The World полностью

* Around 35,000 Ukrainians, many of them members of the OUN, the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization, joined the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei or Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, who wholeheartedly murdered Jews. The OUN was founded in 1929 in Poland, splitting into rival factions, one (OUN-M) under Andriy Melnyk, another (OUN-B) under the younger Stepan Bandera. Melnyk was an old-fashioned nationalist, Bandera a radical nationalist with fascist tendencies. Both were armed by the Nazis after the invasion of Poland. At the start of Barbarossa, Bandera followed the Nazi invaders with two German-supported units of militia, the Nachtigall (under his lieutenant Roman Shukhevych) and Roland battalions, and declared Ukraine independent. In Lviv, in early July 1941, Bandera’s OUN and Nachtigall henchmen killed over 5,000 Jews with Einsatzgruppe C, followed by another carnival frenzy, the Petliura Days, in which militias and farmers used guns and farm tools to kill 2,000 Jews. In September, Bandera, refusing to retract the declaration of Ukrainian independence, fell out with the Germans, was arrested and was sent to a concentration camp. Shukhevych and many of the members of the Ukrainian battalions enrolled in German Schutzmannschaft 201, an auxiliary police battalion – part of the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei who killed tens of thousands of Poles – and joined the Nazi killers in the murder of more than 200,000 Jews.

A typical operation took place in the industrial town of Kryvyi Rih, where the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police murdered most of the Jews, including members of a typical Jewish family, the Zelenskys. There were four Zelensky brothers. Semyon Zelensky escaped to join the Soviet army and, rising to colonel, fought all the way to Berlin. In 2020, on a visit to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, his grandson, Volodymyr Zelensky, called this a ‘story of a family of four brothers. Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All shot by German occupiers. The fourth survived. Two years after the war, he had a son, and thirty-one years later he had a grandson. In forty more years, that grandson became president [of independent Ukraine] and he is standing before you today.’

* A million Jews were murdered in Ukraine, but that was part of a multifaceted bloodbath. Over five million Ukrainians –one in six – were killed, including Jews. The butchery was made more complex by a three-way war: in March 1943, many Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, who had aided the Nazi killing, as well as other patriots, joined Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Shukhevych and launched an insurgency against the Nazis, killing Jews, Poles and Germans. As the Nazis retreated, they fought the Soviets. Between 1918 and 1950, Ukraine was the most murderous place on earth.

* The vast data on Jews and their transport by rail to Auschwitz and Treblinka was tabulated by a computing company that used hole-punching machines. It was called Dehomag, a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company, IBM.

* ‘As I arrived with my parents, the Jewish kapos [camp trusties] whispered to me, “Say you’re Catholic” because I was blond and blue-eyed,’ a Hungarian Jewish boy, Yitzhak Yaacoby, then aged thirteen, told this author. ‘I remember so well how Mengele looked at me. “Are you Jewish?” he asked. “Catholic,” I said. “Pah! Go on then!” laughed Mengele, hitting me with his baton, but not sending me to the “showers”.’ Yaacoby survived.

* In Greece, Princess Alice (mother of Prince Philip, later duke of Edinburgh) hid a Jewish family and was honoured at Yad Vashem as a ‘righteous Gentile’. Even the countries where there was most collaboration with the Nazis, there were also people of great courage and decency: the most ‘righteous Gentiles’ were in Poland (7,177), Holland, France and Ukraine (2,619), but also include two Arabs, the Egyptian doctor Dr Mohamed Helmy and the Tunisian farmer Khaled Abdelwahhab who saved Jews in Vichy north Africa.

* It was only now that Hitler grasped the scale of Stalin’s industrial achievement that would win the war: ‘they have the most monstrous armament humanly conceivable – 35,000 tanks!’ Hitler told the Finnish Marshal Mannerheim on 4 June 1942, in his only private conversation to be recorded. ‘If a general of mine had told me a state could have 35,000 tanks, I’d have said, “That’s crazy! You’re seeing ghosts!”’ But they were real.