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The struggle of the UPA against the German invaders

The struggle of the UPA against the German Invaders
Part of World War II in the Eastern Front
Date April 1942 - August 1944 Location Galicia, Volhynia, Polissia, Transcarpathia, Northern Bukovyna, Podillia, Western Belarus Result UPA Victory The withdraw of the Germans and their Allies from Ukraine
Belligerents
Ukrainian Insurgent Army	Third Reich Hungary Romania Slovakia

The struggle of the UPA against the German occupiers started actively from April 1942, when the German troops and their allies, the military administration first encountered organized Ukrainian military units, which operated primarily in Volyn, and until the end of the Germans' stay on the lands of Ukraine. The UPA dealt a number of blows to the German occupiers immediately after its formation. Individual battles and fragments of this struggle, as well as German and Soviet reports, are presented below.

Spring-autumn 1943 — the period of the most intense battles of the UPA with the Germans in Volyn (the main period of the "anti-German front"). The UPA seizes individual settlements in Western Ukraine, where it creates its own administration (for example, the "Kolky Republic"), tries to oppose the economic activities of the Germans, conducts defensive battles (anti-partisan actions of Erich von dem Bach-Zalevsky and Hans Prützmann).

In the summer of 1943, in Galicia, the OUN-B created an analogue of the UPA — the Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNS); the task of the UNS was to spread the actions of the UPA to Galicia (the name UNS, instead of the UPA, was used in order not to put organizational measures in the District of Galicia, where there were other occupation conditions, under the attack of the Germans). The National Security Service is preparing to fight against the USSR, but defensive battles with the Germans could not be avoided. At the same time, the recruitment of volunteers for the Halychyna SS division continues. Subsequently, the National Security Service changed its name to "UPA-West".

Historiography

Proclaiming the "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State" in Lviv on June 30, 1941, the OUN hoped that the Germans would come to terms with it. However, the attempt to arbitrarily declare a state on the territory already captured by German troops caused Hitler's displeasure. At the beginning of July, the Gestapo arrested the leaders of the OUN-B, including Stepan Bandera, who appeared before the Berlin authorities, where they demanded from him the public cancellation of the "Act of Revival". Having failed to reach an agreement, on September 15, Bandera was placed in a Gestapo prison, and in early 1942 - in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was held until the fall of 1944.

On September 15, on the order of the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, mass arrests of OUN-B members took place in the territories occupied by the Third Reich, which included up to 80% of the organization's leadership. In total, in 1941, the Gestapo arrested more than 1500 Bander activists, several dozen of them were shot shortly after their arrest[4]. Repressions also affected the residents of Melnik. In the meantime, when the supporters of Bandera became the winners in the race for Lviv, already in Kyiv, it was the people of Melnyky who managed to create the Ukrainian National Council. She took power in the city, but already on November 17, 1941, the Germans dissolved her. At the beginning of 1942, some members of the UN Rada, including the poet Olena Teliga, were shot in Babi Yar. In September 1942, two brothers of Stepan Bandera — Oleksandr and Vasyl — died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to the most common version, they were beaten to death by Volksdeutsche Poles, employees of the Auschwitz staff.

In the spring and summer of 1942, OUN-B focused on organizational, propaganda, and educational work, attracting hundreds of new members and supporters. This was facilitated by the appearance of many people hiding from the police in the forests. When the Germans began to mobilize Ukrainian youth to work in Germany, they called for a boycott of recruitment and hiding. Bandera agitators worked in almost every village of Volyn. Detachments of special teachers conducted classes on politics, ideology and history. The main point of the course was the study of the ten nationalist commandments. The people of Bandera also conducted extensive military training. It was planned to create partisan units[5]. In April 1942, on the instructions of the leadership of the OUN-B, so-called "self-defense groups" (armed militia units) were formed in Volyn according to the scheme: "kush" (3 villages, 15-45 members) - district hundred - kurin (3-4 hundreds ). By mid-summer in Volyn, the combatants numbered up to 600 armed participants.

In the rebel plans, the Bandera residents also took into account the "Nakhtigal" and "Roland" battalions. Both units, after being reformed into the 201st Schutzmannschaft battalion, were sent to Belarus to fight against Bolshevik partisans. The positions of commanders in this battalion were occupied by members of the OUN and future military commanders of the UPA: Roman Shukhevich (future Commander-in-Chief of the UPA), Vasyl Sydor (commander of the UPA-West), Yulian Kovalskyi (the first chief of staff of the UPA), Antin Shkitak (commander of the Kryvonis-2 camp), Ostap Linda, Oleksandr Lutsky (Commander of the National Security Service) and others. At the end of 1942, there was an idea among the people of Bandera to withdraw the 201st police battalion to Volyn and start creating partisan units on its base. However, it is unclear why this did not happen. It is true that Mykola Lebed ordered the battalion to go into the forest, but that order was never carried out. Ukrainians, instead of deserting to the UPA, after the end of the one-year contract simply refused to extend it together. The Germans sent them in groups to Galicia and disbanded the unit. But the officers were placed under house arrest and ordered to report regularly to the Gestapo. Therefore, it is not surprising that a large part of the "legionaires" (chiefs and sub-chiefs) quickly found themselves in the underground of the OUN. Among them were Roman Shukhevich and Vasyl Sydor.

The commander of the Red Army near Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943 noted the military perspective of the defeat of the Third Reich in the war, and Soviet partisan units and units began to penetrate the territory of the occupied western regions of Ukraine, carrying out the task of destroying the German rear, and the mobilization of local residents into their ranks began . And this, according to a number of historians, became one of the main reasons for the acceleration of the nationalists' creation of their own armed forces, since the leadership of the OUN-B came to the conclusion that it could lose its influence in the regions and lose the base of its own movement.

The decision to finally join the active struggle against the Germans and their allies was made at the III Conference of the OUN-B, which took place on February 17-21, 1943, at which a decision was made to create a full-fledged military structure. One of the main speakers at the Conference was the head of the OUN delegation to ZUZ Mykhailo Stepaniak. He believed that the task of the OUN in the current conditions was to raise a large-scale anti-German uprising before the arrival of Soviet troops. After a successful uprising, in his opinion, the attempts of the Soviet Union to conquer these lands would look like imperialism in the eyes of the Western allies. In order to raise an uprising, it was necessary to unite all Ukrainian forces, therefore Stepaniak advocated the unification of all Ukrainian national-patriotic forces and the creation of a multi-party government. His proposals were supported by Provod, but were never implemented due to the opposition of Roman Shukhevich and Dmytro Klyachkivsky, who believed that it was necessary to fight not against the Germans, but against the Soviet partisans and Poles, while the fight against the Nazis was secondary. UPA soldiers were prohibited from fighting against the Germans, except in cases when they attacked first or there was a threat to the lives of the local Ukrainian population. At the third conference of the OUN (b), the issues of the creation of the UPA were finally resolved and the main enemies of the Ukrainian liberation movement (Nazis, Poles and Bolsheviks) were identified.

From March 1943, UPA units began to actively attack German garrisons and seize the territories of Volyn and Polissia. For example, in a German document entitled "National-Ukrainian Bandit Movement", dated July 17, 1943, it is said that in March 1943 UPA units made 8 attacks, 57 attacks in April, and already 70 in May