One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine yet the
Holocaust there has not received due attention. This book delineates the participation of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(Ukrainska povstanska armiia-UPA) in the destruction of the Jewish population of Ukraine under
German occupation in 1941-44. The extent of OUN and UPA's culpability in the Holocaust has been
a controversial issue in Ukraine and within the Ukrainian diaspora as well as in Jewish
communities and Israel. Occasionally the controversy has broken into the press of North
America the EU and Israel. Triangulating sources from Jewish survivors Soviet investigations
German documentation documents produced by OUN itself and memoirs of OUN activists it has
been possible to establish that: OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of
summer 1941 OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable
manpower for the Germans' mobile killing units and in 1943 thousands of these policemen
deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency during which UPA
killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.
