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The Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia

1943–1945 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Mass Killing Sexual Violence Killing was the defining act

Displaced

350,000

Between 300,000 and 400,000 Poles fled Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944, a figure reconstructed from Polish underground reports, wartime German administrative records and postwar repatriation registers. Killings are estimated by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance at around 100,000 Poles, with Ukrainian and some Western scholars giving 50,000-60,000 for Volhynia and a further 20,000-30,000 for Galicia; Polish reprisals killed an estimated 10,000-15,000 Ukrainians. Estimates rest on village-by-village testimony collections compiled decades later, which Polish and Ukrainian historians weigh differently.

Share of the population affected

27%

of the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia before the massacres, 1939

Killed

60,000–100,000

direct killing

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What happened

From the spring of 1943 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and allied village self-defence units conducted a campaign against the Polish rural population of Volhynia, spreading to Eastern Galicia in 1944, with the aim of removing Poles from territory claimed for a future Ukrainian state. Whole villages were destroyed in coordinated attacks, the largest on 11 July 1943 when scores of settlements were struck simultaneously. Polish underground formations and, later, Soviet-backed units carried out reprisal killings in Ukrainian villages. The killings drove the flight of several hundred thousand Poles westwards, feeding the population transfers and Operation Vistula already covered in the atlas. The events remain politically live: Poland's Sejm declared them a genocide in July 2016, a characterisation Ukraine's parliament rejected in a formal statement, and successive Ukrainian governments have declined to adopt it while acknowledging the killings.

Parties

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army and allied local units killed and expelled the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia; Polish underground units carried out reprisals against Ukrainian villages

Disputed

Whether the killings constitute genocide — affirmed by Poland's Sejm and Institute of National Remembrance, rejected by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and by parts of Ukrainian historiography, which emphasise the reciprocal character of the violence and the wartime context.

The denominator

The Polish census of 1931 recorded about 346,000 Poles in the Volhynian voivodeship, some 16 per cent of its 2.1 million inhabitants, and roughly one million in the three Eastern Galician voivodeships, giving a combined Polish population of about 1.3 million on the eve of the war. Polish and Ukrainian historians estimate 60,000-100,000 Poles killed and several hundred thousand driven out, with several thousand to some tens of thousands of Ukrainians killed in Polish reprisals.

Where the baseline comes from

Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia — Wikipediaopen-edited
Volhynian Voivodeship (1921–1939) — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The upper figure is that of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance for Polish victims across Volhynia and Galicia; the lower reflects estimates by Ukrainian historians and by Western scholars such as Timothy Snyder for Volhynia alone. The disagreement turns on the territorial scope, on whether deaths in the general chaos of 1944-45 are attributed to the campaign, and on the reliability of postwar survivor testimony collected decades later. Polish reprisals against Ukrainians are separately estimated at 10,000-15,000.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingDestruction of PropertySummary ExecutionSexual Violence

Poland's Institute of National Remembrance and the survivor testimony collections it has published document the village killings, burnings and rapes.

Formal findings

Sejm of the Republic of Poland (2016) — Resolution of 22 July 2016 declaring the 1943-1945 killings of Poles in the eastern borderlands a genocide and establishing 11 July as a national day of remembrance — source
Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (2016) — Statement of 2016 rejecting the Polish resolutions' characterisation and calling for the events to be assessed by historians rather than legislatures — source