Holocaust in Reichskommissariat Ukraine: the map
The atrocities against the Jewish population during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, formed on 20 August 1941,[11] was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre,[12][13] and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan,[14] Lviv,[15][16] Lutsk,[17] and Zhytomyr.[18]
On September 1, 1941, Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote: "The element that settled our cities (Jews)... must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved."[19]
Reinforced through religious prejudice, anti-Semitism had turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[20]
Also, the murders of prisoners by the Soviet secret police retreating eastward, were blamed on the Jews. Antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian militias which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[20] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, with population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd – who had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square – 24 hours to act as they wished against the Polish Jews; they were forced to clean the dead bodies, to dance, and then killed by beating with axes, pipes, etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany.
During Lviv pogroms, some 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists led by People's Militia.[20][21][22] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[23]
While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given choice of enlisting for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet POW camps, due to ongoing close relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung.[24] In total, over 5,000 native Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army signed up for training with the SS at a special Trawniki training camp, to assist with the Final Solution.[25] Another 1,000 of them defected during during field operations.[25]
Trawniki men took major part in the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews during Operation Reinhard. They served at all extermination camps, and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see the Stroop Report) and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising among other ghetto insurgencies.[26] Ukrainian natives were offered choice unavailable to Russian soldiers dying of starvation and exposure in the POW camps for the Red Army.[27] The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted, and always overlooked by Volksdeutsche.[28] Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.[29][30]
In May 2006, the Ukrainian newspaper Ukraine Christian News commented: "Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine."[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaborationism_with_the_Axis_powers#Holocaust