Search for Truth or Witch Hunt?
On January 7 Britain’s ITV channel showed the film SS in Great Britain about the SS Galicia division. Why has this picture come up precisely now? This question was also raised at a Kyiv press conference organized by the OUN-UPA Kyiv regional fraternity.
It is very difficult to judge the film without seeing it. According to the film authors’ opponents who spoke at the press conference, the film’s message is as follows: the British government, which granted refuge in 1947 to 8,000 soldiers of the SS Galicia Division, had no right to do so because they were war criminals. Now almost 1,500 ex-warriors of this division reside in the British Isles. They were accused of committing crimes against humanity in 1941 in the Lviv region, shooting down Polish peasants, and participating in crushing the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
According to former division serviceman and chairman of the OUN-UPA Kyiv regional fraternity Orest Vaskul, chairman of the Ukrainian Information Service in Great Britain Mykola Matviyivsky, and chairman of the Congress of Young Ukrainian Nationalists Viktor Rih, the film’s authors set themselves a goal to attach the label of “punitive death squads” to purely military units.
To clarify the situation, The Day’s correspondent turned to chairman of the task force in charge of making a historical conclusion on the OUN-UPA activities, Professor Stanislav Kulchytsky, who said, “The SS Galicia division was formed in 1943 after the Germans were routed in Stalingrad. Before this, the occupiers did not think it necessary to form military units from the local population. But this SS division (No. 14) is a glaring example of a purely collaborationist unit. There can be no question of an oath of allegiance to the people of Ukraine! (An allusion to the words Mr. Vaskul pronounced at the press conference in reply to a question: they were followed by a second-long pause — in all probability, nobody, including the respondent, believed these words —S. M.). How can one possibly ‘link’ the Galician soldiers, classical mercenaries, to the Ukrainian cause, knowing the German invaders’ attitude toward Ukraine? Of course, no one was aware at that time of the Ost plan, but still the latter envisioned extermination or Germanization of two-thirds of Galicia’s Ukrainian population.
“Yes, OUN (Bandera) fought the Germans from 1942, then against Soviet Army and NKVD units (in conjunction with the Polish Home Army) in Western Ukraine. The SS Galicia division was being formed as a police unit, but, by force of the battlefield situation, it was relocated to the front where it was routed near Brody in 1944. Later, the division soldiers took part in hostilities (as a police unit) in Slovakia and Italy. The Galicians surrendered to the Allies in the Apennines. Most of them had not committed war crimes (or many of which have not been proved); besides, the British government checked the documents of emigrants both before granting asylum to this division’s fighters and over the many decades thereafter. Why were they not repatriated to the USSR? Under the agreement reached at the Yalta conference of three heads of state, the Allies were to extradite to the USSR all its citizens who found themselves in the areas under anti-Hitler coalition armies’ control. But SS Galicia soldiers were Polish citizens, for the overwhelming majority of them came from Western Ukraine.”
