Turning the pages back...

November 24, 1941

As we look back to the time of uncertainty and conflict of the second world war, we remember that another invading force, besides the Soviets, occupied Ukraine 65 years ago, as reported by The Weekly.

Berlin announced on November 17, 1941, the appointment of Dr. Alfred Rosenberg as "Reich minister for the East" or chief administrator of occupied Soviet territories. Locally, administration was divided between Erich Koch, Reich commissioner for Ukraine, and Heinrich Lohse, Reich commissioner for the "Ostland," which included the Baltic states and Belarus.

The Berlin correspondent for The New York Times reported that Ukrainian nationalists, who had hoped to establish an independent Ukrainian state, or at least a Ukrainian protectorate under Reich hegemony, were becoming restless. The Germans divided two large sections of Ukraine, incorporating eastern Galicia under Polish rule and the Odesa region under Rumania.

An editorial in the New York Herald-Tribune, titled "The Eclipse of Ukrainians," showed the blind optimism of people that the Nazis would maintain their promises to the Ukrainians and observed that, with their push further east into the Soviet territories, the Nazis were less likely to relinquish any of their gains. Commenting on the recent divisions in the Ukrainian lands, the article noted that this was a continuation of German policy established at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, when the Germans refused to grant a Ukrainian request for the same territory, then under Austro-Hungarian rule.

The editorial also accurately predicted that the Germans would never allow Ukraine to govern itself, but rather the Germans would mold Ukraine's destiny to serve their own. The difference between Germany's occupation of Ukraine in 1918 and 1941 was that the Germans during World War I never penetrated into Russia as they did in the second world war.

In a spot-on explanation of the situation, the editorial reads: "In this war they have ravaged many of the richest Russian cities and towns, and have destroyed thousands of factories developed only at the cost of the starvation and toil of the Russian masses. If the Germans are defeated, there will be a period of even worse chaos in western Russia and the borderlands that followed the German debacle in 1918. By breaking up local independence movements, the German occupational authorities condemn the Ukrainians and other peoples of the borderlands to either practical slavery if the Nazis win, or a period of anarchy and further bloodshed and suffering if they lose..."

Source: "Nazis set up rule in occupied Ukraine," The Ukrainian Weekly, November 24, 1941.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 19, 2006, No. 47, Vol. LXXIV

| Home Page |