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In the April 9, 2008 issue of the "Gazeta Polska" weekly, an article about the massacre appeared. According to those persons who survived (four of whom were cited), the murderers were Ukrainians of the SS Galizien Division. All those who recollected the massacre (Emilia Bernacka, then 10; Filomena Franczukowska, then 20; Jozefa Orlowska, then 16; and Regina Wroblewska, then 6) claimed that the village was attacked by the Ukrainian troops, who murdered all Poles they managed to catch, including infants. The mentioned persons survived because somebody managed to open the rear door of a village church in which the murderers were massacring the Polish civilians.
The weekly publication of the Polish Home Army – the "Biuletyn Ziemi Czerwienskiej" ("Land of Czerwien Bulletin") for March 26, 1944 (№ 12) [216, p. 8] stated that during the Battle at Pidkamin and Brody, Soviet forces took a couple of hundred soldiers of the SS Galizien division prisoner. All were immediately shot in the Zbarazh castle on the basis that two weeks earlier they had apparently taken part in the killing of the Polish inhabitants of Huta Pienacka, and as a result could not be categorized as prisoners of war.
The Warsaw branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) started an investigation into the massacre in November 1992. The investigation was subsequently suspended between 1997 and 2001, and as of 2008 is being conducted by the Kraków branch of the Institute.
The Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences investigated the events at Huta Pienicka and concluded that the 4th and 5th SS Police regiments did indeed kill the civilians within the village. It noted that at the time of the massacre the police regiments were not under 14th division command but rather under German police command (specifically, under German Sicherheitsdienst and SS command of the General Government). During this time, these units enjoyed a close relationship with local UPA units.
After the massacre, some local AK commanders forbade Polish strongholds from sheltering Soviet partisans in order to minimize the risk of those self-defence posts' destruction.
In the late 1940s, some 8,000 soldiers of the SS Galizien division were allowed to come to Britain, allegedly including members of the unit that massacred inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka. Most of them were not questioned about their activities, and successive British governments refused requests by lobby groups as well as American authorities to investigate their backgrounds. However, a 2001 television documentary, "The SS in Britain", initiated a police investigation after uncovering evidence suggesting that former members of the SS Galizien division living in Britain had participated in massacres in Poland.
The documentary, however, made numerous factual mistakes. The statement that the 4th and 5th regiments of the SS Galizien Division took part in the massacre was inaccurate, as the division had at that time been normalized to 3 regiments; there were no 4th or 5th regiments. The division also was at that time still in the process of formation, which was completed two months later in May 1944 near the Polish town of Dębica.
On February 28, 1989 a memorial was built on the site of the previous village, but was soon destroyed. A new monument commemorating the victims was erected in 2005 and unveiled on October 21, 2005. During the unveiling the consul put the blame of the massacre on the Ukrainians in his speech, stating, "On 28 February 1944, when the 'SS Galizien' together with other Ukrainian nationalists did horrible things as told by a contemporary, they shot mothers, children and murdered..."
Ukraine sent a note of protest regarding the fact that the Polish consul had ignored the Ukrainian government completely when opening the monument, that the new monument did not adhere to "Ukrainian laws" and was erected without the "necessary permits".
As a result of actions by the parliamentarian Oleh Tyahnybok, a note of protest regarding the "illegal erection" of the monument was sent out and the Polish consul was declared a "persona non-grata" for "degrading the national dignity of the Ukrainian people".
On February 28, 2007 a new monument was unveiled to the Poles who had been killed in the atrocities at Huta Peniacka. A delegation from Poland led by the vice consul of Culture for the Polish consulate in Lviv, Marcin Zieniewicz, stated that the occasion marked one of the most tragic pages in the history of not only the Polish people, but also of the Ukrainian people. On February 28, 2009 the presidents of Ukraine and Poland met at the monument to commemorate the massacre.
The village of Huta Pieniacka no longer exists. Most of the houses were burned during the massacre and only the school and a Roman Catholic church remained. Both of these buildings were demolished after the war, and in the area of the village there is a pasture for cattle. There is a post with a Ukrainian inscription "Center of the former village", but it does not mention the name of the village.
January 2017: Monument to Polish WWII massacre victims desecrated with fascist symbols in Ukraine. A cross made of stone was blown up, while two tables with the names of the Poles killed in the 1944 massacre were damaged. The Polish Foreign Ministry has condemned the attack on the monument. In a statement published on its website, it called for an "immediate" investigation, saying those behind it must be punished. Incidents like this threaten relations between the two nations, the statement added. The monument was rebuilt on behalf of local Ukrainian community and unveiled on February 26, 2017.
The Palikrowy massacre was a war crime committed by made up of Ukrainian soldiers of the SS-Galizien who were removed from the SS-Galizien at the time of the massacre and placed under German police command, Ukrainian SVK ("Self-defence", Ukrainian: Samoobronni Kuszczowi Widdiły) forces and Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Poles in the village of Palikrowy (since 1945 Palykorovy), which took place on 12 March 1944. A total of 385 Poles were killed.
Palikrowy was an ethnically mixed village, with 70% Polish population. In 1944, the population was about 1880, with about 360 houses. The action in Palikrowy was coordinated with the attack on nearby Pidkamin including the monastery in Pidkamin, where some of inhabitants from Palikrowy were hiding during the massacre of Poles in Volhynia.
All the inhabitants of Palikrowy were gathered on a meadow near village. The Ukrainian inhabitants of the village were released. Then the Poles were killed by two heavy machine guns. Only a few wounded people survived. Polish houses were burned down and hiding Polish civilians were murdered, and their property stolen.
The Pidkamin massacre or the Podkamień massacre of 12 March 1944 was the massacre of Polish civilians committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under the command of Maksym Skorupsky (Maks), in cooperation with a unit of the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician". The victims were ethnic Polish residents of the Eastern Galician village of Podkamień in the occupied Second Polish Republic's Tarnopol Voivodeship (now Pidkamin, Brody Raion, Ukraine). During the war the area was administratively part of the Nazi German "Reichskommissariat Ukraine" (now Ternopil Oblast). Estimates of victims include 150, more than 250 and up to 1000.
During World War II Pidkamin, (), was a shelter for Poles from the neighbouring province of Volhynia, who had escaped the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and sought refuge in the local Dominican monastery. The complex was surrounded by walls and was located on a hill that dominated the surrounding area and as a result provided a relatively safe haven for refugees. Around 2,000 people were living at Podkamin town and the monastery when it was attacked in March 1944, by the UIA in cooperation with 14th SS Division.
On the first day of the attack it was repelled by a small self-defence group, and that night some of the inhabitants managed to escape. The next day the UIA promised to spare the inhabitants lives in exchange for the surrender of the monastery. While the monastery was being evacuated the UIA opened fire and entered the monastery complex, and massacred a number of people, including the clergy. The bodies of the dead were then thrown into the well. Afterwards the UIA camped in the nearby town of Pidkamin, and between the 12–16 March repeatedly attacked people hiding in the villages. On 16 March, as the Soviet Red Army approached, the UIA withdrew from the area.
Approximately 100 ethnic Poles were murdered in the monastery, and additional 500 were killed in the town of Pidkamen itself. In the nearby village of Palikrowy, 365 Poles were killed. Armed Ukrainian groups destroyed the monastery, stealing all the valuables, except for the monastery's crowned icon. Tadeusz Piotrowski who based his findings on the Home Army or German Police sources, estimates that the number of victims in the monastery and adjacent villages numbered 1000. Among the survivors was the renowned writer and painter, Leopold Buczkowski.
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (, literally: "Volhynian slaughter"; , "Volyn tragedy"), were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. The UPA's actions resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.
According to Timothy Snyder, the ethnic cleansing was a Ukrainian attempt to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the prewar Polish state. Henryk Komański and Szczepan Siekierka write that the killings were directly linked to the policies of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 (March 1943 in some sources) was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state. The massacres led to a wider conflict between Polish and Ukrainian forces in the German-occupied territories, with the Polish Home Army in Volhynia responding to the Ukrainian attacks.
In 2008, the massacres which were committed by the Ukrainian nationalists against the Poles in Volhynia and Galicia were described by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance as bearing the distinct characteristics of a genocide, and on 22 July 2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres as genocide. This classification is disputed by Ukraine and non-Polish historians. According to a 2016 article in "Slavic Review", there is a "scholarly consensus that this was a case of ethnic cleansing as opposed to genocide".
Just before the Soviet invasion of 1939, Volhynia had been part of the Second Polish Republic. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, between 1928 and 1938, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". Through supporting Ukrainian culture, religious autonomy and the Ukrainization of the Orthodox Church, Józef Piłsudski and his allies wanted to achieve Ukrainian loyalty to the Polish state and to minimise Soviet influences in the borderline region. That approach was gradually abandoned after Piłsudski's death in 1935 as a consequence of an increase in radical Ukrainian nationalism.
In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in Vienna, Austria, and was the result of a union between radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations, including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. The organization initiated a terrorist campaign in Poland, which included the assassination of prominent Polish politicians, such as Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, and Polish and Ukrainian moderates, such as Tadeusz Hołówko.
The terror campaign and civil unrest in the Galician countryside resulted in Polish police exacting a policy of collective responsibility on local Ukrainians in an effort to "pacify" the region, demolishing Ukrainian community centers and libraries, confiscating property and produce, and beating protesters. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in elections, with their constituents terrorized into voting for Polish candidates. The Ukrainian plight, protests and pacification received the attention of the League of Nations as 'an international cause célèbre', with Poland receiving condemnation from European politicians. The ongoing policies of Poland led to the deepening of ethnic cleavages in the area.
Volhynia was a place of increasingly-violent conflict, with Polish police on one side and Western Ukrainian communists supported by many dissatisfied Ukrainian peasants on the other. The communists organized strikes, killed at least 31 suspected police informers in 1935–1936 and began to assassinate local Ukrainian officials for "collaboration" with the Polish state. The police conducted mass arrests, reported the killing 18 communists in 1935 and killed at least 31 people in gunfights and during arrests over the course of 1936.
Beginning in 1937, the Polish government in Volhynia initiated an active campaign to use religion as a tool for Polonization and to convert the Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism. Over 190 Orthodox churches were destroyed and 150 converted to Roman Catholic churches. The remaining Orthodox churches were forced to use the Polish language in their sermons. In August 1939, the last remaining Orthodox church in the Volhynian capital of Lutsk was converted to a Roman Catholic church by a decree of the Polish government.
Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often provoked by OUN-B violence but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two ethnic groups. Between 1934 and 1938, a series of violent and sometimes-deadly attacks against Ukrainians were conducted in other parts of Poland.
Also in Wołyń Voivodeship, some of the new policies were implemented, resulting in the suppression of the Ukrainian language, culture and religion, and the antagonism escalated. Although around 68% of the voivodeship's population spoke Ukrainian as their first language (see table), practically all government and administrative positions, including the police, were assigned to Poles.
Jeffrey Burds of Northeastern University believes that the buildup towards the ethnic cleansing of Poles, which erupted during the Second World War in Galicia and Volhynia, had its roots in that period.
The Ukrainian population was outraged by the Polish government policies. A Polish report on the popular mood in Volhynia recorded a comment of a young Ukrainian from October 1938: "we will decorate our pillars with you and our trees with your wives".
By the beginning of the Second World War, the membership of OUN had risen to 20,000 active members, and the number of supporters was many times as many.
On June 22, 1941, the territories of eastern Poland which were occupied by the Soviet Union were attacked by German, Slovak and Hungarian forces. In Volhynia the Red Army was only able to resist the attack for a couple of days. On June 30, 1941, the Soviets withdrew eastward and Volhynia was overrun by the Germans, with support from Ukrainian nationalists, who carried out acts of sabotage. The OUN organized the Ukrainian People's Militia, which staged pogroms and helped the Germans round up and execute Poles, Jews and those who were deemed to be communist or Soviet activists, most notably in Lwów, Stanisławów, Korosten and Sokal.
In 1941, two brothers of the Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera were murdered, while they were imprisoned in Auschwitz, by Volksdeutsche kapos. In the Chełm region, 394 Ukrainian community leaders were killed by the Poles on the grounds of collaboration with the German authorities.
During the first year of the German occupation, the OUN urged its members to join German police units. They were trained in the use of weapons so they could assist the German SS in the murder of approximately 200,000 Volhynian Jews. While the Ukrainian police's share in the actual killings of Jews was small because it primarily played a supporting role, the Ukrainian police learned how to make use of genocidal techniques from the Germans: detailed and advanced planning and careful site selection, giving phony assurances to local populations prior to their annihilation, and sudden encirclement and mass killing. The training which the UPA received in 1942 explains how it was able to efficiently kill Poles in 1943.
The decisions leading to the massacre of Poles in Volhynia and their implementation can be primarily attributed to the extremist Bandera faction of OUN (OUN-B), not to other Ukrainian political or military groups. The OUN-B had an ideology involving the following ideas: integral nationalism, with a pure national state and language being desired goals; glorification of violence and armed struggle of nation versus nation; and totalitarianism in which the nation must be ruled by one person and one political party. While the moderate Melnyk faction of OUN admired aspects of Mussolini's fascism, the more extreme Bandera faction of OUN admired aspects of Nazism.
At the time of OUN's founding, the most popular political party among Ukrainians was the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, which was opposed to Polish rule but called for peaceful and democratic means to achieve independence from Poland. The OUN, on the other hand, was originally a fringe movement in western Ukraine and was condemned for its violence by figures from mainstream Ukrainian society such as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, who wrote of the OUN's leadership that "whoever demoralizes our youth is a criminal and an enemy of our people". Several factors contributed to OUN-B's increase in popularity and ultimately monopoly of power within Ukrainian society, conditions that were necessary for the massacres to occur.
Only one group of Ukrainian nationalists, OUN-B under Mykola Lebed and then Roman Shukhevych, intended the ethnic cleansing of Volhynia. Taras Bulba-Borovets, the founder of the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army, rejected the idea and condemned the anti-Polish massacres when they started. The OUN-M leadership did not believe that such an operation was advantageous in 1943.
After Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, both the Polish government-in-exile and the Ukrainian OUN-B considered the possibility that in the event of mutually-exhaustive attrition warfare between Germany and the Soviet Union, the region would become a scene of conflict between Poles and Ukrainians. The Polish government-in-exile, which wanted the region to return to Poland, planned for a swift armed takeover of the territory, as part of its overall plan for a future anti-German uprising. That view was compounded by OUN's prior collaboration with the Nazis and so by 1943 no understanding between the Polish Home Army and the OUN was possible.
Between 1939 and 1943, Volhynian Poles had been already reduced to some 8% of the region's population (around 200,000 people). They were dispersed around the countryside and deprived of their elites by Soviet deportations, with no local partisan army of their own or state authority (except the Germans) to protect them.
On February 9, 1943, a UPA group, commanded by Hryhory Perehyniak, pretended to be Soviet partisans and assaulted the Parośle settlement in Sarny County. It is considered a prelude to the massacres and is recognized as the first mass murder committed by the UPA in the area. Estimates of the number of victims range from 149 to 173.
In 1943, the massacres were organized westward and started in March in Kostopol and Sarny Counties. In April, they moved to the area of Krzemieniec, Rivne, Dubno and Lutsk. The UPA killed approximately 7,000 unarmed men, women and children in late March and early April 1943.
On the night of April 22–23, Ukrainian groups, commanded by Ivan Lytwynchuk (aka "Dubovy"), attacked the settlement of Janowa Dolina, killing 600 people and burning down the entire village. The few who survived were mostly people who had found refuge with friendly Ukrainian families. In one of the massacres, in the village of Lipniki, almost the entire family of Mirosław Hermaszewski, Poland's only cosmonaut, was murdered along with about 180 inhabitants. The attackers murdered the grandparents of the composer Krzesimir Dębski, whose parents engaged during the Ukrainian attack on Kisielin. Dębski's parents survived by taking refuge with a friendly Ukrainian family.
In another massacre, according to the UPA reports, the Polish colonies of Kuty, in the Szumski region, and Nowa Nowica, in the Webski region, were liquidated for co-operation with the Gestapo and the other German authorities. According to Polish sources, the Kuty self-defense unit managed to repel a UPA assault, but at least 53 Poles were murdered. The rest of the inhabitants decided to abandon the village and were escorted by the Germans who arrived at Kuty, alerted by the glow of fire and the sound of gunfire. Maksym Skorupskyi, one of the UPA commanders, wrote in his diary: "Starting from our action on Kuty, day by day after sunset, the sky was bathing in the glow of conflagration. Polish villages were burning".
By June 1943, the attacks had spread to Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński and Horochów Counties and in August to Luboml County. The Soviet victory at Kursk acted as a stimulus for the escalation of massacres in June and August 1943, when the ethnic cleansing reached its peak. In June 1943, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, head-commander of the UPA-North, issued a secret directive saying:
We should make a large action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements lying next to the massive forests, should disappear from the face of the earth.
However, most of the victims were women and children. In mid-1943, after a wave of killings of Polish civilians, the Poles tried to initiate negotiations with the UPA. Two delegates of the Polish government-in-exile and the Home Army, Zygmunt Rumel and Krzysztof Markiewicz, attempted to negotiate with the UPA leaders, but they were captured and murdered on July 10, 1943 in the village of Kustycze. Some sources claim that they were tortured before their death.
In August 1943, the Polish village of Gaj, near Kovel, was burned and some 600 people were massacred, in the village of Wola Ostrowiecka 529 people were killed, including 220 children under 14, and 438 people were killed, including 246 children, in Ostrowki. In September 1992, exhumations were carried out in those villages and confirmed the number of dead.
The same month, the UPA placed notices in every Polish village: "in 48 hours leave beyond the Bug River or the San river- otherwise Death". Ukrainian attackers limited their actions to villages and settlements and did not strike towns or cities.
The killings were opposed by the Ukrainian Central Committee under Volodymyr Kubiyovych. In response, UPA units murdered Ukrainian Central Committee representatives and a Ukrainian Catholic priest who had read an appeal by the Ukrainian Central Committee from his pulpit.
The Polish historian Władysław Filar, who witnessed the massacres, cites numerous statements made by Ukrainian officers when they reported their actions to the leaders of the UPA-OUN. For example, in late September 1943, the commandant "Lysyi" wrote to the OUN headquarters: "On September 29, 1943, I carried out the action in the villages of Wola Ostrowiecka (see Massacre of Wola Ostrowiecka), and Ostrivky (see Massacre of Ostrówki). I have liquidated all Poles, starting from the youngest ones. Afterwards, all buildings were burned and all goods were confiscated". On that day in Wola Ostrowiecka, 529 Poles were murdered (including 220 children under 14), and in Ostrówki, the Ukrainians killed 438 people (including 246 children).
Father Kamiński claimed that in Koropiec, where no Poles were actually murdered, a local Greek Catholic priest, in reference to mixed Polish-Ukrainian families, proclaimed from the pulpit: "Mother, you're suckling an enemy – strangle it." Among the scores of Polish villages whose inhabitants were murdered and all buildings burned are places like Berezowica, near Zbaraz; Ihrowica, near Ternopil; Plotych, near Ternopil; Podkamien, near Brody; and Hanachiv and Hanachivka, near Przemyślany.
Roman Shukhevych, a UPA commander, stated in his order from 25 February 1944: "In view of the success of the Soviet forces it is necessary to speed up the liquidation of the Poles, they must be totally wiped out, their villages burned... only the Polish population must be destroyed".
A military journal of the Ukrainian 14th SS Division condemned the killing of Poles. In a March 2, 1944 article directed to the Ukrainian youth, which was written by military leaders, Soviet partisans were blamed for the murders of Poles and Ukrainians, and the authors stated, "If God forbid, among those who committed such inhuman acts, a Ukrainian hand was found, it will be forever excluded from the Ukrainian national community". Some historians deny the role of the Ukrainian 14th SS Division in the killings and attribute them entirely to German units, but others disagree. According to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, the Ukrainian 14th SS Division's role in the ethnic cleansing of Poles from western Ukraine was marginal.
By the end of the summer, mass acts of terror aimed at Poles were taking place in Eastern Galicia to force Poles to settle on the western bank of the San River under the slogan "Poles behind the San". Snyder estimates that 25,000 Poles were killed in Galicia alone, and Grzegorz Motyka estimated the number of victims at 30,000–40,000.
The slaughter did not stop after the Red Army entered the areas, with massacres taking place in 1945 in such places as Czerwonogrod (Ukrainian: Irkiv), where 60 Poles were murdered on February 2, 1945, the day before they were scheduled to depart for the Recovered Territories.
By Autumn 1944, anti-Polish actions stopped, and terror was used only against those who co-operated with the NKVD, but in late 1944-early 1945, the UPA performed a last massive anti-Polish action in Ternopil region. On the night of February 5–6, 1945, Ukrainian groups attacked the Polish village of Barysz, near Buchach; 126 Poles were massacred, including women and children. A few days later, on February 12–13, a local group of OUN under Petro Khamchuk attacked the Polish settlement of Puźniki, killed around 100 people and burned houses. Most of those who survived moved to Niemysłowice, Gmina Prudnik.
Approximately 150–366 Ukrainian and a few Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma were killed on March 3, 1945 by a former Polish Home Army unit, aided by Polish self-defense groups from nearby villages. The massacre is believed to be an act of retaliation for earlier alleged murders by Ukrainian Insurgent Army of 9 or 11 Poles in Pawłokoma and unspecified number of Poles killed by of the UPA in the neighboring villages.
Attacks on Poles during the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were marked with extreme sadism and brutality. Rape, torture and mutilation were commonplace. Poles were burned alive, flayed, impaled, crucified, disembowelled, dismembered and beheaded. Women were gang raped and had their breasts sliced off, children were hacked to pieces with axes, babies were impaled on bayonets and pitchforks or bashed against trees.
The atrocities were carried out indiscriminately and without restraint. The victims, regardless of their age or gender, were routinely tortured to death. Norman Davies in "No Simple Victory" gives a short but shocking description of the massacres:
An OUN order from early 1944 stated:
UPA commander's order of 6 April 1944 stated: "Fight them [the Poles] unmercifully. No one is to be spared, even in case of mixed marriages".
Timothy Snyder describes the murders: "Ukrainian partisans burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. In some cases, beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies were displayed, in order to encourage remaining Poles to flee". A similar account has been presented by Niall Ferguson, who wrote: "Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted". The Ukrainian historian Yuryi Kirichuk described the conflict as similar to medieval peasant uprisings.
Even though it may be an exaggeration to say that the massacres enjoyed the general support of the Ukrainians, it has been suggested that without wide support from local Ukrainians, they would have been impossible. The Ukrainian peasants who took part in the killings created their own groups, the SKV or "Samoboronni Kushtchovi Viddily" (Самооборонні Кущові Відділи, СКВ). Many of their victims who were perceived as Poles, even despite not knowingly the Polish language, were murdered by СКВ along with the others.
The violence reached its peak on July 11, 1943 known to many Poles as “Bloody Sunday” when the UPA carried out attacks on 100 Polish villages in Volhynia burning them to the ground and slaughtering some 8,000 Polish men, women and children including patients and nurses at a hospital. These attacks as well as others could have been stopped at anytime by the Germans who in some cases were stationed in garrisons in or near the villages that were attacked. German soldiers however were given orders not to intervene. In some cases individual German soldiers and officers made deals with the UPA to give weapons and other materials to them in exchange for a share of the loot taken from Poles.
In Polish-Ukrainian families, one common UPA instruction was to kill one's Polish spouse and children born of that marriage. People who refused to carry such an order were often murdered, together with their entire family.
According to Ukrainian sources, in October 1943 the Volhynian delegation of the Polish government estimated the number of Polish casualties in of Sarny, Kostopol, Równe and Zdołbunów Counties to exceed 15,000. Timothy Snyder estimates that in July 1943, the UPA actions resulted in the deaths of at least 40,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia (in March 1944, another 10,000 were killed in Galicia), causing additional 200,000 Poles to flee west before September 1944 and 800,000 afterward.
The massacres prompted Poles in April 1943 to begin to organize in self-defence, 100 of such organizations being formed in Volhynia in 1943. Sometimes, self-defence organizations obtained arms from the Germans, but other times, the Germans confiscated their weapons and arrested the leaders. Many of the organizations could not withstand the pressure of the UPA and were destroyed. Only the largest self-defense organizations, whkch were able to obtain help from the Home Army or Soviet partisans, were able to survive. Kazimierz Bąbiński, commander of the Union for Armed Struggle-Home Army Wołyń in his order to AK partisan units stated:
The Home Army on 20 July 1943 called upon Polish self-defense units to place themselves under its command. Ten days later, it declared itself for Ukrainian independence on territories without Polish populations, and it called for an end to the killings of civilians.
Polish self-defence organizations started to take part in revenge massacres of Ukrainian civilians in the summer of 1943, when Ukrainian villagers who had nothing to do with the massacres suffered at the hands of Polish partisan forces. Evidence includes a letter dated 26 August 1943 to the local Polish self-defence in which the AK commander Kazimierz Bąbiński criticized the burning of neighboring Ukrainian villages, the killing of any Ukrainian who crossed its path and the robbing of Ukrainians of their material possessions. The total number of Ukrainian civilians murdered in Volyn in retaliatory acts by Poles is estimated at 2,000–3,000.
The 27th Home Army Infantry Division was formed in January 1944 and tasked to fight the UPA and then the Wehrmacht.
While Germans actively encouraged the conflict, they tried not to get directly involved. Special German units formed from the collaborationist Ukrainian and later the Polish auxiliary police were deployed in pacification actions in Volhynia, and some of their crimes were attributed to the Home Army or to the UPA.
According to Yuriy Kirichuk the Germans actively prodded both sides of the conflict against each other. Erich Koch once said: "We have to do everything possible so that a Pole meeting a Ukrainian, would be willing to kill him and conversely, a Ukrainian would be willing to kill a Pole". Kirichuk quotes a German commissioner from Sarny who responded to the Polish complaints: "You want Sikorski, the Ukrainians want Bandera. Fight each other".
On August 25, 1943, the German authorities ordered all Poles to leave the villages and settlements and to move to larger towns.
Soviet partisan units in the area were aware of the massacres. On May 25, 1943, the commander of the Soviet partisan forces of the Rivne area stressed in his report to the headquarters that Ukrainian nationalists did not shoot the Poles but cut them dead with knives and axes, with no consideration for age or gender.
The death toll among civilians murdered during the Volhynia Massacre is still being researched. At least 10% of ethnic Poles in Volhynia were killed by the UPA. Accordingly, "Polish casualties comprised about 1% of the prewar population of Poles on territories where the UPA was active and 0.2% of the entire ethnically Polish population in Ukraine and Poland". Łossowski emphasizes that documentation is far from conclusive, as in numerous cases, no survivors were later able to testify.
The Soviet and German invasions of prewar eastern Poland, the UPA massacres, and the postwar Soviet expulsions of Poles contributed to the virtual elimination of a Polish presence in the region. Those who remained left Volhynia, mostly for the neighbouring province of Lublin. After the war, the survivors moved further west to the territories of Lower Silesia. Polish orphans from Volhynia were kept in several orphanages, with the largest of them around Kraków. Several former Polish villages in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia no longer exist, and those that remain are in ruins.
The historian Timothy Snyder considers it likely that the UPA killed as many Ukrainians as it killed Poles, because local Ukrainians who did not adhere to its form of nationalism were considered traitors. Within a month of the beginning of the massacres, Polish self-defense units responded in kind. All conflicts resulted in Poles taking revenge on Ukrainian civilians. According to Motyka, the number of Ukrainian victims is 2,000–3,000 in Volhynia, and 10,000-15,000 in all of the territories covered by the conflict. G. Rossolinski-Liebe puts the number of Ukrainians, both OUN-UPA members and civilians, killed by Poles during and after World War II to be 10,000–20,000.
Ukrainian casualties which were caused by Polish retribution are estimated to have numbered 2,000–3,000 in Volhynia. Together with those killed in other areas, the Ukrainian casualties were between 10,000 and 12,000, with the bulk of them occurring in Eastern Galicia and present-day Poland. According to Kataryna Wolczuk for all of the areas affected by conflict, the Ukrainian casualties are estimated as from 10,000 to 30,000 between 1943 and 1947. According to Motyka, the author of a fundamental monograph about the UPA, estimations of 30,000 Ukrainian casualties are unsupported.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), of which the Ukrainian Insurgent Army had become the armed wing, promoted the removal, by force if necessary, of non-Ukrainians from the social and economic spheres of a future Ukrainian state.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists adopted in 1929 the "Ten Commandments of the Ukrainian Nationalists" to which all of its members were expected to adhere. They stated, "Do not hesitate to carry out the most dangerous deeds" and "Treat the enemies of your nation with hatred and ruthlessness".
Ethnic violence was exacerbated with the circulation of posters and leaflets inciting the Ukrainian population to murder Poles and "Judeo-Muscovites" alike.
Taras Bulba-Borovets, the founder of the UPA, criticized the attacks as soon as they began:
According to prosecutor Piotr Zając, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in 2003 considered three different versions of the events in its investigation:
The IPN concluded that the second version to be the most likely.
According to , much of the study of the massacres is done in an "ethnohistorical paradigm". He argues that nationalism is responsible for myths and misconceptions about the events.
According to Ukrainian historian Andrii Portnov the classification as genocide has been strongly supported by Poles who were expelled from the east and by parts of the Polish right-wing politics. Some Polish writers have labeled the Ukrainian crimes worse than Nazi or Soviet atrocities; others, including Waldemar Rezmer, use the word "Zagłada", originally applied to the Final Solution, to describe them.
The Institute of National Remembrance investigated the crimes committed by the UPA against the Poles in Volhynia, Galicia and prewar Lublin Voivodeship and collected over 10,000 pages of documents and protocols. The massacres were described by the commission's prosecutor, Piotr Zając, as bearing the characteristics of a genocide: "there is no doubt that the crimes committed against the people of Polish nationality have the character of genocide". Also, the Institute of National Remembrance in a published paper stated:
The Volhynian massacres have all the traits of genocide listed in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as an act "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."
On 15 July 2009, the Sejm of the Republic of Poland unanimously adopted a resolution regarding "the tragic fate of Poles in Eastern Borderlands". The text of the resolution states that July 2009 marks the 66th anniversary "of the beginning of anti-Polish actions by the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Polish Eastern territories – mass murders characterised by ethnic cleansing with marks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, the Sejm passed a resolution declaring 11 July a National Day of Remembrance to honor the Polish victims murdered in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by Ukrainian nationalists and formally called the massacres a genocide.
In Ukraine, the events are called "Volyn tragedy". Coverage in textbooks may be brief and/or euphemistic. Some Ukrainian historians accept the genocide classification, but argue that it was a "bilateral genocide" and that the Home Army was responsible for crimes against Ukrainian civilians that were equivalent in nature.
Many Ukrainians perceived the 2016 resolution as an "anti-Ukrainian gesture" in the context of Vladimir Putin's attempts to use the Volhynia issue to divide Poland and Ukraine in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian war. In September 2016, the Verkhovna Rada passed a resolution condemning "the one-sided political assessment of the historical events" in Poland.
In 2009, a Polish historical documentary film "Było sobie miasteczko..." was produced by Adam Kruk for Telewizja Polska which tells the story of the Kisielin massacre.
The massacre of Poles in Volhynia was depicted in the 2016 movie "Volhynia", which was directed by the Polish screenwriter and film director Wojciech Smarzowski.
[[Category:Massacres of Poles in Eastern Galicia\| ]]
[[Category:Wartime sexual violence in World War II]]
The Galician Soviet Socialist Republic (, Г.С.С.Р.) was a short-lived, self-declared Bolshevik political entity that existed from 15 July to formally 21 September 1920. The communist state was established during a successful counter-offensive of the Red Army in the summer of 1920 as part of the Polish-Soviet War and in the course of which the Polish-Ukrainian joint military force (Polish Ukrainian Front) was forced to retreat from its positions along the Dnieper that it secured earlier in 1920 all the way to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.
The republic became a buffer zone of the ongoing conflict within the area of the South-Western front of the Red Army. Due to the successful offensive in July 1920, the Soviet government also created the Polrevkom and had intentions of creating the Polish Socialist Soviet Republic. A similar, but less elaborate activity, of the communist Polrevkom, was related to the North-Western front of the Red Army (the "government" was seated in Białystok).

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