An open-air exhibition in honour of SS Halychyna, a Waffen SS division made up of Ukrainian volunteers, in Lviv. Source: exhibition organisers. On Wednesday evening, more than 50 US Congressmen joined together in issuing a letter to Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan demanding that his agency exert diplomatic pressure on Ukraine and Poland in response to recent “incidents of state-sponsored Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.” Citing this week’s public festival in Lviv celebrating the 14th Galician division of the Waffen SS, as well as recent historical memory legislation emanating from both Kyiv and Warsaw, the lawmakers call on the Polish and Ukrainian governments “to unequivocally reject Holocaust distortion and the honoring of Nazi collaborators and fully prosecute anti-Semitic crimes.”
Prompted by the international outcry over Poland’s bill, which prohibits falsely accusing the Polish state and Polish people of “crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes” committed during the Second World War, the letter is significant in that it marks the first real sign of widespread political opposition to Ukrainian revisionism in the United States. Passed in mid-2015, Ukraine’s own package of bills, known collectively as the “Decommunisation Laws”, proscribed the use of Nazi and Communist symbols as well as the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century.”
Specifically named in the legislation were the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its militant offshoot the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Both organisations were radically anti-Semitic and anti-Polish and engaged in widespread violence against both groups. By the end of the Second World War, several thousand Jews and up to a hundred thousand Poles (though estimates vary) were dead at their hands. This wasn’t a hidden agenda. In its 1941 manifesto, the Stepan Bandera wing of the OUN explicitly called on its members to “liquidate undesirable Poles, Muscovites, and Jews”. A significant portion of the group’s leadership served at one time or another in German-led military formations engaged in crimes against humanity. This reality has been obscured by the Ukrainian government and its in-house historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, who heads the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. Under Viatrovych, the OUN and UPA’s pasts have been whitewashed and a new narrative in which they actually saved Jews was presented.
