BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN

IVAN ROHACH

b. 1913, Transcarpathia, d. 1942, Kyiv

Rohach was a journalist, publicist and political activist. In the 1930s he was head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Transcarpathia. A part of Czechoslovakia in the interwar years, Transcarpathia was, due to the comparatively benign Czechoslovak rule, a center for Ukrainian nationalist activity. In 1938-39 he led the paramilitary Ukrainian National Defense and Carpathian Sich in Transcarpathia.

After the split in OUN, Rohach stayed loyal to the Melnyk faction, and led an OUN Expeditionary Group to Kyiv after its occupation by the Germans. In Kyiv he was managing editor of the nationalist newspaper Ukraiinske slovo. After the German authorities closed down the newspaper, Rohach was arrested by the Gestapo and in 1942 shot at Babyn Yar.

The murders of Rohach, Olena Teliha and countless other Ukrainian nationalist activists by the Germans was part of the German program of conquest of Ukraine; an essential precept of which was the elimination of an independence-minded intelligentsia. After the nationally aware Ukrainian leadership was decapitated, the Ukrainian people it would be easier for the German authorities to turn the Ukrainian people into slave-laborers whose only reason for existence would be to perform manual labor for the Third Reich.