Thomas Thorstein |🇩🇪 |🇪🇪

Today, as a Ukrainian-Jewish and a scholar of the Holocaust, I feel deeply ashamed. I never could have imagined that in my country — the country where the Nazis murdered 1.5 million Jews, the country of Babyn Yar, the very symbol of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, a country that claims to be fighting for “freedom and democracy” — a Nazi collaborator and OUN leader like Andriy Melnyk would be buried with full state honors. Men under Melnyk’s leadership served in the Auxiliary police under Nazi. They hunted Jews hiding in attics, basements, forests, and barns, desperate to survive the Holocaust. They guarded ghettos and camps. They marched Jews to execution sites. And they took part in the shootings alongside the Germans. By the spring of 1943, the Holocaust in Ukraine was nearly complete. The Jewish neighbors were gone — murdered before the eyes, and often with the assistance, of Melnyk’s followers. And it was precisely then that Melnyk supported the creation of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, whose members swore an oath to Adolf Hitler. And today, the president of my country — a man whose own relatives were murdered by the Nazis — kneels before the coffin of this Nazi collaborator. One could hardly imagine a greater humiliation for Jews. It is a humiliation for everyone who once believed that “Never Again” meant something in contemporary Ukraine — a country where militant ethnic nationalism increasingly dictates the politics of memory, and national identity.

Photo 1: Ivan Vovk — fighter of Ukraine’s 5th Kyiv Assault Brigade. His patch features a Nazi eagle, a swastika, and the symbol of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division. Photo 2: Ivan Vovk attending the presentation of a book by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav, at Madrid’s Catholic CEU San Pablo University. And this is how the Ukrainian church networks with neo-Nazis. A long-standing friendship, apparently.