Ukrainian historian: collaboration in Crimea was not ethnic, but socio-political in nature
Kyiv, May 16 (Navigator, Vladimir Mikhailov) - During the Great Patriotic War, collaboration in Crimea was not ethnic, but socio-political in nature.
This was stated at a round table in Kyiv by the head of the Department of History of Ukraine during the Second World War at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Doctor of Historical Sciences. Alexander Lysenko.
Subscribe to the news “Navigator - Kiev” в Facebook or In contact with
He emphasized that the policy of the German occupation regime was based on principles that had nothing to do with the interests of the autochthonous communities of Crimea. Crimea played a special role in the plans of the German command, says the historian. It was planned to be one of the first to colonize it and resettle there more than three million representatives of the Germanic peoples - not only Germans, but also the Dutch, Belgians, and Walloons.
“Crimea should not have belonged to the Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, Russians, etc. This is the first message for understanding what the Crimeans should have prepared for when meeting the German army. True, the Crimean people had their own ideas regarding the further development of events, and here I am reminded of an association with representatives of the Western Ukrainian people, who also saw in the Second World War an opportunity for the revival of a sovereign Ukrainian state,” says Alexander Lysenko.
These calculations did not justify themselves, since the Nazis did not allow us to think about any state formations.
As the development of events showed, neither the formation of the Ukrainian government in Lviv, proclaimed on June 30, 1941, nor the formation of national committees on the territory of Crimea became the beginning of statehood for the Ukrainians and the Crimean Tatar people.
The Germans allowed self-organization only within certain limits. Like the Ukrainians and representatives of other communities, the Germans did not allow the Crimean Tatars to create full-fledged self-governing structures, the historian explains.
In the military aspect, the Germans also very strictly defined the boundaries within which the paramilitary forces created on the territory of Crimea operated. By stimulating the creation of such military formations, the Germans sought to subordinate them to a single German command, without a centralized independent structure.
It was emphasized that these formations were in the service of the German Wehrmacht. The Germans immediately made these formations involuntary. One of the researchers, Romanko, identifies several types of formations - organized self-defense, unorganized self-defense, auxiliary order police, Tatar Jaeger brigade of troops, combat group "Crimea", volunteer assistants. The latter is the only type of formation that has signs of voluntariness.
A total of 15-20 thousand people fought in all these formations. For comparison: in the units of the Russian Liberation Army, which were formed on the territory of Crimea, there were from 4 to 5 thousand military personnel, and only 1/5, i.e. less than 1000 people were Russians of Crimea, the rest were taken from prisoner of war camps and representatives of the Russian population of other regions. “Perhaps these figures are not comparable, but in any case they undermine the thesis that collaboration in Crimea was exclusively ethnic in nature and Crimean Tatar in color.” The phenomenon of collaboration is extremely complex, but most researchers believe that in Crimea and in other regions it was not ethnic, but socio-political in nature,” says Alexander Lysenko.
However, the Tatars also took an active part in the partisan movement. In the initial phase, more than 20% of Crimean Tatars were in the partisan detachments and in the urban underground.
To illustrate that some of the Tatars remained loyal to the Soviet government, Alexander Lysenko quotes a memo from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Crimea Koronadzhe addressed to Beria in March 1942: “According to the data that we possess, it can be judged that some part of the Tatar population of Crimea, albeit a small one, remains on the side of the Soviet government, which cannot be ignored when carrying out certain events in Crimea... the majority of the Tatar population of the steppe part of Crimea does not show hostility to the Soviet government, on the contrary, there are opposite facts when they treat it with sympathy. It is known that a significant part of the populated areas of the steppe Tatars refused to take weapons for self-defense and protection from partisans, as the Germans proposed. As a result, armed mountain Tatars provide protection from partisans in these villages. Moreover, among the settlements of the southern coast there are villages that provided assistance to partisan detachments, so they were dealt with by both the Germans and the armed Tatars... The majority of the population of these villages was shot, and those who remained were evicted from the Southern shores. It should be noted that the attitude of the Germans towards the Tatars, who refuse to take weapons, is the same as towards the Russians and Greeks - these Tatars, like the other population, are taken to Germany. As a result of this, this part of the Tatars is hostile both against the armed Tatars and against the Germans.”
This is an indicative document, which for some reason those who are prejudiced against the Crimean Tatars do not like to quote; it must be kept in mind that there were also Tatars loyal to the Soviet regime, emphasized Ukrainian historian Alexander Lysenko.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.