I'm raising the post again!

The events described took place more than half a century ago.
This post was not created to incite hatred towards Ukrainians, forcing them to project long-standing evil onto modern people. It only shows how brutality was accompanied by fascism and how FEAR makes animals out of people.

Volyn massacre (Polish: Rzez wolynska) (Volyn tragedy, Ukrainian: Volinska tragedy, Polish: Tragedia Wolynia) - an ethno-political conflict accompanied by the mass extermination (by Bandera) of the Ukrainian insurgent army-OUN(b) of the ethnic Polish civilian population and civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians, in the territories of the Volyn-Podolia district (German: Generalbezirk Wolhynien-Podolien), until September 1939, under Polish control, which began in March 1943 and reached its peak in July of the same year.

In the spring of 1943, large-scale ethnic cleansing began in Volyn, occupied by German troops. This criminal action was carried out not by the Nazis, but by militants of the Organization
Ukrainian nationalists who sought to “cleanse” the territory of Volyn from the Polish population. Ukrainian nationalists surrounded Polish villages and colonies and then started killing. They killed everyone - women, old people, children, infants. The victims were shot, beaten with clubs, and chopped with axes. Then the corpses of the destroyed Poles were buried somewhere in the field, their property was robbed, and their houses were finally set on fire. In place of the Polish villages, only charred ruins remained.
They also destroyed those Poles who lived in the same villages as the Ukrainians. It was even easier - there was no need to gather large detachments. Groups of OUN members of several people walked through the sleeping village, entered the houses of the Poles and killed everyone. And then local residents buried the murdered fellow villagers of the “wrong” nationality.

This is how several tens of thousands of people were killed, whose only guilt was that they were not born Ukrainians and lived on Ukrainian soil.
Organization of Ukrainian nationalists (Bandera movement) /OUN(b), OUN-B/, or revolutionary /OUN(r), OUN-R/, and also (briefly in 1943) independent-power /OUN(sd), OUN-SD / (Ukrainian Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera Rukh)) is one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Currently (since 1992), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists calls itself the successor of the OUN(b).
In the course of the “Map” study conducted in Poland, it was found that as a result of the actions of the UPA-OUN (B) and the SB OUN (B), in which part of the local Ukrainian population and sometimes detachments of Ukrainian nationalists of other movements took part, the number of Poles killed in Volyn amounted to at least 36,543 - 36,750 people whose names and places of death were established. In addition, the same study estimated from 13,500 to more than 23,000 Poles whose deaths were unclear.
A number of researchers say that probably about 50-60 thousand Poles became victims of the massacre; during the discussion about the number of victims on the Polish side, estimates were given from 30 to 80 thousand.
These massacres were a real massacre. An idea of ​​the nightmarish cruelty of the Volyn genocide is given by a fragment from the book of the famous historian Timothy Snyder:
“The first edition of the UPA newspaper, published in July, promised a “shameful death” for all Poles remaining in Ukraine. The UPA was able to carry out its threats. For approximately twelve hours, from the evening of July 11, 1943 until the morning of July 12, the UPA launched attacks on 176 settlements... During 1943, UPA units and special detachments of the OUN Security Service killed Poles both individually and collectively in Polish settlements and villages, as well as those Poles who lived in Ukrainian villages. According to numerous, mutually corroborating reports, Ukrainian nationalists and their allies burned houses, shot or chased inside those who tried to escape, and killed those who were caught on the street with sickles and pitchforks. Churches filled with parishioners were burned to the ground. To intimidate the surviving Poles and force them to flee, the bandits displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered or disemboweled bodies.”

Even the Germans were amazed at their sadism - gouging out eyes, ripping open bellies and brutal torture before death were commonplace. They killed everyone - women, children...

The genocide began in the cities. Men of the “wrong” nationality were immediately taken to prison, where they were later shot.

and violence against women occurred in broad daylight for the amusement of the public. Among the Banderaites there were many who wanted to get in line/take an active part...

She was lucky... Bandera's men forced her to walk on her knees with her hands raised.

Later, Bandera’s followers “got a taste for it.”

On February 9, 1943, Bandera members from the gang of Pyotr Netovich, under the guise of Soviet partisans, entered the Polish village of Parosle near Vladimirets, Rivne region. The peasants, who had previously provided assistance to the partisans, warmly welcomed the guests. Having eaten their fill, the bandits began to rape women and girls.

Before being killed, their chests, noses and ears were cut off.
Men were deprived of their genitals before death. They finished off with ax blows to the head.
Two teenagers, the Gorshkevich brothers, who tried to call real partisans for help, had their bellies cut open, their legs and arms cut off, their wounds generously covered with salt, leaving them half-dead to die in the field. In total, 173 people were brutally tortured in this village, including 43 children. When the partisans entered the village on the second day, they saw piles of mutilated bodies lying in pools of blood in the villagers’ houses. In one of the houses, on the table, among scraps and unfinished bottles of moonshine, lay a dead one-year-old child, whose naked body was nailed to the boards of the table with a bayonet. The monsters stuffed a half-eaten pickled cucumber into his mouth.

LIPNIKI, Kostopol County, Lutsk Voivodeship. March 26, 1943. A resident of the Lipniki colony - Yakub Varumzer without a head, the result of a massacre committed under the cover of darkness by OUN-UPA terrorists. As a result of this Lipniki massacre, 179 Polish residents died, as well as Poles from the surrounding area seeking shelter there. These were mostly women, old people and children (51 - aged from 1 to 14 years), 4 Jews and 1 Russian in hiding. 22 people were injured. 121 Polish victims were identified by name and surname - residents of Lipnik, who were known to the author. Three aggressors also lost their lives.

PODYARKOV, Bobrka County, Lwów Voivodeship. August 16, 1943. The results of torture inflicted on Kleshchinskaya’s mother, from a Polish family of four.

One night, Bandera’s men brought a whole family from the village of Volkovya to the forest. They mocked unfortunate people for a long time. Then, seeing that the wife of the head of the family was pregnant, they cut her stomach, tore out the fetus from it, and instead stuffed a live rabbit into it. One night, bandits broke into the Ukrainian village of Lozovaya. Over 100 peaceful peasants were killed within 1.5 hours. A bandit with an ax in his hands burst into Nastya Dyagun’s hut and hacked to death her three sons. The youngest, four-year-old Vladik, had his arms and legs cut off.

One of the two Kleshchinsky families in Podyarkov was martyred by the OUN-UPA on August 16, 1943. The photo shows a family of four - spouses and two children. The victims' eyes were gouged out, they were hit on the head, their palms were burned, they tried to chop off their upper and lower limbs, as well as their hands, they had puncture wounds all over their bodies, etc.

The girl in the center, Stasia Stefaniak, was killed because of her Polish father. Her mother Maria Boyarchuk, a Ukrainian, was also killed that night. Because of the husband... Mixed families aroused special hatred among the Rezuns. In the village of Zalesie Koropetskoe (Ternopil region) on February 7, 1944 there was an even more terrible incident. A UPA gang attacked the village with the aim of massacring the Polish population. About 60 people, mostly women and children, were herded into a barn where they were burned alive. One of those killed that day was from a mixed family - half Pole, half Ukrainian. Bandera's men set a condition for him - he must kill his Polish mother, then he will be left alive. He refused and was killed along with his mother.

TARNOPOL Tarnopol Voivodeship, 1943. One (!) of the trees on the country road, in front of which the OUN-UPA terrorists hung a banner with the inscription translated into Polish: “The Road to Independent Ukraine.” And on every tree on both sides of the road, the executioners created so-called “wreaths” from Polish children.

“The old ones were strangled, and small children under one year old were strangled by the legs - once, they hit their heads on the door - and they were done and ready to go. We felt sorry for our men that they would suffer so much during the night, but they would sleep off during the day and the next night they would go to another village. There were people hiding. If a man was hiding, they were mistaken for women...”
(from interrogation of Bandera)

Prepared “wreaths”

But the Polish Shayer family, a mother and two children, was massacred in their house in Vladinopol in 1943.


LIPNIKI, Kostopol County, Lutsk Voivodeship. March 26, 1943. In the foreground are the children - Janusz Bielawski, 3 years old, son of Adele; Roman Bielawski, 5 years old, son of Czeslawa, as well as Jadwiga Bielawska, 18 years old and others. These listed Polish victims are the result of a massacre committed by the OUN-UPA.

LIPNIKI, Kostopol County, Lutsk Voivodeship. March 26, 1943. The corpses of Poles - victims of the massacre committed by the OUN - UPA - were brought for identification and burial. Behind the fence stands Jerzy Skulski, who saved his life thanks to the firearm he had.

POLOTS, region, Chortkiv district, Tarnopol voivodeship, forest called Rosohach. January 16 - 17, 1944. The place from which 26 victims were pulled out - Polish residents of the village of Polovtse - taken away by the UPA on the night of January 16-17, 1944 and tortured in the forest.

“..In Novoselki, Rivne region, there was one Komsomol member, Motrya. We took her to Verkhovka to old Zhabsky and let’s get a heart from a living person. Old Salivon held a watch in one hand and a heart in the other to check how long the heart would beat in his hand. And when the Russians came, his sons wanted to erect a monument to him, saying he fought for Ukraine.”
(from interrogation of Bandera)

Belzec, region, Rawa Ruska district, Lviv voivodeship June 16, 1944. You can see the ripped open belly and entrails, as well as a hand hanging from the skin - the result of an attempt to chop it off. The OUN-UPA case.

Belzec, region, Rawa Ruska district, Lviv voivodeship June 16, 1944.

Belzec, region, Rawa Ruska district, Lviv voivodeship June 16, 1944. Place of execution in the forest.

LIPNIKI, Kostopol County, Lutsk Voivodeship. March 26, 1943. View before the funeral. Brought to to the People's House Polish victims of the night massacre committed by the OUN - UPA.

In Poland the Volyn massacre is remembered very well.
This is a scan of the pages of a book. A list of ways in which the Ukrainian Nazis dealt with civilians:

. Driving a large, thick nail into the skull of the head.
. Ripping off hair and skin from the head (scalping).
. Carving of an “eagle” on the forehead (the eagle is the coat of arms of Poland).
. Eye gouging.
. Circumcision of the nose, ears, lips, tongue.
. Piercing children and adults through with stakes.
. Punching a sharpened thick wire right through from ear to ear.
. Cutting the throat and pulling out through the hole of the tongue.
. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws.
. Tearing the mouth from ear to ear.
. Gagging of mouths with tow while transporting still living victims.
. Rolling the head back.
. Crush the head by placing it in a vice and tightening the screw.
. Cutting and pulling narrow strips of skin from the back or face.
. Broken bones (ribs, arms, legs).
. Cutting off women's breasts and pouring salt on the wounds.
. Cutting off the genitals of male victims with a sickle.
. Piercing a pregnant woman's stomach with a bayonet.
. Cutting open the abdomen and pulling out the intestines of adults and children.
. Cutting into the abdomen of a woman with an advanced pregnancy and inserting, for example, a live cat instead of the removed fetus and suturing the abdomen.
. Cutting open the abdomen and pouring boiling water inside.
. Cutting open the belly and putting stones inside it, as well as throwing it into the river.
. Cutting open a pregnant woman's belly and pouring broken glass inside.
. Pulling out veins from groin to feet.
. Placing a hot iron into the vagina.
. Insertion into the vagina pine cones top side forward.
. Inserting a pointed stake into the vagina and pushing it all the way down to the throat.
. Cutting a woman's front torso with a garden knife from the vagina to the neck and leaving the insides outside.
. Hanging victims by their entrails.
. Inserting a glass bottle into the vagina or anus and breaking it.
. Cutting open the belly and pouring feed flour inside for hungry pigs, who tore out this feed along with intestines and other entrails.
. Chopping/knife/sawing off arms or legs (or fingers and toes).
. Cauterization inside palms on a hot stove in a coal kitchen.
. Sawing through the body with a saw.
. Sprinkling tied legs hot coal.
. Nailing your hands to the table and your feet to the floor.
. Chopping an entire body into pieces with an ax.
. Nailing the tongue to the table with a knife small child, which later hung on it.
. Cutting a child into pieces with a knife.
. Nailing a small child to a table with a bayonet.
. Hanging a male child by his genitals from a doorknob.
. Knocking out the joints of a child's legs and arms.
. Throwing a child into the flames of a burning building.
. Breaking a baby's head by picking him up by the legs and hitting him against a wall or stove.
. Placing a child on a stake.
. Hanging a woman upside down from a tree and mocking her - cutting off her breasts and tongue, cutting her stomach, gouging out her eyes, and cutting off pieces of her body with knives.
. Nailing a small child to a door.
. Hanging from a tree with your feet up and scorching your head from below with the fire of a fire lit under your head.
. Drowning children and adults in a well and throwing stones at the victim.
. Driving a stake into the stomach.
. Tying a man to a tree and shooting him at a target.
. Dragging a body along the street with a rope tied around the neck.
. Tying a woman's legs and arms to two trees, and cutting her stomach from the crotch to the chest.
. A mother and three children, tied together, are dragged along the ground.
. Confining one or more victims with barbed wire, watering the victim every few hours cold water in order to come to one’s senses and feel pain.
. Burying alive up to the neck in the ground and later cutting off the head with a scythe.
. Ripping the torso in half with the help of horses.
. Tearing the torso in half by tying the victim to two bent trees and then freeing them.
. Setting fire to a victim doused in kerosene.
. Placing sheaves of straw around the victim and setting them on fire (Nero's torch).
. Impaling a baby on a pitchfork and throwing him into the flames of a fire.
. Hanging on barbed wire.
. Ripping off the skin from the body and pouring ink or boiling water into the wound.
. Nailing hands to the threshold of a home.

In May 1945, not all residents of the USSR experienced Peaceful time. On the territory of Western Ukraine, there was a powerful network of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN-UPA), better known as Bandera.

Crimes of Ukrainian fascists during World War II

Among the most significant organizations that collaborated with the Nazis was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Its members were recruited mainly from civil war veterans who fought on the side of Petliura against the Bolsheviks.

During the 1930s, the OUN carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Its ideological leader was Dmitry Dontsov (1883-1973), who became one of the leading ideologists of the Ukrainian far right wing through his translation activities, which included Ukrainian translations of Mussolini's Dottrina Fascismo (Doctrine of Fascism) and excerpts from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

In 1940, the OUN split into the Bandera and Melnik factions. Bandera's group managed to attract more followers than Melnik. He began by creating a Ukrainian militia in German-occupied territory in Poland, which, in alliance with the Wehrmacht ( German army), attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the Red Army withdrew from areas captured by the Germans, legions and special militias acted as auxiliaries in countless murders of Jews. After the OUN-B entered Lviv on June 29, 1941, Bandera militias carried out pogroms against Jews. On June 30, 1941, Bandera and his deputy leader of the OUN-B, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared the independence of Ukraine in Lvov. Since 1942, Ukrainian militia served the Third Reich in the “anti-partisan campaign” in Belarus.

When Hitler's troops began to retreat after the defeat at Stalingrad, members of the OUN legion returned to Ukraine and formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943. The UPA was led by Bandera.

The UPA was given German weapons and attempted to carry out an extensive program of ethnic cleansing in order to create the conditions for a “pure” Ukrainian state. In 1943 and 1944, the UPA organized massacres that claimed the lives of 90 thousand Poles and thousands of Jews. He brutally terrorized, tortured and executed Ukrainian peasants and workers who wanted to join the Soviet Union.

After World War II

Immediately after World War II, the American secret service and military began recruiting high-ranking Nazis and Nazi collaborators for the ideological, political, and military struggle against the Soviet Union. Fascists and war criminals from Germany and of Eastern Europe, who were directly involved in the Holocaust and the murder of millions of Soviet citizens, were used for covert activities by American intelligence agencies.

The first large-scale projects from the CIA to destabilize the Soviet Union included: intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. The predecessor of the CIA, the OSS, together with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), had already assisted the guerrilla war waged by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist Bandera (OUN-B) from a material and logistical point of view until the end of World War II . (Taras Kuzio: US support for Ukraine’s liberation during the Cold War: a study of Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation, in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, no. 45, 2012, p. 53) Guerrilla warfare in Ukraine became the prototype for similar CIA operations around the world during the Cold War.

Most important to the UPA was CIA liaison officer Nikolai Lebed, whom American military intelligence described in 1946 as “a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.” In 1949, the CIA sponsored his entry into the United States. In exile, he headed the OUN-Z, an offshoot of Bandera's OUN, which was financed by the United States. He provided communication between the US and UPA fighters. After 1953, Lebed took part in the management of the émigré publishing house Prologue, financed by the CIA, which distributed nationalist and anti-communist literature.

When Zbigniew Brzezinski became an adviser on national security President Jimmy Carter, the United States increased funding for anti-Soviet Ukrainian propaganda. Under President Reagan, the strategy to destabilize the Soviet Union was intensified by increasing national question. The CIA produced material that was aimed at various ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, and appealed to separatist nationalist tendencies.

An ethno-political conflict accompanied by the mass destruction by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army-OUN(b) of the ethnic Polish civilian population and, on a smaller scale, civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians, in the territory of Volyn, which was under Polish control until September 1939, which began in March 1943 and peaking in July of that year.
In the course of the “Map” study conducted in Poland, it was found that as a result of the actions of the UPA-OUN (B) and the SB OUN (B), in which part of the local Ukrainian population and sometimes detachments of Ukrainian nationalists of other movements took part, the number of Poles killed in Volyn amounted to at least 36,543 - 36,750 people whose names and places of death were established. In addition, the same study estimated from 13,500 to more than 23,000 Poles whose deaths were unclear.
In general, historians agree that at least 30-40 thousand Poles became victims of the massacre in Volyn alone; probabilistic estimates by some experts increase these figures to 50-60 thousand, and taking into account other territories, the number of victims among the Polish population reached 75-100 thousand , during the discussion about the number of victims on the Polish side, estimates were given from 30 to 80 thousand

2. Lviv pogrom - July 1941

Jewish pogrom in Lvov in July 1941. Ukrainian nationalists from Stepan Bandera's OUN, as well as the German administration, took part in the pogrom. During the pogrom, local Jews were caught, beaten, abused on the streets of the city, and then shot. Several thousand Jews became victims of the pogrom.
On July 1, a large-scale pogrom began in the city. Jews were caught and arrested, beaten and humiliated. In particular, they were forced to clean the streets, for example, one Jew was forced to remove horse manure from the streets with his hat. Women were beaten with sticks and various items, stripped naked and driven through the streets, some were raped. They also beat pregnant women.
Then some of the Jews were sent to prisons to exhume the corpses of executed prisoners; during the work they were also beaten and humiliated. One of the Jews, Kurt Lewin, especially remembered a Ukrainian dressed in a beautiful embroidered shirt. He beat the Jews with an iron stick, cutting off pieces of skin, ears and knocking out eyes. Then he took a club and pierced the head of one Jew, the victim’s brains fell on Levin’s face and clothes.

3. Executions at Babi Yar - 1941

Babi Yar gained worldwide fame as the site of mass executions of civilians, mainly Jews, Gypsies, Kyiv Karaites, and Soviet prisoners of war, carried out by German occupation forces and Ukrainian collaborators in 1941.
In total, over one hundred (or one hundred and fifty) thousand people were shot. According to other researchers, about one hundred and fifty thousand people (residents of Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine) were shot at Babi Yar alone. 29 people escaped from Babi Yar.

4. Liquidation of the Rivne Jewish ghetto - July 1942
At the beginning of the Nazi occupation, half the city's population were Jews. In 1941, between November 6-8, 23,000 Jews were shot in the Sosenki forest. The remaining 5,000 were herded into a ghetto and killed by Ukrainian collaborators in July 1942.

In accordance with the principle of collective punishment, 149 residents of Khatyn were burned alive or shot for possible assistance by village residents to the partisans. The “118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion,” composed primarily of ethnic Ukrainians, took part in the punitive operation. The battalion included Ukrainian nationalists from the disbanded Bukovina Kuren, associated with the OUN (m).
The battalion was commanded by the former Polish major Smovsky, the chief of staff was the former senior lieutenant of the Red Army Grigory Vasyura, the platoon commander was the former lieutenant of the Red Army Vasily Meleshko.

6. Murder of Lvov professors - July 1941

Mass murders of representatives of the Polish intelligentsia of Lviv (about 45 Polish scientists and teachers, mainly from Lviv University, members of their families and guests), committed in July 1941 in Lviv by German occupation forces with the participation of punitive units of the OUN and UPA

7. The tragedy of Janova Dolina - April 1943
The first mass extermination of the Polish civilian population in the initial period of the “Volyn Massacre”, committed on April 22-23, 1943 in the village of Yanovaya Dolina of the general district “Volyn-Podolia” of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine by detachments of the 1st Group of the UPA under the command of I. Litvinchuk (“Dubovoy” ). In the village of Yanovaya Dolina (now Basaltovoye, Kostopol district, Rivne region), almost all Polish residents were killed.

8. Lipniki massacre - March 1943

On the night of March 26, 1943, a UPA gang under the command of Litvinchuk-Dubovy attacked the village of Lipniki (Kostopolsky District, Rivne region). There were about 700 people in the village at that time, mostly women and children. There were almost no men. Of these, a small self-defense detachment of 21 people was created. They created a small self-defense detachment, however, the forces were too unequal. Dubovoy’s militants were the first to approach the village, followed by a crowd of Ukrainian peasants from neighboring villages with pitchforks and axes. They knew that in Lipniki there were practically no forces to fight back and therefore they boldly went to kill.
Self-defense guards noticed the approach of Ukrainian gangs and gave a signal. Due to the inequality of power, women and children were ordered to leave the village for the forest. However, it was at night, many could not move so fast. About 100 women and children were surrounded by Ukrainian Nazis in a reclamation ditch, and several dozen more people were caught in the village. A wild massacre began with the cutting off of heads and the killing of children in front of their mothers. The Ukrainian Nazis of the UPA brutally killed 179 people, including 51 children. By nationality, among the dead were 174 Poles; 4 Jews who took refuge in Lipniki from the Holocaust, and one Russian woman.

9. Punitive operations in Slovakia - September 1944

On September 28, 1944, combat-ready units of the SS Galicia division were deployed to suppress the Slovak Uprising (KG Beyersdorff). By mid-October 1944, all units of the division, operating as part of the battle groups KG Wittenmayer and KG Wildner, were transferred there.
During its stay in Slovakia, the so-called SS Dirlewanger brigade, known for its war crimes, was subordinate to the division for some time. Units of the division, together with this brigade, participated in a number of operations against Slovak partisans and the local population supporting them. Only fragmentary documentation has been preserved about the behavior of the troops of the division itself during the suppression of the uprising; Slovak historian Jan Korcek provides detailed data on nine cases of war crimes; it is known that during the raid on the village of Smercany, 80 of 120 houses were burned and four civilians were killed, in the village of Nizna Boca - five. The chief of staff of the division, Wolf-Dietrich Heike, wrote in his memoirs about individual “unfortunate incidents” against the civilian population.

10. Extermination of Jews in Chudnov - October 1941

Ukrainian police participated in the liquidation of the Jewish population in Chudnov (500 people, October 16, 1941)

11. Massacre in Dubno - October 1942

On April 4, 1942, a Jewish ghetto was created in Dubno. On May 27, 1942, about 3,800 Jews were killed on the outskirts of the city. And a few months later, Ukrainian punitive forces carried out another massacre. On October 5, 1942, Ukrainian police shot 5 thousand Jews in Dubno. On October 24, 1942, the last ghetto prisoners were exterminated

12. The tragedy of Guta Penyatskaya - February 1944

Mass extermination of the civilian population (ethnic Poles and the Jews they sheltered) in the village of Guta Penyatskaya (government general, now Brody district, Ukraine). On February 28, 1944, by the personnel of the 4th police regiment of the SS Volunteer Division "Galicia" under the command of SS Sturmbannführer Siegfried Banz with the participation of UPA units and the Ukrainian police. Of the more than a thousand residents of Guta Penyatskaya, no more than 50 people survived. More than 500 residents were burned alive in the church and their own homes. The settlement was completely burned, leaving only the skeletons of stone buildings - a school and a church. After the war, the settlement was not restored; a memorial sign was erected at the site of the death of civilians, which disappeared in the 1990s. In 2005, a memorial to those killed was opened.

13. Ethnic cleansing of Central and Western Ukraine at the beginning of the German occupation - 1941

According to research, the police and detachments organized by local leaders of the OUN(b) operated at the end of June-August 1941 in many places in the Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kiev, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and some other regions. In this territory, the police created by the OUN(b) played a supporting role in the mass executions carried out by the Nazis, as well as in less massive and isolated killings of prisoners of war and local residents.

14. Burning of Belarusian villages in the Polotsk region - March 1943

The 50th Ukrainian security battalion participated in the anti-partisan operation on the territory of Belarus “Winter Magic” (German: Winterzauber) in the Sebezh - Osveya - Polotsk triangle, carried out in February - March 1943. During this operation, 158 settlements were looted and burned, including including the villages burned along with their people: Ambrazeevo, Aniskovo, Buly, Zhernoseki, Kalyuty, Konstantinovo, Paporotnoye, Sokolovo.

15. Massacre in a Polish monastery near the village of Podkamen - March 1944.

The 4th regiment of the SS division "Galicia", consisting of ethnic Ukrainians, with the assistance of a UPA detachment, carried out a massacre in the Dominican monastery of the village of Pidkamen. More than 250 Poles were killed[

16.Mass murders and ethnic cleansing in the post-war years - 1945-53.

The USSR's victory over Nazi Germany did not mark the end of the fight against Hitler's henchmen in Ukraine. For several more years, units of the NKVD and the Red Army hunted down and destroyed the underdogs from the ranks of the UPA, who meanwhile continued their atrocities. In 1944-53, as a result of the actions of the UPA, 30,676 Soviet citizens died, including military personnel - 6,476, government officials - 2,732, party workers - 251, Komsomol workers - 207, collective farmers - 15,669, workers - 676, intellectuals - 1,931, children, old people, housewives - 860.

Not all Banderaites were found and convicted after the war. However, those who were put on trial did not receive the longest prison sentences. Even while behind bars, Bandera’s followers continued to fight and organized mass uprisings.

Against Poland

In 1921, the UVO was created in Ukraine - the Ukrainian military organization, designed to fight for the independence of the Ukrainian people after the defeat of the Ukrainian People's Republic, which existed from 1917 to 1920, and was transformed thanks to the successful offensive of the Red Army in the Ukrainian SSR.

The UVO was supported by youth nationalist organizations and the later created Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. Similar organizations were created among Ukrainian emigrants in Czechoslovakia. These were the Union of Ukrainian Fascists and the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, which later united into one league.

At the same time, Ukrainians in Germany were also actively uniting in nationalist unions, and soon the first conferences of Ukrainian nationalists were held in Prague and Berlin.
In 1929, the UVO and other unions of Ukrainian nationalists united into one large Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (the organization is prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation), while the UVO actually became the military-terrorist organ of the OUN. One of the main goals of Ukrainian nationalists was the fight against Poland, a striking manifestation of which was the famous anti-Polish “Sabotage Action” of 1930: OUN representatives attacked government institutions in Galicia and set fire to the houses of Polish landowners living there.

Conquer Europe!

In 1931, Stepan Bandera joined the OUN, a man whom fate would soon become the head of the entire Ukrainian liberation movement and a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism to this day.

Bandera studied at a German intelligence school and soon became a regional guide in Western Ukraine. He is detained by the authorities many times: for anti-Polish propaganda, for illegally crossing the border and for involvement in an assassination attempt. He organized protests against hunger in Ukraine and against Ukrainians buying Polish products.

On the day of the execution of OUN militants by Bandera, an action was organized in Lviv, during which a synchronized bell ringing was heard throughout the city. The so-called “school action” became particularly effective: Ukrainian schoolchildren, instructed in advance, refused to study with Polish teachers and threw Polish symbols out of schools.
In addition, Stepan Bandera organized a number of assassination attempts on Polish and Soviet officials. For organizing the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peracki and other crimes, Bandera was sentenced to hanging in 1935, which, however, was soon commuted to life imprisonment.

During the trial, Bandera and the other organizers of the crime greeted each other with the Roman salute and shouts of “Glory to Ukraine!”, refusing to answer the court in Polish. After this trial, which received great public outcry, the structure of the OUN was revealed by the Polish authorities, and the nationalist organization actually ceased to exist.

In 1938, during the activation political activity Hitler, the OUN is resurrected and hopes for German help in creating a Ukrainian state. OUN theorist Mikhail Kolodzinsky writes about plans to conquer Europe:

“We want not only to possess Ukrainian cities, but also to trample enemy lands, capture enemy capitals, and salute the Ukrainian Empire on their ruins. We want to win the war - a great and cruel war that will make us masters of Eastern Europe.”

Bandera vs Melnikovites

During the Polish Company of the Wehrmacht, the OUN provided little support to German troops, and during the German offensive in 1939, Bandera was released. After this, his activities were connected mainly with the resolution of disagreements that arose in the OUN between Bandera’s supporters - the Banderaites and the Melnikites - supporters of the current leader of the organization.

The political struggle developed into a military one. Since the enmity of two essentially identical organizations was unprofitable for Germany, especially since both organizations nurtured the idea of ​​a national Ukrainian state, which no longer suited Germany, which was already successfully moving to the east, mass arrests of Bandera and Melnikites soon took place by the German authorities.

In 1941, Bandera was imprisoned and then transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the fall of 1944, Bandera, as a “Ukrainian freedom fighter,” was released by the German authorities. Despite the fact that it was considered inappropriate to take Bandera to Ukraine, the OUN continued the fight against Soviet power until approximately the mid-1950s, collaborating with Western intelligence services during the Cold War. In 1959, Stepan Bandera was assassinated by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky in Munich.

Trials

During the period of active struggle against the UPA and OUN in 1941 - 1949, according to the NKVD, thousands of military operations were carried out, during which tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists were killed. Many families of UPA members were expelled from the Ukrainian SSR, thousands of families were arrested and deported to other regions.

One of the well-known precedents for the trial of Bandera’s supporters is the 1941 show trial of 59 Lvov students suspected of connections with the OUN and anti-Soviet activities. The youngest was 15 years old, the oldest was 30. The investigation lasted about four months; it was found that many of the young people were ordinary members of the OUN, but the students did not plead guilty and declared that they were enemies of the Soviet regime. Initially, 42 people were sentenced to death, and 17 wanted a prison sentence of 10 years.

However, the College supreme court As a result, she commuted the sentence, and 19 convicts were shot, while others were given sentences ranging from 4 to 10 years in prison. One of the students was deported abroad.
You can also recall the mention of Ukrainian nationalists at the famous Nuremberg trials. General Lahausen, who acted as a witness, directly stated that Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the German government: “These detachments were supposed to carry out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines and organize comprehensive sabotage.”

However, despite the obvious evidence of the participation of Bandera’s followers and other members of the split OUN in the fight against Soviet Union, Ukrainian nationalists were not defendants at the Nuremberg trial. The USSR did not even pass a law condemning the OUN and UPA, but the fight against the nationalist underground continued until the mid-1950s, and was, in fact, separate specific punitive acts.

In 1955, they were granted an amnesty in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Victory. According to official documents, on August 1, 1956, more than 20 thousand OUN members returned from exile and prisons to the western lands of the USSR, including 7 thousand to the Lvov region.