The Ukrainian nazi sympathizers were strange -- like collaborating with your murderers
Considering that the Soviets starved 3 (?) million of them to death in the 1930s, why be surprised at Ukrainians’ WWII sympathies. History of the period is more complicated than the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of Big Bad Nazis that we have been taught, and taught and taught. Hollywood entertainment vehicle products are not history, I’m afraid. (A Chinese dissident has just died in prison, according to this morning’s WSJ, while we’re deeply concerned and outraged about some old Latvians who served the Germans 75 years ago!)
The lands of Poland and eastward have for centuries been multiethnic, long before the Brave New World term Multi-Culti was invented, and the sympathies for the principals in WWII varied among all the ethnic groups there for various historical reasons dating back to the 19th century at least, and later the appearance of independent nations after WWI in which these ethnic groups found themselves, often against their will, sometimes preferring the old order of one of the three empires that had ruled the area. American believers in the simplistic fairy tale of history would go jump from the nearest bridge if they really knew who there and when greeted whose armies as liberators during WWII. I heard some true stories about it from old timers in Eastern Europe when I visited a dozen years ago. To those who live there today the scourge of the past century has been murderous Communism, while German nationalism came and went. Understanding what happened is not the same as excusing anyone.
Poles were singled out, because of centuries intermixing with Germanic people, Germans feared that they still had enough Aryan blood to be a threat to the Germans. Compare that to the Nazis attitudes towards their neighbors to the South, the Slovaks. German rule over Slovakia was fairly benign, even installing a Puppet government with “Father” Tiso.