A little history on the push of the Third Reich into the Soviet Union in 1942. The Polish government had been knocked flat in 1940 by the blitzkrieg, that overwhelmed what was the largest horse cavalry in the world, the panzer tanks cutting through the Polish ranks like a knife through butter. German troops were massed on the western border of the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and the Ukrainians, weary of their yoke under Stalin, actually welcomed the Germans. Many of them freely joined with the Nazis, as the advance was made on Mother Russia itself, until the advance was halted at Stalingrad, over the winter of 1942 and 1943. The siege of Stalingrad was not as complete as Hitler’s generals thought it should be, and the Wehrmacht was put through a meat grinder. It was just that the Russians defending Stalingrad outlasted them, and in the spring of 1943, the Eastern Front had to retreat through the lands they had so triumphantly conquered only two years earlier. Virtually all the Ukrainians that had sided with the Nazis either fled in the wake of the retreating Germans, or were slaughtered by the vengeful Red Army. Germany became the one place of relative safety for those Ukrainians who escaped the wrath of Stalin’s advancing horde, and made up a large part of the “stateless” displaced persons, or DPs, after the end of hostilities in 1945. Few of the Ukrainians accepted repatriation to their native land, for they knew what awaited them there, and they remained in Germany or spread even further west, to England and
France, where some went on to become citizens.
So in the eyes of the minions of the Soviet Union, the politically unreliable Ukrainians all became, in their terms “Nazis”, a prejudice that holds to this day.
My Grandmother was one of those Ukrainian workers in Germany.