The ss Volunteer Galicia Division
In spring 1943, after the stunning German defeat at Stalingrad, Nazi authorities belatedly decided to recruit non-German “easterners” into their forces. Consequently, Otto Wächter, the Governor of Galicia, approached the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) with a proposal to form a Ukrainian division in the German army. The head of the UCC Volodymyr Kubiiovych and his associates agreed to that proposal as they hoped that the formation of Ukrainian division in the German army would improve the treatment of Ukrainians in Galicia. They also hoped that the division could be used in the future as the basis for the creation of Ukrainian military forces which would fight for an independent Ukraine. The OUN-M supported the idea of creating the Galician Division, but the OUN-B was against it. Their leaders considered the division as a competitor attracting the youth who could otherwise join the UPA.
Germans insisted that the entire higher divisional command be German. The UCC proposed to put the word Ukrainian in the name of the division, but the Germans refused. They did not want to give Ukrainians hopes for independence. Besides, the Nazis believed that Galicians were not Ukrainians, but a rather different ethnos. The idea of the division was met with great enthusiasm among West Ukrainians. When the UCC called for volunteers in June 1943, over 82,000 men responded to fight against Ukraine’s “most terrible enemy - Bolshvism.” Of these, 13,000 eventually became members of the SS Volunteer Galicia Division.
It should be noted, however, that the name SS in this case did not mean that Ukrainians accepted the Nazi ideology or became an elite fascist military unit. They were an ordinary military division which was just subordinated to the SS command and were officially called the Volunteer Galicia Division of Waffen SS (which meant SS subordination). In 1944 the Division was almost destroyed in its first fight against the Soviets at Brody in Western Ukraine. Out of 13,000 only 3,000 escaped. Then, after replenishment, it was used against partisans in Slovakia (1944) and Yugoslavia (1945). The division surrendered to Americans in May 1945 in Austria.
The men of the Galician Division were not the only Ukrainians in Hitler’s armies. Of the approximately 1 million former Soviet citizens who wore German uniforms in 1944 about 220,000 (or 250,000 according to other data) were Ukrainians (most of the others were Russians). About 6 million Ukrainians fought on the Soviet side and large numbers also fought in Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, American, and Canadian forces. Such was the fate of a stateless people. It is interesting to note that practically all Ukrainians and many Russians know about the SS Galicia Division while only a few people know about two Russian SS divisions in the German army.
The Cost of the War
The Second World War had brought a lot of suffering to Ukraine and its inhabitants. About 5.5 million, or one of six inhabitants of Ukraine,13 perished in the conflict. An additional 2.3 million had been shipped to Germany to work as slaves. Over 700 cities and towns (40% of all Soviet cities and towns destroyed in the war) and 28,000 villages were destroyed. The inhabitants of 250 Ukrainian villages were totally executed as hostages. That was the result of collective responsibility tactics used by Germans to punish Soviet partisans and their helpers. For comparison, only one village with its inhabitants was destroyed in France and one in Czechoslovakia.
Ukraine suffered more than any other nation in WWII. According to official statistics Ukraine lost 5.5 million of civil population (according to different data, from 850,000 to 2,25 million of them were Jews14), meanwhile as Belorussia lost 2.2 million, Russia – 1.8 million, Lithuania – 666,000, Latvia – 644,000, Estonia – 125,000. Ukraine’s military losses (2.5 million) were less than those of Russia (3-4 million). But if we count the total number of Ukrainians perished in the war, the number will amount to approximately 8 million. That is by 2-3 million more than Russia and by 2.5 million more than Germany.
1 One fifth (20%) of the deported from Western Ukraine were ethnic Ukrainians, the predominant majority were the Poles.
2 For comparison, in the Stalingrad battle of over 300, 000 German army 91 000 were taken prisoner.
3 These units consisted of former members of the Carpathian Sich, who were taken prisoner by Hungarians but then released.
4 Protectorate means a country that is controlled and protected by a more powerful country
5 They were reorganized into a single battalion and served in Belarus until the end of 1942, when the unit was dissolved and most of its Ukrainian officers were arrested.
6 The Nazis also executed people who were mentally ill and homosexuals.
7 About 200 000 of them decided not to return to the USSR after the war because they feared repressions. They settled in Western Europe and North America.
8For political reasons Soviet historians gave exaggerated numbers: 200,000 or even 500,000.
9 Petliura was not popular among OUN members for his ‘betrayal’ of Western Ukraine to the Poles in 1920.
10 Nationalistic historians usually give exaggerated numbers such as 100,000 or 300,000.
11 Some Polish historians give extremely politicized and unrealistic data such as 200,000 or even 600,000. Ukrainian historians usually write about 35.000 killed.
12 Some historians name other number – 400,000.
13 The equivalents for Germany, France and Britain were one in fifteen, one in seventy-seven and one in a hundred and twenty-five.
14 Jewish historians usually tend to exaggerate the number (over 2 million), to show the extent of the Holocaust and to justify the restoration of Israel in 1947. Independent historians calculated that from 850,000 to 1 million Jews perished in Ukraine in WW II. Jews made up a quarter of Soviet Ukraine’s city population in 1926; in the 1960-70s – 3-4 percent. Western Ukraine lost almost all her Jewish people as a result of the war.