still to be written

“Mother cried out: ‘My baby, we’re burning!’ Naked, we rushed outside and saw houses burning. Shooting and shouts all around… We ran for safety to the vegetable garden, and mother went back to the house. She wanted to take something out. The house’s thatched roof was ablaze by that time. I lay motionless, waiting for mother to come back. Then I turned and saw about ten men and even women bayoneting her… My sister Katia got up and implored: ‘Don’t shoot!’ I shouted: ‘Dearest uncle, don’t kill my sister!’ But a shot rang out. Sister’s coat was immediately soaked with blood. She died in my arms. I remembered the killer’s face forever. I remember crawling away. Then I saw our neighbor Fekla Subcelna and her baby daughter being thrown alive into the fire. Aunt Fekla was holding her tiny tot in her arms. Farther on, by the burning house’s door, there was a charred and blood-stained old woman Grinevichikha lying. My brothers and I crawled through vegetable gardens to our uncle’s place. His house had been burned down, but he had miraculously survived. So we dug out a shelter and lived in it.”

This is not a description of Nazi atrocities on the occupied Soviet territory. This is testimony of one of the eyewitnesses of the assault and destruction of the village Drazhne by Red partisans, recorded by the Belarusian historian Viktor Khursyk.

How? Why? What for? It is a very simple, and a very Soviet, story.

By spring of 1943 Stalin was fed up with Belarusian partisans hiding in the woods, so he ordered them to take action. The 2nd Minsk Partisan Brigade commanded by Ivanov, an officer sent from Moscow, attempted to take by storm the village of Drazhne, where a police garrison was stationed. But the policemen repelled this poorly-planned assault. Then the brigade command decided to seize the part of the village where there were no police pillboxes, and kill the local residents, passing them off as policemen (there was a certain system of control over detachments and brigades by the guerrilla movement headquarters, and the latter needed to have corpses and burnt houses at hand, so to speak, to be able to justify their actions). Similar incidents also occurred in other places, for example, in the village of Starosillia, Mogilev oblast.

Although, in my view, this story is in itself of great importance for a better understanding of war history and the nature of the Soviet system, it is in this context just a preamble to the main topic — knowing who Roman Shukhevych and other would-be UPA soldiers and officers fought against as part of the 201st Police Battalion.

Representatives of the current government and its intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) minions have said so much lately about the “collaboration” of leading Ukrainian nationalists and their “shooting in the back” of heroic Red Army men and partisans.

As far as cooperation with certain German governmental institutions is concerned, it is true. Ukrainian nationalists communicated with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. But is this really collaboration if neither Bandera nor Shukhevych were Soviet citizens? It is the Poles who can make this kind of complaint. Indeed, in purely legal terms, the OUN leaders, who did not acquire Ukrainian citizenship in 1939-41, remained Polish citizens. Moreover, on July 30, 1941, Stalin signed an agreement with the Polish Sikorsky-led government-in-exile, which canceled territorial changes as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Stalin thus officially returned Galicians and Volhynians to the condition of “Polish citizens,” which, incidentally, provoked a terrible slaughter in Volhynia. But this proves that all western Ukrainians were not collaborators, from the perspective of Moscow or Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine.

Yet it is the battles of nationalist formations against Soviet partisans and the Red Army that are the most important. As a comprehensive overview of those events is beyond the scope of just one article, I will now focus on the actions of the 201st Police Battalion, formed on the basis of the disbanded Roland and Nachtigall legions, which operated in Belarus. This is the period of the lives of UPA commander-in-chief Roman Shukhevych and a number of his comrades that gave birth to a lot of myths, not only due to the efforts of the well-paid “counter-propagandists,” both past and present, but also because of the general public’s ignorance of facts.

So let me remind you about these facts.

The 201st Security Police Battalion was formed in Frankfurt. Its soldiers, including not only OUN members from Roland and Nachtigall but also about 60 Red Army POWs from (attention!) the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions, signed a contract (attention!) for a year. The battalion, headed by Major Yevhen Pobihushchy, consisted of four companies, one of which was commanded by sotnyk Shukhevych.

The contract was signed on December 1, 1941. On March 16, 1942, they were ordered to march eastward. Three days later, having been furnished with field kitchens, ammunition, and the unit mail number, the battalion set off to Belarus, where it was included into the 201st Security Division of the 3rd Motorized Army at the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center. The unit’s main task was to guard communication lines in the Mogilev-Vitebsk-Lepel triangle, which was full of Soviet partisans and paratroopers. Scattered among 12 strongholds, the battalion was to guard an area of 2,400 sq. km. In other words, it was responsible for the rear, as the frontline was not so far away. In the winter, the Red Army tried to break through to the territory of Soviet Belarus in a counterattack near Vitebsk but was repelled.

The first serious battle against the partisans, during which two Ukrainian combatants were killed, occurred on June 16, while the second one took place on June 25. On August 19 Shukhevych’s car was blown up by a mine. Soon the battalion killed a large group of air-dropped saboteurs. The battalion suffered the greatest losses on September 29, 1942, when 26 combatants, including platoon leader Kashubinsky, were killed in action.

As the contract expired on December 1, 1942, all the personnel (attention!) refused to extend it. The battalion was relocated to Mogilev and disbanded on January 6, 1943. All the Ukrainians, including those from the eastern regions, were sent to Lviv, from where they dispersed as they did not wish to continue serving in German formations. Battalion officers Poruchnyk Brylynsky and Chotars Maly and Hertsyk were awarded German medals for conspicuous gallantry in battles on the territory of Belarus.

In this situation, the Ukrainian policemen played the role of a damper of sorts for the local populace, for they cushioned both the exploitation on the part of German occupiers and the aggressiveness of Soviet partisans and saboteurs. The tough discipline of the Ukrainian combatants, as well as similar language and religious rites, positively distinguished the fighters of the 201st Battalion from all the others whom ordinary Belarussians were coming across in that tragic period. Local residents said that “Ukrainians are pleasant people.”

So Shukhevych received no German awards, nor did he burn down “hundreds of villages and hamlets,” nor was he an SS Hauptsturmfuehrer. He would not have become one even if he had wanted to: to acquire an SS officer rank in 1942, one was to prove the purity of his Aryan blood from at least the 18th century onwards. Only as late as 1944 could one make his way to the Nazi “black order” without submitting a heap of documents because the Third Reich had received a monumental thrashing.

Incidentally, my impression is that some authors deliberately “confuse” the 201st Security Battalion with the 101st. The latter really conducted mass-scale punitive actions in Belarus — but not before the summer of 1943. Chiefly manned with ex-POWs, it was commanded by the Donetsk-born Red Army Major Rostislav Muraviov. It is he who achieved the rank of Sturmbannfuehrer in 1944, when the battalion was incorporated into the 30th SS Division.

Now for some more details about who Shukhevych and the 201st Battalion fought against. An independent Belarusian researcher (as he says himself), Parmen Posokhov, writes: “In early 1942 the partisan movement in Belarus mainly consisted of, firstly, ex-POWs and those who had broken out of encirclement, secondly, NKVD sabotage groups, for example, one with Zaslonov at the head, and, thirdly, groups of the General Headquarters intelligence directorate, as the one headed by Linkovsky originally air-dropped in the Chashnyk district, next to the Lepel one. The local populace began to go to the woods in the second half of 1942, and this assumed a mass-scale nature in 1943.”

This information is valuable, given that Posokhov never hides his negative attitude to not only Ukrainian nationalism but perhaps Ukrainians in general. Actually, almost all high-profile researchers note the absence of any serious nationwide partisan movement and hostilities between the “true” partisans (not intelligence agents and NKVD saboteurs), the police, and the Wehrmacht’s security units before 1943. As for the 201st Battalion, serious researchers with diametrically opposed ideological views agree that it was never excessively eager to fight a battle. It was sometimes ready to make a neutrality deal with the partisans (Shukhevych was also involved in this), although, as it was said above, there were also hostilities and casualties on both sides.

By force of inertia, most Ukrainians still see Soviet partisans as people’s avengers and defenders against the enemy invasion. But the reality was far more complicated and cruel than that — both in Ukraine and in Belarus. Here is an eloquent fragment of a special instruction worked out by the Central Partisan Movement Headquarters about countering the penetration of Nazi agents into partisan detachments:

“On August 10, 1943, Koroliov, the commander of the Osipovich partisan formation, reported to Moscow: ‘The Gestapo has began using Jews for espionage purposes. For example, the Minsk and Borisov Gestapo have opened nine-month courses for Jews. The spies were assigned safe houses in the city and sent to partisan detachments. They carried toxic agents to poison partisans and commanders. A spy ring of this kind was exposed in the Minsk area.” The conclusion sounds like an instruction for partisans: “The Germans are planting Jews in partisan units as intelligence agents in the hope that the partisans, who know that the Germans are severely persecuting Jews, will show more trust in them.”

Can you imagine now, in the light of this instruction, the destiny of the hapless Jews who managed to escape from concentration camps and ghettoes to the partisans? Meanwhile, these “valuable instructions” were based on the espionage paranoia that ruled supreme in all Soviet structures before, after, and especially during, the war. And, although this instruction is dated 1943, there are no grounds to believe that Soviet partisans were taking a different attitude a year before. In fact, taking into account the overall military and political situation, they were supposed to be even more distrustful of Jews, as well as their own shadows.

Now let us get back to Posokhov’s claims. He believes that the 201st Battalion was deliberately evading serious battlefield clashes and was getting ready, under Abwehr guidance, to become the UPA core unit: the woodland, where the battalion was scattered, very much resembled Volhynia, and there was an Abwehr school in Lepel to boot.

In spite of the outlandish, at first glance, nature of these claims, I would not reject them flatly but consider them calmly and impartially. For it is an indisputable fact that Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych did have contacts and cooperated with the Germans during World War II. The crux of the matter is who the main actors on the German side were.

First of all, naturally, it is Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence and counterintelligence service, as well as his subordinates: Col. Hans Oster and Col. Erwin von Lahousen (the latter was in charge of relations with the OUN).

These were the people who supervised the formation of the so-called Sushko Battalion (a special-purpose unit commanded by Col. Roman Sushko and based on agreements with the still united OUN), and the Nachtigal and Roland battalions.

These actors are very interesting. “The Abwehr chief Adm. Canaris was a convinced antifascist, but he was devoted to Germany, so direct collaboration with the British ran counter to his views… Some Abwehr units became centers of a plot against Hitler… One of these groups was headed by Col. Oster,” says Philip Knightley, a British commentator on intelligence services. Indeed, three out of five Abwehr department chiefs were conspirators.

Canaris and Oster were executed for an anti-Hitler plot on April 9, 1945. Lahousen testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, where he exposed a lot of Nazi crimes, including the activity of the Einsatzgruppen. It was discovered that Operation Sea Lion — the Nazi invasion of Britain — was canceled in 1940, not in the least because the Abwehr had furnished very overrated data on the strength of British divisions in the parent country. After that Canaris did his best to keep Spain from joining the war on Germany’s side and capturing Gibraltar. In the summer of 1943 Canaris met British and US intelligence chiefs in Santander, Spain, and offered a deal: removing Hitler from power, de-Nazifying the country, declaring a ceasefire in the West, and continuing the war in the East. The offer was rejected by the British and American political leadership.

Moreover, Canaris, as an enemy of Nazism, should be credited with saving 500 Jews, and several Jewish organizations have now applied to Yad Vashem to pronounce the Abwehr head as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Can you fancy that: the head of Hitler’s intelligence service is among the righteous who saved Jews?

These people are unlikely to have been looking for partners among their ideological adversaries in a Ukrainian camp, and it perhaps not accidental that they first turned to Andrii Melnyk and only then to Bandera and Shukhevych. Canaris, a relentless enemy of Bolshevism who turned into Hitler’s enemy in the late 1930s, needed, in the long term, a Ukraine that would be a partner to a non-Nazi Germany. So their interests coincided, and many events in 1940-43 should be examined through this prism.

Quite probably, a strong battleworthy UPA and a strong “underground Ukraine” were supposed to be the first bricks in a structure allied to a Germany liberated of Nazism. Like Shukhevych and his comrades-in-arms, Canaris considered the USSR and all kinds of totalitarianism as the main enemy and Britain, the US, and other democratic states as allies. So, as interests coincided, what was shameful for Ukrainian nationalists in this cooperation?

In other words, I think Posokhov’s hypothesis has the right to exist, but it will be difficult to accept or reject it — too many captured German documents are still hidden from the world by Soviet authorities.

Naturally, there were different people among Soviet partisans as well as OUN figures. Of course, one should not portray UPA fighters and their commanders as angels: as Vasyl Kuk, the insurgents’ last commander-in-chief, said, “we were killed, and we killed.” My aim is not to absolve Roman Shukhevych (after all, his basic political principles, inscribed in the resolutions of the 3rd Grand Assembly of Ukrainian Nationalists, have now been enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine, while the Bolshevik ideologemes are on the dumping ground, although some vested interests resort to them from time to time) but to show the incredible complexity of history and the meanness of “counter-propagandists,” national and foreign alike. And we must answer to the thunderous calls “not to rewrite history”: this tragic and true history is still to be written.