The Polish–Ukrainian conflict was an ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Fighting, which would continue after the end of the war in 1945, concluded in 1947. It was fought primarily between irregular Ukrainian and Polish units, with limited participation by Soviet partisans and the Red Army, as well as Romanian, Hungarian, German and Czechoslovak armed formations. Fighting was concentrated in the south-eastern Kresy region (today Western Ukraine) of the German-occupied Second Polish Republic.
The occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939 led to demands by Ukrainian nationalists for a new Ukrainian state which would include the Polish territories of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.
Background
Ukrainian radical nationalism
In 1920, exiled Ukrainian officers, mostly former Sich Riflemen and veterans of the Polish–Ukrainian War, founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), an underground military organization with the goal of continuing the armed struggle for independent Ukraine. In 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 by a union between several radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations and the UVO. Members of the organization carried out several acts of terror and assassinations in Poland, but it was a 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 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, OUN membership had risen to 20,000 active members, and the number of supporters was several 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.
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.
Just before the Soviet invasion of Poland, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". By conducting Volhynia Experiment 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 border 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.
After the assassination of Bronisław Pieracki in 1934, an internment camp was established in Bereza Kartuska, where opponents of the Polish government, including members of the OUN, were detained.
Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often a response to OUN violence but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two groups. Between 1921 and 1938, Polish colonists and war veterans were encouraged to settle in the Volhynian and Galician countrysides. Their number reached 17,700 across 3,500 new settlements in Volhynia by 1939. Between 1934 and 1938, several violent and sometimes-deadly clashes occurred. In one such incident, the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw reported that Polish mobs attacked Ukrainian students in their dormitory under the eyes of Polish police, a screaming Ukrainian woman was thrown into a burning Ukrainian store by Polish mobs and a Ukrainian seminary was destroyed during which religious icons were desecrated and eight people were hospitalized with serious injuries and two killed. Attacks against Ukrainians were conducted 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 arrest attempts in 1936.
September 1939
Just before Germany invaded Poland, Germany established contacts with the OUN, which had been abandoned in the mid-1930s. The result of this cooperation was the establishment of the Bergbauernhilfe in 1938. This unit was to be transported to Galicia, to the rear of the Polish army, in order to spark an anti-Polish uprising. This plan lost its relevance after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 24 August 1939. However, after the German army reached the outskirts of Lviv on 12 September 1939, an anti-Polish action was launched by Ukrainian militias affiliated with the OUN. Polish services, including soldiers, were attacked, and Stryi was briefly occupied. However, a swift Polish counteraction prevented the action from spreading. Similar action was taken by communist-linked militias after 17 September—the Soviet invasion of Poland—throughout Kresy, particularly in Polesia and Volhynia. Ukrainian nationalists took up the fight again, often collaborating with the Soviets. Polish manors in particular were attacked, and landowners were killed. Particularly bloody were the actions of the Hryhoriy Goliash "Bey" unit in Brzeżany and Podhajce counties, which carried out massacres of a number of villages: Koniuchy, Potutorów, Sławentyn, Jakubowce, and others, claiming lives of a couple of hundred Poles. Where the Polish army could, it fought the militia, often taking brutal revenge, burning villages from which shots were fired and killing people caught with weapons.
Several thousand militiamen took part in actions against Poland in September 1939, killing at least 2,000 people in Eastern Galicia and about a thousand in Volhynia. Polish counteractions claimed several hundred casualties. At the same time, about 110,000 Ukrainians served in the Polish army, of whom 7,000–8,000 lost their lives in the fight against the Germans.
1942 escalation
At the Second Conference of the OUN-B in April 1942, Ukrainian nationalists advocated "the pacification of Polish-Ukrainian relations" with regard to the Poles "on the platform of independent states and the recognition and respect of the rights of the Ukrainian people to Western Ukrainian lands." At the same time, the OUN continued to fight against "the chauvinistic sentiments of the Poles and their appetites for Western Ukrainian lands, against anti-Ukrainian intrigues and attempts by the Poles to occupy important spheres of the economic and administrative apparatus of the Western Ukrainian lands at the cost of the exclusion of Ukrainians."
The roots of these events can be traced back to the ethnic cleansing of the Zamość region from November 1942 until March 1943, when the Germans, having expelled both Poles and Ukrainians, settled the latter in the Polish villages of the Hrubieszów district (during so-called Ukraineraktion in January–March 1943). In response to this, among other things, Polish partisans from the Home Army and Peasant Battalions began to attack representatives of the Ukrainian rural intelligentsia and ordinary peasants. Andrzej Leon Sowa described the settlement of Ukrainians in these villages as an "effective German provocation" aimed at escalating ethnic conflicts in their occupied territories.
In the village of Obórki, Lutsk district, on 13–14 November 1942, 53 Polish residents were murdered. Although the murders were committed by Nazi punitive forces, the Polish community erroneously blamed Ukrainian nationalists. Such incidents were enough to fuel intense hostility between Poles and Ukrainians.
The events in the Zamość region were a fragment of the wider Polish-Ukrainian conflict, which had moved into the area from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Its substrate was primarily Ukrainian independence aspirations. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), formed in 1942 and fighting Polish and Soviet partisans, set about exterminating Poles and forcing them through terror to leave the disputed lands.
In the summer of 1942, negotiations took place in Lviv between members of the OUN and the Polish underground. Both sides agreed on the need to jointly fight against the Soviet and Nazi occupants. However, the Polish side was unwilling to guarantee the independence and recognition of western Ukraine, and the Polish government in London decided to take a wait-and-see approach. According to documents from the OUN Report, in late 1942, the occupation forces carried out a reign of terror against the Ukrainian population of Polesia and Volhynia, assisted by Poles who reported the Ukrainian population for collaborating with Soviet partisans.
Some of the local Polish population believed that, due to the collaboration of some Ukrainians with the Nazi regime, the Ukrainian population should be deported to Soviet Ukraine after the war. This view was shared by the local Home Army command, but the Polish authorities in Warsaw and London took a more moderate stance.
Hrubieszów, Tomaszów and Lubaczów counties in 1943
Causes of the conflict
At the beginning of 1944, dramatic events took place on the left bank of the Bug, in the districts of Hrubieszów, Tomaszów and Lubaczów. From January of that year until the end of the German occupation, the Home Army, People's Guard, National Armed Forces and Peasant Battalions fought against the UPA.
Local skirmishes
From 1942, there were cases of murder of Ukrainian activists and landlords by Polish partisan units in the Zamość region. These were not mass crimes but instead executions carried out on designated individuals. Later, there began to be more massive robbery attacks on villages originally inhabited by Poles, to which the German authorities brought Ukrainians. Sporadic killings of these then occurred; 32 people were killed in this way during the whole year. The first mass attack against a larger group of Ukrainians occurred on 26 July 1943 in Bukovina, when the Polish Army's NOW-AK unit led by Franciszek Przysiężniak killed 10 Ukrainians in retaliation for an earlier crime against Poles committed in the same village by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.
A decisive change in tactics towards the Ukrainians occurred after more refugees from Volhynia, engulfed by the anti-Polish purge carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, arrived in Zamość. In the autumn of 1943, Polish partisan units began a series of attacks on Ukrainian Auxiliary Police posts. On the night of 23–24 October, the posts in Łukowa and Księżpol were attacked. Only the first of these actions was successful, during which the Home Army lost two soldiers but captured the post, killing 11 policemen and 2 German gendarmes. On the same day, an unspecified group composed of Poles looted the Ukrainian village of Aleksandrów. The aforementioned activities of the Polish partisans caused panic among the Ukrainians and prompted several thousand to flee the Zamość region.