Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia

• 1. Introduction

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  The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia killed as many as 100,000 Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945. A UPA commander named Maksym Skorupskyi kept a diary during the killings. He wrote, "Starting from our action on Kuty, day by day after sunset, the sky was bathing in the glow of conflagration. Polish villages were burning." Most of the dead were women and children. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, carried out the killings in German-occupied Poland. Parts of the local Ukrainian population supported the campaign. Who gave the order to target an entire population? How far did that order reach: into mixed marriages, into a fortified monastery, into a village school full of children? And why, decades later, do Poland and Ukraine still not agree on what to call it?

• 2. A Movement Radicalizes

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  In 1920, exiled Ukrainian officers, many of them former Sich Riflemen, founded the Ukrainian Military Organization, known as the UVO. Its goal was to keep fighting for an independent Ukraine. By the second half of 1922, the UVO was already carrying out sabotage and assassination attempts against Polish officials and moderate Ukrainian activists. In 1929, several radical nationalist and far-right groups merged with the UVO in Vienna to form the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN. Andriy Sheptytsky, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, condemned the new organization's violence. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, the OUN remained a fringe movement. Most Ukrainians instead supported the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, a party that opposed Polish rule but pursued independence through peaceful, democratic means.

  A 1931 census showed how divided the borderlands already were. In Eastern Galicia, 52% of residents spoke Ukrainian and 40% spoke Polish; in Volhynia, 68% spoke Ukrainian and only 17% spoke Polish. Polish authorities responded to Ukrainian unrest with a shifting mix of conciliation and repression. In 1930, a terror campaign in the Galician countryside led Polish police to impose collective punishment on local Ukrainians. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest during elections. From 1937, the Polish government in Volhynia used religion as a tool of Polonization. It destroyed more than 190 Orthodox churches and converted another 150 to Roman Catholic use.

  Just before the war, though, Volhynia had briefly been, in one historian's phrase, "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration." The Sanacja regime had supported Ukrainian culture and church autonomy in hopes of winning Ukrainian loyalty and blocking Soviet influence. That approach faded after Józef Piłsudski's death in 1935, and Poles came to hold nearly every government and police post in the region. By the start of the Second World War, OUN membership had reached 20,000 active members, with many more sympathizers standing behind them.

• 3. War Opens The Door

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  On the night of 12-the 13th of September 1939, in the town of Stryj, armed Ukrainian bands struck Polish troops as Poland's defense against Germany collapsed. Similar attacks soon spread through every district of mixed ethnicity in Eastern Galicia. After the 17th of September, when the Soviet Union also invaded, the violence grew larger and more organized, led by the OUN and by communists. Roughly 2,000 Poles were killed in Eastern Galicia and 1,000 in Volhynia, with the worst massacres striking the villages of Koniuchy and Potutory. The OUN itself reported attacking 183 villages that September. Polish forces answered with pacification operations that likely killed several hundred people.

  In September 1939, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were annexed by the Soviet Union and absorbed into the Ukrainian SSR. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, began dismantling the Polish middle and upper classes, arresting social activists and military leaders. Between 1939 and 1941, some 200,000 Poles were deported to Siberia, stripping the Polish community of its natural leadership. The NKVD also worked to subvert Ukrainian nationalism. It banned every Ukrainian political party and pushed 20,000-30,000 Ukrainian activists to flee into German-occupied territory. Dmytro Levytsky, head of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, was arrested along with many colleagues and never heard from again. With moderate Ukrainian leadership eliminated, the underground OUN became the only significant organized force left among western Ukrainians.

  On the 10th of February 1940, in Kraków, a breakaway faction formed under Stepan Bandera, becoming known as OUN-B. The remaining group, loyal to Andriy Melnyk, became OUN-M. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, Soviet forces withdrew from Volhynia within days. The OUN sided with Germany, seizing about 213 villages and forming militias behind Soviet lines. Those OUN-B militias carried out antisemitic pogroms against Jews with, in the record's words, exceptional cruelty. The largest, in Lviv, killed 6,000 Polish Jews. On the 30th of June 1941, OUN-B declared a Ukrainian State in Lviv. The Gestapo responded by arresting roughly 1,500 OUN-B members and associates. By early 1942, German authorities had also curtailed OUN-M's influence, even as OUN-B began quietly stockpiling weapons and building a clandestine network inside the local collaborationist police.

• 4. The Order To Cleanse Volhynia

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  On the 9th of February 1943, a UPA unit commanded by Hryhory Perehyniak disguised itself as Soviet partisans and attacked the settlement of Parośle in Sarny county. Between 149 and 173 people were killed there, in what is now recognized as the UPA's first mass murder in the region. The killings spread through Volhynia village by village. In Kostopol and Sarny counties, under commander Ivan Lytvynchuk, known as "Dubovy," UPA units systematically murdered Poles across dozens of villages. In Lipniki, where Poles had organized one of the first self-defense units, the "Dubovy" unit killed 184 people on the night of 26-the 27th of March despite the resistance. About 130 more died in Brzezina on the 8th of April.

  OUN-B and UPA leadership then chose Holy Week, 18-the 26th of April 1943, for a coordinated assault on the western counties of Równo and Krzemieniec. The bloodiest single attack came on the night of 22-the 23rd of April in Janowa Dolina, where Lytvynchuk's unit killed 600 people and burned the entire village to the ground. Some Polish communities fought back. In Kuty, a self-defense unit reportedly repelled the UPA assault, though at least 53 Poles still died; survivors were later evacuated by German forces drawn by the glow of fire.

  By June 1943, having met determined resistance in places like Kuty, UPA Volhynia commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky, known as "Klym Savur," issued an order for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." Local Home Army command, under an officer known as "Luboń," had by July organized about 100 self-defense units and concluded there was no basis for a truce. A rival local official, "Jan Linowski," still believed an agreement was possible and arranged talks with the UPA's security service. On the 10th of July 1943, three Polish negotiators, including Zygmunt Rumel, went to a second round of talks in the village of Kustycze. All three were murdered there that same day, ending any hope of a truce.

• 5. Bloody Sunday

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  A citation attributed to Dmytro Klyachkivsky surfaced decades later, published in the 1990s by Polish historian Władysław Filar. It reportedly read: "We should make a large action of the liquidation of the Polish element... Villages and settlements lying next to the massive forests, should disappear from the face of the earth." The full order was never published and its authenticity is disputed, but it matched what came next. Home Army intelligence suggested the next wave of attacks was planned for the 20th of July 1943. The UPA moved first.

  On the 11th of July, the day after the murder of the Polish negotiators, UPA units surrounded and attacked 96 Polish villages in Horochów and Włodzimierz Wołyński counties, plus three more in Kowel county. Fifty more villages in the first two counties were hit the next day. Poles now call the 11th of July "Bloody Sunday." The UPA struck about 100 villages that day alone, burning them and killing an estimated 8,000 Polish men, women, and children, including hospital patients and nurses. In the village of Gurów, only 70 of 480 inhabitants survived. In Orzeszyn, the UPA killed 306 of 340 Poles. In Sadowa, only 20 of 600 Polish residents lived. In Zagaje, 260 Poles were killed. The wave lasted five days, until the 16th of July. Across the month, 520 Polish villages were attacked and 10,000-11,000 Poles were killed.

  A second major wave struck on 29-the 30th of August, spreading into the Luboml district and continuing into mid-September. On the night of the 30th of August, the "Lysiy" unit surrounded the village of Kąty and killed 180-213 people farm by farm. The next day, the same unit killed 86-87 people in Jankowce, then surrounded Ostrówek, where residents were gathered in the school and church and stripped of valuables before the men were killed with blunt tools; between 476 and 520 people died in total. In Wola Ostrowiecka that same morning, children were given candy while men were led outside and killed with axes. Women and children left in the school were then burned alive and hit with grenades, killing an estimated 520-572 people. Several hundred more villages were attacked before the month was over. A Polish refugee wrote at the time: "All around dead bodies and potential victims. It smells of corpses from every Pole now. There are living corpses walking around."

• 6. The Killing Spreads To Galicia

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  In March 1944, UPA command under Roman Shukhevych ordered its forces to drive Poles out of Eastern Galicia, first with warnings and then by raiding villages, killing men, and burning buildings. Vasyl Sydor, known as "Shelest," the UPA commander in Eastern Galicia, issued a similar order, though it was often disobeyed and entire villages were slaughtered anyway. One commander's order stated plainly: "First call upon Poles to abandon their land and only later liquidate them, not the other way around." Because Poles in Galicia were sometimes given that warning, and because self-defense there was stronger, the death toll ran lower than in Volhynia.

  On the 28th of February 1944, in the village of Korosciatyn, 135 Poles were murdered; a local priest, Mieczysław Kamiński, later counted the victims. A witness named Jan Zaleski recorded in his diary that night: "The slaughter lasted almost all night. We heard terrible cries, the roar of cattle burning alive, shooting." That same day, in Huta Pieniacka, home to more than 1,000 people and a wartime shelter for Polish and Jewish refugees, villagers had beaten back a Ukrainian and German attack on the 23rd of February, killing two soldiers of the Ukrainian 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Five days later, 500-600 men from that division returned with local nationalist fighters. Kazimierz Wojciechowski, commander of the village's self-defense, was doused with gasoline and burned alive in the square. Women and children were locked in barns that were then set on fire; estimates of the dead range from 500 to 1,200, and the village was destroyed.

  At the Dominican monastery in Pidkamin, some 2,000 people, mostly women and children, had taken shelter. UPA units attacked in mid-March 1944, and Polish accounts say Ukrainian SS units cooperated in the assault. Over 250 Poles were killed there, with 300 more killed nearby in Palikrovy. In the surrounding countryside, whole villages such as Berezowica, Ihrowica, Plotych, and Hanachiv were emptied and burned. Shukhevych's own order from the 25th of February 1944 left little room for doubt: "It is necessary to speed up the liquidation of the Poles, they must be totally wiped out, their villages burned... only the Polish population must be destroyed."

• 7. Rescuers And Retaliation

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  In 2007, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance published documentation of 1,341 cases in which Ukrainian civilians helped their Polish neighbors, compiled by historian Romuald Niedzielko. The UPA treated that kind of help as collaboration with the enemy; 384 of those Ukrainian rescuers were executed for it. In Polish-Ukrainian marriages, a common UPA order was to kill the Polish spouse and any children of the marriage. People who refused were often killed along with their entire family. The Ukrainian Central Committee, led by Volodymyr Kubiyovych, publicly opposed the killings. UPA units responded by murdering its representatives and a Ukrainian Catholic priest who had read the Committee's appeal from his pulpit.

  Polish self-defense had begun forming by April 1943, and by July around 100 such units existed in Volhynia. On the 20th of July 1943, nine Polish partisan units, roughly a thousand men, were formed to support them and strike UPA bases. Kazimierz Bąbiński, commander of the Home Army's Wołyń district, ordered his men in writing: "I forbid the use of the methods utilized by the Ukrainian butchers. We will not burn Ukrainian homesteads nor kill Ukrainian women and children in retaliation." That order was not always followed. Polish partisans killed an estimated 2,000-3,000 Ukrainian civilians in revenge attacks during 1943, and in August that year Bąbiński himself wrote to criticize local units for burning Ukrainian villages and robbing Ukrainian civilians.

  In January 1944, Home Army units across Volhynia converged to form the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division, intended for an anti-German uprising called Operation Tempest. Fearing encirclement by the UPA, the division instead fought sixteen major clashes against Ukrainian forces between the 11th of January and the 18th of March 1944, mostly winning. Ukrainian sources say the division's soldiers also committed atrocities in some captured villages, including in Ochniwka, where historian Yaroslav Tsaruk documented 166 alleged deaths. After its clashes with the UPA, the division turned to fighting the Germans and withdrew from Volhynia toward the Lublin region.

• 8. Counting The Dead

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  The Institute of National Remembrance breaks its estimate down by region: 40,000-60,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia, 30,000-40,000 in Eastern Galicia, and at least 4,000 in Lesser Poland, including up to 2,000 in the Chełm region. Other historians land in different places. Niall Ferguson put the combined Volhynia and Eastern Galicia toll at 60,000-80,000. G. Rossolinski-Liebe estimated 70,000-100,000. John P. Himka wrote of "perhaps a hundred thousand." Grzegorz Motyka, author of a major study of the UPA, arrived at a similar order of magnitude for the years 1943 to 1945. Władysław and Ewa Siemaszko documented 33,454 Polish victims, naming 18,208 of them; by July 2010, Ewa Siemaszko had raised that documented count to 38,600. A joint Polish-Ukrainian historians' meeting in 1994, at the Karta Centre in Podkowa Leśna, settled on a moderate estimate of 50,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia alone. On the Ukrainian side, Per Anders Rudling estimated 2,000-3,000 deaths from Polish retaliation in Volhynia, while Motyka put the toll across all territories at 10,000-15,000. Historian Timothy Snyder considers it plausible that the UPA killed nearly as many Ukrainians as it killed Poles, treating any Ukrainian who resisted its nationalism as a traitor.

  Poland's parliament adopted a resolution in 2008 describing UPA's crimes against Poles as bearing "the hallmarks of genocide," strengthened in 2013 to "ethnic cleansing with the hallmarks of genocide." On the 22nd of July 2016, the Sejm designated the 11th of July, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, as a National Day of Remembrance for the victims. Ukraine and some non-Polish historians reject the genocide label and describe the events instead as ethnic cleansing. In 2002, Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski expressed regret over the postwar Operation Vistula, calling the argument that it was justified revenge for the UPA killings "fallacious and ethically inadmissible." In July 2023, on the 80th anniversary of the massacres, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky jointly paid tribute to the victims at a mass in Lutsk. That same year, Polish archaeologists began excavating the former village of Puzhniki, searching for the mass graves of victims still unaccounted for eight decades later.