the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several

dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local

administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the

All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43

there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,

Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.

When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the

population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to

apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass

shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in

the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even

minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.

The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers

began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by

arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.

(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)

Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941

announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev

and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been

shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941

again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This

should serve as a warning to the population."

The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,

or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.

If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone

who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed

for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio

program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three

women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were

executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with

its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,

Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of

which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the

acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society

has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.

The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army

(UPA):

The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of

the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine

and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian

guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan

"neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p.

884)

During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and

the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major

losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned:

Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in

May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091)

Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by

guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers

were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World

War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

Photograph of partisans