Fedir Bohatyrchuk - Medical Career, Collaboration With The Nazis During World War II

Medical Career, Collaboration With The Nazis During World War II

Bohatyrchuk completed his high school studies in 1912, and entered the University of Kiev later that year to study medicine. During the Russian Civil War, he was employed by a military hospital, and was a professor of anatomy at the Institute of Physical Education and Sport in Kiev.

As a radiologist and medical doctor in 1940, Bohatyrchuk was seconded to a German medical research facility when Kiev fell to the Nazi armies in September 1941. During World War II, he was a head of the Ukrainian Red Cross, and the Institute of Experimental Medicine. While working with the Red Cross, Bohatyrchuk did a lot to help the Soviet prisoners of war kept in the German camps in extremely harsh conditions. These activities irritated the Germans, and in February 1942 Bohatyrchuk was arrested and spent about a month in a Gestapo detention centre in Kiev. There also exists information that, while working at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Bohatyrchuk provided a cover to a Jewish female employee (a sister of the Kiev chess player Boris Ratner), thereby saving her from execution or deportation to a ghetto. At a later stage of the War, though, Bohatyrchuk became a Nazi collaborator. When the Soviet army pushed the Germans from Kiev, Bohatyrchuk, together with his family, migrated to Cracow, then Prague, in 1944. There he joined the Committee for Freedom of Peoples in Russia, a Nazi-sponsored, semi-military organization headed by the Nazi collaborationist Russian general Andrey Vlasov. (Vlasov's troops participated in the hostilities, on the German side.) Bohatyrchuk was also the leader of the Ukrainian National Council (Ukrainśka Narodna Rada), another Nazi-sponsored project. As a result of these activities, Bohatyrchuk was the number one "persona non grata" in Soviet chess until the defection of Viktor Korchnoi. The Soviets removed many of his games from their official records, but many of them were later reclaimed using outside sources.