'Victim' of Communism: Roman Shukhevych
Editor’s note: This article from Historicly was republished after news broke on October 25, that Canadian journalist Duncan Kinney, who operates the site Progress Report, was charged (not convicted) by the Edmonton Police Service with mischief under $5,000. Police allege Kinney vandalized the monument to Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych, located at the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton. Kinney would write an article about the Skukheyvch statue having the words “Actual Nazi” spraypainted onto it, after receiving pictures of this monument on August 10, 2021. Kinney and allies deny the charges laid by Edmonton police, whom Kinney has written many critical articles on.
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, had a brick dedicated to Roman Shukhevych, which prompted Historicly to produce this article, which we have republished.
Update: Since we have written our article, they have decided to remove his name from the brick. You can still find the original dedication archived in the wayback when machine. Right now, the brick has been purged of his name.
For every brick, we [Historicly] shall bring their story in this special December Series called “Featured Victims of Communism”
This article was originally published on Historicly.
Written by: Esha K. and M. Fergus Gabhainn
What they said:
In memory of General Roman Shukhevych (1907 – 1950) who, in 1943, formed and led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought to rid Ukraine of enslavement from Soviet communist rule. Shukhevych died in battle with Soviet security forces on March 4, 1950.
What they omitted
The map of the world before World War 1 looked vastly different. Most of Ukraine was part of Tsarist Russia except for an area in the west known as “Galicia” which was a “protectorate” of the Austria-Hungarian empire.
Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, soldiers in the Austria-Hungarian empire simply “checked out”, leading to the collapse of the Austria-Hungarian empire. Modern countries were carved out with a whip of a pen as to maximize profits for the France-US-UK (“Faukus”) alliance. While carving out countries with no regards to people, their families, their ethnicities and historic ties, the Faukus alliance also tried to balkanize as much of Tsarist Russia as possible, to preserve these areas for their capitalist and imperialistic profits.
France had armed and trained petty industrialist Jozef Piłsudski for carving out what is modern day Poland. In what is now considered modern Ukraine, Faukus alliance armed Anton Denniken and his White Armies. Denniken’s antisemitism was so outrageous that Winston Churchill had to warn him to tone it down or else he may not be able to get continued support:
[M]y task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies.
Luckily, the Bolsheviks were able to defeat the White Armies in the region that is now known as Ukraine. Finally, Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty called Brest-Litovosk, where once again, the borders changed. The allies who were very supportive of “self-determination” for Ukraine became shocked at what many Ukranians themselves, determined. In 1920, Soviet Galicia was declared and it was short lived.
Worried about more people being able to “self-determine,” the allies gave their explicit blessing for Piłsudski’s armies to fight and carve out as much land as possible for his Polish Republic. During this process, Piłsudski’s armies engaged in a campaign of “Polification” which entailed the wholesale genocide of anyone who was not Polish(catholic). Despite this, the leader of what was left of the “White Ukrainian armies” Simon Petlura made a deal with the proverbial devil. According to the CIA:
The Ukrainian National Directory with Simon Petlura at the head was left completely to itself in these fateful struggles; at the end of 1919 it had to clear the battlefield and seek an alliance with the newly created state of Poland, whose head, Pilsudski [sp], had a great understanding of the danger from the east. In April 1920, Poland and the Ukraine concluded s treaty in conjunction with a military convention, A joint Ukrainian and Polish campaign led to the liberation of Kiev in May 1920, but it had to be abandoned soon and the joint armies had to clear the Ukraine. Poland deserted its Ukrainian ally in the peace treaty at Riga in 1921 when it recognized the Soviet government in the Ukraine. The regular war between the Ukraine and Moscow ended at that time.
Finally, in 1923, Faukus alliance officially recognized Poland’s annexation of Galicia, thereby forcing these Ukrainian nationalists to reap what they sowed.
Under this backdrop, Roman Shukhevych became part of the Second Republic of Poland. He managed to graduate from Politechnika Lwowska with a degree in Civil Engineering. Soon, he and fellow students, formed an illegal organization to “fight” for an “independent Ukraine.” But, that is a joke. If they truly wanted an independent Ukraine, nothing prevented from using their white armies to support to Soviet Galicia. In reality, what they wanted was a restoration of the feudal relationships when Galicia was a “protectorate” of the Austria Hungarian empire.
In 1931, Roman Shukevych became the head of the “militant” wing of the OUN known as UPA. Their organization engaged in petty terrorism where they mostly assassinated random government officials in the Second Polish Republic.
After the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, hundreds of Ukrainians were recruited and trained by the Abwehr. We know this because during the war, many of the captured Wehrmacht soldiers immediately spilled the details about their collaborators. Abwehr General, Erwin Stolze, during this interrogation, recounted:
Making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, German intelligence was inteerested in using the "Ukrainian nationalists," who were an active spy-terrorist organization already proven to serve the interests of the German General Staff.
He further continued,
In 1937, with the intensification of preparations for an attack on Poland, contacts with the KONOVALTS organization were renewed.
When asked about how they assisted in the invasion of the USSR, General Stolze said,
At my direction, BANDERA began to organize insurgent groups in Ukraine, with the task of armed struggle against the Red Army and the seizure of some important objects, including the Drogobych oil sources.
At first it was assumed that by a single password given over the radio, the groups would begin open armed action. However, this was deemed inexpedient and I, together with BANDERA, decided that the groups' action was to begin automatically with the invasion of the Soviet territory by the German troops.
According to Abwehr, the UPA’s “offensive” was to coincide with the Wehrmacht’s Operation Barbarosa. On June 30, 1941, Yaroslav Stetsko (the man pictured in the left with Ronald Reagan and on the right with George Herbert Walker Bush), proclaimed an independent Ukrainian State.
He said:
The restored Sobornoye Ukraina (Cathedral Ukrainian State) will cooperate closely with National Socialist Great-Germany, which under Adolf Hitler creates a new order in Europe and the world and helps the Ukrainian people to break free from the Moscow occupation. Long live the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, may the guide of the OUN Stepan Bandera live on!"
After this proclamation of their “own state,”members of the OUN went on an orgy of violence. According to eyewitnesses:
pregnant women were hit or kicked in the stomach.
stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, lodged a baton in her vagina
Jews were forced to kneel and scream out loyalties to the OUN.
Most of the sadism is available on film with just a google search. They are too graphic to display on our website.
A week later, on the night July 6, 1941, the Nachtigall battalion followed a path from l'vov to Vinnitisa, spilling as much blood as possible. In their first city of Zolochiv, Soviet prisoners of war were deprived of food and water. Their rotten corpses were displayed to incite terror among the local population. In Satanov, they engaged in some gratuitous acts of sadism by setting fire to synagogues and forcing the Jewish citizens to say affirmations to Christ and pretend that they were filled with joy.
Members of the nightingale proudly boasted about their deeds. According to a Nachtigall fighter Viktor Kharkiv “Khmara” during this July march:
At the time of our march eastwards we saw with our own eyes the victims of the Judeo-Bolshevik terror, and the sight so strengthened our hatred of the Jews that in two villages we shot all the Jews we encountered. I recall one example. At the time of our march through one village we saw many vagrant people. Asked where they were going they answered that the Jews were threatening them and that they were afraid of spending the night in their houses. As a result of that, we shot all the Jews we encountered there.
The Nachtigall’s reign of terror continued until August 13, 1941. They were transported back to Frankfurt an der Order where they were given enhanced military training for "pacification" campaigns. On October 21, 1941, these same soldiers were reorganized as the 201st Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft Battalion also known as (“201”). Roman Shukhevych’s title was that of Hauptmann (captain) of the first company and deputy commander of the legion.
Anti-Partisan “Pacification”
The "blitzkrieg" strategy use of overwhelming force, with their advanced Luftwaffe (Air Force) to rush over Soviet territory and level as much of it as possible, corroding the landscape and civilization with indiscriminate bombing campaigns.
This total-annihilation approach to warfare drove rural villagers into undeveloped wooded areas; soon irregular militias known as "partisans" were formed, each resisting Nazi occupation in their own way, resulting in a kind of asymetric warfare. Hitler likened the partisans to the US's "struggle" against the "red Indians."1
Despite a massive technology deficit, the Belarussian partisans were comparatively successful: Partisan Nina Litwinczyk, obtained a job as a typist in the Gestapo headquarters, soon compiling a list of names of every national who had collaborated with the Nazis — this detailed exposure of the rat-line rendered the subsequent extermination campaign relatively effortless.
Another Partisan, Elena Mazanik, managed to infiltrate the house of Wilhelm Kube, planted a bomb under his bed scheduled to go off at around midnight — the component parts of the bomb so precisely attuned that come the end of its countdown, Wilhelm Kube was successfully erased from the mortal plain while his pregnant wife was left undisturbed until morning.
Roman Shukheyvich's 201st Battalion was to eliminate partisans, apprehend saboteurs as well as administer the Reichskommissariat — Nazi colonial outposts. Einsatzgruppen reports catalog daily operations in benign terminology rooted in the exact bare minimum amount of truth to escape designation as euphemism: "fought partisans," "quelled banditry," etc. belied the accompanment of savagery.
A pack of attack dogs used to track and tear apart partisans, their tactics compensated a lack of sophistication for primal terror. A standard program of no quarter given; policy handed down from on high from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel that "attacks on soldiers in the East should be met by putting to death 50 to 100 Communists for one German soldier," adding that "human life was less than nothing in the East." The 201st Battalion followed to the letter and exemplified this decree, in a manner that chilled the bones of the "proper" Nazis:
Ukrainian militia on horseback, armed with pistols, rides and lang, straight cavalry swords, 'vere riding wildly inside and around the town park. As far as lve could make out, they were driving people along before their horses; men, women, and children. A shower of bullets was then fired at this human mass. Those not hit outright were struck down with the swords. Like some ghostly aparation, this horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commanded by SS officers, trampled savagely over human bodies, ruthlessly killing innосent children, mothers and old people whose only crime was that they had escaped the great mass murder, so as to be eventually shot or beaten to death like wild animals. (Testimony of Erwin Bingel)
In their first mission, they were dropped off by their German detachments near Lake Domzharitskoe, located in the Vitebsk region. For the first few days, the 201st Battalion did pursue the partisans, unsuccessfully, albeit. Instead, they decided to engage in "Plan B" – killing and destroying everyone in the villages.
They began in a town called Logoisk. According to a survivor (who maybe the only one), she and five others hid under a bush until nightfall. And then either a Russian or a Belarussian approached them and warned them against returning to the village. They said, " Run. They've killed everyone"
Another Partisan diary states, "On September 2 this year, Hitler's bandits broke into the village of Khrapovichi, Vitebsk district, they burned down 78 houses of the collective farmers, 97 outbuildings, all public yards and the secondary school building. They also destroyed the church.
Another survivor in a village in their rampage Maxim Kozlovsky recounts they “brought us all together in one place, then ordered us to go into a house eight at a time and began to shoot us. My wife and I went into one house, and my children into another. The forester's wife and her infant child begged not to be killed. Then the punisher snatched the child from her and hit her head against the corner of the house and shot her. They killed my two sons in front of my eyes and I ran away with my third son. We ran into the house, but the punishers found us there, shot me, wounded me in the back. I ran to the forest, I was ambushed, they shot at me, but I managed to escape. In the village, a woman and two other children hid my son under the floor. The child cried, the soldier shot, killed one boy, then set fire to this house."
In the course of Swamp Fever, the fascist managed to kill 10,013 Soviet Citizens and 1,217 were forcibly relocated to one of the forced labor camps. This wasn't all. He continued into massacres in Poland and Russia. In fact, he was a Forest Brother, engaging in acts of terrorism until he shot himself in 1950.
The sick joke and grand irony stitched into the border of the red curtain that closed on Roman Shukheyvich's wretched life is that he can so easily be touted as a "Victim of Communism" despite no one cut from this man's cloth, guilty of these crimes, having any reasonable claim to being cast as a victim of anything at all, is precisely because of his prowess as the harvester of sorrow he was. Per the autobiography of a subordinate regarding the movements of the Nachtigal detachment through the Ukrainian SSR:
"During our march, we saw traces of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror, this so strengthened our hatred of the Jews that in two villages we shot all the Jews we met."
The NKVD's "massacres" and "victims" references the killing of Nazis and their collaborators at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, apparently some kind of misdeed when performed by Communist hands—tell the same story: as these harbingers of death made their way through the west of Ukraine, if they encountered evidence of antifascist activity in a village, it was used as the impetus and rationale to slaughter all Jews in sight, sometimes entire villages.
The numbers bear this out: starting from the Nachtigall Battalion and the 4,000 Jews killed in their pogroms in Lviv and throughout the remainder of Western Ukraine as they moved towards the center and took Kyiv, "liquidating" over 30,000 Jews — when this human plague reached the land east of the Dnieper, "the Jewish Problem" was 'solved' by the 'liquidation' of over 4,000 Jews with those left being taken slave and cordoned off into groups of up to 1,000 at a time.2
Following this trail of blood and brutality blazed by the Nachtigall detachment in response to seeing "traces of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror," by the time Roman Shukheyvich was in Belarus with the 201st Battalion waging a terror campaign against the partisans. When Oberkommando Wilhelm Keitel issued the decree on September 16th 1941 that 50 to 100 Belarussians should be slaughtered for every Nazi killed by a partisan, he was merely elevating the savagery somehow both rabid in practice yet rational in calculation established by Shukheyvich's Nachtigall detachment in Ukraine to the level of an official policy that would greatly contribute to Belarus losing 25% of its population.
We know of this through investigations into the morbidity—literal corpse-counting—records released long after the fact, statements from perpetrators themselves — conducting thorough research in multiple languages revealed a distinct absence of living witnesses that were not directly responsible for this terror. The comparison made by Hitler himself to what was done to the "red Indians" by the US was disgusting and yet thoroughly warranted. This was a full scale, unbridled extermination campaign to clear the land for settlement by foreign invaders and the results are reflective of that.
Bust of Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton Canada
And Roman Shukheyvich, as with those involved with the extermination of the indigenous in what is now the US, is memorialized and glorified on the basis of galling omissions, glaring obfuscations and outright denials of historical reality within cults of personality built by ghouls seeking reassurances of an alleged right of supremacy held by a "race" that reproduces itself on barbarism alone and condemns its victims with all of its own faults.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in propaganda campaigns operating organs like Victims of Communism to whitewash the legacies of some of the most brutal men history has on offer because that is the level of energy and resources that must be spent to validate their ideology of the ravenous devouring of the world itself.
An organization like "Victims of Communism" exists because without someone to invent the reality where any exist, we would never see them, without an organization in which time and energy, and above all, money could be spent converting slave owners and genociders into sympathetic figures in the crusade against an ideology built on the principle that every human has the right to be fed, clothed, educated and live indoors, we would notice we are permanently surrounded by Victims of Capitalism.
References
1: Philip W. Blood — "Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe," pp. 79)
2: Second Day, Wednesday, 11/21/1945, Part 04", in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Volume II. Proceedings: 11/14/1945-11/30/1945. [Official text in the English language.] Nuremberg: IMT, 1947. pp. 98-102.)
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