During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005 there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading fi gures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko's legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fi ght shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN's own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization's problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offi ces of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic.
2Brought to power by the so-called Orange Revolution, the administration of Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005Yushchenko ( -2010 expressed a clear ambition to orient Ukraine away from Russia and toward the EU, NATO, and the Western world. One step in this direction was the reassessment of modern Ukrainian history. Old Soviet heroes were reexamined, and the anti-Soviet nationalist resistance to Soviet rule reinterpreted in heroic terms. This is all part of a long and painful process of nation building and national consolidation, as Ukraine moves away from Soviet historiography into nation-based history writing.1 Following independence, and particularly after the Orange Revolution, nationalist and diaspora historical interpretations were adopted as the basis for new national myths. This essay addresses one particularly sensitive and delicate part of this mythology, the relation of Ukrainian nationalists-the Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN(b), and its armed forces, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA-to the Jews, a polarizing topic which has come to have important political connotations. The purpose here is not to restore one single historical "truth." Rather, it is to study the political use of history, the manipulations of the historical record, by tracing the genealogy of a set of historical myths, circling key mythmakers, their choice of material, and ...