THE rehabilitation of Ukrainians who fought with the Nazis as “freedom fighters” against Soviet Russia during the Second World War has provoked a political row between Moscow and Kiev and reopened old wounds about collaboration with Hitler.
Thousands of Ukrainian guerrillas fought with the Germans in the name of nationalism during the Second World War. The Ukrainians said that they were fighting against Stalin’s totalitarian regime, which had brutally suppressed them. The Russians, however, allege that the guerrillas were criminal-infested gangs happy to be paid by Nazi Germany to betray their motherland.
This week the authorities in the town of Ivano-Frankovsk in western Ukraine passed a resolution giving the 14th SS Galicia division the status of “fighters for the freedom and independence of Ukraine”. The decision gives those who fought in the Galicia division the rights to the same pensions and benefits as Ukrainians who fought with the Red Army against the Nazis.
Anatoli Kinakh, the Ukrainian Prime Minister, gave the initiative his tacit backing yesterday. “All decisions should be made in accordance with justice and history,” he said. His press spokesman said: “These groups were fighting for the independence of Ukraine.”
But the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a strongly worded communiquй condemning the move as “a dangerous precedent aimed at revising the results of the Second World War and the decisions of the Nuremberg trial”. The statement added: “The rehabilitation of these people was a disgraceful act of betrayal toward millions of peaceful civilians, including Russians and Ukrainians, who perished fighting Hitler’s army or in occupied territories.”
Mikhail Margelov, a prominent MP and chairman of the Russian Parliament’s Committee on International Affairs, suggested that today’s Ukrainian Government sympathised with the Nazis. He said that the next logical step for the Ukrainians would be to put up a statue of Himmler in Ivano-Frankovsk.
The move has also been condemned by Jewish campaigners. Vadim Rabinovich, the head of the Ukrainian Jewish Congress, described the move as a scandal and a crime against the Ukrainian and Jewish people. “They have spat on history and on all those who died in the war,” he said.
Mr Rabinovich said that the Jewish Congress would do everything possible to overturn the decision, and called on the Ukrainian Parliament to condemn the move. “If they start rehabilitating the former SS, the next thing will be a statue of Hitler at Babi Yar,” he said, referring to the area outside Kiev where German occupying forces killed more than 100,000 people, most of them Jews.
Efraim Zuroff, director of Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said: “There is a dangerous tendency in certain post-Communist countries to attempt to rehabilitate those units which fought alongside the Nazis. Those who volunteered to fight for Hitler and Nazi Germany are the moral equivalent of those who support Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network.”
Critics such as Dr Zuroff say that the Ukrainians are desperate to create new heroes for themselves as they struggle to come to terms with the poverty-stricken reality of modern life in the country. They say that military divisions such as Galicia are being promoted as folk heroes to fill the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of Communism.
But others argue that the Ukrainians were so poorly treated by the Soviet regime that many felt they had little choice but to take up the Germans’ invitation to fight and accept their money and uniforms. Some, who joined “Bandera’s boys”, a 300,000-strong force led by Stepan Bandera, fought both Germans and Russians.
The Ukrainians, like all those under Stalin’s regime, had suffered greatly from his rule. Up to ten million Ukrainians died in the famine engineered by Stalin in the early 1930s.
>From the mid-1940s to the 1950s a fierce guerrilla war raged in Ukraine, a
war whose history is still largely unwritten. Thousands of Soviet troops
were lost in battles with Ukrainian nationalists and in similar wars in the
Baltic states and Poland.
The Soviet Government reacted harshly, deporting or imprisoning 300,000 people from western Ukraine alone. It took until 1959, when Stepan Bandera was killed by Soviet agents in West Germany, to pacify Ukraine.
It is that same area of western Ukraine that is today the stronghold of Ukraine’s nationalist movement, with campaigns to ban the Russian language and even pop music.