Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany

Some who worked with or for the Nazis against the Allied forces[2][3] Ukrainian nationalists hoped that enthusiastic collaboration would enable them to re-establish an independent state.

In the territories of Poland invaded by Nazi Germany, the size of the Ukrainian minority became negligible and was gathered mostly around UCC (УЦК [uk]), formed in Kraków.

Operation Barbarossa brought together native Ukrainians of the USSR and the prewar territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union.

By September the occupied territory was divided between two new German administrative units: to the southwest, the District of Galicia of the Nazi General Government, and the northeast, Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which stretched all the way to Donbas by 1943.

[6] Reinhard Heydrich noted in a report dated July 9, 1941 "a fundamental difference between the former Polish and Russian [Soviet] territories.

Hence the German troops were greeted by the Polish as well as the White Ruthenian population [meaning Ukrainian and Belarusian] for the most part, at least, as liberators or with friendly neutrality...

"[8] Ukrainian nationalist partisan leader Taras Bulba-Borovets gathered a force of 3,000 in summer 1941 to help the Wehrmacht fight the Red Army.

[12][6] Because of the fluid nature of these allegiances, historian Alfred Rieber has emphasized that labels such as "collaborators" and "resistance" have been rendered useless in describing the actual loyalty of these groups.

[21] During this period, on 1 September 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in an article titled Zavoiovuimo misto" (Let's Conquer the City): "All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated.

",[22][23][24] "The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocable be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people".

The antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultranationalist Ukrainian People's Militia, which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.

[26] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd, which had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square, 24 hours to act as they wished against Polish Jews, who were forced to clean the dead bodies and to dance and then were killed by beating with axes, pipes etc.

[29] While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given a choice to enlist for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps because of ongoing close relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung.

The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine".

[44] Sol Litman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center states that there are many proven and documented incidents of atrocities and massacres committed by the unit against Poles and Jews during World War II.

The Central Committee was the officially recognized Ukrainian community and quasi-political organization under the Nazi occupation of Poland.