ABSTRACT
This article explores how the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) acted during the Holocaust. It pays special attention to the impact of fascism and racism on the genocidal violence of the OUN in occupied western Ukraine. Although the fascist state with the providnyk Stepan Bandera, which was proclaimed by Yaroslav Stetsko on 22 June 1941 in Lviv, was not accepted by Adolf Hitler, and although Bandera, Stetsko, and other leading members of the OUN were interned in Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps, many rank-and-file members of the OUN helped the German occupiers to kill 800,000 Jews in western Ukraine. In doing so, the OUN carried out one of its main goals, which was to cleanse the territory of Ukraine of the Jews, Poles, and Russians. When the Nazis declared western Ukraine to be judenfrei in late 1942 and early 1943, the OUN members deserted from the police and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which in 1943 and 1944 killed about 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. Although the UPA distanced itself from fascism in 1943, it used violence as a political tool and kept cleansing the territory of western Ukraine from the “enemies of the Ukrainian people.”
