ACTIVITIES OF NATIONALIST FORMATIONS OF HUNGARY AND THE UKRAINE IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF HITLER’S ‟NEW ORDER” IN BRYANSK REGION (1941–1943)

Abstract

The adoption of Hitler’s side by the 3rd Reich satellite states’ citizens as well as representatives of a number of peoples of the USSR for active participation against the Red Army and Soviet partisans, is one of the little-studied topics of the World War II East Front history; as well as the role of those persons in war crimes against Soviet civilians. Bryansk Region was one of the occupied territories of the USSR, where such collaboration took place on a large scale. Here, together with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, such nationals as the French, Italians, Finns, Spaniards, Romanians, Greeks, Croats, the Ukraine Rusyns acted, as well as a number of Russian renegade formations. In this article, on the basis of archival documents from Bryansk archives, including recently declassified documents from the archives of the political police department of Bryansk Region, as well as on the basis of recollections of participants in fighting, casual witnesses and on the basis of testimonies of surviving victims, the participation of Hitler’s most brutal collaborators – units of the Hungarian and Ukraine units – in the destruction of the Soviet civilians, is studied. The main attention is paid to the elucidation of criminal motives and purposes of Hitler’s collaborators; to what concrete crimes against humanity they committed; and also what were the true scales of their role in the establishment and attempts to maintain Hitler’s ‘new order’ in the occupied territory of Bryansk Region.