By: Fern Sidman
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told cheering members of a joint session of Congress during a defiant wartime visit to the nation’s capital on Wednesday that against all odds his country still stands, thanking Americans for helping to fund the war effort with money that is “not charity,” but an “investment” in global security and democracy, as was reported by the AP.
While Zelensky and Ukraine enjoy a tidal wave of infectious support from the United States, NATO countries in Europe and many other countries around the world as the war waged against them by Russia continues unabated, there are concerns that allies are growing weary of the costly war and its disruption to global food and energy supplies.
In early 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin had said that his goal was to have Ukraine become part of Russian territory again and told the world of Ukraine’s past and current support and collaboration with the Nazis.
The media immediately dismissed Putin’s charge and said that because Zelensky was Jewish there was absolutely no predicate for Putin’s claim. Because Russia is the clear aggressor in this conflict and has been painted as a threat to democracy and freedom in Europe, the world essentially bought this, due in large part to the fact that the media did not make efforts to investigate Putin’s claims.
Since that time, sporadic articles have appeared that have shed light on Ukraine’s dubious past but none have effectively turned the tide of sympathy against the country.
In August of 2015, the Daily Mail of the UK revealed that many decades on from the end of the Second World War, the full, shocking scale of the Nazi-inspired Holocaust in Ukraine was brought to light due to the pioneering work by a French Catholic priest as he researched the truth of the industrial-scale killing.
Father Patrick Desbois began his search by seeking to trace his grandfather’s experience as a prisoner of war held in a concentration camp by the Nazis in Ukraine during the Second World War, the Daily Mail reported.
Around 2,000 mass graves of Jewish victims have been located where men, women and children were shot and buried by the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators.
In accounts of heinous Nazi atrocities that were assiduously collected by Father Desbois, he reported that blood oozed through the soil at sites of these graves.
The Daily Mail also reported that he uncovered accounts of how Jews were killed by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators ‘for fun’, or ‘out of anger, boredom, drunkenness’, or ‘to rape the girls’.
Leading historian Mikhail Tyaglyy told MailOnline in 2015 that the number of Jewish victims in Ukraine is between 1.4 million and 1.6 million, significantly higher than the oft-quoted figure of around one million.
The priest’s search took him to four sites around Rava Ruska, close to the Ukrainian border with Poland, where 15,000 Jews were slain, and also the site of a Nazi camp where his grandfather Claudius Desbois had been held as a prisoner of war, the report said.
Gradually, elderly Ukrainian locals who had remained silent all their lives about these Nazi era atrocities disclosed factual information to him as did hundreds more in many other villages and towns in Ukraine.
One account from Rava Ruska was of a Nazi officer who spotted a young Jewish woman running out of the ghetto to buy butter at the market, the Daily Mail reported. He ordered her to be stripped naked, and demanded the trader smear her with the butter after which he decreed her beaten to death with sticks.
This is but one account of the sadistic nature of the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.
The atrocities against the Jewish population during the Holocaust started within a few days of the beginning of German occupation of the Ukraine, as was reported by the military-history.com web site.
Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi Germany did so in various ways including participating in the local administration, in German-supervised auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft, in the German military, and serving as concentration camp guards, as was reported by Wikipedia.
There are indications that the Ukrainian auxiliary police was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre and in other Ukrainian cities and towns, such as Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr, according to the military-history.com web site. On September 1, 1941, the Nazi-controlled Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote “The element that settled our cities (Jews)… must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved.”
The massacre was the largest mass-murder under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its Ukrainian collaborators during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust” to that particular date, as was reported by Wikipedia. It is only surpassed overall by the later 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941 (committed by German and Romanian troops), and by Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims.
In May 2006, a Ukrainian newspaper called “Ukraine Christian News” commented: “Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. The participation of Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine.”
Nazi sympathy amongst the populace of modern say Ukraine still exists, and news pertaining to it rarely trickles out.
In January of 2018, the JTA reported that in an unusual move, Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine protested a local region’s honoring of a collaborator with Nazi Germany.
Ambassador Joel Lion condemned the Lviv region’s decision to name 2019 the year of Stepan Bandera in a statement he published at the time. JTA reported that Lion wrote that he is “shocked” by the recent decision.
“I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible antisemitic crimes helps fight antisemitism and xenophobia,” he wrote.
Lviv already has a large statue of Bandera, who collaborated for a time with Nazi forces that occupied what is now Ukraine and is believed to have commanded troops that killed thousands of Jews, as was reported by the JTA. Kiev and several other cities have streets named for him.
Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959. The JTA noted that Nazi collaborators in Ukraine were once regarded by authorities as illegitimate to serve as national role models because of their war crimes against Jews and Poles, but Bandera and other former collaborators are now widely regarded as patriot heroes.
In 2020, the Jerusalem Post reported that subsequent to a nationalist march in Ukraine in honor of a Nazi collaborator, the ambassadors of Israel and Poland protested the glorification of Holocaust-era war criminals.
In a joint letter sent by Joel Lion and Bartosz Cichocki, the two ambassadors accused the city government of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv of having “waved the Stepan Bandera banner,” a reference to a portrait of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator that was hung from a municipal building at the end of a Jan. 1 march honoring Bandera’s 111th birthday, the JPost reported. Hundreds of people attended the march.
“Celebrating these individuals is an insult,” the ambassadors wrote.
The JPost reported that the letter also condemned the sponsorship by the Lviv district of an event celebrating Andryi Melnyk, another collaborator with the Third Reich. The ambassadors wrote the events caused them “great concern and sorrow.”
In March of 2022, CNN reported that the far-right Azov movement has been part of the military and political landscape in Ukraine for nearly a decade.
CNN offered a background of the movement. They wrote: “An effective fighting force that’s very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military.”
The report added that, “In its heyday as an autonomous militia, the Azov Battalion was associated with White supremacists and neo-Nazi ideology and insignia. It was especially active in and around Mariupol in 2014 and 2015. CNN teams in the area at the time reported Azov’s embrace of neo-Nazi emblems and paraphernalia. “
The existence of an identifiably Azov element within the Ukrainian armed forces – and an effective element at that – poses uncomfortable questions for the Ukrainian government and its Western allies, which continue to send arms to the country, CNN added.
