These various branches of the organization of Heinrich Himmler unfortunately wore the same uniform, though they had different insignia. [1]
Polish eyewitnesses, and many historians are quick to identify various individuals as “Waffen SS Galicia” and the current fashion, even in Ukraine, is to lump them all as “SS-men”. But in actual fact, the subject of Rudling’s article, the 14.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1), did not take part in nor was present at the atrocity described, nor any other.
It is true that some two months later the personnel of these police regiments were added to the actual 14.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) and many later took part in the battle of Brody on July 18-22 1944. The fact that many members of the Waffen SS Division Galicia that joined it at various times may have carried baggage of misdeeds and crimes committed previously, does not affect the record of the Division itself. The responsibility for anything prior is individual. Officers such as Gen. Freitag, Wien, or Magall also carried the baggage of their previous activity and again the responsibility is individual. However, the quotation in Rudling’s article “Major 1. General-Stab-Offizier Wolf-Dietrich Heike claimed that ‘The [14. Waffen SS Division Galizien] took to the sword in good faith and for a just cause, that is the freedom and independence of their country. They wielded it cleanly and flawlessly.’” holds true.
To most readers, the circumstances surrounding the war in western Ukraine will be poorly understood. World War 2 in western Ukraine, the provinces of Halychyna (“Galicia”), Volyn’, Pidlasha, Lemko lands, and Kholm lands, was a four-sided conflict. The intricate complexities of four-sided warfare, where each side opposes all others, is rarely analyzed nor war-gamed. The sides to the conflict in western Ukraine were the German Reich, the Muscovite Empire known as the USSR, the Polish empire, and a native Ukrainian population seeking a country of their own.
The third party listed, the Polish empire, was a creature of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference which had gifted to a nascent Poland vast swaths of lands populated by Ukrainians, others by Belarusians, others by Lithuanians (including their current capital Vilnius), as well as some lands populated by Germans. I do not use the word fascist outside of its correct context, namely Mussolini’s Italy. Used in any other context the word becomes a shape-shifter allowing both writer and reader to impose varying meanings onto it. Thus, I will not use that word here. Interwar Poland was a vast land empire, that was authoritarian, ethnocentric, chauvinist, intolerant, unfree, and brutal. The government itself was unstable; the first president was assassinated just five days after taking office, in 1926 a revolt led by Polish Gen. Jozef Pilsudsky resulted in some 400 dead and 900 wounded[2]. Access to higher education was proscribed for non-Poles. Schooling in native languages was repressed and replaced by Polish. Opponents of government policy such as socialists and Ukrainian nationalists found themselves in the Bereza Kartuzka concentration camp. Ukrainians were subjected to “Pacification” measures; essentially pogroms by another name. The Polish attitude at the time towards Jews is well illustrated by the Jedwabne massacre.[3], and are reflected in Poland’s current laws limiting discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.[4] Relations between Jozef Pilsudsky and Hitler were warm, in fact Hitler admired him and attended a funeral memorial service for Pilsudsky in Berlin[5]. Simply put, interwar Poland was the empire that Hitler wanted the German Reich to become.
And thus, the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, certainly did not spring to being on empty ground. Its immediate goal was the creation of an independent Ukrainian state on these western Ukrainian lands. In fact, that goal came to life for a very brief moment in the creation of an independent Carpatho-Ukraine. In a matter of days this land was overrun by Hungarian forces, allies of the German Reich, and the OUN fighters were crushed - not without some complicity by Poland[6].
During the German occupation, Poles had formed a potent underground called the AK, Armia Krajowa [Home Army], along with other units such as Bataliony Chlopskie [Polish Peasants’ Battalions] that eventually merged into the AK. Mindful of preserving its Ukrainian colony, the “eastern borderlands” or Kresy Wschodnie, the AK not only fought against the German occupiers but fought especially against the Ukrainian nationalist underground, the UPA. They readily allied themselves with Soviet Partizans against this last common enemy. It was a brutal conflict. One or the other would commit some terrorist act against Germans but leave traces that would lead one to believe that the opposite underground was behind the act. This would result in swift revenge against the suspected perpetrators, such as the burning of villages or mass executions. No atrocity stood alone. There was always a preceding one and a following one. Huta Peniacka in Rudling’s example was a well-armed fortified village, home to an AK base. Most homes had underground bunkers with caches of arms. Just prior to the events referred to by Rudling it had hosted a Soviet Partisan company of over 60 men. From there, Soviet agents would infiltrate as far as Lviv itself. The Soviets had just left the day before, on February 22, leaving only their wounded behind.
From the very beginning of the war, the Ukrainian nationalist leadership knew that for Ukraine to become a subject and not an object in the endgame of WW2 it had to have a trained modern, well-armed military force. The OUN which had split into the Col. Andriy Melnyk faction and a Stepan Bandera faction, had differing opinions on the formation of a Ukrainian unit within Germany’s armed forces. Bandera, a young firebrand leader of Ukrainian nationalism, initially opposed the Division’s creation. Col. Melnyk, an older experienced military leader found common cause with the Reich in reversing the results of the Paris Peace Conference and defeating the USSR. He pushed for the creation of such a force. The experience of the previous war showed that a Ukrainian military unit formed within the armed forces of an agreeable empire could be the difference between independence and oblivion. In WW1 a Ukrainian regiment, the Sichovi Striltsi [Sich Riflemen], within the Austrian armed forces had become the post-war nucleus of 2 Ukrainian armies! They formed the core of the western Ukrainian UHA, Ukrainian Galician Army, and the Sichovi Striltsi of the Ukrainian National Republic. The latter were formed by prisoners of war that had been held in Imperial Russia!
It was believed that a regular military force is a better argument at a peace conference than scattered guerilla units. Had the war ended with front lines in Ukraine rather than Berlin, there would have been hope for an independent Ukrainian state, something that sadly took another 50 years to achieve. Thus, given the objective of creating a military unit, while recognizing the German reality on the ground, swearing a meaningless oath to Adolph Hitler, rather than to Churchill or Roosevelt, was a small price to pay.
After being investigated by the Allies and cleared of any war crimes, the Galicia Division members were released in 1947 from their POW camp in Rimini, Italy. In Canada, the Deschenes Commission (February 1985 – December 1986) also found that the veterans of this division committed NO war crimes.
Another specific accusation that Mr. Rudling levels against the Division is:
“The Waffen-SS was designated a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trial, something which has complicated nationalist myth making around the unit.”
It is true that that the Nuremburg Trial did issue a statement that the SS and all SS related units are designated as criminal organizations. This is a blanket political statement in a victor’s justice trial. The very fact that only the losing side was subject to trial discredits the entire proceeding. The very careful maneuvering around the date of August 23, 1941 to avoid mention of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that could embarrass the USSR was quite shameless[7]. Equally shameful is the fact that the USSR presented false evidence that the Katyn massacre had been perpetrated by German forces[8]. Thankfully, it appears that that particular evidence was disregarded, but still, it raises troubling questions. In any case, no evidence at all that was specifically related to the 14.Waffen SS Division Galicia was ever reviewed or presented at the trial.
“The Nuremberg Criminal Court for war crimes (and subsidiary courts like the Dachau International Military Tribunal) prosecuted only Axis nationals or collaborators and did not prosecute Allied war crimes. This led to the paradox that no one from the Soviet Union was charged although the USSR [with its then ALLY Nazi Germany] had participated in the invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939 [and the partition of occupied Europe into respective ‘spheres of influence’]. So, while German defendants were charged with waging war of aggression for Germany's attack on Poland, no one from the Soviet Union was charged even though the USSR had attacked Poland as well. Indeed, the Soviets even sat in judgment, as one of the four Allied judges was Soviet. Similarly, one of the indictments was ‘conspiracy to wage aggressive war’, but the Soviets who conspired with the Nazis to wage aggressive war against Poland were not indicted.”[9]
