page_title: Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
section_title: Interwar period in Second Polish Republic
hierarchical_section_title: Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia / Background / Interwar period in Second Polish Republic
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Ludność Polski wg języka ojczystego według spisu powszechnego z 9 grudnia 1931
context_page_description: The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, with the active and frequent support of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. UPA's methods were particularly brutal, with many of the victims being tortured and mutilated, and resulted in 40,000–60,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia and 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia, with the total in other regions about 100,000.
  The killings were directly linked with the policies of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state. Not limiting their activities to the purging of Polish civilians, the UPA also wanted to erase all traces of the Polish presence in areas.
context_section_description: Just before the Soviet invasion of 1939, Volhynia had been part of the Second Polish Republic. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, between 1928 and 1938, Volhynia was "the site of one of eastern Europe's most ambitious policies of toleration". Through supporting Ukrainian culture, religious autonomy and the Ukrainization of the Orthodox Church, Józef Piłsudski and his allies wanted to achieve Ukrainian loyalty to the Polish state and to minimise Soviet influences in the borderline region. That approach was gradually abandoned after Piłsudski's death in 1935 as a consequence of an increase in radical Ukrainian nationalism.
  In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in Vienna, Austria, and was the result of a union between radical nationalist and extreme right-wing organisations, including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. The organization initiated a terrorist campaign in Poland, which included the assassination of prominent Polish politicians, such as Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, and Polish and Ukrainian moderates, such as Tadeusz Hołówko.
  The terror campaign and civil unrest in the Galician countryside resulted in Polish police exacting a policy of collective responsibility on local Ukrainians in an effort to "pacify" the region, demolishing Ukrainian community centers and libraries, confiscating property and produce, and beating protesters. Ukrainian parliamentarians were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in elections, with their constituents terrorized into voting for Polish candidates. The Ukrainian plight, protests and pacification received the attention of the League of Nations as 'an international cause célèbre', with Poland receiving condemnation from European politicians. The ongoing policies of Poland led to the deepening of ethnic cleavages in the area.
  Volhynia was a place of increasingly-violent conflict, with Polish police on one side and Western Ukrainian communists supported by many dissatisfied Ukrainian peasants on the other. The communists organized strikes, killed at least 31 suspected police informers in 1935–1936 and began to assassinate local Ukrainian officials for "collaboration" with the Polish state. The police conducted mass arrests, reported the killing 18 communists in 1935 and killed at least 31 people in gunfights and during arrests over the course of 1936.
  Beginning in 1937, the Polish government in Volhynia initiated an active campaign to use religion as a tool for Polonization and to convert the Orthodox population to Roman Catholicism. Over 190 Orthodox churches were destroyed and 150 converted to Roman Catholic churches. The remaining Orthodox churches were forced to use the Polish language in their sermons. In August 1939, the last remaining Orthodox church in the Volhynian capital of Lutsk was converted to a Roman Catholic church by a decree of the Polish government.
  Between 1921 and 1938, thousands of Polish colonists and war veterans were encouraged to settle in the Volhynian and Galician countrysides, adding to the already-significant Polish, Jewish, German and Armenian urban populations in both regions whose presence in the lands had dated to the 14th century. The new settlements were constructed in areas lacking infrastructure, such as buildings, roads and rail connections. In spite of the great difficulties, their number reached 17,700 in Volhynia in 3,500 new settlements by 1939. According to the Polish census of 1931, in Eastern Galicia, the Ukrainian language was spoken by 52% of the inhabitants, Polish by 40% and Yiddish by 7%, In Wołyn (Volhynia), the Ukrainian language was spoken by 68% of the inhabitants, Polish by 17%, Yiddish by 10%, German by 2%, Czech by 2% and Russian by 1%. The additional presence of the newly-arrived settlers ignited further anti-Polish sentiment among local Ukrainians.
  Harsh policies implemented by the Second Polish Republic were often provoked by OUN-B violence but contributed to a further deterioration of relations between the two ethnic groups. Between 1934 and 1938, a series
caption: Media related to Polish census of 1931 – Statistics of Poland at Wikimedia Commons
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