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Facing the Kremlin. Stepan Banderas monument will be installed a hundred kilometers from Muscovite

The occupation administration began undertaking extensive anti-partisan operations involving armor and aircraft. At the end of April, a division for fighting the UPA was redeployed to Berezne, Lyudvypil, Mizoch, Ostroh, Shumsk, and Kremenets.

The Nazis counterinsurgency actions proved to have little effect. While in March the UPA units attacked the German economic targets only 8 times, in April there were already 57 attacks, and 70 in May.

Heinrich Schoene, General Commissar of Volyn-Podillya, reported at a meeting in Rivne June 5, 1943 to Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg that “Ukrainian nationalists cause more difficulties than the Bolshevik gangs” to his administration.

The Soviet partisans’ leadership also recognized this fact later. Petro Vershyhora, commander of Soviet partisans, reported to the Ukrainian Partisan Movement Headquarters on March 4, 1944, “We cannot make the same mistake in Poland as we did in Volyn by passing the leadership of a popular uprising against the Germans into the hands of counterrevolutionary groups of nationalists.”

The available Nazi forces were not enough to suppress resistance. Therefore, Erich von dem Bach, commander of anti-partisan forces in the East, took the struggle against the UPA in his hands in July 1943. He commanded the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer (10,000 soldiers) and 10 mechanized infantry battalions with artillery. The grouping was covered by 27 aircraft from the air and 50 tanks and armored vehicles on the ground.

However, UPA units maneuvered and gave the enemy no chance to destroy them. Overall, in July the insurgents attacked German bases 295 times, and maintenance building 119 times.

In early August 1943, von dem Bach was sent to another area. The German pressure weakened, and the UPA intensified their anti-German operations: 391 assaults on garrisons and 151 attacks on enterprises.

But soon, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Higher SS and Ukrainian Police Leader, organized a new attack on the UPA. This attack lasted from August 23 to September 9, 1943 in South Volyn. First, aircraft bombed the village of Antonivtsi, which was the headquarters of the Bohun group. Then the punitive expedition attacked the UPA camp in Kremenets forests. The Kurins (battalions) had to split into small units and break out of the encirclement.

In the summer of 1943 the insurgency anti-Nazi movement spread over Halychyna. On August 18, Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNS, the original name of UPA in Halychyna) attacked the German stone quarry in Skole, Lviv region. The nationalists freed 150 forced laborers and killed the camp security guards.


Autumn 1943 was the beginning of larger scale battles between the insurgents and the Nazis. On September 3, Ukrainian soldiers on commanding eminence executed a German battalion that was travelling by narrow-gauge rail in the mountains near the town of Dolyna. The invaders left about 200 soldiers on the battlefield. On September 25-29, the Trembita hundred repelled a punitive attack on their camp on Mount Stovba.

On November 29-30, 1943, there was heavy fighting between 1.5-2 thousand Schutzmanns and the Kryvonis-II Kurin near the village of Nedilna, Sambir district. The insurgents retreated with considerable losses, almost the entire headquarters and the leader of the Kurin were killed on the battlefield.

Prützmann undertook the last major counterinsurgency action in Volyn in November 1943. On November 2-3, aircraft bombed the town of Stepan and ousted the units of Zahrava group to the north. Simultaneously, on November 3 German planes bombed and shelled the town of Kolky, where the UPA had formed the Kolky Republic. It should be noted that the Nazis could not seize the Republic from June to early November 1943, and then they carried out a clearance operation, killing 600 civilians.

In October-November 1943, the UPA-ONS conducted 47 fights against German occupiers, and the UPA village self-defense clashed with them 125 times. The Nazis lost more than 1,500 soldiers.
 
The Nazis failed to suppress the UPA resistance completely. The approaching Soviet-German front drained most part of military forces. Therefore, the German generals stopped undertaking actions against insurgents in Volyn. In Halychyna, the confrontation lasted until the end of summer 1944. Ukrainian People’s Self Defense (UNS) was re-formed into the UPA-West. In March-May 1944, the UPA defended Ukrainian villages against looting by the Germans. In May, the Wehrmacht defeated the Halaida and Siromantsi hundreds in Lviv region.

From May 31 to June 6, 1944, the units of the Wehrmacht’s 7th Armored Division fought against the UPA in the Chornyi Lis village. By mid-summer the confrontation in Halychyna peaked.

The biggest clashes of the UPA-West with the German-Hungarian troops took place around Mount Lopata on the boundary between Drohobych and Stanislav (now – Ivano-Frankivsk) regions. These events were also detailed in written reports of the Polish underground. From July 6 through July 16, 1944, heavy fighting took place – both with artillery engagement and close-handed fights. Insurgents under Vasyl Andrusyak’s command won. Fifty Ukrainians were killed. The invaders lost 200 soldiers and retreated.

Under pressure of the Red Army the Wehrmacht left Ukraine. The UPA continued to skirmish and disarm German units until early September.

There were episodes in the history of the Ukrainian insurgency movement when some commanders tried to illegally negotiate with the German command using the formula “neutrality in exchange for weapons” or “food in exchange for weapons.” Besides, several cases are known when from 80 to 100 small arms were handed over to the insurgents using the above formula. But the Ukrainian underground leadership did not welcome such arrangements. In some cases, it even led to severe punishment. In March 1944, the UPA field court martial sentenced Porphyriy Antoniuk, the first initiator of the unauthorized negotiations, to death. In April 1944, Mykola Oliynyk was sentenced to death by the UPA court.
 
However, the talks with the German occupation officials were subsequently held by the OUN (b) Provid. The occupiers wanted the OUN and UPA to stop fighting against them so that the Germans could focus on repelling the Soviet Army’s advance. The OUN members sought to secure the release of prisoners of concentration camps (Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and many others) as well as to obtain weapons, which they always lacked. Meetings between the Provid members and German authorities took place in March, April, June and July 1944. As a result of them, the insurgents received several hundred units of weapons, and in September – October 1944 Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists were released, though they remained under the Gestapo supervision.

Instead, insurgents decreased intensity of their anti-Nazi actions (mainly in Volyn), but did not stop them. Major Müller, officer of the group of armies “South” reported: “While some Ukrainian nationalist gangs follow the orders of the German Wehrmacht or perform its task, others fight fiercely against the Wehrmacht.”

According to researchers, 12 thousand German invaders and their allies were killed by UPA members. The Ukrainian underground and insurgent units also lost 10-12 thousand people during the armed confrontation with the occupiers.

On August 25, 1943 Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Higher SS and Ukrainian Police Leader, sent the following telegram: “To the Commander of the group of armies ‘South’. Due to the fact that the Reichsführer-SS ordered to send strong teams of military units previously assigned to me to the front, I have to limit myself to the remnants of these units to suppress the Ukrainian national uprising in Volyn. Since this results in appearing of large uncontrolled areas in the north of Ukraine, in the near future there will be increased pressure from gangs in the south sector.”
 
"UPA happily collaborated with the Nazis " with leaders killed by Nazis and Nazi death camps ... stop your useless stralist propaganda here


",




("bandit


Professor Ivan Katchanovski writes that during the war the leadership of OUN B and UPA was heavily engaged in Nazi collaboration. He wrote that at least 23% of its leaders in Ukraine were in the auxiliary police, Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, as well as in other police formations. 18% took part in training in Nazi Germany's military and intelligence schools in Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland, 11% served the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions, 8% in local administration during the Nazi occupation, and 1% in the SS Galicia Division. According to Katchanovski, the percentage of Nazi collaborators among the OUN-B and UPA leadership is likely higher than those numbers, since much data from early occupation is missing.[8]

The arrests were only temporary however according to professor Katchanovski; while 27% of the leadership of OUN B and UPA were arrested at one time, they were released relatively soon or allowed to escape.[9]

“ The atrocities against the Jewish population during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, formed on 20 August 1941,[13] was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre,[14][15] and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan,[16] Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr.[17] On 1 September 1941, Nazi-sponsored 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."[18]

Reinforced through religious prejudice, anti-Semitism had turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[19] The NKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police retreating eastward were blamed on the Jews. Antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian People's Militia which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[19] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, with population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd – who had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square – 24 hours to act as they wished against the Polish Jews; they were forced to clean the dead bodies, to dance, and then killed by beating with axes, pipes, etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany. During Lviv pogroms, some 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists led by People's Militia.[19][20][21] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[22]”
 
However, the talks with the German occupation officials were subsequently held by the OUN (b) Provid. The occupiers wanted the OUN and UPA to stop fighting against them so that the Germans could focus on repelling the Soviet Army’s advance. The OUN members sought to secure the release of prisoners of concentration camps (Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and many others) as well as to obtain weapons, which they always lacked. Meetings between the Provid members and German authorities took place in March, April, June and July 1944. As a result of them, the insurgents received several hundred units of weapons, and in September – October 1944 Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists were released, though they remained under the Gestapo supervision.

Instead, insurgents decreased intensity of their anti-Nazi actions (mainly in Volyn), but did not stop them. Major Müller, officer of the group of armies “South” reported: “While some Ukrainian nationalist gangs follow the orders of the German Wehrmacht or perform its task, others fight fiercely against the Wehrmacht.”

According to researchers, 12 thousand German invaders and their allies were killed by UPA members. The Ukrainian underground and insurgent units also lost 10-12 thousand people during the armed confrontation with the occupiers.

On August 25, 1943 Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Higher SS and Ukrainian Police Leader, sent the following telegram: “To the Commander of the group of armies ‘South’. Due to the fact that the Reichsführer-SS ordered to send strong teams of military units previously assigned to me to the front, I have to limit myself to the remnants of these units to suppress the Ukrainian national uprising in Volyn. Since this results in appearing of large uncontrolled areas in the north of Ukraine, in the near future there will be increased pressure from gangs in the south sector.”

So in other words, as I said, there was enthusiastic collaboration.

“ The German Operation Barbarossa of 1941 brought together native Ukrainians of the Soviet Ukraine, and the prewar territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union as well. To the north-east, they fell under the German administrative control of Reichskommissariat Ukraine; and to the south-west, under the Nazi General Government. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) volunteered to assist the Wehrmacht.[3] In total, the Germans enlisted 250,000 native Ukrainians for duty in five separate formations including the Nationalist Military Detachments (VVN), the Brotherhoods of Ukrainian Nationalists (DUN), the Galician Division of the Waffen SS, the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UVV), and the Ukrainian National Army (Ukrainische Nationalarmee, UNA).[3][11] By the end of 1942, in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone, the SS employed 238,000 Ukrainians and only 15,000 Germans at a ratio of 1 to 16.[12]”
 
The Nazis failed to suppress the UPA resistance completely. The approaching Soviet-German front drained most part of military forces. Therefore, the German generals stopped undertaking actions against insurgents in Volyn. In Halychyna, the confrontation lasted until the end of summer 1944. Ukrainian People’s Self Defense (UNS) was re-formed into the UPA-West. In March-May 1944, the UPA defended Ukrainian villages against looting by the Germans. In May, the Wehrmacht defeated the Halaida and Siromantsi hundreds in Lviv region.

From May 31 to June 6, 1944, the units of the Wehrmacht’s 7th Armored Division fought against the UPA in the Chornyi Lis village. By mid-summer the confrontation in Halychyna peaked.

The biggest clashes of the UPA-West with the German-Hungarian troops took place around Mount Lopata on the boundary between Drohobych and Stanislav (now – Ivano-Frankivsk) regions. These events were also detailed in written reports of the Polish underground. From July 6 through July 16, 1944, heavy fighting took place – both with artillery engagement and close-handed fights. Insurgents under Vasyl Andrusyak’s command won. Fifty Ukrainians were killed. The invaders lost 200 soldiers and retreated.

Under pressure of the Red Army the Wehrmacht left Ukraine. The UPA continued to skirmish and disarm German units until early September.

There were episodes in the history of the Ukrainian insurgency movement when some commanders tried to illegally negotiate with the German command using the formula “neutrality in exchange for weapons” or “food in exchange for weapons.” Besides, several cases are known when from 80 to 100 small arms were handed over to the insurgents using the above formula. But the Ukrainian underground leadership did not welcome such arrangements. In some cases, it even led to severe punishment. In March 1944, the UPA field court martial sentenced Porphyriy Antoniuk, the first initiator of the unauthorized negotiations, to death. In April 1944, Mykola Oliynyk was sentenced to death by the UPA court.

“ The atrocities against the Jewish population during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, formed on 20 August 1941,[13] was used in the round-up of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre,[14][15] and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan,[16] Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr.[17] On 1 September 1941, Nazi-sponsored 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."[18]

Reinforced through religious prejudice, anti-Semitism had turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[19] The NKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police retreating eastward were blamed on the Jews. Antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian People's Militia which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[19] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, with population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd – who had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square – 24 hours to act as they wished against the Polish Jews; they were forced to clean the dead bodies, to dance, and then killed by beating with axes, pipes, etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany. During Lviv pogroms, some 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists led by People's Militia.[19][20][21] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[22]””
 
However, the talks with the German occupation officials were subsequently held by the OUN (b) Provid. The occupiers wanted the OUN and UPA to stop fighting against them so that the Germans could focus on repelling the Soviet Army’s advance. The OUN members sought to secure the release of prisoners of concentration camps (Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and many others) as well as to obtain weapons, which they always lacked. Meetings between the Provid members and German authorities took place in March, April, June and July 1944. As a result of them, the insurgents received several hundred units of weapons, and in September – October 1944 Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists were released, though they remained under the Gestapo supervision.

Instead, insurgents decreased intensity of their anti-Nazi actions (mainly in Volyn), but did not stop them. Major Müller, officer of the group of armies “South” reported: “While some Ukrainian nationalist gangs follow the orders of the German Wehrmacht or perform its task, others fight fiercely against the Wehrmacht.”

According to researchers, 12 thousand German invaders and their allies were killed by UPA members. The Ukrainian underground and insurgent units also lost 10-12 thousand people during the armed confrontation with the occupiers.

On August 25, 1943 Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Higher SS and Ukrainian Police Leader, sent the following telegram: “To the Commander of the group of armies ‘South’. Due to the fact that the Reichsführer-SS ordered to send strong teams of military units previously assigned to me to the front, I have to limit myself to the remnants of these units to suppress the Ukrainian national uprising in Volyn. Since this results in appearing of large uncontrolled areas in the north of Ukraine, in the near future there will be increased pressure from gangs in the south sector.”

Also of note is the fact that:

“ By the time the Red Army returned to Ukraine, a significant number of the population welcomed its soldiers as liberators.[1] More than 4.5 million Ukrainians joined the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany, and more than 250,000 served in Soviet partisan paramilitary units, dwarfing the numbers of Hiwi's and occupation troops and other anti-soviet soldiers, even in the early years of the war.[2]“

So your collaborator heroes were never anything more than a handful of thugs running around the brush
 
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