ABSTRACT
The Baranivka episode is an inherently interesting and moving story, and it arguably possesses intrinsic value for merely illustrating events from the partisan war with an unusual degree of detail. In 1941, however, the partisans proved to be only a minor problem for the Wehrmacht, particularly in ukraine. More important, the Baranivka episode revealed the highly ambivalent relationship between ukrainian rural villages and area partisans. German reprisal violence, however wanton and disproportionate, was provoked by soviet guerrillas who enjoyed at least passive support from the area's inhabitants. Even the best of the western works produced before 1989 were colored by the national security agenda of the Cold War, while soviet accounts were committed to depicting the partisans as a "nationwide" liberation movement that contributed directly to the German defeat. In contrast to the pattern of behavior that Hannes Heer describes in belarus, the German army in ukraine also tended to limit its reprisals to sites of actual partisan activity.
