RT has obtained a trove of declassified KGB documents, highlighting crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists in Soviet territories occupied by Nazi Germany during WWII. The files include witness accounts of people who survived ethnic cleansing, as well as testimonies of Ukrainian collaborators captured by the Soviet domestic intelligence, then known as the NKVD.
Large swaths of present-day Ukraine fell under Nazi occupation in summer 1941 as German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union. In fact, attacks on ethnic Jews and Poles, as well as local communists, began immediately as Soviet troops withdrew.
“In the first hours following the retreat of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian population has demonstrated commendable activity against Jews,” a status report from the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police, dated July 16, 1941, reads.
Said “commendable activities” involved burning down a synagogue in the western Ukrainian city of Dobromyl and the murder of some 50 Jews by an “angry crowd” in Sambor. In Sokal, the help of local “trustworthy Ukrainians” allowed Nazis to find and exterminate some 183 “communist Jews.” Moreover, Ukrainian nationalists rounded up and brutally abused around 1,000 Jews in Lvov, subsequently putting them into a local prison, with the facility and the ‘inmates’ eventually taken over by the Germans, according to the status report. (more...)
Secret Soviet files reveal horror crimes of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
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