Читать книгу Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust - John-Paul Himka - Страница 19

There is a great variety of OUN and UPA documentation. Wartime OUN and UPA had well developed administrative structures that generated masses of documents. Some have been preserved by OUN members in the diaspora and have ended up in published collections as well as in archives, libraries, and museums across North America and Europe. But the richest trove is in archives in Ukraine, comprised primarily of documentation captured by the Soviets. Occasionally, too, OUN-UPA archives buried in containers for more than half a century have been unearthed.46

The most official of the OUN documents are the resolutions of the organization’s congresses and conferences as well as various programmatic documents. But aside from these, there are many other kinds of documents, including:47

 drafts of programmatic documents;

 transcripts of meetings;

 orders and instructions to units of UPA and OUN’s security service (SB OUN);

 field reports from units of UPA and SB OUN;

 SB OUN interrogation records;

 materials from OUN-UPA training courses;

 memoranda of both factions of OUN to various German offices;

 proclamations and announcements to the population.

In using OUN-UPA documents, an important factor to consider is to whom a particular document is addressed. Leader Stepan Bandera himself stated: “One program should be addressed to the members and sympathizers of nationalism, and the second for external factors. The first should be the main credo for members and sympathizers. The second program should exist for external consumption. It can change according to the circumstances and external situation.”48 Particularly with regard to documents aimed for external audiences, it is necessary to consider the time and context in which documents emerged. There were moments when OUN was close to the Germans, other moments when they were enemies, yet other moments when OUN hoped to court the Western allies. In 1941 OUN was optimistic that the Germans would be victorious, but this ceased to be the case by 1943. Earlier, OUN competed ideologically with the Germans; later it did so with the Soviets. After it became clear that Germany would lose the war and that OUN’s participation in the mass murder of Jews would blemish its reputation with the Western allies, OUN-B undertook to revise the historical record. On 27 October 1943, the OUN leadership in Ukraine issued an order to compile

c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out executions, urged the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confirm with their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.

d. Material that would clearly confirm that Poles had initiated and taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms....49

The order was sent “in strictest confidence” to “the oblast, circle, and county leaders” of OUN.

Also, we know that not every order was written down, and sometimes we have to interpret the course and meanings of actions without documentation from OUN-UPA itself.

Yet in spite of efforts to dissemble and to doctor history, OUN produced written documents that testify to antisemitism, the pursuit of ethnic cleansing, and the murder of Jews.