A community too often omitted

Jews of Volhynia: Polish citizens, victims of the Holocaust and nationalist violence

Before the war Volhynia had a large and diverse Jewish population, most of whom were citizens of the Second Polish Republic. The overwhelming majority were murdered in the Holocaust organised by Nazi Germany. Sources also document participation by local auxiliary police, nationalist activists and killings of Jews who survived in hiding. These histories must be connected without confusing different campaigns and chains of command.

Citizenship and identity

According to the 1931 census, about 208,000 Jews lived in Volhynia Voivodeship. In legal terms they were Polish citizens, but citizenship did not determine national or cultural identity. Many identified primarily as Jewish and used Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian or Ukrainian in different settings. The precise description is therefore 'Jews of Volhynia, pre-war Polish citizens'.

The Holocaust and the principal responsibility

The main organiser and perpetrator of the Holocaust in Volhynia was the Nazi German state through the SS, security police, order police, gendarmerie and occupation administration. German structures established ghettos, directed mass shootings and carried out deportations. Local auxiliary police and other collaborators provided guards, arrests, transport and direct participation in killings. This hierarchy of responsibility must remain clear.

OUN, UPA and Jews in hiding

Survivor testimony and scholarship document antisemitic violence involving OUN activists, nationalist militias and members of UPA, especially against Jews who escaped ghettos or survived in forests and hiding places. The evidence differs by locality and period, so individual cases require source-level verification. It is accurate to record such killings where the evidence identifies them. It is inaccurate to attribute the entire destruction of Volhynian Jewry to UPA or to erase German direction of the Holocaust.

How the portal implements this

The portal does not automatically merge every Holocaust site into the layer of anti-Polish massacres. That would combine different campaigns, dates and perpetrators. Jewish victim communities are added to a locality record when a source explicitly confirms their presence in the documented event. Separate explanatory articles provide the broader Holocaust context, while site-level records must state who killed whom, when and on what evidence.

Sources