Turning the pages back... September 15, 1947 (09/14/97)

Turning the pages back...

September 15, 1947

Fifty years ago, the front page of The Weekly's September 15, 1947, issue carried a report that members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) had begun to escape westward to the American occupation zones in Austria and Germany, over the Tatra mountains, because "evidently [they] have found their positions untenable in the unequal struggle" against the militarized Soviet internal security forces.

"One of the more spectacular escapes of these Ukrainian 'resisters,' as The [New York] Times calls them in its dispatch from Munich, Germany dated September 11," was that of 36 "members of the Ukrainian resistance group who had marched into Bavaria from their home territory" and were seized by German state police aided by American constabulary police, at Passau, [in the] American zone, near the Czech border.

"The Times reports that all of them wore 'Russian uniforms and were completely equipped with machine guns, tommy guns and hand grenades of Russian manufacture.' They reported that they had been four weeks en route, using maps as far as Linz, Austria. From that point they made their way westward by the compass.

"Their trek took them through Poland and Austria, and across the Czech border to a community called Wildenranna in the Landkreis of Wegscheid. At this point a few of the men visited farmhouses in the vicinity and demanded food. They then retired into the forest near Untergriessbach with their companions.

"The Germans of the neighborhood summoned the state police, who reconnoitered and found the Ukrainians grouped around campfires, eating and singing folksongs. Considering themselves to be too inadequate a force to try to capture the band, the German police appealed for help to constabulary headquarters in Passau.

"The raid was made successfully during the early morning hours and all members of the expedition were taken into custody and disarmed. They were taken to Passau until orders could be received for their disposition."

Below this item, The Weekly ran an appeal issued by the Ukrainian Congress Committee to Gen. Lucius Clay, commander of U.S. occupation forces in the American zone in Germany, "to grant these and other defenders of Ukrainian national liberties and democratic ideals the traditional American right of asylum."

Source: "Ukrainian Resistance Groups Escaping to the American Zone," The Ukrainian Weekly, September 15, 1947, (Vol. 14, No. 34).

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