The Polish–Ukrainian conflict was an ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Fighting, which would continue after the end of the war in 1945, concluded in 1947. It was fought primarily between irregular Ukrainian and Polish units, with limited participation by Soviet partisans and the Red Army, as well as Romanian, Hungarian, German and Czechoslovak armed formations. Fighting was concentrated in the south-eastern Kresy region (today Western Ukraine) of the German-occupied Second Polish Republic.
The occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939 led to demands by Ukrainian nationalists for a new Ukrainian state which would include the Polish territories of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.
Background
Ukrainian radical nationalism In 1920, exiled Ukrainian officers, mostly former Sich Riflemen and veterans of Polish–Ukrainian War, founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), an underground military organization with the goals of continuing the armed struggle for independent Ukraine. Already in the second half of 1922 UVO organized a wave of sabotage actions and assassination attempts on Polish officials and moderate Ukrainian activists. In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in Vienna, Austria, and was the result of a union between several radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations with UVO.Rudling, Per A. (November 2011). "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths". Number 2107. University of Pittsburgh: The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies. p. 3 (6 of 76 in PDF). . Members of the organization carried out several acts of terror and assassinations in Poland, but it was still rather fringe movement, condemned for its violence by figures from mainstream Ukrainian society such as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Andriy Sheptytsky.Bohdan Budurowycz. (1989). Sheptytski and the Ukrainian National Movement after 1914 (chapter). In Paul Robert Magocsi (ed.). Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptytsky. Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. p. 57. The most popular political party among Ukrainians was in fact the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), which was opposed to Polish rule but called for peaceful and democratic means to achieve independence from Poland.
By the beginning of the Second World War, the membership of OUN had risen to 20,000 active members, and the number of supporters was many times as many.
Polish policy towards Ukrainian minority
The policy of the Polish authorities towards the Ukrainian minority was changeable throughout the interwar period, varying between attempts at assimilation, conciliation and a policy of repression.
For example, in 1930 terror campaign and civil unrest in the Galician countryside resulted in Polish police exacting a policy of collective responsibility on local Ukrainians in an effort to "pacify" the region. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in elections, with their constituents terrorized into voting for Polish candidates. Beginning in 1937, the Polish government in Volhynia initiated an active campaign to use religion as a tool for Polonization and to convert the Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism.Timothy Snyder. (2005). Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp.167 Over 190 Orthodox churches were destroyed and 150 converted to Roman Catholic churches.
On the other hand, just before the war, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". By conducting Volhynia Experiment through supporting Ukrainian culture and religious autonomy and the Ukrainization of the Orthodox Church, the Sanacja regime wanted to achieve Ukrainian loyalty to the Polish state and to minimise Soviet influences in the borderline region. That approach was gradually abandoned after Józef Piłsudski's death in 1935.Timothy Snyder. (2005). Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 32–33, 152–162 Practically all government and administrative positions, including the police, were assigned to Poles.Сивицький, М. Записки сірого волиняка Львів 1996 с.184
After the assassination of Bronisław Pieracki in 1934, an internment camp was established in Bereza Kartuska, where opponents of the Polish government, including members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, were detained. Also that marking start of "" conducted by military against civil population of "eastern minorities".
Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often a response to OUN violence, but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two ethnic groups. Between 1921 and 1938, Polish colonists and war veterans were encouraged to settle in the Volhynian and Galician countrysides, their number reached 17,700 in Volhynia in 3,500 new settlements by 1939.Lidia Głowacka, Andrzej Czesław Żak, Osadnictwo wojskowe na Wolyniu w latach 1921–1939 w swietle dokumentów centralnego archiwum wojskowego (Military Settlers in Volhynia in the years 1921–1939), PDF, pp. 143 (4 / 25 in PDF), 153 (14 / 25 in PDF). "Mimo ogromnych trudności, kryzysu gospodarczego na początku lat 30. i złożonej sytuacji politycznej na tym terenie, osadnicy zdołali zagospodarować znaczne obszary ziemi i stworzyć od podstaw wiele osad z nowoczesną –jak na owe czasy –infrastrukturą. W 1939 r. na Wołyniu mieszkało około 17,7 tys. osadników wojskowych i cywilnych w ponad 3,500 osad." Between 1934 and 1938, a series of violent and sometimes-deadly. In one of many such incidents, the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw reported that Polish mobs attacked Ukrainian students in their dormitory under the eyes of Polish police, a screaming Ukrainian woman was thrown into a burning Ukrainian store by Polish mobs and a Ukrainian seminary was destroyed during which religious icons were desecrated and eight people were hospitalized with serious injuries and two killed. attacks against Ukrainians were conducted in other parts of Poland. Volhynia was a place of increasingly violent conflict, with Polish police on one side and Western Ukrainian communists supported by many dissatisfied Ukrainian peasants on the other. The communists organized strikes, killed at least 31 suspected police informers in 1935–1936, and assassinated local Ukrainian officials for "collaboration" with the Polish government. The police conducted mass arrests, reported the killing of 18 communists in 1935, and killed at least 31 people in gunfights and during arrest attempts in 1936.According to official data, 20 communists were injured during police actions in 1935, and in one case policemen wounded at least seven people while being assaulted by a crowd armed with sickles and clubs. The communists retaliated against those who failed to participate in strikes. From: Timothy Snyder (2007). Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. Yale University Press. pp. 137, 142.
September 1939
Just before Germany invaded Poland, Germany established contacts with the OUN, which had been abandoned in the mid-1930s. The result of this cooperation was the establishment of the so-called Ukrainian Legion in 1938. This unit was to be transported to Galicia, to the rear of the Polish army, in order to spark an anti-Polish uprising. This plan lost its relevance after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 24, 1939. However, after the German army reached the outskirts of Lviv on September 12, 1939, an anti-Polish action was launched by Ukrainian militias affiliated with the OUN. Polish services, including soldiers, were attacked, and Stryi was briefly occupied. However, a swift Polish counteraction prevented the action from spreading. Similar action was taken by communist-linked militias after September 17, the Soviet invasion of Poland, throughout the Eastern Borderlands, particularly in Polesie and Volhynia. Ukrainian nationalists took up the fight again, often collaborating with the Soviets. Polish manors in particular were attacked, and landowners were killed. Particularly bloody were the actions of the "Bey" unit in Brzeżany and Podhajce counties, which carried out massacres of a number of villages: Koniuchy, Potutorów, Sławentyn, Jakubowce and others, claiming lives of couple hundreds Poles. Where the Polish army could, it fought the militia, often taking brutal revenge, burning villages from which shots were fired and killing people caught with weapons.
Several thousand militiamen took part in actions against Poland in September 1939, killing at least 2,000 people in Eastern Galicia and about a thousand in Volhynia. Polish counteractions claimed several hundred casualties. At the same time, about 110,000 Ukrainians served in the Polish army, of whom 7,000-8,000 lost their lives in the fight against the Germans.
Escalation of conflict in 1942 At the Second Conference of the OUN-B in April 1942, Ukrainian nationalists advocated "the pacification of Polish-Ukrainian relations" with regard to the Poles "on the platform of independent states and the recognition and respect of the rights of the Ukrainian people to Western Ukrainian lands." At the same time, the OUN continued to fight against "the chauvinistic sentiments of the Poles and their appetites for Western Ukrainian lands, against anti-Ukrainian intrigues and attempts by the Poles to occupy important spheres of the economic and administrative apparatus of the Western Ukrainian lands at the cost of the exclusion of Ukrainians."
The roots of these events can be traced back to the ethnic cleansing of Zamojszczyzna (November 1942 – March 1943), when the Germans, having expelled both Poles and Ukrainians, settled the latter in the Polish villages of the Hrubieszów district (during so-called in January–March 1943). In response to this, among other things, Polish partisans from the Home Army, and Peasant Battalions began to attack representatives of the Ukrainian rural intelligentsia and ordinary peasantsСергійчук В. Трагедія Волині (Причини й перебіг польсько-українського конфлікту в роки Другої світової війни) (Частина 1) // Визвольний шлях. 2003. № 2. С. 44-49. Andrzej Leon Sowa described the settlement of Ukrainians in these villages as an "effective German provocation" aimed at escalating ethnic conflicts in their occupied territories.
In the village of Obúrki in the Lutsk district on November 13-14, 1942, 53 Polish residents were murdered. Although the murders were committed by Nazis punitive forces, the Polish community erroneously blamed Ukrainian nationalists. Such incidents were enough to fuel intense hostility between Poles and Ukrainians«Mord w Obórkach nie stanowił jeszcze wstrząsu dla polskiej społeczności Wołynia ani też dla partyzantów radzieckich, którzy tu rozwijali swoją działalność». // Edward Prus, Atamania UPA: tragedia kresów, 1996, str. 129.
It should be emphasized that the events in the Zamość region were a fragment of the wider Polish-Ukrainian conflict, which had moved into the area from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Its substrate was primarily Ukrainian independence aspirations. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, formed in 1942 and fighting Polish and Soviet partisans, set about exterminating Poles and forcing them through terror to leave the disputed lands.