Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

This video gets most historical details correct, except for the part about “British and Americans punished the wrongdoers after #WWII.”

How Britain and America Inspired #Nazi #Eugenics

Gotta bring this one back for an encore! 😝

Eugenics and race played significant roles in Ukrainian interwar nationalism, yet remain largely unstudied.

The Ukrainian nationalists’ understanding of the racial makeup of their imagined community was contradictory as they struggled to reconcile their desire for racial purity

Eugenics came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in Ukrainian radical nationalism around 1936.

In 1941, the leading Ukrainian far-right organization, the OUN had developed a project for eugenic engineering for their aborted state, declared in L’viv on June 30, 1941.

What role did eugenics play in Ukrainian nationalist thought in the 1930s/40s, and what role did these radicals envision for eugenic engineering in their intended state? 🧐

How did eugenic thought manifest itself in Ukrainian nationalist ideology after 1945, as many of the nationalist activists were dispersed across the Western world?

This racial identity belief continued into the Cold War and persists in mainstream Ukrainian patriotism now.

eugenic societies were first established in #Ukraine around 1926.

The role of eugenicists in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe was also dependent on international political relations in the next decade; not least of their respective states’ relation to #Nazi Germany.

Today, as eugenics and racial anthropology tend to be popularly associated with National Socialism and the far right, it may be helpful to keep in mind that the early eugenic movement included political positions from across the political spectrum.

In Sweden, for instance, the eugenic project included representatives from the authoritarian right to liberals, progressives, and radical socialists, whereas Soviet racial anthropologists in the 1920s sought to reconcile eugenics with official Marxist ideology.

Eugenics had a rather short history in the USSR, limited largely to the period 1918–1930.

The Russian Eugenics Society was disbanded. From 1930 on, #eugenics was denounced as “fascist,” or a “bourgeois doctrine.”

In 1903, Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi published the so-called “Decalogue of the Ukrainian National Party.”

This “Decalogue” was intended to guide the ideological and private ethics of Ukrainian nationalists.

Its third “commandment” demanded a “Ukraine for the Ukrainians.”

The 6th “commandment” designated Muscovites, Poles, and Jews as enemies and ethnic others, whereas the tenth and “commandment” called for policing the sexual life of its adherents:

“Do not marry a foreign woman because your children will be your enemies”

Dmytro Dontsov emerged as a Ukrainian nationalist leader in the 1920’s. He was an enthusiastic student of eugenics and admirer of #fascism.

He extolled Benito #Mussolini’s “creative leadership” and praised Adolf #Hitler in quasi-religious terms, as “the real Messiah”

Dontsov became an important transmitter of völkisch and radical nationalist thought into Ukraine, not least as a translator and publisher of the works of Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, and Hans F. K. Günther, the leading ideologue of #Nazi race theory.

Dontsov explained the misfortunes of the Ukrainians by the substandard racial qualities of its people, and, in particular, of its political elite.

Dontsov lamented, “the Ostisch type lacks ‘the Nordics’ ruling spirit’ – his is of the ´calmly subjugated’ type.

Following Dontsov, Rostislov Iendyk argued for the need of Ukrainian Nationalists to adopt Nazi practices and experiences of racial hygiene, and promote the strengthening Nordic element within the Ukrainian people.

Dontsov and Iendyks’ investment in völkisch raciology was part of a larger ideological project.

Iendyk’s popular 1934 biography of Adolf Hitler, published and prefaced by Dontsov, interpreted the role of the Jews essentially as determined by their racial character.

If Polish nationalism tended to be anti-German, the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the former Habsburgs lands was pro-German; in the late 1930s, National Socialism generated considerable interest and sympathy among the western Ukrainian nationalists.

By the late 30s the Ukrainian nationalists’ anti-Semitic attitudes rhetoric became markedly more radical, in particular from 1938.

In September, 1939 Dontsov’s journal Vistnyk published sections of Mein Kampf, emphasizing the Jewish danger to the Aryan race.

Ukrainian nationalism in the 1910s and 1920s, was liberal, socialist, and, for the most part, democratic.

From 1919, the racial-eugenic current in Ukrainian nationalist thought was increasingly dominated by Galician Ukrainians, who up until 1918 had been Austrian citizens.

The attempts to establish a Ukrainian nation state ended in bitter frustration in the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty, which divided the Ukrainian lands and reduced Ukrainians to national minorities in intensely nationalistic – and nationalizing – states like Poland and Romania.

The Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) was established in 1921 by war veterans who, disillusioned with democracy, sought to set up a Ukrainian state through armed struggle.

By 1929 the UVO united much of the Ukrainian far right into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

The OUN policed the sexual and reproductive life of its imagined community, which it understood in biological and spiritual terms.

OUN published violent, quasi-religious doctrines like “44 Rules of Life of a Ukrainian” and “12 Characteristics of a Ukrainian Nationalist.”

The “44 Rules of Life of a Ukrainian Nationalist” was intended to guide the lives and daily activities of its members.

It characterized intermarriage with other races “a crime of national treason,” which would lead to “degeneration” and therefore needed to be banned.

Its 40th rule read:

“Cherish motherhood as the source of re-generation of life. Make your family a ciborium for the purity of Your Race and Nation”

Iurii Lypa, one of the ideologues of Ukrainian Nationalism, rose to prominence in the late 1930s.

After the 1940/41 split, Lypa came to side with the more radical Bandera wing of the OUN, the OUN-B (B for #Bandera).

A poet and physician, Lypa worked as a military doctor in the UPA, the Ukranian Insurgent Army, the OUN's armed wing, and was killed by the Soviets in 1944.

Ukrainian nationalists today refer to him as a “classic of Ukrainian geopolitics and raciology!” 😯

In his 1936 essay “The Ukrainian Race,” Lypa argued
“every woman has to get married. Marriage is the duty of women to their own kin. To aid her in that task is the duty of the state.”

Oh, but it gets weirder yet… 👇🏽

“We need to realize that the 300 ovulations of every Ukrainian woman, as well as 1,500 ejaculations of every Ukrainian man are the same sort of national resources, as, say, its energy supplies and iron, coal, or oil deposits.”

In order to achieve these aims, Lypa called for extensive authority of a future Ukrainian state to intervene into the most intimate aspects of its citizens’ lives.

“In order to maintain that order of life there will be sexual and eugenic advisors, sexual courts and tribunals!”

Volodymyr Martynets was one of the more prominent OUN ideologues to seek a practical solution to what he called the “Jewish problem” in #Ukraine.

In 1938, Martynets’ published a booklet entitled The Jewish Problem in Ukraine, where he argued “Jews are parasitic” to Ukraine.

In order to prevent miscegenation with Jews, which, he argued, would lead to the “Judaization” of Ukrainians, Martynets wanted total isolation of Jews from any economic, political, and cultural contacts with Ukrainians, something he hoped would force the Jews to a mass exodus.

On March 10, 1938, Konovalets tasked the young firebrand Iaroslav Stets’ko to draft a military doctrine for the OUN.

Stets’ko was arranging the ideological preparations for a second Grand Assembly of the OUN, scheduled to be held in Mussolini’s #fascist Rome in August 1939.

The OUN Military doctrine characterizes Polish as sexually demoralizing and exploitative:

“In the Polish settlements all poor Ukrainian girls lose their innocence, when they go there for work!”

The “Military doctrine” reflects a further radicalization.

Kolodzins’kyi openly called for the removal, “literally, to the last man of the Polish element from the Western Ukrainian Lands, thereby end the Polish pretentions about the Polish character of those lands.”

If Martynets, had proposed “total isolation” of its Jews, Kolodzins’kyi now called for a partial extermination of minorities “who are hostile to Ukr[ainian] independence. The fury of the Ukrainian people towards the Jews will be particularly horrific,” he continued.

“We have no need to hamper this rage; on the contrary, we need to increase it, since the more Jews killed during the uprising, the better for the Ukrainian state,” he wrote.

On May 23, 1938, Konovalets’ was assassinated by an NKVD agent in Rotterdam.

This event paved the way to the adoption of #Nazi anti-Jewish discourse and further radicalization of the Ukrainian nationalists.

Konovalets’ successor, his brother-in-law Andrii Mel’nyk represented a younger generation of radicals in the Galician “homeland”.

Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, on March 15, 1939, Transcarpathia declared independence, only to promptly be invaded and absorbed by Hungary.

Kolodzins’kyi went to fight in Transcarapthia and was killed on March 18, 1939.

Possibly the most intelligent of the OUN leaders, Stets’ko was certainly one of the most radical.

His role in the radicalization of the Galician OUN cannot be overstated.

In May 1939, Novyi Shliakh, the leading OUN paper in #Canada, published Stets’ko’s article “We and Jewry”, penned under his pseudonym Zynovyi Karbovych, in which he described Jews as “swindlers and materialists, determined to corrupt the heroic culture of warrior nations.”

Stets’ko elaborated on the issue of separation of Jews from Ukrainians.

He argued that Ukrainians constituted “the first people in Europe to understand the corrupting work of Jewry,” which was the reason why they had separated themselves from the Jews for centuries, he said.

The OUN draft constitution of September 1939, which stipulated that “#Ukraine is a sovereign, authoritarian, totalitarian” state under the OUN’s exclusive control, “in which Jews are excluded from citizenship.”

The German and Soviet partition and occupation of #Poland in September 1939 radically altered the preconditions for Western Ukrainian Nationalist activism.

The top leadership of the Galician OUN, among them Stepan #Bandera and Mykola Lebed — who both served partial life sentences for terrorism and murder – were released from prison.

Bandera’s radicals soon broke with Mel’nyk’s leadership and set up their own organization, taking the bulk of the Galician “homeland” organization with them.

Stetsko sided with Bandera and became his first deputy.

Kraków quickly became the most important center for Ukrainian nationalists in the 1940’s.

The OUN was not only tolerated, but actively supported by the German authorities.

The OUN set up military units in German uniform preparing for Operation Barbarossa with Abwehr support.

The establishment of the OUN(b) was formalized by a Grand Assembly in Kraków in April, 1941.

The OUN-B “Banderites”adopted a banner with the colors red and black, symbolizing Blut und Boden, and adopted the fascist, raised arm salute.

The 1941 program stipulated that the “Jews in the USSR are the most dedicated supporters of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine” and that “the OUN-B fight the Jews as supporters of Muscovite-Bolshevism. #Moscow is the main enemy”

The OUN pamphlet “Nation as a Species” appeared in 1941 and stipulates the OUN(b)’s absolute rejection of miscegenation with other peoples living together with Ukrainians:

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, marked the beginning, as Hitler put it, not only of a world crusade against Bolshevism, but also of a national uprising, a Ukrainian national revolution, as envisioned by the OUN(b).

Not Bandera, but his deputy, the 29-year-old Stets’ko was the dominant figure in the crucial final week of June 1941, which the OUN(b) referred to as the “Ukrainian national revolution”

In letters to #Hitler, #Mussolini, #Franco, and #Pavelić, Stets’ko reassured them that his newly declared state of #Ukraine was part of Adolf Hitler’s New Order in Europe.

The German authorities refused to recognize this state, and both Stets’ko and Bandera were detained and brought to Berlin, where they were questioned by the Gestapo but were otherwise free to move around in the city, meet other OUNites, and petition the German government.

In May 1941, the OUN(b) issued a blueprint for a national uprising which spelled out the need for mass violence against Jews and drew up the lines for a eugenic agency to specify the requirements for who would be allowed to assimilate into the Ukrainian national organism.

After Stalingrad, as it became clear that #Nazi #Germany would lose the war, thousands of Ukrainian policemen defected the police, and went underground, where they formed the backbone of the (UPA), under OUN(b)’s command — and unleashed a hellish campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Upon their release from prison, Stets’ko and #Bandera resumed cooperation with #Nazi Germany for the remainder of the war.

Stets’ko was wounded in the vicinity of Prague by the US Air Force on May 10, 1945 — who literally shot his penis off! 👍

A bullet fired from the air tore off his arm at the elbow before ricocheting into his lower abdomen, causing irreversible injury of his penis.

He would suffer from poor health and spend the remainder of his life in physical pain.

As the Ukrainian #Nazis escaped after the war to Canada, Britain, Australia, the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, Peru, and Tunisia, the Ukrainian émigrés encountered new, unfamiliar ethnic groups.

Their racial science gained a renewed but somewhat different urgency.

In June 1947, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the oldest and most prominent Ukrainian scholarly eugenics association, was reactivated in Munich, in the US Zone of occupied Germany.

Iendyk reminded his readers about the duty and imperative of a bio-politically conscious Ukrainian living under Muscovite occupation to maintain his community’s racial hygiene and shelter it from “degenerative influence from the east.” (#Russia)

After the war, Dontsov went to #Canada where he was adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal.

After trying & failing to get into the US, the disabled, penis-less Stets’ko spent the rest of his life in Munich. Stets’ko after 1945 presented himself as a “victim of Nazism!”

Presenting himself as the “Former Prime Minister of Ukraine;” in 1946 Stets’ko set up the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), an OUN(b) front organization which brought together veterans the now-defunct “New Order” of the #Nazi regime.

Stets’ko remained preoccupied with Jewry and Eugenics for the rest of his life. In May 1957, in the OUN(b)’s most important ideological journal Stets’ko – again under a pseudonym – published a long article entitled “National and International Jewry” revisiting the Jewish question

In his private correspondence with Donstov, Stets’ko complained about what he perceived as the decline of the West.

After having been denied a visa to the US, Stets’ko explained this by the power of:

Following the assassination of Stepan #Bandera by a Soviet agent in October 1959, Stets’ko further strengthened his position in the OUN(b), becoming the leader of that organization in 1968.

Stets’ko was increasingly frustrated with how his own anti-Semitic publication record – even though much had been published under a pseudonym – hampered the effectiveness of his anti-communist activism.

For this, he of course blamed the Jews.

If, to its members and followers, “the OUN was like a mother for the nation,” they regarded Stets’ko as the “father of the nation” — a perfect #Nazi strongman — even if he didn’t have a penis. 😝

I hope this thread provided you some useful historical insight on the racial eugenics-inspired mindset of the #NazisInUkraine.

Believe it or not, there’s MORE to this long story I couldn’t possibly fit in the thread!

Read on:
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

More information in this thread also:

https://twitter.com/RealLoriSpencer/status/1617441131289001986?s=20&t=AJsQptBpWkdD8pIXwl8FUA

Before you say, “but that was a long time ago! The Ukrainians aren’t racist now!” — watch this.

https://twitter.com/dissentralintel/status/1618677334839816192