The collaboration of the Third Reich’s occupied peoples with the Nazi regime had a pan-European character. Its basis was political motivations and social causes – the need to survive in extreme conditions of warfare and a totalitarian regime. Economic and domestic cooperation could not be avoided in any of the occupied territories.

For the representatives of the European nations occupied by Germany, political and military cooperation with the enemy was a choice which jeopardized their civic duty towards their own homeland. An alternative to political and military collaboration could be active or passive resistance or simply the rejection of excessive assistance to the invader. Hitler’s captive western European nations could hope to win as part of the anti-Hitler coalition in order to solve the problem of their liberation.

The situation in Eastern Europe was different. Here, the Nazi occupational regime was tougher but the pre-war situation was also not acceptable to every resident. The problem of stateless people and hostile political regimes existed before the German occupation. This was especially clear in the territories that the Third Reich captured from the Soviet Union. The Nazis actively used the national questions in the USSR and people’s dissatisfaction with Stalinism in their fight against Moscow. However, instead of liberating the people as they had expected, the Nazis launched a regime of terror and even greater enslavement.

The nature and extent of cooperation was determined by the occupiers themselves and not their enslaved people. For political and ideological reasons, the Nazis chose which initiatives to support or encourage and which to suppress depending on the occupied population and German political thought. For example, in small Latvia, local residents formed two divisions of the Waffen-SS, but all petitions from the Polish political representatives about the formation of an allied Wehrmacht national force were rejected.

Small, stateless nations who were completely occupied by the Germans (like the Crimean Tatars) were in a particularly difficult situation. Logic dictating that national survival via cooperation with the invaders was paramount.

Consider the reasons for collaboration with the Nazis in Ukraine and Russia.

Both countries suffered from the totalitarian Stalinist regime and had reason to hope for the overthrow of Soviet authorities. Unlike the Russians, there was an additional motive for the desire of the defeat of the USSR in Ukraine – the desire to restore independence. This was especially true in western Ukraine, that was occupied by the Soviet Union for less than two years before the German occupation and this short experience was not very rosy.

Germany fully occupied the Ukrainian SSR, while the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) lost only about 17 percent of its territory. The entire population of Ukraine was larger than the population in the occupied territory of Russia. When the Wehrmacht reached Russian territory, Soviet citizens’ illusions about the “German liberators” had already been significantly weakened. The occupation of Ukraine lasted longer than that of the western regions of Russia.

Calculating the exact number of representatives of each of the two occupied nations who served with the Germans is not difficult. Although there was a clear correlation between the Nazis and the national military formations they created, there is no clear correlation between the national status of certain eastern battalions and the nationality of its personnel. In the “Russian” formations there happened to be many ethnic Ukrainians and vice versa. Even the political orientation of a soldier did not always determine his place in military service.

In general, researchers believe that there was about 250,000 “Ukrainian” personnel in formations of the Wehrmacht, SS, police and other structures. In “Russian” formations, this range falls somewhere between 300 and 800 thousand, depending on the methodology of calculations.

Most of the “eastern” units had company and battalion staff and belonged to the police or Wehrmacht (units of 100–500 people). Some of them wore the “ROA” (“Russian Liberation Army”) armbands while others wore the “UVV” (“Ukrainian Liberation Army”). There was only the 14th Waffen-SS Division “Galicia”, which formed in 1943–1944, among the Ukrainian forces in German service and numbered no more than 1000 personnel (during its entire lifetime, about 32,000 people went through its formation). By November 1944, the Division was officially denied the right to be called “Ukrainian.” Other large Ukrainian formations – regiments and brigades – only started to be created in the last year of the war.