World War II is arguably the most studied event in human history and yet it still offers opportunities to write a book on an important subject utilizing unexplored or barely explored primary sources. This is certainly the case with Unlikely Allies by Paweł Markiewicz, which is based on archival collections in Canada, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States not to mention an impressive number of secondary sources in five languages. The monograph is a study of “cooperation” (xiii) between two unequal groups of political actors, German occupiers (administration officials, Gestapo, SS) and Ukrainian nationalists (Banderites, Melnykites, and others), in the General Government created by Nazi Germany out of defeated Poland in 1939. Partially, this relationship was channeled through a special organization created by the Ukrainian side with German approval—the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC), headed by a famous Ukrainian geographer Volodymyr Kubijovyč (spelled Kubiiovych in the text). Both are the focus of the book. The author, however, warns readers that Unlikely Allies “is not a biography” of Kubijovyč during wartime (xii), to which I may add a warning of my own that it is also not a history of the UCC. Markiewicz is not the first to look at the “German–Ukrainian cooperation” in the General Government. Certain episodes of this relationship like Waffen-SS Division Galicia have received a lot of academic and public attention (often controversial) prompting one scholar to aptly call it “a historiographical minefield.” But unlike his predecessors, Markiewicz attempts to walk through all such “minefields”: his book, he claims, is “the first in-depth account” of the whole “cooperation” (a term he uses as synonymous with “collaboration”) rather than just of its highlights.

Unlikely Allies begins with a survey of the troubled history of Polish–Ukrainian relations in the interwar period and how Ukrainian nationalists came to regard Germany, especially after 1933, as their only realistic chance at liberating Ukrainian lands from Polish and Soviet rule. With exception of new information on Kubijovyč from the author's archival findings, this survey paints a well-known picture. Strangely, it omits Polish executions of Ukrainian nationalists, formally citizens of Poland, on the Hungarian–Polish border in the spring of 1939. The narrative moves to the establishment of the General Government (headed by Hans Frank throughout the war) and its new ethnic hierarchy which benefited Ukrainians at Polish and Jewish expense. Frank's policy was to divide and rule—as long as Poles were considered a threat to German occupation he planned on fostering Polish–Ukrainian antagonism. The Ukrainian nationalists, especially followers of Andrii Melnyk (Melnykites), sought to exploit this policy for their benefit including through the UCC, an organization they created with German authorization. For its head, they settled on Kubijovyč (though he was not their first choice), a political nobody and unemployed professor on the eve of World War II. Nominally a welfare institution, the UCC operated as a sort of proto-government with Kubijovyč constantly trying to convince Frank to grant it more powers over the Ukrainian population. Some of Kubijovyč's proposals were far-reaching like creating a Ukrainian enclave within the General Government, essentially an autonomous entity (under the UCC's authority, of course) that could be turned into a state at an opportune moment. But Frank was at best willing to meet Ukrainian desires halfway and limited his concessions, which the author calls “token,” to matters of culture, religion, education, public welfare, and the like. The enclave was never created. For his part, Frank expected the UCC to help with meeting agricultural goals and with providing laborers to the Third Reich. The author shows well that neither camp was monolithic. The followers of Stepan Bandera, Banderites, ceased their cooperation and went underground after it became clear in the summer of 1941 that Nazi Germany was not going to allow the nationalists to create a state like it did in Slovakia and Croatia. On the German side, the SS and Gestapo functionaries were more cautious than Frank about the whole cooperation, some of them were already thinking about Ukrainian nationalists as soon-to-be enemies to German rule in the occupied territories. Nonetheless, the SS had no issues in using the UCC for its various resettlement projects involving the Ukrainian population. It was also the SS that provided the Ukrainian nationalists with the opportunity to create an elite military unit in German service for fighting on the Eastern Front, the Waffen-SS Division Galicia, from Ukrainian volunteers in the General Government in 1943. The UCC and Kubijovyč personally actively participated in the recruitment drive for the division, which they hoped would serve as a nucleus for the future Ukrainian army. Their hopes were shattered by the division's “staggering” (194) losses in its first major engagement with the Soviet troops in 1944. In the end, under the threat of the advancing Red Army, Kubijovyč and most of the UCC apparatus evacuated with the occupational authorities from the General Government and met the war's end in Germany and Austria.

There are occasional factual errors and typos in the book: “an armistice signed in Paris” in 1918 (3), “radical OUN nationalists” operating in 1922–23 (9), or a mysterious Ukrainian state that existed “in the nineteenth century” (115). In reality, the armistice was signed at Compiègne, “OUN” (created in 1929) should be changed to “UVO,” and “nineteenth” should be changed to “twentieth.” The title of the book does not seem to match its substance since much of it proves that the German occupiers and the Ukrainian nationalists were neither unlikely nor allies. Both sides had common enemies inside the General Government (Poles and Jews) and outside (the Soviets). That alone made prospects of their cooperation opposite to unlikely, not to mention the interwar decades of the nationalists’ pro-German orientation. As for allies, a German official quoted in the book said it with brutal honesty to Bandera and his followers in 1941: “perhaps the Ukrainians are full of enthusiasm and feel that they are our allies, however we are not allies” (138). Indeed, the German side at best considered the Ukrainian nationalists as useful tools, and in other instances, as the author mentions in discussing Reichskommissariat Ukraine, did not hesitate to exterminate them without mercy.

The book can be praised for several reasons, but for me its most important achievement is the clear and well-documented account that the UCC headed by Kubijovyč was not just a welfare organization or an obedient cog in the apparatus of the occupation. Markiewicz proves that the Committee was also an active player with its own goals within German projects of reshaping the ethnic landscape and redistribution of material possessions in the General Government. When German occupiers were expropriating Jewish and Polish properties or resettling the Polish population Kubijovyč always advocated, as it seems from the book, for the intensification and expansion of such actions to the Ukrainian benefit.

In conclusion, Unlikely Allies is an important contribution to the subject of the Ukrainian nationalists’ collaboration with Nazi Germany. Even readers who do not agree with the author's interpretations will appreciate the book as it introduces a lot of new factual material into historiographical circulation.