Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II

Across the Polish and Ukrainian lands, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Germans share a long and complicated history with one another, often contingent upon shifting imperial and national developments. World War II, the Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust violently disentangled the region's heterogenous population. Paweł Markiewicz examines these relationships and their bloody apex in the Lublin and Galicia districts in Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II. Using the complicated figure of Volodymyr Kubiiovych, leader of the Ukrainian Central Committee (UTsK), as a lens for understanding larger phenomena within Ukrainian nationalist circles, Markiewicz presents an extremely nuanced analysis of Ukrainian and Nazi cooperation in the General Government. While many individuals and organizations, including Kubiiovych and the UtsK, collaborated with the Nazi government, Markiewicz is careful not to simplify and reduce their interactions to Ukrainians collaborating with Nazis. Rather, he reveals the importance of Ukrainian national agendas, which never wholly overlapped with Nazi ambitions in the region. As the Nazis used Ukrainian organizations, like the UtsK, to implement and support their racial hierarchy and administrative goals, so too did the UtsK use the Nazis to reify Ukrainian national identity and ethnically Ukrainianize the region. These “unlikely allies” became such because they understood their relationship to be mutually beneficial despite their competing agendas.Working in Polish, Ukrainian, German, and English and drawing on archival documents in Germany, Canada, Great Britain, Poland, and the United States, Markiewicz's argument is meticulously and extensively documented. He painstakingly pieces together a biography of a phenomenon, Ukrainian collaboration, using Volodymyr Kubiiovych and the UtsK as a lens. The text is organized both chronologically and thematically, with the first chapters focusing on interwar Polish and German developments and Kubiiovych's situation within them. The following chapters examine German occupation policy, Kubiiovych's interactions with the General Government's administration, and his divergences and convergences with other Ukrainian nationalist thinkers and organizations. An epilogue, which briefly examines this work's significance for contemporary memory discourses in Ukraine, follows.Kubiiovych was born in Austrian Galicia to a mixed family. His mother was ethnically Polish and his father Ukrainian. His Ukrainian identity only developed against the backdrop of Polish anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and policies in interwar Poland. This crystalized during his time working under Stepan Rudnyts'kyi in Vienna. Like Rudnyts'kyi, Kubiiovych studied geography. Upon completing his Ph.D., he used his trade to imagine a Ukrainian nation on the map. During World War II, he became a “war professor” and administrator, using both his intellectual pursuits and the circumstances of war and occupation to further his pre-war goals, the establishment of an ethnically Ukrainian state that involved part of eastern interwar Poland. As the head of UtsK, Kubiiovych nurtured his partnership with the Nazi administration of the General Government throughout the entire duration of the war. He informed and helped implement Nazi racial policy in the region, promoting ethnic cleansing and genocide via both rhetoric and practice. He was politically motivated with clearly defined goals. These included creating a national elite, unifying Ukrainian national identity via an education and humanitarian outreach, and laying the groundwork for an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state. This state would exist on the very lands Kubiiovych had labeled Ukrainian on maps in the decade prior to Nazi invasion.Generally, when addressing Ukrainian nationalism and collaboration during World War II, scholars and the public alike tend to focus on the figure of Stepan Bandera and organizations like the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Volodymyr Kubiiovych and the UtsK, the sole Nazi-sanctioned Ukrainian-operated political organization in the General Government, remain comparatively underexamined in scholarship. The historiographical hyper focus on young Ukrainian nationalists, who both fought Nazis and used violence against Jews and Poles as a tool to further nationalist aims, obscures fissures within Ukrainian nationalist discourses and simplifies modes of collaboration. With his examination of Kubiiovych and the UtsK, Markiewicz nuances current understandings of Ukrainian collaboration.Considering Kubiiovych's high level of influence in the Ukrainian diaspora and deeply respected status as a mover and shaker in the Shevchenko Society and the author of the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Markiewicz also opens “an invitation for a critical appraisal of the past” (p. 218). As we must with Bandera, we should also critically challenge romantic notions of Kubiiovych's past and consider his interwar and postwar intellectual works alongside his very real collaboration with Nazi Germany and culpability in both anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian policies and violence. Had Markiewicz penned this text a year later, he might have also considered the implications of his work alongside Russian aggression in Ukraine. Careful analyses of the complexities of collaboration in Ukrainian and Polish lands, like Markiewicz's, can serve as a bulwark not only against historical omissions but also against the weaponization of the past.Markiewicz's examination of Nazi nationalities policy in the General Government is particularly strong, especially as it pertains to the local Polish and Ukrainian populations. Using divide and rule tactics to prevent the Slavic populations of the General Gouvernement from uniting against their German occupiers, the Nazis tapped into a longer history of Ukrainian and Polish conflict and hostilities toward imperial and national policies (i.e., anti-Ukrainian policies in interwar Poland). For many Ukrainian nationalists, like Kubiiovych, Poles came into focus as the greater threat. They viewed Nazi Germany, and its racial hierarchies, as tools to be used and abused in their protracted conflict with Poles over the borderland. This cooperation resulted in disastrous consequences for the region's Poles and Jews. However, as is the case with any perpetrator or collaborator history, one runs the risk of silencing victim groups, relegating them to passive objects of perpetrator aggression. Markiewicz does offer an analysis of Polish motives for anti-Ukrainian violence in the Lublin region; however, the narrative is almost entirely devoid of Jewish voices.Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II is a must-read for all scholars of Ukraine, Poland, World War II, and the Holocaust. The text supplies a wealth of new information, fundamentally shifts the way we think about Ukrainian collaboration, and is sure to spur new lines of historical inquiry. It would be a welcome addition to university libraries, graduate-level classrooms, and exam reading lists.

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