BANDENBEKÄMPFUNG: UKRAINIAN AUXILIARY POLICE AND ITS ROLE IN THE OPRESSION OF SOVIET RESISTANCE IN GENERALBEZIRK KIEW, 1941–194

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to highlight the course, features and trends of the participation of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in the liquidation of the Soviet resistance movement in the territory of the Kyiv General District. The author considered the process of organizing the police, the specifics of its activity as an auxiliary force during the anti-partisan warfare in Ukraine and Belarus. In addition, the influence of Soviet party assets on the police and vice versa is considered. Special attention is focused around terminological
traps and the language of Nazi euphemisms.
Since the 1990s, the phenomenon of local collaborationism in the territories of the USSR occupied by the Germans during the Second World War has increasingly become the focus of scientific research, especially as a subdiscipline of Holocaust studies. However, representatives of this direction usually focus attention on the genocide of the Jewish (and Roma) people, without mentioning
other victims of Nazis’ politically motivated violence. It is not only about the total extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, but also hundreds of thousands of injured civilians of various ethnic and social origins. Some of the crimes were committed during anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union. Not only Germans, but also their local Christian helpers often became complicit in crimes.
According to estimates by some historians, the total number of civilians killed in the guise of anti-guerrilla warfare, or the so-called “combating of bandits” (German: Bandenbekämpfung) could reach 600,000 people. The punitive nature of such operations and the participation of auxiliary police units were studied mainly on the example of Belarus, where the Soviet resistance movement became widespread (which was facilitated by geographical conditions). The historiographical discussions surrounding the complicity
of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in the destruction of the local population of Belarus, in particular the village of Khatyn, “pull” all research attention.
On the other hand, on the example of Ukraine, such a focus was practically not applied. Thus, this article aims to expand studies of the Holocaust in Ukraine by examining the involvement of auxiliary police in mass violence against
“political opponents” – representatives of the Soviet resistance movement.