, the 1941-1942
Axis advance into the
Soviet Union, and the initial 1941 OUN(m) expeditionary groups.. From their bases in
Berlin and Kraków, the OUN(m) and OUN(b) formed expeditionary groups, intending to follow the
Wehrmacht into Ukraine during the June 1941
German invasion of the Soviet Union to recruit supporters and set up local governments with the OUN(b) having formed the
Nachtigall and
Roland battalions under the
Abwehr in February. One group of Melnykites based in
Chelm attempted to march into
Volhynia intending to precede the Wehrmacht advance and welcome German troops, though they were ambushed and killed by OUN(b) members on the banks of the
River Bug. In July, 500 OUN(m) members penetrated into Ukraine in the form of expeditionary groups, each tasked with a specific route, from bases organised on the territory of the
General Government whereafter they organised municipal administrations, civic institutions, schools, and newspapers.
Arrival in Kyiv , and
Ulas Samchuk. Despite a secret directive by OUN(b) leadership not to allow Melnykite leaders to reach Kyiv (which Melnykites referred to as a 'death sentence'), a group of OUN(m) members reached the city before the Banderites in the days following
its capture by the Germans on 19 September 1941. That same day a Melnykite hoisted a
yellow-and-blue flag, accompanied by a
swastika flag from 13 October, to the top of
St. Sophia's Cathedral, though a squabble ensued with Banderites as to what way up the flag should be. Members of the Zhytomyr police led by OUN(m) activists arrived in the following days and made an important contribution to the formation of the auxiliary police in Kyiv. They were soon supplemented by expeditionary groups that included PUN members whereby a group led by
Oleh Olzhych established the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) on 5 October, intended to serve as the basis for a future Ukrainian state, and persuaded
Mykola Velychkivsky, a local university instructor, to chair it. Local historian
Oleksander Ohloblyn agreed to become mayor of the
collaborationalist Kyiv administration and was accepted by the Wehrmacht authorities, though the Germans replaced him on 1 November with his deputy,
Volodymyr Bahaziy, who was a more enthusiastic sympathiser of the OUN(m) and funnelled money from the sale of Soviet equipment to the nationalist cause. Though popular among the small intelligentsia, the vast majority of Ukrainians were not
nationally conscious and were largely indifferent to the idea of statehood, while discourse about Ukrainians' experiences during the
Holodomor flourished in the absence of
censorship under the USSR.
Émigrés from
Western Ukraine tended to be perceived by the local population as foreigners and though some local Ukrainians would enthusiastically support the campaign, the nationalists' radical
Ukrainisation policies disrupted the lives of many locals and earned them antipathy alongside their occasionally monopolistic role in municipal administrations and their supposed attitude of superiority. In coordination with the PUN, a group of Melnykites that arrived in Kyiv in September-October joined the
Propaganda Abteilung U (Propaganda Division for Ukraine), a division of the
Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops, and set up the newspaper
Ukrainske slovo in Kyiv that had a circulation of over fifty thousand and propagandised the OUN(m), Ukrainian nationalism, and the German 'liberation'. Though initially released on 24 December, the editorial staff were eventually executed in early January 1942, reportedly for 'failing to follow orders' with the same anonymous 1943 German report, historian Yuri Radchenko asserts that this was most likely authored by an employee of the Kyiv SD, alleging that an initial investigation of their offices discovered pro-
Western Allies sympathies and chauvinist attitudes and that subsequent interviews of the editorial staff's circle provided a large amount of incriminating material against them. and the
General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region; 1943-1944
Red Army counteroffensive:
Zhitomir–Berdichev offensive and
Operation Bagration. Despite the waves of repressions, Melnykite propaganda abstained from anti-Nazi and anti-German positions though the official Melnykite underground periodical
Surma in a June 1943 issue detailed executions against Melnykite local administrations and sympathisers in Zhytomyr,
Dnipropetrovsk, and
Poltava, as well as repressions across central and eastern Ukraine, in which the Germans were referred to as those "who had their own special plans against Ukraine".
Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense In September 1943, representatives of the Volhynia regional council of the OUN(m) met with a number of pro-partnership SD and
SiPo officers in and around Lutsk for negotiations pertaining to the cessation of German reprisals and the release of Melnykite, and also some
Petliurite, prisoners. In November, they formed the
Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense (ULS), numbering 150 Melnykites and officially under the command of ten German SS officers, mostly from the
Chelm SD. The ULS was allowed to have its own chaplain as well as being granted a propaganda arm, the main output of which was the legion's official journal
Nash Shlyakh (Our Path) that published antisemitic,
Polonophobic, and
Russophobic articles, characterising the conflict in its April 1944 first issue as a struggle "for the eradication of Polish [
slur:
lyashskyi] and Jew-Muscovite rule in Ukraine". Intended to combat Soviet and Polish partisans, the unit was deployed in late autumn to the village of Pidhaitsi, near Lutsk, until 18 January 1944. During this time, ULS soldiers shot between 30 and 100 Jewish civilians though it remains unclear if an order was given. Following a fierce battle against Soviet partisans on 11-12 February, the ULS conducted an
"anti-partisan" action against the Polish villages of Karczunek and Edwardopol, near
Volodymyr, on the night of 14–15 February. In late February 1944, the ULS was redeployed to
occupied-Poland, quartered and trained in the villages of
Moroczyn and
Dziekanów in
Hrubieszów County where they
combatted Polish partisans and
pacified several Polish townships while legion soldiers were noted as having casually killed Polish civilians. Briefly being redeployed to Volhynia in June before returning to Poland in July, they captured and executed Banderite partisans, mobilised
local inhabitants for forced labour, and continued attacks on Polish settlements. By the summer of 1944, the ULS numbered approximately 1,000 soldiers after a recruitment effort and the release of many Melnykites held in German prisons. On 22 July during a night march, ULS commander SS-
Hauptsturmführer Siegfried Assmuss was killed in an inadvertent skirmish with Soviet partisans in retaliation for which the unit massacred the nearby Polish village of
Chłaniów which had served as a centre for
People's Army partisans. Rank-and-file members of the ULS and its Ukrainian commanders opposed the proposed relocation of the unit to
Warsaw in August 1944 away from areas inhabited by Ukrainians, culminating in a show of force by German police and SS units who surrounded the village of
Bukowska Wola where they were quartered, after which the legion was split into three units. A ULS combat group comprising a third of the legion's soldiers subsequently
partook in street fighting in September during the suppression of the
Warsaw Uprising whereafter the unit participated in
Operation Sternschnuppe in late September, following which the legion was reunified and continued to conduct anti-partisan operations in occupied-Poland. In February 1945, the ULS was relocated to occupied-
Yugoslavia where they were quartered in the vicinity of
Maribor and directed against
Tito's partisans.
Fate of Melnykite leadership Provid member Yaroslav Baranovsky was assassinated by the OUN(b) in
Galicia on 11 May 1943, which was condemned by
Catholic Metropolitan of Galicia and Archbishop of Lviv Andrey Sheptytsky.
Roman Sushko was assassinated in Lviv on 14 January 1944, likely perpetrated by Banderites or possibly by agents of the
Gestapo. Melnykites blamed the OUN(b) for the assassination. Amid the
Allied bombing of Berlin, Melnyk and his wife travelled to Vienna in late 1943 and were arrested by the Gestapo in late January 1944, concurrently with other PUN members, after which
Oleh Olzhych became acting head of the PUN (and thereby the wider OUN(m)).
Release and the Ukrainian National Committee SD to
Gestapo chief
Heinrich Müller, informing him about the creation of the Ukrainian National Committee. Suffering from manpower shortages, a group of Nazi Party officials and SS officers endeavoured to set up the
Ukrainian National Committee (UNC) to negotiate and coordinate support for the retreating
German forces in return for political concessions with a broad spectrum of imprisoned Ukrainian nationalist leaders released and taken to Berlin, including Melnyk and the OUN(m) leadership in October 1944. Melnyk, Andriievsky, and Boidunyk left Berlin for
Bad Kissingen in February with the town occupied by
American troops on 7 April. This was general policy for
displaced persons after the war.
John Alexander Armstrong posits that even though, "apparent to all", Nazi Germany's chances of victory on the
Eastern Front had gone from remote after the
Germans' failure to take Moscow to extremely remote after the 1942-1943 winter of
Stalingrad, Ukrainian nationalists generally staked their strategic course on hopes that either the Western Allies would intervene in their favour or that the two superpowers would exhaust one another whereby a period of anarchy would emerge in
Eastern Europe, similar to that that followed the
First World War, in which an organised but contemporarily inferior nationalist military force could assert itself. According to
Timothy Snyder, Banderite leaders believed that in such a scenario their chief enemy would be a resurgent Poland. Historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach assert that for the duration of the war, even during the repressive crackdowns, the OUN(m) never abandoned its stance on collaboration with the Third Reich as a path to an independent Ukrainian state whereby their orientation oscillated between neutrality and friendship. Radchenko estimates that between several hundred and one thousand OUN(m) members were killed by the Nazis over the war. ==Post-WWII and the Cold War era==