The Soviets had a habit of stealing grain from Ukraine to starve Ukrainians into submission, the Holodomor being the most infamous occasion (but it wasn't the first such famine, there was one in the early 20s right after the Soviets conquered Ukraine for the first time as well). Like the various other nationalities trapped under Bolshevik tyranny, including the Russians themselves, the Ukrainians had very good reason to want the Reds dead.
As for why the Germans would have recruited these guys, the Germans were starting to backslide as of 1943 (when the SS Galizien was established - by this time Op. Barbarossa had failed to achieve its intended goals and the Germans had definitively lost at Moscow & Stalingrad, and they had also failed to cut off the Soviet oil supply from Baku in the Caucasus) and needed additional manpower wherever they could find it. Had they been more reasonable they would've recruited Ukrainians and various other nationalities from 1941 onward when the latter were prepared to greet them as liberators, though.
The Soviets had a habit of stealing grain from Ukraine to starve Ukrainians into submission, the Holodomor being the most infamous occasion (but it wasn't the first such famine, there was one in the early 20s right after the Soviets conquered Ukraine for the first time as well). Like the various other nationalities trapped under Bolshevik tyranny, including the Russians themselves, the Ukrainians had very good reason to want the Reds dead.
As for why the Germans would have recruited these guys, the Germans were starting to backslide as of 1943 (when the SS Galizien was established - by this time Op. Barbarossa had failed to achieve its intended goals and the Germans had definitively lost at Moscow & Stalingrad, and they had also failed to cut off the Soviet oil supply from Baku in the Caucasus) and needed additional manpower wherever they could find it. Had they been more reasonable they would've recruited Ukrainians and various other nationalities from 1941 onward when the latter were prepared to greet them as liberators, though.