Posted on 07/16/2022 6:05:55 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Beginning in 2014, when the Maidan uprising brought a new government to Ukraine, the country has been erecting monuments to Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators at an astounding pace — there’s been a new plaque or street renaming nearly every week. Because of this, the Ukraine section represents an extremely partial listing of the several hundred monuments, statues, and streets named after Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.
L’viv and Ivano-Frankivsk — 1.5 million Jews, a quarter of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust, came from Ukraine. Over the past six years, the country has been institutionalizing worship of the paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with the Nazis and aided in the slaughter of Jews, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which massacred thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles. A major figure venerated in today’s Ukraine is Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), the Nazi collaborator who led a faction of OUN (called OUN-B); above are his statues in L’viv (left) and Ivano-Frankivsk (right). Many thanks to Per Anders Rudling, Tarik Cyril Amar and Jared McBride for their guidance on Ukrainian collaborators.
Ternopil and numerous other cities — Another statue of Bandera in Ternopil. Above left is a photo from Zhovkva 1941, when OUN members welcomed the Nazis, assisting with their murder of Jews. The banners include “Heil Hitler!” and “Glory to Bandera!”
Ukraine has several dozen monuments and scores of street names glorifying this Nazi collaborator, enough to require two separate Wikipedia pages (there are so many Bandera streets that only a few are listed in this project).
Kyiv — In 2016, a major Kyiv boulevard was renamed after Bandera. The renaming is particularly obscene since the street leads to Babi Yar, the ravine where Nazis, aided by Ukrainian collaborators, exterminated 33,771 Jews in two days, in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the World Jewish Congress condemned the move.
Above right, the annual torchlight march on Bandera’s birthday in 2021; during the 2017 commemorations marchers chanted “Jews Out!”
Krakovets, L’viv and numerous other towns — Monuments to Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), another OUN figure and Nazi collaborator who was a leader in Nazi Germany’s Nachtigall auxiliary battalion, which later became the 201st Schutzmannschaft auxiliary police unit. Shukhevych later commanded the brutal Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for butchering thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles.
The World Jewish Congress condemned the glorification of Shukhevych and the statue in Ivano-Frankivsk.
Ternopil — A bust of the genocidal Yaroslav Stetsko (1912–1986), who led Ukraine’s 1941 Nazi-collaborationist government which welcomed the Germans and declared allegiance to Hitler. A rabid antisemite, Stetsko had written “I insist on the extermination of the Jews and the need to adapt German methods of exterminating Jews in Ukraine.” Five days prior to the Nazi invasion, Stetsko assured OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera: “We will organize a Ukrainian militia that will help us to remove the Jews.”
He kept his word — the German invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by horrific pogroms with the incitement and eager participation of OUN nationalists. The initial L’viv pogrom alone had 4,000 victims. By the war’s end, Ukrainian nationalist groups massacred tens of thousands of Jews, both in cooperation with Nazi death squads and on their own volition.
Below right, Stetsko’s signature on the Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood with a pledge to “work closely with National-Socialist Greater Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.”
L’viv — A memorial plaque to Dmytro Paliiv (1896–1944), co-founder and SS-Hauptsturmführer of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) aka SS Galichina, unveiled 2007. SS Galichina was formed as a division in the Waffen-SS in 1943; among the formation’s war crimes is the Huta Pieniacka massacre, when an SS Galichina subunit slaughtered 500–1,200 Polish villagers, including burning people alive.
Below left, a march in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), western Ukraine, 1941; below right, a march celebrating the 71st anniversary of SS Galichina’s founding, L’viv, western Ukraine, 2014. L’viv’s 2018 march consisted of hundreds giving coordinated Nazi salutes.
Bystrychi and five other locales – A memorial plaque to Taras Bulba-Borovets (1908–1973), the collaborator appointed by the Nazis to head the Ukrainian militia in the Sarny district. Bulba-Borovets’ men organized and carried out numerous pogroms, slaughtering the area’s Jews. In addition to the plaque in his native village, Bulba-Borovets has another plaque in Olevsk, a monument in Berezne and streets in Lutsk, Ovruch and Zhytomyr.
In 1940, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) split into two factions: OUN-M, led by Melnyk and OUN-B, led by Stepan Bandera. Melnyk’s faction was every bit as genocidal as Bandera’s – an OUN-M newspaper gleefully celebrated the liquidation of Kyiv’s Jews at Babi Yar (see Ivan Rohach entry below).
The OUN-M remained allied with the Nazis, same as the OUN-B. Germany’s 1941 invasion of Ukraine was welcomed with banners and proclamations such as “Glory to Hitler! Glory to Melnyk!”
Chernivtsi – A memorial to the Bukovinsky Kuren, a large paramilitary formation comprised of OUN-M members (see Andryi Melnyk entry above). The unit was originally formed in the Ukrainian-Romanian region of Bukovina and headed for Kyiv after the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941. According to several reports, the unit marched into Kyiv around the time of the Babi Yar massacre, when the Nazis, aided by Ukrainian nationalists, gunned down 33,771 Jews in two days in one of the most horrific massacres of the Holocaust.
Afterward, much of the Bukovinsky Kuren was reformed into the 115th and the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalions. The Schutzmannschaft were auxiliary police battalions composed of local collaborators in the Soviet Union, primarily Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics. They were under the Ordnungspolizei which was controlled by the SS. These battalions played a crucial role in both the war and the Holocaust: Germany used them to suppress anti-Nazi resistance and carry out the genocide by rounding Jews up in ghettos as well as slaughtering them in nearby fields and forests. Often, the Schutzmannschaft committed war crimes against Jews, other ethnicities such as the Roma and civilians on their own volition, not just under Nazi orders. (For more, see work by Martin Dean.)
Chernivtsi – A memorial to the Bukovinsky Kuren, a large paramilitary formation comprised of OUN-M members (see Andryi Melnyk entry above). The unit was originally formed in the Ukrainian-Romanian region of Bukovina and headed for Kyiv after the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941. According to several reports, the unit marched into Kyiv around the time of the Babi Yar massacre, when the Nazis, aided by Ukrainian nationalists, gunned down 33,771 Jews in two days in one of the most horrific massacres of the Holocaust.
Two platoons of the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion distinguished themselves by perpetrating the 1943 Khatyn massacre, when they liquidated a Belarusian village by burning the inhabitants alive and gunning down anyone who tried to escape. (See the New York Times on one of the perpetrators who had emigrated to Canada.)
Zhyznomyr – This village has a plaque to OUN-M member Oleksa Babiy (1909–1944) who directly participated in the Babi Yar massacre while serving in the Sonderkommando 4a unit of Einsatzgruppe C, the SS death squad that bears primary responsibility for the slaughter. Two years later, Babiy became an officer in SS Galichina, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division (see Volodymyr Kubiyovych entry below for more on SS Galichina). Above right, Jews forced to undress and give up possessions before being shot in Babi Yar. See Yad Vashem testimonies here.
Kyiv and two other locales – A street named for OUN-M member Ivan Rohach (1914–1942). A virulent antisemite, Rohach published and edited the Ukrayins’ke Slovo, an OUN-M newspaper which vociferously advocated for the genocide of Ukraine’s Jews. On October 2, 1941, three days after Germans and Ukrainian collaborators exterminated 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, Rohach ran an editorial titled “The Jew Is the Greatest Enemy of the People,” calling on Ukrainians to show Jews no mercy (above left).
A week later, he ran an article urging readers to be on the lookout for any Jewish survivors hiding in the city. The same week, the Ukrayins’ke Slovo celebrated the improved life in Kyiv, praising the abundance of “unoccupied” housing which had suddenly become available. (This housing was Jewish homes rendered “unoccupied” by the slaughter of their inhabitants.)
(article continues on a great deal more, see original link for full article and pictures)
How did all those Nazi collaborators escape the wrath of Stalin?
Red Army=“Every woman between 8 and 80”
Nobody cares who hands them a rifle afterwards.
George Soros loves Ukraine.
He sent over 100 Jewish people to their death during WW2.
Well, you’ve got some nerve saying that!!!
ALL HONOR TO YOU!!!
Your analysis and historical knowledge is correct...but...
There’s one thing that all those mutually antagonistic, feuding ethnic groups all believed and agreed on—IT SURE IS FUN AND PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE TO KILL JEWS! THE UKRAINIANS ARE ALL FOR THE OLD TRADITION!
I POSTED A PRIVATE TO YOU. PLEASE READ IT.
DITTOS!
DITTOS! BRAVO! ALL HONOR TO YOU!
thanks for nice message. Respect
watch the nazi death squads documentary it shows all of this. The Nazis in control of these towns in the Ukraine used locals and the local police to do the dirty work while they filmed it.
Which we can expect it would require of notoriously corrupt Ukraine (whose freedom Evangelicals support) if conquered. (While Evangelicals constitute only 2% of the population the Ukrainian public has elected some 500 evangelicals into office at all levels of government).
Of course, the liberal West works to make Ukraine and the rest of the world to war against God, as it does.
Yes, as you point out antisemitism is a cultural thread that runs through all those groups. In some of the groups the thread is thin and under normal circumstances inconsequential. In others it’s near the surface and easily stirred up in a people when a scapegoat is needed to blame the failures of the ruling regime on. A very common tactic in Czarist Russia as well as the USSR - e.g., The Doctor’s Plot. The West of course is not immune, there’s the most famous horrific German example. You see it still, e.g., the growing “Palestinians-Can-Do-No-Wrong-The-Israelis-Can-Do-No-Right!” notion that’s popular with the ‘Nouveau Left’ in Europe & the US. It’s gone on for 1000+ years.
No one has said there are no neo-nazis in Ukraine. They have said the numbers are very small. Probably no more than in the USSR, er, Russia. I suggest you look up the Sparta Battalion as well as Putin’s favorite motorcycle club. https://www.booktopia.com.au/putin-s-fascists-robert-horvath/book/9780367474133.html?source=pla
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