Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II

Unlikely Allies offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee's ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland.

Ukrainian nationalists' collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian region within the borders of the General Government or an ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict. Kubiiovych's wartime experiences with Nazi politicians and administrators--greatly overlooked and only partially referenced today--not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War II.

Author: Pawel Markiewicz
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 11/15/2021
Pages: 366
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.76d
ISBN: 9781612496801

About the Author
Markiewicz, Pawel: - Pawel Markiewicz currently serves as chief specialist analyst in the International Security Programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw, Poland. A native of Revere, Massachusetts, he earned his doctorate in modern Central-East European history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. His research interests include topics in twentieth-century East-Central European history, nationalist movements in the region, Polish-Ukrainian studies, and Ukrainian-German relations and Polish diaspora issues. Markiewicz was a visiting scholar at the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Kyiv and at Salem State University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies before completing a visiting fellowship at Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute. He has written articles and reviews in the Slavonic and East European Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, The Polish Review, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Dzieje Najnowsze, and Polski Przegląd Dyplomatyczny, and has provided commentaries for newspapers such as the Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza.