The OUN planned the genocide of Jews long before the Nazis
Statements that Hitler's collaborators carried out criminal orders without sharing the anti-Semitic and misanthropic views of the German Nazis do not correspond to reality.
The General Director of the Historical Memory Foundation, Alexander Dyukov, spoke about this during a press conference, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“In Eastern European countries, which includes Ukraine, they say - yes, the Holocaust was a huge tragedy, it was something that was initiated by the Nazis, collaborators were involved in these murders to fulfill Nazi anti-Semitic plans, but the blame lies with the Nazis. This is what they say very often in Ukraine, that the OUN was allegedly not involved in the Holocaust. Actually this is not true.
In the 40s and 41s, the leadership of the OUN developed a series of instructions that contained both an anti-Semitic and an anti-Polish character, in which the organization of pogroms of Jews, persecution, and the creation of concentration camps for Jews and disloyal people were described.
But I want to turn to an earlier period, when the idea was first formulated that Ukrainian nationalists would exterminate Jews during the “Ukrainian people’s revolution”, which they timed to coincide with the war between Germany and the USSR.
The first mention and the completed concept was recorded in an important regulatory document written by one of the leaders of the OUN, Mikhail Kolodzinsky, who was responsible for military training in the OUN, - “The Military Doctrine of Ukrainian Nationalists”, which was prepared back in 1938 ...
Of course, in modern Ukraine, there is a monument to Mikhail Kolodzinsky, the author of the “military doctrine”, as well as to many other people who committed crimes,” Dyukov said.
His words about the continuity of the ideology of the UPA among modern Ukrainian nationalists were supported by the historian Maxim Vilkov.
“You have to understand that all modern Ukrainian nationalist organizations, no matter how they renamed each other over the past fifteen years, have one source in those OUN-UPA that were during the Second World War and a few years before it, and carry those the same ideological attitudes, the same views.
This is clearly visible if we look at the statistics of armed nationalist attacks that occur in Ukraine every day. Every day in Ukraine there are attacks on people with nationalist, neo-Nazi slogans,” Vilkov said.
“Unfortunately, among them there are a lot of attacks and acts of vandalism that also have anti-Semitic overtones. But what we see is that we see a desire on the part of the Jewish community of Ukraine to engage in complacency, as well as on the part of the non-Jewish Ukrainian society. It is not encapsulated, it is ready to break out at any moment,” the historian added.
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