Khromeychuk, Olesya ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 385 Khromeychuk, Olesya. ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division. Nationalisms Across the Globe, 11. Peter Lang, Oxford Bern and New York, 2013. xix + 197 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €50.00: £40.00: $64.95 (paperback). Olesya Khromeychuk’s study of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division — a synthetic name for a division that changed its name several times during its short existence between 1943 and 1945 — seeks to answer the questions 1) why some 8,000 members of this division escaped repatriation to the Soviet Union and 2) how their transfer to Great Britain as POWs, their ‘civilianization’ in Great Britain and the eventual move of an undetermined number of former Division members to Canada were arranged. The more ambitious goal is to explore how memory and identity were formed and how narratives of the SS Division and of Ukrainian self-assertion became intertwined. An even more general purpose of the study is suggested in the foreword by David R. Marples. He submits that the careful reconstruction of the formation and perpetuation of narratives — the historicization of memory in other words — may provide a way out of the impasse of antithetical accounts of the role of Ukrainians in the Second World War. The story of how the Ukrainian members of the SS Division escaped repatriation, were shipped to the United Kingdom and entered Canada as civilians is not a flattering one, at least in terms of Ukrainian narratives of identity. First, the British Screeners were hard-pressed to identify (the) Ukraine as an entity, but they were sure that (Ukrainian-)Poles — ‘Galicians’ — could not be repatriated to the Soviet Union, because it was not their patria. For once, statelessness turned into an advantage. Second, they concluded that the Ukrainians under their scrutiny were really not eager volunteers at all, but simple Eastern European peasant folk, who got caught up in the maelstrom of war and surely could not have been capable of war crimes. Imperial attitude for once worked in favour of Eastern Europeans. Third, the experience of the repatriation of Cossack units on the one hand and a growing anti-Soviet attitude on the other boiled down to the defence of ‘our’ Ukrainians against ‘their’ (the Soviets’) vengeful demands. Fourth, the Vatican was actively involved in protecting a group of God-fearing Christians. And last but not least, Britain needed menial labourers, especially in agriculture, after the release of German POWs. However, none of the above convinced the British media, which retained a far more distrustful, if not necessarily more informed, view. The fact that the detained Ukrainians were (Waffen) SS members and that — with or without reference to Nuremberg — the SS was widely considered a criminal, evil and indeed German organization factored prominently in these SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 386 early debates. The latter in turn shaped the narratives of division members and more broadly the expatriate Ukrainian discourse. The Ukrainian diaspora closedranksandcametoenfoldthemembersoftheWaffenSS‘Galicia’Division within a narrative of ‘the’ Ukrainian struggle for nation and statehood. The ensuingnarrativeistrivial,becauseitissoutterlycommon.TheDivisionfought the good fight for Ukrainian statehood — with Nazi Germany as its ally. It may have had a few criminals in its ranks, but otherwise committed no war crimes. Khromeychuk lets this narrative stand as one truth among others. That seems very dubious to me and surely not a way out of what has become a poisonous debate about the legacy of the Second World War. While I do not consider the multiplication of narrative ‘truths’ to be a solution, I was somewhat surprised to note that not all narratives were presented, for there was a heated, internal debate among Ukrainian nationalists — in this respect not different from what happened in colonial India — on the wisdom of Ukrainians joining the SS in the first place. This was not a debate about war crimes, but about Ukrainians being used as colonials and cannon fodder for German imperial ends. It may well prove to be a better starting point to reconstruct the variety of political voices (and choices) among the varieties of Ukrainians in order for Ukrainian historians to escape a poisoned memory. This said, old-fashioned history, painful as it may be, still...