Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, by John-Paul Himka (introduction)

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Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, Brown University

“This is the most meticulously researched and definitive history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement’s collaboration in the Holocaust. Himka’s precise account illuminates the virulent antisemitism that pervaded this movement like other fascist campaigns during the Second World War. In painstaking detail and drawing from multilingual testimonies, Himka pinpoints the units, places, and individual perpetrators and recounts the suffering of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainian embroiled in the devastation of western Ukraine.” Wendy Lower, John K. Roth Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College

Dr. John-Paul Himka is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alberta. He is co-editor (with Joanna B. Michlic) of Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe (University of Nebraska Press 2013), as well as author of a number of books and numerous articles on Ukrainian history.

ISBN: 978-3-8382-1548-8 Distributed by

COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

ibidem

Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust

“This outstanding book is the first comprehensive study of the involvement of the OUN-UPA in the Holocaust. Clearly written, forcefully argued, based on deep knowledge of the existing literature in all relevant languages and on a mass of archival documentation, and admirably balanced, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust will remain the definitive book on the topic for years to come.”

UAV 12

John-Paul Himka

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA), in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under German occupation in 1941–44. Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors, Soviet investigations, German documentation, documents produced by OUN itself, and memoirs of OUN activists, it has been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.

ibd

John-Paul Himka

Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941–1944

Ukrainian Voices, vol. 12

ibidem


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