Olesya Khromeychuk: “Undetermined” Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division. Oxford, Bern, Berlin [usw.]: Lang, 2013. XIX, 197 S., 5 Abb. = Nationalisms across the Globe, 11. ISBN: 978-3-0343-0874-8

Olesya Khromeychuk: “Undetermined” Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division. Oxford, Bern, Berlin [usw.]: Lang, 2013. XIX, 197 S., 5 Abb. = Nationalisms across the Globe, 11. ISBN: 978-3-0343-0874-8.

On 27 April 2014, young demonstrators marched through L’viv in memory of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division. They wore traditional embroidered shirts and carried banners displaying the badge of the division. Coming at a time when the Kremlin was justifying its intervention in Ukraine with the claim that the country was being taken over by fascists, it provided supporters of the Russian line with visual evidence of the danger in Ukraine. Olesya Khromeychuk’s study of the division is therefore very timely, appearing at a moment when the impact of narratives of the Ukrainian past, and of the division in particular, in shaping contemporary politics has reached the attention of many beyond the ivory tower.

Khromeychuk’s book is based on memoirs by members of the division (hereafter referred to as “Galicians”), her interviews with former “Galicians”, British and Canadian archival documents and debates in the two countries’ press. It has two goals: (1) to explain why the “Galicians” were allowed to settle in the West and (2) to examine the narratives created by the “Galicians” about their activity. In doing so, she hopes to avoid the tendency of earlier studies to condemn or exculpate. The author acknowledges that she cannot but construct her own narrative, yet states – perhaps in contradiction to this – that she hopes to avoid creating her own ‘truth’ to compete with those espoused in the other narratives.

Khromeychuk rightly sees the roots of the Waffen SS Galicia Division in the nationalist desires for a Ukrainian army going back to the First World War and the associated attempts to work with successive German regimes from 1918. Perhaps, she could have made clearer the origins of this desire in the debates over the failure to create an independent, non-Soviet Ukrainian state and stressed more firmly how German-Ukrainian cooperation went back to the contacts created during the First World War and the Central Powers’ occupation of Ukraine. In particular, it would have been interesting to address the question of whether the German-Ukrainian relationship was more based on ideological affinity or geopolitical pragmatism. If the author had drawn on the definitive account of this relationship before 1939 (Frank Golczewski: Deutsche und Ukrainer. 1914–1939. Paderborn 2010), she could have dealt with these aspects more comprehensively. Khromeychuk mentions the work in her bibliography but does not cite it in the footnotes.

The author identifies three narratives surrounding the division’s alleged participation in war crimes: (1) that the division was entirely innocent of wrongdoing; (2) that the division committed war crimes against Poles in the village of Huta Pieniacka and during the suppression of the Slovakian national uprising, and (3) that the division, as a unit, probably did not commit war crimes, but many of its members had been involved in major atrocities while serving with other detachments. Often, Khromeychuk seems to prefer the third option. This would certainly be a balanced and nuanced conclusion, albeit a preliminary one requiring further archival research. Nevertheless, it indicates the difficulty of writing a history that does not construct its own ‘truth’: in order to expose the omissions and distortions within the different narratives, as Khromeychuk indeed seeks to do, one cannot avoid arranging them into a hierarchy of probability.

In order to resist repatriation to the USSR, the “Galicians” created a narrative that claimed that the unit represented a homogeneous national group, who had not been citizens of the USSR before the invasion of Poland, and that they had joined the division not out of political conviction or Germanophilia but in a desire to resist the Soviets. The British were receptive to this narrative in order to avoid a repetition of the scandal surrounding the forced repatriation of Cossacks to the Soviet Union. They also found the Soviet evidence of war crimes to be insufficient. Here, Khromeychuk meticulously traces the omissions in the British reports that allowed the texts to remain consistent with this narrative. She underlines that the British screening provided an inadequate account of the division’s wartime activity. However, a little more background detail, for example the debates on the repatriation of the Cossacks, would have been useful here.

The author gives an equally discriminating account of the conflicting narratives that emerged in Britain and Canada concerning the proposed settlement of “Galicians” in the two countries. She finds evidence that the Ukrainian aid organizations who took up the case of the former members of the division did have reservations about some “Galicians”. She is also keenly aware of the potential contradictions in the narratives. For example, she observes that the claim made in defence of the “Galicians” that many had only served in the division for a short time contained an inherent danger: joining later could be taken as evidence that the individual had spent longer in units more deeply implicated in war crimes.

The work concludes with a brief overview of the controversy surrounding the division in contemporary Ukrainian debates over the Second World War. This section contains some interesting comments from participants in the debate taken from interviews conducted by the author. However, without a discussion of the diaspora memorialisation of the division and its influence on memory in Ukraine itself, this section feels slightly incomplete.

Given the extreme sensitivity of the subject, Khromeychuk understandably seeks to maintain a studied non-partisanship throughout the work. Perhaps she goes too far here. For example, the author writes that the debates over the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists’ attitude toward Jews “rarely engage in a constructive dialogue” despite the fact that “scholars offer undeniable evidence of the nationalists’ anti-Semitic sentiment” (p. 33). Reading this, one asks oneself whether it would be possible to have a constructive dialogue with those who deny the undeniable.

Khromeychuk’s approach reveals how the “Galicians” developed exculpatory narratives surrounding their service in the Waffen SS and successfully presented these to the British and Canadian authorities in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union and gain the right to settle in the Western countries as citizens. While there is nothing particularly surprising about the narratives themselves, her argument as to their application is quite convincing. Certainly, more archival research is needed to find out, for example, how far the division was involved in atrocities during the Slovakian national uprising or whether “Galicians” who fought in the Wiking Division later re-joined the Galicia Division. A study of narratives alone cannot answer these questions, nor can it avoid constructing its own ‘truth’. However, despite these reservations, Khromeychuk’s work is a refreshingly non-polemical discussion of a fraught historical question with contemporary political relevance.

Christopher Gilley, Hamburg