On the 22nd of June 1941, the German army burst across the Soviet frontier. Panzer divisions rolled through shattered border posts as Stuka dive bombers screamed down on the cities of Brest, Minsk, and Lviv. Villages burned in their path. Behind the tanks came the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile death squads.
Together with local nationalists, they rounded up Jews, communists, and Soviet officials, driving them to freshly dug graves. Endless columns of Soviet prisoners marched west under rifle butts, while the German advance seemed unstoppable. Streams of refugees clogged the roads east as the Wehrmacht pushed toward Leningrad and Moscow. In towns and villages across western Ukraine, local nationalists joined in, clearing roads, taking over police posts, and targeting those they called enemies of the nation.
They welcomed the Germans not as invaders, but as liberators from Stalin’s rule. One of the most fanatical Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators was Roman Shukhevych. Roman Taras Yosypovych Shukhevych was born on the 30th of June 1907 in Kakovitz, a small village west of Lviv, today’s Lviv, then part of Austria-Hungary. Both of his parents were active Ukrainian nationalists inspired by the earlier national revival movement.
His worldview was shaped in part by Yevhen Konovalets, the commander of the Ukrainian Military Organization. It was a secret nationalist paramilitary formation created to fight against Polish control of western Ukraine. Between 1921 and 1922, Konovalets rented a room in Shukhevych’s family home. In 1925, Shukhevych joined the Ukrainian Military Organization.
A year later, he received orders to assassinate Stanisław Sobiński, the chief school inspector in Lviv, whom Ukrainian activists accused of promoting Polish language policies meant to suppress Ukrainian education. In October 1926, Sobiński was murdered in front of his wife by the 19-year-old Shukhevych and Bohdan Pidhainy, a fellow member of the Ukrainian Military Organization. It was Shukhevych’s first political assassination. In 1930, Shukhevych married Natalia Berezinska, and the marriage produced two children.
Even as his personal life settled, his political involvement deepened. In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, was founded in Vienna. It emerged from a merger of several radical nationalist and fascist groups, including the Ukrainian National Association, the Union of Ukrainian Fascists, and the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Its members were mainly Ukrainian war veterans frustrated by their failure to secure independence after the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to 1920.
With Ukrainians now divided among four states—the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—the OUN became the dominant movement of the Ukrainian far right, using terrorism as a political weapon. Operating under the cover name “Dzvon,” meaning bell, Shukhevych served as the military reference of the OUN’s leadership. After the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki in June 1934, Polish authorities launched mass arrests of OUN members. Shukhevych was detained the following month and sent to the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp.
He was allegedly tortured by Polish authorities and held there for about a year and a half before being released in December 1935 for lack of evidence. During the Warsaw trial of 1935 to 1936, he appeared as a witness. He demanded the right to speak Ukrainian and was fined for doing so. When he greeted the court with the words “Glory to Ukraine,” he was imprisoned again.
Released under an amnesty in 1937, he soon resumed underground nationalist activities against the Polish government. In early 1938, Shukhevych crossed illegally from Poland into Czechoslovakia and settled in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, where he began cooperating with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. When the region gained autonomy and was renamed Carpathian Ukraine later that year, he joined Ukrainian nationalists in forming the Carpathian Sich, a paramilitary force. In March 1939, Shukhevych took part in a failed coup in the city of Khust against the pro-Czech authorities.
The uprising was crushed, and as Czechoslovakia collapsed following the creation of the Slovak Republic and the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, Hungarian troops invaded and annexed Carpathian Ukraine. Shukhevych fought briefly against the advancing Hungarian forces and was nearly killed in one of the clashes before fleeing across the border into Romania. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. On the 17th of September, the Soviet Union attacked from the east under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a secret agreement that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
After Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland, most of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists regrouped in the German-occupied zone known as the General Government. By 1940, the OUN had split. A younger and more radical wing under Stepan Bandera challenged the authority of Andriy Melnyk, a veteran of the earlier independent struggle. The rival movements became known as the OUN-B, led by Bandera, and OUN-M, led by Melnyk.
Both embraced authoritarian nationalism and anti-Semitic ideas that had circulated in interwar Europe. But they differed in their approach to Germany. Melnyk’s group remained loyal to the Reich, while the Bandera faction hoped to use the coming German-Soviet war to create an independent Ukrainian state. Roman Shukhevych, who had already served in the OUN’s military branch, became one of the key organizers of the Bandera faction.
In the spring and summer of 1940, he joined more than 100 Ukrainian nationalists at a secret training center run by the Abwehr in the resort town of Zakopane in German-occupied southern Poland. As preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union intensified, the Abwehr created two small Ukrainian units to accompany the German army: Sonderformation Nachtigall, meaning nightingale, and Organization Roland. The Nachtigall battalion, formed in Kraków in March 1941, consisted mainly of Ukrainian nationalists trained at Neuhammer, a military camp in Silesia. Shukhevych held the rank of captain and was the highest-ranking Ukrainian in the Nachtigall battalion, which operated under the supervision of German liaison officer Theodor Oberländer, who later became a minister in the postwar cabinet of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
The Nachtigall battalion members were dressed in German uniforms and armed with German weapons. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941, the Nachtigall Battalion advanced eastward and entered Lviv on the 30th of June. As German troops pushed the Red Army out of western Ukraine, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, executed thousands of political prisoners in local jails, including Shukhevych’s brother. News of the prison massacres, together with pre-existing anti-Semitic feeling, fueled brutal outbreaks of violence.
On the 1st of July, a large pogrom erupted in Lviv, where many Jews were killed after Ukrainian militias influenced by German propaganda believed that Jews were responsible for Bolshevik crimes. According to many witnesses, members of the Nachtigall battalion also took part in these killings, which claimed at least 4,000 lives. On the same day that Nachtigall entered Lviv, the Bandera faction of the OUN proclaimed Ukrainian independence, declaring loyalty to Germany in hopes of recognition. The Nazis, however, rejected the idea of a Ukrainian state in territory they regarded as vital for their Eastern Empire.
The OUN leadership was quickly arrested, and the Nachtigall unit was dissolved and disarmed. By early 1942, the battalion was reorganized as Schutzmannschaft 201, a German auxiliary police formation. After additional training, the unit was deployed to Belarus to fight Soviet partisans. Its operations went far beyond combat, involving reprisals against unarmed civilians.
For every German casualty reported, dozens of local civilians were listed as enemy dead, indicating large-scale retaliatory killings. This period became a brutal training ground in counterinsurgency and in the harsh occupation methods typical of the Eastern Front. The experience demoralized many Ukrainian volunteers. By 1943, as German fortunes declined, Shukhevych and a number of his comrades left Belarus and returned to western Ukraine.
There, under the direction of the Bandera OUN, they helped form the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. The new movement presented itself as a national liberation force fighting both Germans and Soviets, but in practice it also targeted civilians viewed as obstacles to an ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state. In August 1943, Shukhevych became the supreme commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Under his leadership, the insurgent forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish population of Volhynia and eastern Galicia.
It is estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 ethnic Poles—men, women, and children—were killed in raids on villages. Another 300,000 were driven from their homes, becoming refugees as a result of the ethnic cleansing. The UPA also hunted down groups of Jews who had survived the earlier waves of Nazi extermination and were hiding in forests, as well as members of other minorities such as Czechs and ethnic Germans. The UPA conducted the raids with extreme brutality.
In the village of Kisielin on the 11th of July 1943, about 90 Poles were murdered when attackers locked people inside the church. Men, women, and children were ordered to take off their clothes and were then massacred by machine gun. The wounded were killed with weapons such as axes and knives on the spot and without mercy. Sunday, the 11th of July 1943, became known as the Volhynia Bloody Sunday.
UPA death squads aided by local Ukrainian peasants simultaneously attacked at least 99 Polish settlements, often using the fact that people gathered in churches. Priests were killed with axes or crucified. The churches were usually set on fire, and people burned alive inside. Only on this day, thousands of people were murdered.
Women were impaled on the ground with bayonets. Children were torn apart by their legs. Others were impaled on pitchforks and thrown over fences or bashed against trees. Members of the intelligentsia were tied with barbed wire and thrown into wells.
Arms, legs, and heads were chopped off with axes. Tongues were cut out. Ears and noses were severed. Eyes were gouged, bellies ripped open, and entrails pulled out.
Heads were smashed with hammers, and living children were thrown into burning houses. As the front moved westward in 1944 and the Germans retreated, the UPA turned its attention almost entirely to the returning Soviet authorities. Soviet security forces responded with mass arrests, deportations, and executions. By the final months of the war, western Ukraine was caught between the Red Army’s advance and the nationalist underground’s attempt to resist renewed Soviet domination.
The Second World War in Europe ended on the 9th of May 1945. But in western Ukraine, the conflict continued for years as the nationalist underground fought a stubborn insurgency against Soviet rule. Roman Shukhevych was 42 years old when on the 5th of March 1950, Soviet internal troops surrounded his safe house in the village of Bilohorshcha near Lviv, and he was killed in the ensuing battle. Soviet authorities punished his entire family under the doctrine of collective guilt.
His brother Yuri had been executed by the NKVD in Lviv before the German occupation. His mother Yevhenia and his wife Natalia Berezinska were exiled to Siberia, while his father Yosyp, already disabled, died soon after being deported. Shukhevych’s children, Yuri and Maria, were placed in an orphanage.
In later years, his son Yuri, himself a nationalist dissident, spent decades in Soviet camps and exile, eventually losing his sight but living long enough to witness Ukraine’s independence.
