WORLD WAR II ended over half a century ago but new issues related to the war are still emerging. Newspapers in 1999 reported that Germany had agreed to pay $5.2 billion to the Nazi slave laborers who have never been compensated. According to the Nuremberg Trial of War Criminals in 1945 there were 5,000,000 people forced into slave labor by the Nazi German government. These people were taken to work in German armaments, ammunition, aircraft and V2 rocket factories. They also were used as slave labor on construction of bombed bridges, railroads, highways, factories, defusing bombs and on farms.

Many of these Nazi slave laborers, or Ostarbeiters (East Workers) from Ukraine, were killed in the Allied bombing raids by British and American bombers which targeted the factories in which they worked. If they were not killed by the bombs, or executed by their Nazi guards -- often for virtually no reason -- they were planned to be "worked to death."

According to the official statistics of Ukraine there were 2,244,000 Ukrainians taken for slave labor to Germany. However, this statistic should be 2.5 million since it does not include people from the General-gouvernement (Western Ukraine), Crimea (85,447), Carpatho-Ukraine (114,982) nor Ukrainians taken among the Poles, and others. When the German army surrounded and physically forced, or ordered, Ukrainians to go to work in Germany they took the youngest and strongest, age 13 to 18, and more girls than boys. Because of this fact there are still alive today approximately one-half million Ukrainians who were former Nazi slave laborers and prisoners in concentration camps. Many of them survived the Allied bombs, Nazi German executions, Stalin’s executions and exile to Siberia.

When Hitler on June 22, 1941 launched Barbarossa, the invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet Union, he had allied Axis armies from Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria assisting the German Wehrmacht. Stalin was completely surprised, shocked and paralyzed by fear. It took him eleven days before he could talk on the radio to the people of the Soviet Union on July 3rd.

Stalin announced a "scorched earth" policy intended to devastate Ukraine so thoroughly that the advancing German Armed Forces, would find everything burned and destroyed. Ukraine, the former "breadbasket of Europe," would become a desolate desert. But the German Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, advanced so rapidly that the Soviet forces were unable to destroy all Ukraine’s factories and wealth. However, before the arrival of the German armed forces, the retreating Soviet officials shipped huge amounts of Ukrainian factory equipment, skilled personnel, foodstuffs, vehicles and other machinery East out of Ukraine and established new factories in Russia and Siberia.

Hitler chose Ukraine over Moscow in 1941 as his main target because he wanted Ukraine for its industries, mineral and agricultural wealth and as the Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. He planned that German colonies would be planted all over Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people would be cleared away for the German colonists. Either Ukrainians would be killed or deported because they were considered Untermenschen (sub-humans). Within twenty years the German government planned that Ukraine would be entirely German in population with only some Ukrainians working as slaves for their Nazi German superiors. The Nuremberg Trial reported the establishment of some of the first of these German colonies in Ukraine after Ukrainians were brutally cleared away or executed to make space.

Hitler conducted a war of annihilation in Ukraine because the Nazi Lebensraum plan was to repopulate Ukraine with German population. There were wholesale executions of Ukrainians, of hostages, of the starvation of Ukrainian Red Army prisoners of

war, of diseases allowed to spread, of the starvation of Ukrainian cities and the complete destruction of hundreds of Ukrainian villages together with their entire population. 28,000 Ukrainian villages were largely destroyed during the German occupation.

The Gestapo and the Nazi German SS hanged many Ukrainians publicly to frighten the population. There was a Nazi Annihilation Institute in Kiev, according to The New York Times, which killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. The Nazi Governor of Kiev, Eberhardt, on at least three occasions ordered the execution of 400 innocent Ukrainian hostages at a time as revenge for sabotage.

Among the 1,360 major factories and 2,593 enterprises moved during the war from Ukraine to Russia was the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. This was the Ukrainian factory which designed and built the famous medium T-34 tank in 1939. This tank is considered by most military experts as the best tank design of World War II. Even the German General Heinz Guderian, the leading German tank expert and tactician, rated it the best tank in the war and superior to the German tanks.

Almost 1,000 T-34 tanks were built before the Nazi invasion and they were a great shock to the Germans who eventually copied some of the exceptional design features of the Ukrainian T-34 tank fopr the Panzer. The three standard German anti-tank guns could not stop the T-34, the shells just bounced off. The Soviet KV-1 predecessor of the JS-1, heavy tank was also designed by a Ukrainian, Mykola Dukhov, from Poltava. These tanks won the greatest tank battle in history, on the north-eastern edge of Ukraine at Kursk/Kharkiv which was fought 4 to 11 July 1943. The Germans lost the battle, which had been code named Citadel by Hitler. The German Army now started its humiliating retreat all the way back to Berlin.

On September 7, 1943, as the German armies retreated, Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler issued an order for "scorched earth" treatment of Ukraine to make it a desert zone. Himmler said, "It is necessary that after the retreat from the regions of Ukraine, there should be no head of cattle, not a bushel of grain, not a rail; no house should be left undamaged, no mine fit to operate for years to come, no well unpoisoned. The enemy must find what will indeed be a totally scorched and destroyed land."