Along with the Roland Battalion it was one of two military units which originated on February 25, 1941, when the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, sanctioned the formation of a "Ukrainian Legion"[3] under German command.

[4] The Battalion participated in early stages of Operation Barbarossa (the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union) with Army Group South[5] between June and August 1941.

[7] Prior to Operation Barbarossa, the Stepan Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) sought contact with Nazi Germany and in fact received its training there in order to use this as an opportunity to restore independence of Ukraine.

[citation needed] According to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and other sources, OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence, regarding the formation of the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions.

The Nachtigall Battalion traveled along with a Panzer-Jaeger Division[dubious – discuss] and some tank units went along through Radymno-Lviv-Ternopil-Proskuriv-Vinnytsia path.

[12] The battalion took up guard of strategic objects, the most important of which was the radio station on the Vysoky Zamok Hill in the centre of Lviv.

[4] The Nachtigall servicemen participated in and organized the Declaration of Ukrainian Independence proclaimed by Yaroslav Stetsko on June 30.

[14][verify] The German refusal to accept the OUN(b)'s June 30 proclamation of Ukrainian independence in L'viv led to a change of the Nachtigall battalion direction.

[15][16][verify] Russian historian Sergei Chuyev states that despite the ending, OUN achieved its ultimate goals – 600 members of their organization had received military training and had battle experience and these men took positions as instructors and commanders in the structure of the newly formed Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The members were four former anti-Hitler activists, Norwegian lawyer Hans Cappelen, former Danish foreign minister and president of the Danish parliament Ole Bjørn Kraft, Dutch socialist Karel van Staal, Belgian law professor Flor Peeters, and Swiss jurist and member of parliament Kurt Scoch.

[22] Yad Vashem's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust contends that between June 30 and July 3, 1941, in the days that the Battalion was in Lviv, the Nachtigall soldiers together with the German army and the local Ukrainians participated in the killings of Jews in the city.