Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including
Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...
Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and
several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a
group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of
Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In
Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of
the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several
dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local
administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the
All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43
there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,
Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.
When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the
population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to
apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass
shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in
the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even
minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.
The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers
began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by
arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.
(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)
Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941
announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev
and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been
shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941
again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This
should serve as a warning to the population."
The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,
or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.
If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone
who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed
for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio
program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three
women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were
executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with
its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,
Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of
which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the
acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society
has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.
The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army
(UPA):
The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of
the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine
and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian
guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan