New documentary to focus on Ukraine in World War II (01/12/97)

New documentary to focus on Ukraine in World War II

TORONTO - Prof. Norman Davies, a noted historian at the University of London and author of the new publication "Europe: A History" (Oxford University Press), in a recent interview analyzed World War II, stating that Germany and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for starting the war in 1939.

Prof. Davies noted in his interview: "from September 1939 to 1941 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union weren't formal allies but they were clearly partners ... Germany, I think in those two years attacked eight European countries, the Soviet Union attacked and invaded five European countries."

The interview with Prof. Davies was conducted at Oxford University by Slavko Nowytski, the director of a film on Ukraine in World War II. This documentary film has been commissioned by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center and is scheduled for completion in late 1997.

The film will provide the first comprehensive, but concise, introduction to the Ukrainian experience in the second world war - in which an estimated 10 million Ukrainians perished and over 2.3 million Ukrainians were taken as Ostarbeiter slave laborers to Germany in 1942-1944.

The Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center (UCRDC) is continuing its search for materials that will best portray the fate of Ukraine during the war. The film will cover the struggle of Ukrainians to survive between the scorched earth policies of Stalin's Red Army on one side and Hitler's brown German Army on the other. Among the 10 million Ukrainians that Ukraine lost in the war were 600,000 Ukrainian Jews executed by the German Einsatzgruppen.

According to Andrew Gregorovich, executive director of the UCRDC, the film will include interviews with Ukrainian Ostarbeiter survivors and some of the Jews saved by Ukrainians in the war.

Prof. Davies said: "The post-war history of Ukraine starts with the phase of continuing resistance. Many people in the West don't realize that Ukrainians ... were fighting against both Hitler and Stalin and after ... 1945 there was a remnant of the wartime resistance continuing."

In discussing the question of collaboration with Germany, Prof. Davies observed: "a large number of the volunteers for the Waffen SS came from Western Europe. The nation which supplied it the largest number of divisions was the Netherlands [four]. There were two Belgian divisions, there was a French Waffen SS. ... It's surprising that there were so few Ukrainians [in the German Army]. Many people don't know, for example, that there were far more Russians fighting alongside the Wehrmacht or in the various German armies than there were Ukrainians ... Thanks to Soviet propaganda, the Russian contribution to the Nazi war effort has been forgotten, whereas the Ukrainian contribution has been remembered, I think, too strongly."

The British professor noted that Western scholars usually think only in terms of collaborators with Nazi Germany and do not even consider those who collaborated with Soviet Russia simply because the USSR was an Allied country in World War II.

Another point noted by Prof. Davies was that "many of the people who died during the war in the Soviet Union were not war dead in the ordinary understanding of the word. Robert Conquest, for example, has argued that Stalin killed 6 million of his own citizens during the war. Now are we to count among the war dead people killed by their own government? Are we to include the Soviet prisoners of war, more than a million of whom survived barbaric Nazi captivity to return to the Soviet Union only to be killed by their own authorities when they returned?"

"The Soviet Union was a dinosaur which died of natural causes," said Prof. Davies summing up his interview.

The UCRDC is interviewing other prominent historians and experts for the documentary film "Ukraine in World War II," which promises to be a major resource for better understanding the role and history of Ukraine in the context of world history in this century.

For further information contact the UCRDC at 620 Spadina Ave., Toronto, Ontario M5S 2H4; telephone (416) 966-1819.

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