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)
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Rather curious that the USSR used to run the place.
This only happened once the Ukraine became independent?
Or were they anti-Soviet, and accepting alliances where they could find them?
I know nothing about the history of these groups, but accusations of Nazism, in this day and age, I find absurd.
Remember Godwin's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forward#Jewish_Daily_Forward_Building
“At the peak of its circulation, The Forward erected a ten-story office building at 175 East Broadway on the Lower East Side, designed by architect George Boehm and completed in 1912. It was a prime location, across the street from Seward Park. The building was embellished with marble columns and panels and stained glass windows. The facade features carved bas relief portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels[37] (who co-authored, with Marx, The Communist Manifesto), and Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the first mass German labor party.”
I don’t understand, we’ve been told there are no Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Fighting the Soviets who had a policy of starving Ukraine does not make you a Nazi collaborator.
RussoNazi propaganda.
This article is about Ukrainians of today, from 2014 onward honoring actual Nazis with statues and street names.
It is clear you didn’t read even the first paragraph of this article before dismissing it.
Do Finns of today erect statues of Nazis who mass murdered thousands, and name streets after them?
As a response to this article, your response makes no sense at all.
They are hiding under beds, doncha know...
I'm sorry, that still sounds more like a committed anti-communist who cooperated with the Nazi regime for a time than an actual Nazi.For a time, Bandera collaborated with Nazi Germany. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he prepared the 30 June 1941 Proclamation of Ukrainian statehood in Lviv, pledging to work with Nazi Germany. For his refusal to rescind the decree, Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and on 5 July 1941 held under house arrest. After January 1942 Bandera was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp but kept in special, comparatively comfortable detention. In 1944, with Germany rapidly losing ground in the war in the face of the advancing Allied armies, Bandera was released in the hope that he would be instrumental in deterring the advancing Soviet forces. He set up the headquarters of the re-established Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, which worked underground. After the war, Bandera with his family settled in West Germany where he remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations as well as with the US and British intelligence agencies. Fourteen years after the end of the war, Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by KGB agents in Munich, West Germany.
But but but ... you told us Ukraine is really Russian. Why did all these Russians yearning only to be reunited with Moscow, collaborate with Germany to fight the Soviets? It is a conundrum.
It’s a shame you didn’t read the article, your response might be more sensible and relevant if you had.
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/
“Nazi collaborator monuments in Ukraine”
Yea, but they’re Good Nazis, unlike the bad Nazis led by Hitler or the 600 tourists still rotting away in the DC Central Jail.
He was even assassinated by the KGB.
Look, having cooperated with the Nazis at any time certainly is viewed today as a mistake, as we know the Nazis to be pure evil.
But these people weren’t killing Jews, they were trying to get a Ukraine independent from the communists.
Imprisoned by the Nazis, tried to get his region unrepentant from Moscow and Germany, anti communist ultimately assassinated by the KGB.
Is a statute to him the same as honoring Nazis? I don’t think so.
If you read the article you will see you are wrong, many of the people celebrated in Ukraine since 2014 with statues and street names participated in mass murders.
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/
Bandera was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Two of his brothers died in a Nazi concentration camp. To allied himself with the Nazis for a short time AFTERWARD to try and liberate Ukraine from the Soviets.
In the 1950s he was essentially an ally of the United States against the Soviets. He was so successful that the Soviets had him assassinated in West Germany.
These facts don’t get posted very often.
“I don’t understand, we’ve been told there are no Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.”
Name names. Who told you that?
There you go posting facts! You actually expect these people to respect facts?
Hi Vladimir998.
As you probably know, Ukrainian units founded by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B) mass murdered 70-100 thousands polish Civilians.
This was not military combat, this was Ukrainian ideologue troops mass murdering civilian people.
Can you explain to me what this had to do with fighting the soviets? It had nothing to do with that.
It is interesting to see Freepers minimizing and dismissing mass murders led by Ukrainians.
But the real question is can’t they choose heroes who didn’t inspire and participate in mass murders?
And why only talk about Stepan Bandera? There are many others mentioned in this article who participated in mass murders, and are singled out for honor by Ukraine with statues and street names.
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