DOWODY ZBRODNI NACJONALISTÓW UKRAIŃSKICH NA LUDNOŚCI POLSKIEJ W LATACH 1939-1947 ORAZ ICH OCENA W ŚWIETLE PRAWA KRAJOWEGO I MIĘDZYNARODOWEGO
EVIDENCE OF THE CRIMES COMMITTED BY UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS AGAINST THE POLISH POPULATION IN THE YEARS 1939—1947, AND THEIR ASSESSMENT IN THE LIGHT OF NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Summary/Abstract: During the Second World War, in the south Eastern Borderlands (or, in Polish Kresy Wschodnie) of the Second Polish Republic, the Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the German and Soviet occupiers. The Third Reich and the Soviet Union were opposed to the creation of the totalitarian Ukrainian state by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). However, both the occupiers’ and the Ukrainian nationalists’ aim was the extermination of the Polish nation. The significant ideological similarity between the Ukrainian nationalism and German Nazism was unequivocally shown by the complicity on a mass scale of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust. In order to murder as many Poles in Volhynia as possible, at the beginning of 1943, the OUN started forming the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). A few months later, the UPA spread its terrorist activities also throughout the south Kresy Wschodnie. Most of the terms frequently used for crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists, such as “slaughter” or “ethnic cleansing”, do not have legal significance. In accordance with the Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, these crimes should correctly be defined as genocide. Professor Ryszard Szawłowski finds that due to particularly drastic cruelty, the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists ought to be named, in Latin, genocidium atrox (“atrocious genocide”). What is more, the activities of Ukrainian nationalists, among other things, murder and subversive acts, were precisely and strictly forbidden by the Polish Criminal Code of 1932 as well as by the laws adopted in Poland by the communist authorities after the end of the German occupation. In the communist— Poland many sentences, including life-time prison or death sentences, were passed on the members of the structures of the OUN and UPA. There is no legal possibility to overturn those verdicts; and, in addition the crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists are still prosecuted by the Institute of National Remembrance— Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. Likewise, the pieces of evidence presented in the article, unarguably show that the activities of Ukrainian nationalists against the Polish population in the years 1939—1947, were inherently criminal.

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