Partisan warfare broke out on a large scale both among Ukrainian patriots and Soviet sympathizers. Bands of men, sometimes numbering thousands, with equipment taken from both sides, ravaged the country, while the Soviets announced that those who fought the Germans were patriots and those who attacked the Red Army were fascists and bandits. The names of such leaders as Taras Bulba and Bandera who were distinctively Ukrainian nationalists and fought both sides are known but again there is little detailed knowledge of their activities. The worst aspects of 1918 were repeated for these leaders, although struggling only for an independent Ukraine, came into frequent clashes. Some of them seem to have been the survivors of the older nationalist bands that had fought even after the formal ending of the Civil Wars, others were communistically inclined and fought for the Soviets, and undoubtedly some were able to profit by more or less temporary alliances with various German units which controlled the main centres of population and the lines of communication but which were unable to occupy the broad expanses of the country. Soviet propaganda during the war emphasized the fact that the purges of the thirties had completely destroyed any fifth-column activities in the Soviet Union and glorified all the partisans, but despatches since the close of hostilities indicate that in some areas the great swarms of bandits and deserters from the Red Army could hardly have appeared in the course of a few weeks. Apparently in some districts there was almost as much anti-Soviet as anti-Nazi activity going on in the no man’s land between the two armies. At the same time, there can be no doubt that this partisan activity played an enormous role in hemming in the German forces and in rendering it impossible for them to secure supplies even from land which seemed to be safely under their control. It is indeed possible to wonder what would have been the outcome in many areas, especially in Ukraine, had the Germans seriously undertaken the task of liberating the community and of dealing honestly with the people who had experienced so many years of starvation and confiscation. Yet these ideas were entirely foreign to the Nazi temperament, which sought to displace the native population by settling German colonists on the soil and to reduce the original inhabitants to still greater misery or to carry them off and destroy them by forced labor.