For Your Information Nazi Collaborators in Ukraine and Harper Government's Concern for Anti-Semitism

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The day before the House of Commons Take Note debate on anti-Semitism, a reception was held at the Parliament for the Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament Andriy Parubiy. Parubiy co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, a neo-Nazi party which glorifies the wartime activity of anti-Semitic collaborators in the Second World War. These include prominent Nazi collaborators such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary faction the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Ukraine's Nazi collaborator organizations were formed in various European countries after western Ukraine was seized by Poland from the Soviet Union in 1921. The second congress of the OUN was held in Rome under Mussolini's protection in 1939. Following the congress the organization split into two factions, led by Anrij Melnyk and Stepan Bandera, both of whom swore loyalty to the Third Reich. The Nazi invaders of the Soviet Union were hailed as liberators by the OUN. The OUN leaders had grandiose ideas of becoming the rulers of a united Ukraine that included Soviet Ukraine as well as Western Ukraine, which they conceived as being part of the new fascist order in Europe. The "independent Ukraine" of the OUN was to be an ethnically cleansed territory, where all non-Ukrainian inhabitants were to be either driven out or killed. The OUN organized the first wartime pogroms of Jews in Ukraine. While maintaining loyalty and service to the Nazis, the OUN later gave the slogan "Long live a greater independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles and Germans; Poles behind the River San, Germans to Berlin, and Jews to the gallows." In July-August 1941 alone, the OUN participated in the murder of over 13,000 Jews in Volynia/Wolyn, then a Polish province, in northwestern Ukraine. The genocide against the Jews in Volynia/Wolyn was an SS operation, but the main force that carried it out consisted of Ukrainian police in the service of the Nazis. An estimated 150,000 Jews were killed in 1942. In the end, more than 98 per cent of the Jewish citizens of Volynia/Wolyn perished. The OUN and UPA maintained a close relationship with the SS Galizien, a German-commanded unit composed of Ukrainians. The main role played by the UPA was not the engagement of the Red Army, but the murder and genocide of civilian populations. This included acts designed to kill or remove the entire Polish and Jewish population from Western Ukraine, as well as the murder of Ukrainians who had joined the partisans to fight the Nazis and attacks on partisans from Soviet Ukraine. Testimony of survivors and documents from many sources, including the German and Polish archives, Holocaust archival sources and the OUN's own records identify the reasons for the killing of people of Ukrainian nationality by the OUN/UPA. These included: membership or former membership in the Communist Party, joining the partisans, refusal to participate in massacres, refusal to join the OUN/UPA, rendering assistance to Poles, "intermarriage" and refusal to kill their Polish wives and children. As the victory over fascism became imminent, all the major nationalist leaders were called to Berlin in the dying days of the Third Reich. The SS Galizien surrendered to the British and were imprisoned in Italy. In 1947 they were permitted as an entity to immigrate to Britain and later to Canada. Substantial numbers of OUN-UPA members also immigrated to Canada and the U.S. It is they who the Harper government calls "victims of communism" today. References Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947 (1998) Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941—1945: A Study of Occupation Policies , 2nd Ed., (London: MacMillan, 1981) (TML Weekly No. 9, February 28, 2015)