Ukrainian auxiliary police (Schutzmannschaft, the Schuma) units provided much of the operational manpower for the Holocaust by bullets in occupied Ukraine and Belarus. Around 35,000 to 40,000 Ukrainians served in the Schutzmannschaft battalions and the local rural police of the German occupation between 1941 and 1944. They participated in mass shootings at Babi Yar, at Kamenets-Podolsk, at the Lwów ghetto, at Berdychiv and at hundreds of smaller killing sites across the western and central Soviet territories. Ukrainian auxiliaries also formed the bulk of the Trawniki guard force, the SS auxiliary unit trained at the Trawniki camp in occupied Poland and deployed as the operational guard force at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. The post-war fate of the Ukrainian auxiliaries who escaped to the West, including the Demjanjuk case, has been one of the longest-running threads in the international war crimes record.
The recruitment
The Germans began recruiting Ukrainian auxiliaries within weeks of the invasion of June 1941. Recruits came from three principal sources: Ukrainian nationalists who saw German rule as deliverance from Soviet oppression, former Soviet prisoners of war held in the German POW camps where conditions were lethal (the Schuma offered an escape from the camps), and rural villagers conscripted by the German rural administration. The motivations of individual recruits varied; the operational result was the same. The auxiliaries were deployed across occupied Ukraine and Belarus in the Schutzmannschaft battalions and the local rural police forces.
Babi Yar and the killing pits
The Ukrainian auxiliary police participation at Babi Yar on 29 to 30 September 1941 has been documented from German operational records and from survivor and perpetrator testimony. Around two thirds of the men who conducted the actual shooting at the ravine were Ukrainian auxiliary police. The German Sonderkommando 4a under Paul Blobel directed the operation; the Ukrainian auxiliaries did most of the shooting. Around 33,771 Jews were killed at Babi Yar in two days, the largest single mass shooting of the Holocaust. The operational arithmetic of killing on this scale, four shooters per minute over 36 hours, was only possible because Blobel had Ukrainian auxiliary manpower in addition to his German shooters.
The pattern repeated across Ukraine. At Berdychiv in September 1941 around 18,000 Jews were killed in a series of shootings conducted by mixed German-Ukrainian teams. At Kamenets-Podolsk in August 1941 around 23,500 Jews were killed by similar combined forces. At Drobitsky Yar near Kharkiv in December 1941 around 15,000 Jews were shot. At Lviv (Lwów) in 1941 and 1942, multiple operations killed around 100,000. The Ukrainian auxiliary participation in these killings was extensive and is documented in detail.
The Trawniki men
The Trawniki camp in occupied Poland was the SS training facility for non-German auxiliary guards. Around 5,000 men were trained at Trawniki between 1941 and 1944, the great majority Ukrainians, with smaller contingents of Latvians, Estonians and Soviet ethnic Germans. Trawniki-trained guards were deployed as the operational guard force at the Operation Reinhard killing camps (Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka) and at the killing sites of the Aktion Erntefest in November 1943, in which around 42,000 Jews of the Lublin labour camps were shot in three days, the second-largest mass shooting of the Holocaust after Babi Yar.
The Trawniki men were issued identification cards (Dienstausweise) bearing their photograph, signature, and assigned identification number. The cards were standardised. Surviving Trawniki cards have been the central documentary evidence in the post-war prosecutions of individual Trawniki men, including the Demjanjuk case, and have been the subject of forensic dispute in those cases. The German Bundesarchiv holds a substantial collection of original cards that survived in the camp records.
The OUN and the UPA
A separate strand of Ukrainian wartime activity was conducted by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929, and its military wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), formed in 1942. The OUN-B, the more radical wing of the movement, conducted its own programme of anti-Jewish violence in Galicia and Volhynia in 1941 to 1944, including the Lwów pogroms of June 1941, the so-called Petliura Days, and the killings of around 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943 to 1944, an episode known to Polish historiography as the Volhynian Slaughter. The UPA continued an armed insurgency against Soviet rule in western Ukraine until the early 1950s. The post-Soviet Ukrainian state has had a contested relationship with the OUN-B and UPA legacy: the Ukrainian state under Viktor Yushchenko honoured Stepan Bandera as a national hero in 2010, a designation revoked in 2011, while continuing the broader official rehabilitation of the wartime nationalist movement. The historical debate continues.
The post-war fate
Ukrainian auxiliary police and Trawniki men who escaped to the West after the war did so by attaching themselves to the post-war refugee waves and presenting themselves to Allied screening teams as Soviet nationals fleeing Stalinist persecution. The screening was inadequate. Around 2,000 Ukrainian auxiliary veterans were admitted to the United States, around 1,500 to Canada, and several hundred each to Britain, Australia and Argentina. The cases that have surfaced from the 1970s onwards include John Demjanjuk (Trawniki, served at Sobibór and Trawniki), Mykola Sysyn, Konrāds Kalējs (Latvian, the Arajs Kommando, lived in Australia and the United Kingdom), and the Ukrainian Galician Division veterans whose admission to Britain in 1947 has been one of the longest-running British war crimes controversies. The British Deschênes Commission of 1985 to 1986 (in Canada) and the Hetherington-Chalmers report of 1989 (in Britain) examined the admissions process and recommended targeted prosecutions; the prosecutions that followed were small in number and largely unsuccessful, often because the defendants had died of old age before trial.
What it was
The Ukrainian auxiliary police are the case of the local instrument that made the Holocaust by bullets possible at scale. The arithmetic of mass shooting required local manpower, and the Germans had it. The Ukrainian auxiliaries did the shooting at most of the major killing sites in occupied Ukraine and Belarus, and they staffed the operational guard force of the killing camps in occupied Poland. The post-war flight of many of the perpetrators to the West, and the inadequate screening that admitted them, has meant that the accounting for the Ukrainian auxiliary participation has stretched into the twenty-first century.
See also
Sources
- Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, University of North Carolina Press, 2005
- Peter Black, Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2011
- Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, Belknap Press, 2004
- Hetherington-Chalmers Report, War Crimes, HMSO, 1989
- USHMM: Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, Trawniki men