The Division's Support
The Division enjoyed support from multiple political and religious groups within the western Ukrainian community. The Division's prime organizer and highest ranking Ukrainian officer, Dmytro Paliiv, had been the leader of a small legal political party in the Second Polish Republic. Many of his colleagues had been members of the pre-war moderate, left-leaning democratic UNDO movement that before the war had also been opposed to the authoritarian Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The Division also obtained moral support from officers of the exiled Polish-allied Ukrainian National Republic such as General Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko. The Division was also strongly supported by Andriy Melnyk's moderate faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who saw it as a counterweight to the extremist Banderist-dominated UPA.
The Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) strongly opposed the idea of creating the division, in part because it was an organization outside of its control, and claimed in its propaganda that the division was to be used by the Germans as cannon fodder. Nevertheless, it did not interfere in its formation and once the division was formed it sent some of its members, a number of whom would obtain prominent positions, into the division in order for them to gain military training and to prevent it from completely getting out of their hands. Despite this infiltration, Bandera's OUN failed to gain control over the division.
It also had the support of both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Among its members was a son of Mstyslav Skrypnyk, the Orthodox Bishop of Kiev.
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