Ukrainians in German Mills of death (1941-1944)

Keywords: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1941-1944, Auschwitz, labor camps

Abstract

The article considers social, political and legal ideas about the deportation of Ostarbeiters from the USSR to Germany during the Second World War. Factual and documentary source approaches to determining the phenomenon of forced deportation of the population of the USSR are presented. The evidence of a crime against the entire nation of Ukrainians was considered impartially and as fundamentally as possible by the German command. The ability to create underground organizations within the territory of concentration camps as an element of the resistance movement of Ukrainians against German enslavement is presented.

World War II caused the concentration camp system to grow to unprecedented proportions. In 1940, in occupied Poland, the SS built Auschwitz concentration camps near Auschwitz and Maidanek on the outskirts of Lublin. Each camp was overgrown with a dense network of branches located at a particular enterprise. Ukrainians are one of the many ethnic groups to be sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Faced with extremely difficult conditions, Ukrainians began to actively consolidate, creating underground self-help groups. Underground networks emerged «from below», gradually establishing contacts, through which they avoided work, obtained additional food rations, and found physically easier work. Gradually, functions were distributed within the group, which clearly correlated with the objective capabilities of a particular prisoner – a member of the group. Like any network, it had a leader who managed and coordinated all the actions of the group. One such group was a group of OUN(b) members imprisoned in Auschwitz, an underground organization called Iskra, which was formed in the summer of 1942 in Wurzen, near Leipzig. By the end of 1944, the group had several hundred members, including Polish and French civilian workers, as well as German citizens living in the surrounding villages and towns, and forced laborers in Leipzig. Thanks to such groups, more than one human life was saved.

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Published
2021-01-15
How to Cite
Stanovska, V. (2021). Ukrainians in German Mills of death (1941-1944). Acta De Historia & Politica: Saeculum XXI, (02), 15-20. https://doi.org/10.26693/ahpsxxi2020.02.015
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Articles