The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population, against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia, and the Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The UPA's actions resulted in up to 100,000 Polish deaths.
The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. These killings were exceptionally brutal, and most of the victims were women and children. Other victims of the massacres included several hundred Armenians, Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and impeded the massacres by hiding Polish escapees.
The killings were an attempt at ethnic cleansing to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the pre-war Polish state. The decision to force the Polish population to leave areas that the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) considered to be Ukrainian took place at a meeting of military referents in the autumn of 1942, and plans were made to liquidate Polish-community leaders and any of the Polish community who resisted. Local UPA commanders in Volhynia began attacking the Polish population, committing massacres in numerous villages.
Encountering resistance, the UPA commander in Volhynia, Dmytro Klyachkivsky ("Klym Savur"), issued an order in June 1943 for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population". The largest wave of attacks took place in July and August 1943, the assaults in Volhynia continuing until the spring of 1944, when the Red Army arrived in Volhynia and the Polish underground, which had organized Polish self-defense, formed the 27th AK Infantry Division. Approximately 50,000–60,000 Poles died as a result of the massacres in Volhynia, while up to 2,000–3,000 Ukrainians died as a result of Polish retaliatory actions.
At the Third Supreme Assembly of the OUN in August 1943, Mykola Lebed criticized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's actions in Volhynia as "banditry". The majority of delegates disagreed with his assessment, and the Supreme Assembly decided to extend the anti-Polish operation into Galicia. However, it took a different course: by the end of 1943, it was limited to killing leaders of the Polish community and exhorting Poles to flee to the west under threat of looming genocide.
In March 1944, the UPA command, headed by Roman Shukhevych, issued an order to drive Poles out of Eastern Galicia, first with warnings and then by raiding villages, murdering men, and burning buildings. A similar order was issued by the UPA commander in Eastern Galicia, Vasyl Sydor ("Shelest"). This order was often disobeyed and entire villages were slaughtered. In Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1946, OUN-B and UPA killed 20,000–25,000 Poles. 1,000–2,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish underground. Some Ukrainian religious authorities, institutions, and leaders protested the slayings of Polish civilians during the 1943–1944 events, but to little effect.
In 2008, Poland's Parliament adopted a resolution calling UPA's crimes against Poles "crimes bearing the hallmarks of genocide". In 2013 it adopted a resolution calling them "ethnic cleansing with the hallmarks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, Poland's Sejm established 11 July as a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against citizens of the Second Polish Republic. This characterization is disputed by Ukraine and by some non-Polish historians, who characterize it instead as ethnic cleansing.
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population, against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia, and the Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The UPA's actions resulted in up to 100,000 Polish deaths.
The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. These killings were exceptionally brutal, and most of the victims were women and children. Other victims of the massacres included several hundred Armenians, Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and impeded the massacres by hiding Polish escapees.
The killings were an attempt at ethnic cleansing to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the pre-war Polish state. The decision to force the Polish population to leave areas that the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) considered to be Ukrainian took place at a meeting of military referents in the autumn of 1942, and plans were made to liquidate Polish-community leaders and any of the Polish community who resisted. Local UPA commanders in Volhynia began attacking the Polish population, committing massacres in numerous villages.
Encountering resistance, the UPA commander in Volhynia, Dmytro Klyachkivsky ("Klym Savur"), issued an order in June 1943 for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population". The largest wave of attacks took place in July and August 1943, the assaults in Volhynia continuing until the spring of 1944, when the Red Army arrived in Volhynia and the Polish underground, which had organized Polish self-defense, formed the 27th AK Infantry Division. Approximately 50,000–60,000 Poles died as a result of the massacres in Volhynia, while up to 2,000–3,000 Ukrainians died as a result of Polish retaliatory actions.
At the Third Supreme Assembly of the OUN in August 1943, Mykola Lebed criticized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's actions in Volhynia as "banditry". The majority of delegates disagreed with his assessment, and the Supreme Assembly decided to extend the anti-Polish operation into Galicia. However, it took a different course: by the end of 1943, it was limited to killing leaders of the Polish community and exhorting Poles to flee to the west under threat of looming genocide.
In March 1944, the UPA command, headed by Roman Shukhevych, issued an order to drive Poles out of Eastern Galicia, first with warnings and then by raiding villages, murdering men, and burning buildings. A similar order was issued by the UPA commander in Eastern Galicia, Vasyl Sydor ("Shelest"). This order was often disobeyed and entire villages were slaughtered. In Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1946, OUN-B and UPA killed 20,000–25,000 Poles. 1,000–2,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish underground. Some Ukrainian religious authorities, institutions, and leaders protested the slayings of Polish civilians during the 1943–1944 events, but to little effect.
In 2008, Poland's Parliament adopted a resolution calling UPA's crimes against Poles "crimes bearing the hallmarks of genocide". In 2013 it adopted a resolution calling them "ethnic cleansing with the hallmarks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, Poland's Sejm established 11 July as a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against citizens of the Second Polish Republic. This characterization is disputed by Ukraine and by some non-Polish historians, who characterize it instead as ethnic cleansing.
Background
Interwar period in Second Polish Republic
The recreated Polish state covered large territories inhabited by Ukrainians, while the Ukrainian movement failed to achieve independence. According to the Polish census of 1931, in Eastern Galicia, the Ukrainian language was spoken by 52% of the inhabitants, Polish by 40% and Yiddish by 7%. In Wołyn (Volhynia), Ukrainian was spoken by 68% of the inhabitants, Polish by 17%, Yiddish by 10%, German by 2%, Czech by 2% and Russian by 1%.
Ukrainian radical nationalism
In 1920, exiled Ukrainian officers, mostly former Sich Riflemen and veterans of Polish–Ukrainian War, founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), an underground military organization with the goal of continuing the armed struggle for independent Ukraine. As soon as the second half of 1922, UVO organized a wave of sabotage actions and assassination attempts on Polish officials and moderate Ukrainian activists. In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in Vienna, Austria, and was the result of a union between several radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations with UVO. Members of the organization carried out several acts of terror and assassinations in Poland, but it was still rather fringe movement, condemned for its violence by figures from mainstream Ukrainian society such as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Andriy Sheptytsky. The most popular political party among Ukrainians was in fact the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), which was opposed to Polish rule but called for peaceful and democratic means to achieve independence from Poland.
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.
Polish policy towards Ukrainian minority
The policy of the Polish authorities towards the Ukrainian minority was changeable throughout the interwar period, varying between attempts at assimilation, conciliation and a policy of repression.
For example, in 1930 a 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. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in elections, with their constituents terrorized into voting for Polish candidates. 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.
On the other hand just before the war, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". Through supporting Ukrainian culture and religious autonomy and the Ukrainization of the Orthodox Church, the Sanacja regime wanted to achieve Ukrainian loyalty to the Polish state and to minimise Soviet influences in the borderline region. That approach was gradually abandoned after Józef Piłsudski's death in 1935. Practically all government and administrative positions, including the police, were assigned to Poles.
Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often a response to OUN-B violence, but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two ethnic groups. Between 1921 and 1938, Polish colonists and war veterans were encouraged to settle in the Volhynian and Galician countryside; their number reached 17,700 in Volhynia in 3,500 new settlements by 1939. Between 1934 and 1938, a series of violent and sometimes-deadly attacks against Ukrainians were carried out in other parts of Poland. 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 assassinated local Ukrainian officials for "collaboration" with the Polish government. The police conducted mass arrests, reported the killing of 18 communists in 1935, and killed at least 31 people in gunfights and during arrest attempts in 1936.
Second World War
Ukrainian diversion in September 1939
After the first Polish setbacks in the defensive war against Germany, there were acts of diversion, attacks on Polish troops and inhabitants mainly in the areas of Eastern Galicia. The first attacks took place on the night of 12-13 September 1939 in Stryj, and then in every district of mixed ethnicity. This first wave of diversions was not massive and was quickly, often brutally, suppressed by Polish forces. It was only after 17 September that there were anti-Polish incidents on a much larger scale, organized by the OUN and communists, in which some 2,000 Poles were killed in Eastern Galicia and 1,000 in Volhynia. The largest massacres took place in the villages of Sławentyn, Koniuchy and Potutory. According to the OUN, they attacked 183 villages throughout September. In total, several thousand people took part in anti-Polish actions. The Polish side responded with pacifications, in which probably several hundred people were killed.
Soviet occupation of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
In September 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The eastern part of Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union; Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were attached to the Ukrainian SSR. After the annexation, the Soviet NKVD started eliminating the predominantly Polish middle and upper classes, including social activists and military leaders. Between 1939 and 1941, 200,000 Poles were deported to Siberia. The deportations and murders deprived the Poles of their community leaders.
During the wartime Soviet occupation, Polish members of the local administration were replaced by Ukrainians and Jews, and the Soviet NKVD subverted the Ukrainian independence movement. All local Ukrainian political parties were abolished. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Ukrainian activists fled to German-occupied territory; most of those who did not escape were arrested. For example, Dmytro Levytsky, head of the UNDO, was arrested along with many of his colleagues, and never heard from again. The elimination by the Soviets of the moderate or liberal political leaders within Ukrainian society allowed the extremist underground OUN to remain the only surviving group with a significant organizational presence among western Ukrainians.
OUN activities 1939–1941
In Kraków on 10 February 1940, a revolutionary faction of the OUN emerged, called the OUN-R or, after its leader Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B (Banderites). This was opposed by the current leadership of the organization, so it split, and the old group was called the OUN-M after the leader Andriy Melnyk (Melnykites).
On 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany; the Soviets quickly withdrew eastward and left Volhynia. The OUN supported Germans, seized about 213 villages and organized diversion in the rear of the Red Army. The OUN-B formed Ukrainian militias that, displaying exceptional cruelty, carried out antisemitic pogroms and massacres of Jews. The biggest pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian nationalists took place in Lviv, resulting in the massacre of 6,000 Polish Jews. The involvement of OUN-B is unclear, but at the very least OUN-B propaganda fuelled antisemitism. The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Several hundred Poles were also killed at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists at the time, and a group of about a hundred Polish students were murdered in Lviv.
On 30 June 1941, the OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State in Lviv. In response to the declaration, OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo (ca. 1500 persons). The OUN-M continued to operate openly, collaborating with the Germans and taking over local administration, but its leaders also began to be arrested and the organisation's influence was curtailed by the Germans in early 1942. Meanwhile, the OUN-B, unwilling and unable to openly resist the Germans, began methodically creating a clandestine organization, engaging in propaganda work, and building weapons stockpiles. It set out to infiltrate the local collaborationist police, from which it received training and weapons. The auxiliary police assisted the German SS in the murder by shooting of approximately 200,000 Volhynian Jews, and their experience both led them to believe the Germans would turn on them next and taught them how to make use of genocidal techniques.
In the Chełm region, 394 Ukrainian community leaders were killed by the Poles on the grounds of collaboration with German authorities.
Polish underground in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
During the Soviet occupation, the Polish underground in the eastern territories collapsed. However, after the Germans took control of the area, the structures of the Home Army (AK) were rebuilt. In Volhynia, an Independent District of the Home Army was established, while in Eastern Galicia the Lwów Area of the Home Army was created. The former numbered around 8,000 sworn soldiers at the end of 1943, while the latter numbered around 27,000 at the beginning of 1944. The Polish forces were preparing to launch an anti-German uprising once the German army disintegrated. From 1943 onwards, the plan was to focus on capturing Lwów and western Volhynia once the Red Army arrived, and a fight against Ukrainian forces was also anticipated.
Due to the OUN's collaboration with the Nazis, local Poles generally thought there was no possibility for reconciliation and that Ukrainians ought to be deported to Soviet Ukraine after the war. Such a view was shared by the local Home Army command, but the Polish authorities in Warsaw and London took a more moderate stance, discussing the possibility of limited Ukrainian autonomy.
Polish-Ukrainian antagonism
Both the Polish government-in-exile and the underground state on one side, and the Ukrainian OUN-B on the other, 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. In early 1943, the Polish underground considered the possibility of rapprochement with Ukrainians, which proved fruitless since neither side was willing to sacrifice their claims.
The field of competition was the occupation administration. As a rule, the Germans preferred Ukrainians and filled administrative positions with them. However, a shortage of suitably qualified people forced the Germans to reach out to Poles, who began to gain the upper hand in lower-level administration during 1942. This process caused unrest in the Ukrainian underground.
Even in the interwar period, the OUN adhered to concepts of integral nationalism in its totalitarian form, which stipulated that a Ukrainian state must be ethnically homogeneous and the only way to defeat the Polish enemy was through the elimination of Poles from Ukrainian territories. From the OUN-B perspective, the Jews had already been annihilated, and the Russians and Germans were only temporarily in Ukraine, but Poles had to be forcefully removed. The OUN-B came to believe that it had to move fast while the Germans still controlled the area in order to pre-empt future Polish efforts to re-establish Poland's prewar borders. The result was that the local OUN-B commanders in Volhynia and Galicia, if not the OUN-B leadership itself, decided that ethnic cleansing of Poles from the area through terror and murder to be necessary.