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Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany - Wikipedia
The atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust in Ukraine started within a few days of the beginning of the Nazi occupation. There are indications that the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, formed on 20 August 1941,[12] was used in the roundup of Jews for the Babi Yar massacre,[13][14] and in other massacres in cities and towns of modern-day Ukraine, such as Stepan,[15] Lviv, Lutsk, and Zhytomyr.[16] On 1 September 1941, Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote: "The element that settled our cities (Jews)... must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved."[17]
Reinforced by religious prejudice, anti-Semitism had turned violent in the first days of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians derived nationalist resentment from the belief that the Jews had worked for Polish landlords.[18] The NKVD prisoner massacres by the Soviet secret police while they retreated eastward were blamed on Jews. The Antisemitic canard of Jewish Bolshevism provided justification for the revenge killings by the ultranationalist Ukrainian People's Militia, which accompanied German Einsatzgruppen moving east.[18] In Boryslav (prewar Borysław, Poland, population 41,500), the SS commander gave an enraged crowd, which had seen bodies of men murdered by NKVD and laid out in the town square, 24 hours to act as they wished against Polish Jews, who were forced to clean the dead bodies and to dance and then were killed by beating with axes, pipes etc. The same type of mass murders took place in Brzezany. During Lviv pogroms, 7,000 Jews were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists, led by the Ukrainian People's Militia.[18][19][20] As late as 1945, Ukrainian militants were still rounding up and murdering Jews.[21]
While some of the collaborators were civilians, others were given a choice to enlist for paramilitary service beginning in September 1941 from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps because of ongoing close relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung.[22] In total, over 5,000 native Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army signed up for training with the SS at a special Trawniki training camp to assist with the Final Solution.[23] Another 1,000 of them defected during field operations.[23] Trawniki men took major part in the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jews during Operation Reinhard. They served at all extermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see the Stroop Report) and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising among other ghetto insurgencies.[24] The men who were dispatched to death camps and Jewish ghettos as guards were never fully trusted and so were always overseen by Volksdeutsche.[25] Occasionally, along with the prisoners they were guarding, they would kill their commanders in the process of attempting to defect.[26][27]
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No. The first victim of Nazism was Germany.
The first victim of Ukrainian nationalism was Ukraine. The hatred and discrimination caused by far-right ideology tored up Ukraine and artrocites of Neo-Nazi groups (like Odessa Massacre) forced people in Southern and Eastern Ukraine to take weapon in their hands to defend themselves.
