The District of Galicia

On 1 August 1941, six weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union, Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the General Government as its fifth district. Alongside the districts of Kraków, Warsaw, Radom and Lublin, which had existed since 1939, the District of Galicia (Distrikt Galizien) was created, with its capital at Lwów (Lviv). It took in the whole of the pre-war Stanisławów and Tarnopol provinces and the eastern part of Lwów province – lands which the Soviet Union had annexed to the Ukrainian SSR in the autumn of 1939 and which the Wehrmacht overran in less than a month in the summer of 1941. That day Governor-General Hans Frank arrived in Lwów to take formal possession of the new province. The district’s first governor was his protégé Karl Lasch (PL), until then governor of the Radom district.

The decision had been taken two weeks earlier, and it dashed the hopes of the Ukrainian nationalists who on 30 June had proclaimed the restoration of a Ukrainian state in Lwów. It also settled how the Germans would carve up the former eastern lands of the Polish Republic among their own administrations: on the same day, 1 August, the Białystok region and the Wilno region were also placed under civil administration, followed a month later by Volhynia. For more than half a million Galician Jews, joining the General Government meant falling into the hands of a German occupation apparatus that had been testing its methods on Jews for two years and which, in the autumn of 1941, became the first on Polish soil to move on to the mass murder of entire communities.

Lands conquered in three weeks

Before the war Eastern Galicia had been the most multinational part of Poland. Ukrainians predominated in the countryside, Poles and Jews in the towns; Lwów, the third-largest city of the Republic, was at once a Polish university centre, the seat of the Greek Catholic metropolitan and one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. In the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939, Germany and the USSR drew the border along the San, so the western part of old Galicia, with Kraków, Rzeszów and western Przemyśl, went to the General Government, while the eastern part – after the Soviet invasion of 17 September – came under Soviet rule. In less than two years of Soviet occupation the NKVD arrested and deported tens of thousands of people into the interior of the USSR, above all Poles, but also Ukrainians and Jews.

After 22 June 1941 the front swept across Galicia within a few weeks. The Germans took Lwów on 30 June, and the retreating NKVD left thousands of murdered prisoners in the prisons of the city and the region (the NKVD prisoner massacres). Their discovery served as a pretext for pogroms in which the Ukrainian militia and the mob, with German approval and participation, murdered Jews, who were held collectively responsible for the Soviet crimes. In the first days of July the German Security Police murdered Polish professors in Lwów. The south-eastern part of the region, with Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) and Kołomyja, was occupied at the beginning of July by Hungarian troops, who ran a military administration there for several weeks. By mid-July the Red Army had fallen back beyond the Zbruch, the old Polish–Soviet border, and the whole of Eastern Galicia was in the hands of the Germans and their allies.

The end of Bandera’s state

Activists of Stepan Bandera’s faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) entered Lwów together with the Wehrmacht. On the evening of 30 June Yaroslav Stetsko read out, at a gathering in the city centre, the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, which promised close cooperation with the Reich “under the leadership of Adolf Hitler” and war against the USSR, and placed himself at the head of a provisional government. Bandera’s followers set up militias and municipal administrations in town after town across the region, and their marching groups moved east behind the front.

The German leadership had no intention of tolerating any Ukrainian statehood, even an allied one. Bandera, whom the Germans had already forbidden to leave Kraków, was detained on 5 July and taken to Berlin, where he was held under house arrest; Stetsko was detained in Lwów in the first half of July and likewise sent to Berlin. Both refused to revoke the act of 30 June. Stetsko’s government existed in practice only on paper, and in mid-September, after an attack on activists of Andriy Melnyk’s rival faction for which Bandera’s followers were blamed, the Gestapo carried out mass arrests of OUN-B members; Bandera and Stetsko were imprisoned and later held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Hitler decided the fate of Galicia itself on 16 July 1941, at a conference at his headquarters attended by Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Lammers and Martin Bormann. It was agreed there that the occupied Soviet territories would be divided into Reich Commissariats under civil administration; according to Bormann’s note, the former Austrian Galicia was designated “Reich territory”, which in practice meant attaching it to Frank’s General Government. Ukrainian activists protested against the decision, among them – according to some studies – Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky; on 3 August the members of Stetsko’s government held in Berlin also sent a protest from there. It made no difference whatsoever. Galicia passed into the hands of officials who since 1939 had treated the conquered lands as a colony.

The fifth district

By Hitler’s decree, Eastern Galicia became part of the General Government with effect from 1 August 1941. Frank came to Lwów that day. The ceremonies took place in front of the building of the former Galician Diet, which before the war had housed the Jan Kazimierz University. The Governor-General was greeted with bread and salt by a delegation that included the city’s Ukrainian mayor, and beside him on the balcony stood guests from allied countries: the Slovak General Ferdinand Čatloš and the Hungarian General Ferenc Szombathelyi, whose troops were just then handing over to the Germans the Pokuttya region they had occupied in July, together with General Karl von Roques, commander of the rear area of Army Group South. German propaganda circulated photographs of the ceremony as proof that the population of the “liberated” lands welcomed the new authorities.

The new district was the largest in the General Government. It covered some 48,000–51,000 square kilometres – depending on the source and on later border adjustments – and had around 4.5 million inhabitants. The General Government thus grew by roughly half, to almost 145,000 square kilometres. The district was divided into county administrations (Kreishauptmannschaften) and the separate city of Lwów, which the Germans called Lemberg. In the west the boundary with the Kraków district still followed the line of the San – the two halves of Przemyśl were joined only in the autumn of 1941 – and in the east it ran along the Zbruch. German was the official language, and Ukrainian was introduced as an auxiliary language alongside Polish, placed before Polish in official notices.

On 1 August Frank appointed as governor of the district Karl Lasch, a Nazi Party functionary whom he had backed for years and who had ruled the Radom district since the autumn of 1939. In Galicia Lasch proved above all a plunderer: he extorted money and valuables from Jews and smuggled looted goods. When the SS exploited the affair in its feud with Frank, the Governor-General had to sacrifice him. Lasch was dismissed on 6 January 1942, arrested a few weeks later, and died on 1 June 1942 in unclear circumstances, most probably shot on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. He was succeeded by the Austrian Nazi Otto Wächter, until then governor of the Kraków district, who ruled Galicia until July 1944.

Alongside the civil administration, an SS and police apparatus was built up in Galicia. Fritz Katzmann, who arrived in Lwów at the end of July, became SS and Police Leader of the district, and the special Security Police unit of Eberhard Schöngarth, active in Lwów since 2 July, grew into the Lwów headquarters of the Security Police and SD, with outposts in the towns of the district. The Ukrainian militia organised in July by Bandera’s followers was disbanded, and by an ordinance of 18 August its place was taken by the German-controlled Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The railways and industry also passed to the General Government, including the oilfield of Borysław and Drohobycz, the most valuable source of oil on Polish soil.

The partition of Poland’s eastern lands

The incorporation of Galicia into the General Government was part of a wider partition of the eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic, which had belonged to the USSR in 1939–1941. The Germans did not treat these lands as a whole, nor did they accept that they had ever had anything to do with the Polish state, which in their eyes had ceased to exist. They divided them up according to their own plans for the East.

Also on 1 August 1941, military administration in the Białystok region was replaced by civil administration. The former Białystok province and part of Polesie were formed into the Białystok District (Bezirk Bialystok), placed under Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, as head of the civil administration; the district was not formally annexed to the Reich, but it was governed from Königsberg. On the same day the area around Wilno (Vilnius), taken in June, was attached to the Reich Commissariat Ostland, in which Wilno became part of the General District of Lithuania. On 1 September the Nowogródek lands and northern Polesie joined the same commissariat as the General District of White Ruthenia, while Volhynia and southern Polesie went to Erich Koch’s Reich Commissariat Ukraine, established that day. The line between Galicia and Volhynia, an ordinary provincial boundary in the Second Polish Republic, became the border between two units of the German occupation with entirely different status.

These differences mattered enormously to the people living there. Galicia, as part of the General Government, was subject to Frank in Kraków and to his law, with all its discrimination but also with vestiges of Polish and Ukrainian institutions. Volhynia came under the rule of Koch, the most brutal of the German viceroys in the East, within a commissariat that the Germans treated as an area for purely colonial exploitation. The division also permanently separated the fortunes of the Ukrainian national movement in the two regions, with consequences that became apparent in 1943–1944.

Two days before 1 August, on 30 July 1941, the government of Władysław Sikorski signed in London an agreement with the USSR in which Moscow recognised that its 1939 treaties with Germany concerning territorial changes in Poland had “lost their validity”. The question of the future border, however, remained open, and Stalin had no intention of giving up the lands seized in 1939. The German ordinances of August 1941 and the Polish–Soviet agreement of July were two sides of the same reality: eastern Poland, which the Western Allies had never formally ceased to regard as Polish, had passed under the occupation of one invader after two years of occupation by the other.

Poles, Ukrainians and Jews under the new rulers

German policy towards the district’s inhabitants rested on the principle of “divide and rule”. Ukrainians, who made up around two-thirds of the population, were treated better than Poles: they received posts in the communal and county administration, in the auxiliary police and in schools, and Ukrainian social organisations were allowed to operate under supervision, headed by Volodymyr Kubiyovych’s Ukrainian Central Committee (PL) in Kraków. Yet the Germans gave them neither a state nor autonomy, and the Ukrainian village, like the Polish one, had to deliver compulsory quotas and supply labourers for work in the Reich. The Poles, of whom some one million lived in the district, lost their elites and institutions for the second time in two years. The Polish universities of Lwów were not reopened, Polish education was restricted to elementary and vocational schools, and the Security Police continued the operations against the intelligentsia which, in the summer of 1941, had brought the murder of the Lwów professors and executions in other towns of the region.

The Jews suffered the worst fate. As early as July, under military administration, they were ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David; levies were imposed on them, Jewish councils (Judenräte) were set up and round-ups for forced labour began. At the end of July Lwów saw another wave of killings, known as the Petliura Days (PL), in which between one and two thousand people died, according to various estimates. Incorporation into the General Government extended Frank’s entire system of anti-Jewish law to Galicia: compulsory labour, a ban on changing one’s place of residence, confiscation of property. In the autumn the district authorities ordered the creation of a ghetto in Lwów, and the SS set up a forced labour camp on Janowska Street, which also became a place of execution.

Galicia soon proved to be the place where German policy towards the Jews crossed one threshold after another. Shortly after the district was incorporated into the General Government, the German Security Police in Stanisławów murdered several hundred members of the Jewish and Polish intelligentsia, and in the following weeks the shootings spread to other localities. From October 1941 the Security Police and the Order Police began the mass murder of entire Jewish communities in the southern part of the district, women and children included – several months earlier than in the other districts of the General Government.

Place in the war

The District of Galicia existed for less than three years, but they were the years that destroyed multinational Galicia. From the spring of 1942 Jews from the district’s ghettos were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp, and the rest were shot on the spot; in a report of 30 June 1943 Katzmann announced that, apart from the labour camps, the district was “free of Jews”. According to historians’ estimates, of the more than half a million Jews living in Eastern Galicia in 1941, only some ten to twenty thousand survived the war. Otto Wächter, who replaced Lasch, at the same time courted the loyalty of the Ukrainians and in 1943 brought about the formation of the SS Division “Galizien” from Galician volunteers. Bandera’s followers, disillusioned with German policy and persecuted since the autumn of 1941, went underground and created the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose units carried out the massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943–1944, and then in Eastern Galicia.

German rule in the district ended in the summer of 1944. On 27 July 1944 the Red Army, supported by units of the Home Army, took Lwów; soon afterwards the NKVD arrested the Polish commanders. The future of these lands was decided by the leaders of the Big Three: at the Tehran and Yalta conferences they agreed that Poland’s eastern border should run approximately along the Curzon Line, and that Lwów, Stanisławów and Tarnopol should remain in the Ukrainian SSR. After the war most of the Poles were resettled westwards, and Eastern Galicia, which the Germans had attached to the General Government in August 1941, became part of present-day Ukraine.

For Hans Frank, the acquisition of Galicia was his greatest success: the territory under his rule grew by half. In reality the district became the place where the SS most quickly and most completely freed itself from Frank’s administration – and, with that, one of the main sites of the Holocaust on Polish soil.