MOSCOW, August 16. /TASS/. Members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, outlawed in Russia) in Crimea provided lists of local Jews to occupying German authorities during World War II, according to declassified files from the Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) branch in Crimea and Sevastopol made available to TASS.
"In March 1942, I compiled the lists of about 150 Jewish families on police orders and passed those lists to the police. Sometime after that, the Germans drove all those Jews - men and women, but mostly women, children and elderly people - to Simferopol, and they were all shot <...> ten kilometers from the city," the transcript of an OUN member’s interrogation reads, which was declassified as part of the "No Statute of Limitations" project.
The OUN member added that he had also reported a Jewish woman to Nazi Germany’s SD intelligence agency. "The woman never returned from the SD and I don’t know what they did there to her and her child," the defendant confessed.
Another OUN member told interrogators that in January 1942, he had written a report claiming that a woman named Konstantinova "is an ethnic Jew, which she actually wasn’t, and sent the report to the city administration; after that, the Germans arrested Konstantinova." "Konstantinova had come to the city administration [of Simferopol] to ask for a job but the administration chief mistook her for an ethnic Jew, ushered her out of the office and later insisted I write a report that Konstantinova was Jewish," the man said as he justified his actions.
The OUN members that were interrogated after the Soviet Army’s liberation of Crimea said that "the Germans shot 12,000 Jews in Simferopol."
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was a far-right political organization that operated primarily in western Ukraine. In attempts to achieve its aim of creating an independent Ukraine, the OUN focused on extremist means, including terrorist acts. During World War II, the OUN, in cooperation with German intelligence agencies, began its struggle against the Soviet government.