Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II

By Paweł Markiewicz

Unlikely Allies offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee’s ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland.

Ukrainian nationalists’ collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. Kubiiovych’s wartime experiences with Nazi politicians and administrators—greatly overlooked and only partially referenced today—not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781612496818

Paweł Markiewicz

Paweł Markiewicz currently serves as chief specialist analyst in the International Security Programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw, Poland. A native of Revere, Massachusetts, he earned his doctorate in modern Central-East European history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. His research interests include topics in twentieth-century East-Central European history, nationalist movements in the region, Polish-Ukrainian studies, and Ukrainian-German relations and Polish diaspora issues. Markiewicz was a visiting scholar at the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Kyiv and at Salem State University’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies before completing a visiting fellowship at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. He has written articles and reviews in the Slavonic and East European Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, The Polish Review, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Dzieje Najnowsze, and Polski Przegląd Dyplomatyczny, and has provided commentaries for newspapers such as the Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza.

Book preview

UNLIKELY ALLIES

Central European Studies

Charles W. Ingrao, founding editor

Paul Hanebrink, editor

Maureen Healy, editor

Howard Louthan, editor

Dominique Reill, editor

Daniel L. Unowsky, editor

Nancy M. Wingfield, editor

The demise of the Communist Bloc a quarter century ago exposed the need for greater understanding of the broad stretch of Europe that lies between Germany and Russia. For four decades the Purdue University Press series in Central European Studies has enriched our knowledge of the region by producing scholarly monographs, advanced surveys, and select collections of the highest quality. Since its founding, the series has been the only English-language series devoted primarily to the lands and peoples of the Habsburg Empire, its successor states, and those areas lying along its immediate periphery. Among its broad range of international scholars are several authors whose engagement in public policy reflects the pressing challenges that confront the successor states. Indeed, salient issues such as democratization, censorship, competing national narratives, and the aspirations and treatment of national minorities bear evidence to the continuity between the region’s past and present.

Other titles in this series:

Balkan Legacies: The Long Shadow of Conflict and Ideological Experiment in Southeastern Europe

Balázs Apor and John Paul Newman (Eds.)

On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire

Annemarie Steidl

Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria

Scott O. Moore

Croatian Radical Separatism and Diaspora Terrorism During the Cold War

Mate Nikola Tokić

Jan Hus: The Life and Death of a Preacher

Pavel Soukup

UNLIKELY ALLIES

Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II

PAWEŁ MARKIEWICZ

Purdue University Press • West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2021 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-61249-679-5 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-61249-680-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-61249-681-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-61249-682-5 (epdf)

Cover image: Hans Frank and Volodymyr Kubiiovych (National Digital Archive, Poland)

For those who supported this journey and those that questioned it

CONTENTS

Maps

Preface

1.  The Makings of Ethnic Struggle in Interwar Poland

2.  Ukraine—The German Fete

3.  Small Deeds and Great Works

4.  Grateful Traitor

5.  Token Concessions

6.  The Basis for Every Nation Is Territory

7.  They Rejoice in Our Success for Ukraine

8.  Fight and Flight

Epilogue

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Poland 1919–1939

Interwar Poland, 1919–1939. (Courtesy of Christoph Mick)

------- German-Soviet demarcation line after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939

Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Courtesy of Christoph Mick)

------ Borders 1938

—— Administrative borders under German occupation

German administrative borders after the attack on the Soviet Union

German occupation zones created from interwar Polish territory. (Courtesy of Christoph Mick)

PREFACE

JANUARY 1944. WORLD WAR II was entering what would be its final bloody stages. In the east a Soviet Red Army offensive was pushing the German Wehrmacht back west while Allied leaders were considering where and when to invade the European continent for the final assault against the Nazis. A Ukrainian weekly newsreel for that year, however, projected a different image of the war. As part of a ceremony to ring in that pivotal year in what the Germans then called Lemberg (what was previously Lwów and is currently L’viv), Volodymyr Kubiiovych,¹ head of the Ukrainian Central Committee, visited Governor Otto Wächter, the Nazi administrator of the Galicia district of the General Government—the German occupation zone carved out from part of the Second Polish Republic. Of course, this was not the first time that the erudite Kubiiovych led delegations to high-ranking German officials. Since 1940 he regularly met with Nazi officials, including General Governor Hans Frank, either informally or formally to also ring in the New Year as well as on the anniversaries of Hitler’s birthday in April and the General Government’s creation in October. During each meeting, Kubiiovych emphasized what he believed was a developing relationship between Ukrainian nationalists and the occupation regime. Wearing a double-breasted suit and greeting Wächter that January as he so often did with the other administrators—by raising and outstretching his right arm in the Nazi fascist style—this time the tall, slim, bald, bespectacled Kubiiovych expressed his concern over the Red Army’s advance toward the General Government’s borders. He pledged that the recently formed 14th Waffen SS Division Galizien consisting of young Ukrainian recruits from throughout Wächter’s district would defend the lands alongside the Wehrmacht, thereby destroying their common enemy. For Kubiiovych, who played a prominent role in urging the young men to volunteer for armed service, the division was a piece of personal pride. He reveled in the notion of contributing a Ukrainian unit under German command to the anti-Soviet struggle. As was customary, upon exchanging pleasantries and before leaving, Wächter was presented with a special gift—a large figure of a bearded St. Nicholas holding fir branches; an act that elicited smiles from both Kubiiovych and the governor.

Fast-forward seventy-six years to 2020. On January 14 Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada or parliament passed a resolution outlining events and individuals the country would commemorate throughout the year. Among those chosen was the late Volodymyr Kubiiovych. The text of the resolution explaining why he was selected to be honored on March 23 reads: "120 years since the birth of Volodymyr Kubiiovych (1900–1985), intellectual, historian, geographer, encyclopedist, public and political activist, organizer and editor-in-chief of the Entsyklopediia Ukraïnoznavstva."² Twenty years earlier the Ukrainian postal service issued a specially designed envelope on the 100th anniversary of Kubiiovych’s birth, complete with sketches of him, his encyclopedia, and his geographic atlas. Some might argue that the brief description invoked in the parliamentary resolution rather conveniently summarized who he was. However, just as for so many born and living in Poland during part of their lifetime, one question immediately comes to mind—how did Volodymyr Kubiiovych experience World War II? Some would say that how he lived through the war was inconsequential. He survived. That is what counted. It isn’t surprising that Kubiiovych’s wartime experience is omitted or overlooked as only a fraction of it is known today. Besides, what is known either stems from memoirs or encyclopedia entries written by him or from historical monographs that mentioned him in passing while discussing broader Polish-Ukrainian or German-Ukrainian topics of the period.

The lack of a convincing answer to this question motivated me to find one. After years of research, my answer is presented in the following pages. It adds what I believe is a valuable missing piece to the above description and overall image of who Volodymyr Kubiiovych was before questioning whether he is truly deserving of being recognized and honored by a country of which he was never a citizen; rather, he recognized himself as an ethnic element of the people inhabiting its ethnographic territory. I first heard of Volodymyr Kubiiovych in 2012 upon beginning my doctoral studies at the renowned Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. It was during six years of research that I came to familiarize myself with Kubiiovych’s World War II face. That is when this book began. Although at first glance it may appear so, this is not a biography of Volodymyr Kubiiovych. Rather, it is an analysis of German-Ukrainian relations during the Second World War in which Kubiiovych plays a prominent role. Three features constitute this relationship. The first is Volodymyr Kubiiovych, who headed the Ukrainian Central Committee (UTsK), formally a welfare organization that was in fact the quasi-official center of nationalist political life under German occupation. It was in that capacity that Kubiiovych represented occupied Ukrainians before General Governor Hans Frank and his administrators. To be clear, he was no Jozef Tiso, the priest turned politician who headed the German client Slovak Republic during World War II. Rather, Kubiiovych was a war professor, one of the many intellectuals involved on the side of a belligerent in the war for lost souls or the need to clearly define and differentiate a community of people from an alien or enemy community.³ The second component is Nazi German policy toward non-Germans in the General Government, something that rather successfully divided occupied society throughout the war and bestowed on Ukrainians some preferential social treatment. The last element is the cooperation between Kubiiovych and the UTsK, on the one hand, with the German occupation regime, on the other.

Certain aspects of Ukrainian nationalism and relations with Nazi Germany during World War II have already been examined by scholars in one form or another. Nevertheless, this book is the first in-depth account of German-Ukrainian cooperation in the General Government through the lens of the Ukrainian Central Committee and Volodymyr Kubiiovych from other than a strictly Ukrainian nationalist perspective. To examine this complex topic, I employ a thematic approach that is rigorously rooted in chronological methodology to fully reveal the reasons for and effects of this mutual cooperation. The first two chapters summarize the Ukrainian issue in prewar Poland and Germany while also placing Kubiiovych in the context of both. Chapter 3 looks at the Ukrainian nationalist position during the first months of war in 1939, details the divide and rule policy that the German occupiers employed, and traces the development of the Ukrainian Central Committee. The fourth chapter is an analysis of Kubiiovych’s interactions with Nazi administrators and other Ukrainian nationalists in his capacity as UTsK head before presenting how he was perceived by Poles, both in the burgeoning underground as well as in the exile government in London, and by the Soviets. Chapter 5 discusses in more detail certain aspects of the German preferential social treatment policy and how Kubiiovych reacted to it. The remaining three chapters chronicle UTsK work through Kubiiovych’s priorities amid German occupational policies to demonstrate how they affected Polish-Ukrainian relations before he and others were forced to flee west. Although the UTsK had sections in all five General Government districts, these chapters focus on the Lublin and Galicia districts for two reasons. First, the Ukrainian situation in both consumed much of Kubiiovych’s attention throughout the entire war. Second, the ethnically mixed composition of parts of the two districts were sources of prewar antagonism that unburdened themselves during occupation.

At the center of the German-Ukrainian relationship in the General Government is collaboration, a difficult aspect of national or state memory that correlates external conflicts with societal divides stemming from radicalization by foreign aggression or incurred defeats.⁴ After World War II, it was given a negative, treacherous connotation, particularly by the victorious Soviets in East Central Europe. To this day, this view resounds in discourse on collaboration and remains a lingering effect of the postwar communist school of historiography. Equating collaboration with treason only strengthens emotional reactions and leads to politicization or mythologization. For some historians, like Karel Berkhoff, this inhibited his primary goal of fully understanding German occupation in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.⁵ However, during the war, collaboration was used in a neutral sense to denote cooperation.⁶ Because of this, I have decided to use the wartime understanding as my guide in assessing the extent and effects of cooperation between Kubiiovych’s Ukrainian Central Committee and the German occupiers in the context of the changing social specificity of the war. This approach examines the relationship from the point of view of both parties who saw their relations precisely in terms of mutual cooperation.⁷

Furthermore, it would be wrong to simply reduce Kubiiovych and the UTsK to mere German collaborators since they had their own ambitious agenda that only partially overlapped with that of the Nazi occupiers. For nationalists like Kubiiovych, it meant politically achieving autonomy under German hegemony, raising ethnic awareness, creating a national elite, militarily contributing to the new European order, maintaining the physical substance of his people, and denouncing others to eliminate all those seen as rivals. As this book shows, achieving all was not a forgone conclusion. Conversely, for the Germans the character of cooperation in various parts of occupied Europe was dependent on their politics and plans for the conquered territory and its peoples.⁸ In the General Government, it was an occupier-driven phenomenon demanding explicit consent and was something the Germans were able to control for the purposes of dividing and creating an environment of discrimination that nominally favored some to eliminate others. This political web created a state of differentiation in the attitudes of occupied non-Germans. Whereas some saw subordinating to the new German norms as natural, others deemed it either an act of crossing the line of civic responsibility or as visible proof of disloyalty. During the war in the General Government, the occupier’s social preferential treatment toward the Ukrainians was seen by Poles in precisely this light, leading to increasing hostility and ultimately open violence. For the Germans, this became a side effect of their divide and rule policy.

One important aspect that is discussed throughout these pages is how Kubiiovych’s cooperation with the German occupiers influenced the difficult and at times very violent Polish-Ukrainian relationship throughout the war. This context is missing from the broader discussions of that relationship, and it is my hope that what is discussed here will not only add to that discourse but stimulate more. Additionally, the German-Ukrainian relationship in the General Government shows how cooperation with the occupation regime by a group consisting of ardent and right-wing nationalists affected the fate of the common Ukrainian farmer in eastern Galicia or the average peasant who lived among Poles in eastern Lublin and considered themselves more Orthodox than Ukrainian. As will be seen, these ordinary people often paid a very high price for Kubiiovych’s cooperation with the Germans by finding themselves caught in the occupational game that pitted Poles and Ukrainians against one another. This stands as a darker side of German-Ukrainian cooperation in the General Government during World War II.

The basis for my study is the original archival documents that I examined in Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Great Britain, the United States, and Poland. A complete list is found in the bibliography. I also incorporated memoirs, published documents, contemporary literature, and primary and secondary sources. My research was made possible through financial assistance. I was fortunate to be a recipient of the Etiuda.4 doctoral grant (2016/20/T/HS3/00237) from the National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) in Poland. This allowed me to conduct a six-month residency at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The Riochi Sasakawa Young Leadership Fellowship Foundation Grant allowed me to spend time at the University of Toronto and conduct research in the Library and Archives Canada, where the Volodymyr Kubiiovych collection containing the Ukrainian Central Committee materials is housed. The Tokyo Foundation’s SYLFF Research Abroad Grant permitted me to conduct archival research in Kiev. The Kościuszko Foundation of New York provided me with a generous doctoral scholarship, which I used to work in the Provincial Archives in Edmonton, Alberta. The Historical Faculty at the Jagiellonian University also provided me with several grants, which allowed me to conduct archival research in Great Britain and Germany. For this support, I am truly grateful.

In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that gripped the world in 2020, I was forced into a two-week precautionary quarantine after returning to Poland from Washington, D.C. Fourteen days of self-isolation proved the perfect time for editing my dissertation to a sizeable monograph length before sending my book proposal to publishers. I’m most thankful to the editorial team of Purdue University Press for agreeing to publish my manuscript as part of the long established, well-respected Central European Studies series and especially director Justin Race, who proved to be my most valuable contact throughout the entire publication process. Acquisitions assistant Susan Wegener proved invaluable and Chris Brannan assisted me in putting together the images found throughout the following pages. Katherine Purple and her team offered frank and insightful advice while shepherding the manuscript through the various stages of editing and production. My thanks to historian Christoph Mick who permitted me to use several maps that, in my opinion, will allow the reader to better envision where much of the events in this book took place. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my two anonymous reviewers. In my opinion, their positive comments and constructive criticism only made this book better.

One does not complete a project like this without the help and advice of many individuals and professionals in the field of history. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to Jan Jacek Bruski for guiding and training me to think critically during our years spent together as doctoral student–dissertation adviser in Kraków. Above all, I am envious of his knowledge of Ukrainian historical topics and very appreciative of his scrupulous and meticulous attention to detail; skills that are immensely useful in my writing. I also wish to thank Krzysztof Zamorski, Jarosław Moklak, Grzegorz Motyka, Igor Hałagida, John-Paul Himka, Jerzy Borzęcki, Gennadii Korolov, Wiktor Węglewicz, Marek Wojnar, Yuri Radchenko, Ernest Gyidel, Ray Brandon, Per Anders Rudling, Piotr Wróbel, Aleksandros Kyrou, Chris Mauriello, Brad Austin, Roman Szporluk, Anthony Bajdek, Michael James Melnyk, and Stefan Valašek. In addition, my family, close colleagues, and friends have supported me tremendously throughout this journey. My parents, Jadwiga and Jerzy, immigrated to the United States in 1963 and 1973, respectively, to make a better life for themselves and their family. They are among my greatest supporters who shared in the successes of my historical endeavors. To them I am beyond grateful. My brother Piotr, sister-in-law Michelle, and their family always gave me the necessary respite to recharge when back home in Massachusetts. My parish pastor, Reverend Andrzej Grelak, provided me with invaluable spiritual support throughout my studies. While writing my dissertation and completing my doctoral studies I lost my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, who not only experienced and survived the horrors of World War II in occupied Poland, but also supported my desire to write about it. It was also while beginning my adventure with Volodymyr Kubiiovych and the Ukrainian Central Committee that I met my better half, Justyna, who, although not a history fanatic like myself, showed deep interest in my work and accompanied me patiently throughout this entire process. Her support and compassion, especially during times of self-doubt, motivated and pushed me forward. To all I’m indebted for being able to spend more time with my head in books, translating documents, or in my secret refuge that is the past than with them.

It’s always challenging to make sense of Eastern Europe’s shifting region or city names. In a book where frontiers moved and territory was administered in various languages, every place had several different names. I decided to use well-established English names (according to Merriam Webster) for cities and regions whenever possible. For example, I use Kraków, not Cracow and L’viv, not Lvov or Lwów, but Kiev, not Kyiv. Only when quoted or described in specific contexts do such names as Lemberg, Krakau, or Kholm appear. In all other cases I used the names most common in contemporary sources and administration. Concerning names and surnames of Ukrainian (or Russian) individuals, I followed the U.S. Library of Congress system for transliteration.

Of course, any mistakes in this book are solely my own.

Paweł Markiewicz

Warsaw, Poland, December 2020

1

THE MAKINGS OF ETHNIC STRUGGLE IN INTERWAR POLAND

THE PRECURSOR TO THE ETHNIC struggle between Poles and Ukrainians during the twentieth century lay in part in their experiences under Habsburg rule. A brief synopsis is vital to understanding not only later relations but also German policy in the multiethnic lands they occupied during World War II. The partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Russia, Prussia, and Austria provided the Habsburg monarchy with a 129,000-square-kilometer province that was christened the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The title harkened back to the Latin form of the medieval Ruthenian principalities of Halych and Volodymyr, which roughly coincided with the Polish territory taken by Austria in 1772. The subjects inherited by the Habsburgs in their newly invented province were a smattering of Poles, Ukrainians (who at the time called themselves Ruthenians), Germans, and Jews. Kraków and L’viv became two crucial urban centers where culture and ethnic identity developed a mere 328 kilometers apart.¹

It was Galicia that provided a nucleus for developing national movements within the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth century. A wave of spring revolutions in Europe in 1848 led to the implementation of such liberal reforms as constitutional government. Even though efforts by democratic and noble Poles to incite a rebellion among Galician peasants toward national freedom failed in 1846, leading to the annexation of the free city-state of Kraków to Galicia, it did not temper nationalist will. Habsburg strategy to undermine rising Polish influence in the province involved invoking their most powerful weapon there—the Ukrainians. Although this early Ukrainian national movement was in its infancy, Austrian officials were quick to realize the antipathy among the predominantly peasant Ukrainians toward the Poles—they questioned Polish rights to act as spokesmen for the entire province while pledging loyalty to the dynasty above all. For their faithfulness Emperor Francis Josef deemed these early Ukrainians the Tyroleans of the east. Administrators were encouraged to, for example, recognize them as a separate nationality while Ukrainian elites demanded a division of Galicia with a separate administration and cultural identity for the eastern Ukrainian part. A Supreme Ruthenian Council, led by conservative Greek Catholic clergy and lay intelligentsia, was organized to act as a political counterweight to the Polish National Council. Ukrainians were also permitted to promote education and publication through newspapers like Dilo (Deed) and a network of Prosvita or enlightenment reading rooms scattered throughout the eastern part of the province. By 1903, Prosvita claimed 1,400 reading rooms with 66,000 members in 33 branches. These steps propelled the national movement into a decisively cultural stage. Pursuing a policy of divide and rule, officials were quick to assure Vienna that using Ukrainians aimed to paralyze Poles for the benefit of governing.²

On the heels of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which created a parliamentary monarchy, Galicia gained a degree of autonomy, albeit under the firm control of the Habsburg administration. Gravely shaken by the collapse of the January Uprising, Polish nobles elected to the newly created provincial diet and Reichsrat, or imperial council, advocated accommodation with the monarchy as a means of gaining political concessions. In doing so they relegated Ukrainians to a position of inferiority. By shifting the focus to the rising influence of Poles in the province, Vienna made various piecemeal concessions, such as making Polish the official vernacular and Polonizing higher education, to mitigate a nationalist upsurge at what was thought to be minimal cost. Unlike in the lands partitioned by Prussia or Russia, in Habsburg Galicia it was colloquially said that even the stones spoke Polish.³ Although Ukrainians lacked a native noble class, indigenous urban bourgeoisie, or merchant class, by the turn of the twentieth century they had established a secular intelligentsia that continued the national mobilization of their brethren. Much of this success was owed to the direct engagement of Ukrainian intellectuals from czarist Russia, such as Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi or Mykhailo Drahomanov, in Galicia’s political and cultural affairs. Beginning with an ideological conversion that adopted the Ukrainian ethnic self-designation, clergy and the intelligentsia began developing the idea of independence as the ultimate aim of their national movement. The Austrian authorities also acknowledged them in part by recognizing the literary Ukrainian language developed in the Russian Empire as an official language of instruction in Galician schools—an indispensable tool for preparing a cadre of national activists—yet amid Ukrainian hopes, they refused to formally divide the province along ethnic lines. A series of Ukrainian political parties—Social Democrats, National Democrats, and radicals—won seats in the imperial Reichsrat while mobilizing the peasantry for the national cause. However, Poles continued to dominate the provincial diet. This fueled antagonism in Galicia in the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914, spanning from heated political debate to political violence, such as in 1908 when a Ukrainian student assassinated the province’s Polish viceroy, Count Andrzej Potocki.⁴

Changes to the map of Europe taking shape in 1917 and 1918 proved opportune for some of the national movements in East-Central Europe. On November 11, 1918, an armistice signed in Paris brought World War I to an end. Whereas the guns fell silent along the Western Front and representatives of the Great Powers were preparing to begin the process of drawing a peace, the lands of the Habsburg monarchy presented a picture of ethnic ferment inspired in large part by the American president Woodrow Wilson’s vision of national self-determination.⁵ The erosion of Habsburg rule propelled Poles and Ukrainians in eastern Galicia to take matters into their own hands. A combination of religious (Roman versus Greek Catholic and Orthodox) and social (Polish landlords versus Ukrainian peasants) problems provided a key to the political conflicts that emerged between the two communities.⁶ Contemporary historians describe the events in and around contested L’viv that fall in terms of two concurrent national uprisings, part of a greater regional civil war raging from 1918 to 1921.⁷ In the early morning hours of November 1, 1918, Ukrainians began disarming ethnic Poles in the city. Ukrainian civilians, primarily high school and university students, joined military patrols. Local Poles soon organized makeshift self-defense units, also consisting of young students, and attacked the Ukrainians. On November 9, with fighting in the city raging, the West Ukrainian National Republic was proclaimed by the recently established Ukrainian National Council. Fighting Ukrainians were transformed into crude units of a Ukrainian Galician Army, which succeeded in pushing as far west as Przemyśl before losing it three days later. Following a brief stalemate in which Ukrainians were able to mobilize more fighters and push the Poles into a defensive position around L’viv, in March 1919 the Poles mounted an offensive with recently arrived well-trained military reinforcements, particularly from among the Polish army, consisting of exiles that fought in France, and pushed the Ukrainians out of eastern Galicia by May. Several months later, the West Ukrainian government fled to Vienna. Lasting about six months, the interwar legacy of the Polish-Ukrainian War enshrined the event as both the defense of historic territory by fallen Polish heroes and, as Ukrainians saw it, a failed precursor to their nation-state aspirations whose dead were immortalized into a political cult that spanned the princes of medieval Rus and the Cossacks. It was this legacy that created resentment, animosity, and hostility toward Poland, which became an enemy for Ukrainian nationalists.⁸

For Poles, the eastern Galicia episode was just one in a series of six concurrent struggles they found themselves in between 1918 and 1921. The gravest conflict was the Polish-Soviet War. Small skirmishes between the Polish and Red armies following the withdrawal of German troops from the eastern front in early 1919 outside of Brest-Litovsk were the catalyst to conflict. With Soviet Russia in the throes of a civil war and the Red Army under pressure from all sides, the Polish army went on the offensive. By September they controlled territory beyond Minsk, including a series of river lines extending south through the Pripet Marshes.⁹ As winter set in and their advance stalled, Poles looked to the West for weapons or to put pressure on the Soviets to sue for peace. However, the Allied leaders in Paris were suspicious of the land grab that Polish commander-in-chief Józef Piłsudski launched in the east, seeking to reclaim much of what was once Polish territory with the aim of creating a federation of nations—Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia—to check Soviet influence. To those at Versailles these wanton acts of self-determination went far beyond the eastern boundary that British Lord Curzon proposed for an ethnic Polish state. For their part, the French grew tired of Polish territorial ambitions, particularly since they risked alienating Russia, a country Paris believed could once again become an ally. The British were more skeptical of the chances of Polish victory. Prime Minister David Lloyd George even urged the Poles to begin peace negotiations with the Soviets.¹⁰

Unable to gain Allied support, Piłsudski turned to Symon Petliura, head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), who settled behind Polish lines after being forced out of central Ukraine by battling revolutionary Red and counterrevolutionary White forces in the throes of the Russian civil war. Piłsudski supported the idea of a Ukrainian state beyond eastern Galicia for tactical reasons—to weaken Soviet Russia and create a future buffer for Poland. For Petliura, this was a last-ditch effort to preserve his crumbling state. An alliance, concluded on April 20, 1920, included Petliura conceding western Volhynia and eastern Galicia to Poland. Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia saw this as an act of betrayal.¹¹ On April 25, 1920, the joint Polish-Ukrainian armies launched an offensive that captured Kiev on May 7, 1920. However, in June and July, the Red Army broke through the joint lines in eastern Galicia. By the beginning of August, five Soviet armies were approaching the suburbs of Warsaw. As defenses held firm and repulsed the Red Army at the Vistula bridgehead, Polish forces cut through the Soviet rear, encircling the Red Army and routing them. As the Poles began to march on Moscow unopposed, Lenin sued for peace.¹²

Part of the Polish-Soviet War were the other national movements that Poles encountered. In the north, Piłsudski sent troops to Lithuania with the intent of not only pushing the Soviets further east but also taking Vilnius, his birthplace, once and for all. Beginning in May 1919, this undeclared dirty war saw regions change hands between Soviets, Lithuanians, and Poles multiple times before an informal truce was reached in November 1920 following a mutiny staged by Polish forces in Vilnius in spite of Allied protests. Similar to Ukrainians in Galicia, the conflict significantly deepened the nationalization and militarization of Lithuanian society as well as their animosity toward Poland. In the center, Piłsudski aimed to win over a Belarusian national movement to his idea of federalism. He was prepared to offer Minsk cultural autonomy but not political; something that did not sit well with leaders representing a Belarusian National Republic. However, once Polish forces occupied western Belarusian lands, a policy of forced Polonization, which fed anti-Polish sentiments, was launched and Belarusian cultural autonomy was never implemented. Although Piłsudski paid lip service in public to the idea of a Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian-Ukrainian federation, privately he voiced misgivings about its success.¹³

Following an armistice in October 1920 and a series of negotiations, the Riga Treaty officially concluded the Polish-Soviet War on March 18, 1921.¹⁴ This treaty ensured that Lord Curzon’s idea was dead as Poland’s new eastern border lay about 400 kilometers east of his proposed line. It formally divided the contested borderlands into Polish and Soviet sides, splitting the Belarusian and Ukrainian populations into two halves with Poland gaining western Volhynia and eastern Galicia, while recognizing the existence of the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics. Furthermore, agreement with the Soviets caused Piłsudski to abandon his alliance with Petliura, whose forces were routed by the Red Army. In forsaking the last territories held in Podolia in November 1920, Petliura and what remained of his army were interned by their former allies in Poland, where the UNR functioned during the interwar years as an exile governing and émigré center.¹⁵

Post–World War I Poland stood alienated from the majority of its large or small neighbors and was not the regional alliance of smaller states that Piłsudski had hoped for. In addition to the territory gained via the Riga Treaty, following a series of peace conferences organized by the Allies, the Habsburg Empire was dismantled and its Ukrainian lands were divided among Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Yet to the dismay of nationalists like Roman Dmowski and his National Democratic Party (Endecja), the new Poland was not a tight-knit ethnically homogenized Poland for the Poles but became the largest multiethnic country in East-Central Europe that included large groups of Jews, Germans, Belarusians, and Ukrainians as well as smaller Russian, Tartar, Czechoslovak, and Lithuanian diasporas. Ukrainians, constituting the largest ethnic minority (16 percent), primarily inhabited four newly created administrative provinces or voivodships: Lwow, Stanislalow, Tarnopol, and Wołyń (Volhynia). Excluding Volhynia, the three southeastern voivodships came to be collectively called by Polish nationalists Eastern Little Poland. To prevent regional integration between Ukrainians in southeastern Poland and their less nationally conscious brethren in Volhynia, the Polish government implemented an internal boundary. The so-called Sokal border mimicked the old frontier between the Habsburg and czarist empires and largely fragmented Ukrainians in eastern Poland. Smaller Ukrainian enclaves also dotted the southern and eastern regions of the Kraków voivodship and the eastern portion of the Lublin one. Over 90 percent of Ukrainians were peasant farmers living in villages or small towns while cities were primarily home to Poles and Jews.¹⁶ To bolster the small rural populations in southeastern Poland, especially in Volhynia, so-called military colonists (osadnicy), Polish war veterans and their families, were awarded large tracts of land for their service. The presence of these veterans—deemed by locals as squatters, thieves, and enemies of the people—only added to the Ukrainian peasants’ already growing irritation over the fact that they owned little land despite efforts to obtain more.¹⁷

A problem for Poland throughout the interwar period was the status of ethnic minorities, something that often undermined domestic stability while alienating potential partners. In the western provinces inhabited by the German minority, land reform overwhelmingly targeted large German estates. Germans in Upper Silesia’s industrial sector were discriminated against and suffered high unemployment rates. Overall, ethnic Germans in prewar Poland were quietly hostile toward the state. Supported by the Weimar and later the Nazi government, they formed various organizations and engaged in anti-Polish agitation and propaganda in one form or another.¹⁸ The largely unassimilated Jewish minority, inhabiting urban centers and poor shtetls, was hesitant to abandon its distinct otherness in the face of growing Polish nationalism. Poles became weary of Jewish loyalty to the new state, particularly since some voted in plebiscites for inclusion into Germany or fought with the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Bolsheviks against the Poles. Thus, early governments dominated by the National Democrats enacted antisemitic policies that promoted emigration. Between 1921 and 1931 about 400,000 Jews left Poland for the United States or Palestine. Amid the Great Depression, Poles boycotted Jewish shops and industries in response to their domination of trade and industry. Anti-Jewish hostilities were deemed a form of national self-defense in interwar Poland. This included damaging Jewish properties, physical harassment, and assault or murder of individuals or targeted groups. Most striking were the restrictions imposed to limit the number of Jews in professions or higher education. In the latter, so-called ghetto benches segregated Jews from Poles in lecture halls.¹⁹

Affirming their recognition over its eastern border, the Allies obligated Poland to grant autonomous status to Ukrainians inhabiting former eastern Galicia for a period of twenty-five years, after which a plebiscite would be held. However, due to the fact that the American Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty, thereby no longer participating in conference work, and the French and British soon suspended the decision on eastern Galicia, this was never implemented, meaning that the Ukrainian issue shifted from the international arena to an internal Polish question.²⁰ Developing a policy toward the large Ukrainian minority presented problems for Polish governments. Moderates and nationalists around Piłsudski adhered to a principle of state assimilation while conservatives and right-wing ultranationalists favoring the National Democrats tended to see national assimilation or Polonization as the only course. Endecja-dominated governments introduced policies marginalizing Ukrainian administrative, educational, religious, and economic life. Among these were education and language reforms enacted in 1924 that came to be known as the Lex Grabski (named after Stanisław Grabski, minister of religious affairs and public education and brother of Prime Minister Władysław Grabski). Against the letter of the Minorities Treaty signed in 1919 between Poland and the Allies that permitted primary education in the minority language, the reforms either severely limited or completely replaced Ukrainian primary schools with bilingual, functionally Polish ones. Nearly two-thirds of schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction were shut down between 1924 and 1926. During the 1927/28 school year, 835 Ukrainian elementary schools existed. By the 1936/37 school year that number dropped by almost half to 496. Conversely, the number of dual-language schools rose in number from 2,121 to 2,710, a direct result of the reforms.²¹ In addition, the Grabski government also trifled with the idea of a Ukrainian university. Whereas Ukrainians demanded one, the government approved a project to create an institute at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. This did not satisfy Ukrainians and the issue remained unresolved. A language policy was also implemented in which Polish was deemed the official vernacular at the state and local levels, in the army, and in such public institutions as railroad stations and post offices. A subsequent government regulation forbade the use of the term Ukrainian, allowing in its place the term Ruthenian (ruski) to describe Ukrainians in eastern Galicia and western Volhynia.²² These policies alienated Ukrainians, serving as evidence that the Polish state was an occupier rather than a legitimate authority. The growing frustrations opened the door for Soviet foreign policy to win over these disgruntled souls by showcasing tolerance toward minorities in the face of discrimination with the goal of undermining Polish rule throughout the borderland regions.²³

One sector where Ukrainians flourished in interwar Poland was the cooperative movement. By the end of the 1930s, around 3,500 cooperatives included some 700,000 members and employed 15,000 Ukrainians who were not afforded employment by the state. Aside from this, publications were founded and political or cultural activity was supported. One of the most successful cooperatives was the Maslosoiuz, an exporter of butter and dairy products to Europe. However, the Polish government did limit cooperative activity to eastern Galicia. Galician Ukrainians also organized other strong organizations. The Prosvita or enlightenment cultural society had over 11,000 members in 1925 and sponsored over 2,000 reading halls. The Ridna Shkola educational society established and maintained private schools while Plast, the scouting organization, contained some 6,000 members before being officially banned in 1930. A wom-en’s union was active and vocal. Meanwhile, the Volhynia region remained a primarily Ukrainian agricultural backwater.²⁴

Józef Piłsudski’s May 1926 coup d’état marked a significant shift in the state’s Ukrainian policy. Piłsudskite governments promoted a line of assimilation, or loyalty to Poland in exchange for Ukrainian individualization, selectivity, and regionalization. Ideas turned into experiments and initiatives, not only from government institutions but also from indirectly linked government agencies. A chief Piłsudskite pillar centered around local governments and self-administration, seen as the keys to breaking Ukrainian separatism and slowly assimilating them into the state. The government planned on conducting elections at the local level and allowing qualified, loyal Ukrainians into the civil service. However, some Endecja regulations remained in place. For example, Polish remained the only state language while the position of Polish land ownership in strategically important regions was strengthened.²⁵ Perhaps the most grandiose state assimilation experiment was conducted by Henryk Józewski, Piłsudski’s confidant and later voivode, or governor, of Volhynia. Józewski envisioned gaining Ukrainian loyalty through encouraging cultural development. In western Volhynia, cooperatives and theaters were subsidized from state funds while Józewski pushed the Orthodox Church to use Ukrainian during sermons and sponsored political representation through the Volhynian Ukrainian Alliance Party. He also made strides to place language education on an equal standing by making Ukrainian a mandatory subject in Polish schools or by demanding various subjects also be taught in Ukrainian in bilingual ones.²⁶

As governments oscillated between policies of assimilation, Ukrainians formed political parties to voice their grievances and desires at the state level. The largest of these was the Ukrainian National-Democratic Union (UNDO). Following the fusion of several moderate nationalist groups in L’viv in 1925, UNDO began publishing a daily newspaper, Dilo, and maintained close relations with cooperatives, Prosvita, and the women’s union. Although the party considered state rule in southeastern Poland illegitimate, it participated in elections, respected the rules of democracy, vocally criticized state policies, and worked toward improving cultural, political, and social life for Ukrainians. UNDO members believed in negotiating with the Polish government but rejected terror and violence to achieve that purpose. From 1935 to 1939, UNDO party leader Vasyl Mudryi served as deputy speaker of the Polish Sejm. Besides UNDO, a Communist Party of Western Ukraine was briefly active, being banned in 1923 while the crypto-communist Ukrainian Peasant-Worker Union (Sel-Rob) was banned in the 1930s.²⁷

Besides political parties, illegal organizations also appeared. Arising amid the political chaos resulting from the failure to build a Ukrainian state, radical nationalists espoused the virtues of organization, authority, solidarity, and faith as essential to mobilizing Ukrainian masses toward achieving their ultimate goal of independence.²⁸ A phenomenon that appeared in all Ukrainian émigré groups during the early twentieth century, it especially resonated and engrained itself among members of the Sich Riflemen, a Ukrainian unit within the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, some of whose members later joined the UNR Army, forming a regular unit under the same name, and the Ukrainian Galician Army. The key persona was former rifleman Ievhen Konovalets’, whose vision led to the formation of a radical nationalist youth group in eastern Galicia in 1921 and later the paramilitary Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO). He was joined in his endeavors by fellow veteran and colleague Andrii Mel’nyk, among others. UVO represented a transition between formations of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 and those later in World War II.²⁹ The combination