iver Kuban. Having discovered this horrible place, the Germans gave permission to all who wished to view this inhuman device. Thousands of people visited the place, among them the author of these lines. Other nations direct their talents towards the discovery of better medicines, new materials, better means of communication to make living conditions better. The Russian people are using all their talents for the production of machines and new methods of mass murder and torture. (P. K., The infernal device of the Russian Communists (by an eyewitness), in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, pp. 123-124) M. Kowal BOLSHEVIK MURDERS I am Michael Kowal, from the town of Kaminka Strumylova in the Lviw Region in Ukraine. During the communist occupation of Western Ukraine I personally witnessed three arrests in my native town on June 22, 1941, those of Bohdan Mulkevich, and Michael Mulkevich who lived on Zamok Street, and Michael Mulkevich's blacksmith apprentice, presumably from the village of Rymaniw in the same Region. They were suspected of disloyalty to the communist regime. After th communist retreat from Kaminska-Strumylova they were found in the town prison with 33 other victims, murdered in a horribly sadistic manner. All the corpses were tied together with barbed wire and all bore signs of terrible beatings. Some had nails driven into their skulls. None of them had been shot to death. Their bodies, nude and badly mauled, were practically unrecognizable to their relatives. Bohdan Mulkevish's wife recognized her husband, but, trying to verify her identification by his gold teeth, found them missing. All the bodies were taken away fro interment. That Same day 19 other bodies were discovered near the village of Todan about 9 or 10 kilometers from Kaminka-Strumylova. They were tied to trees and their chests were pierced with bayonets. These were all identified by relatives and taken away for burial. (M. Kowal, Bolshevik Murders, in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, p. 529) Andriy Vodopyan A RAVINE FILLED WITH THE BODIES OF CHILDREN I was serving in the Soviet Russian Army. Our artillery unit was retreating before the Germans in the direction of Yeletsk. On September 18, 1941, our unit came to a wide ravine situated about 14 miles from Chartsysk station, and about 60 miles from the city of Staline. The ravine stretched from the station of Chartsysk to the station of Snizhy. When we approached the ravine we were taken aback by a horrible sight. The whole ravine was filled with the bodies of children. They were lying in different positions. Most of them were from 14 to 16 years of age. They were dressed in black, and we recognized them as students of the F.S.U., a well-known trade and craft school. We counted 370 bodies altogether. All of them had been killed by machine gun fire. This group of children was being evacuated from Staline when the Germans neared the city. The children had marched 60 miles, and, exhausted and unable to continue walking, asked for transportation. The officers in charge promised to send them trucks. Instead of trucks, a detachment of the Russian political police (NKVD) arrived, and shot the children in cold blood with machine guns. This ravine, filled with hundreds of bodies of slain children, moved even the soldiers, accustomed as they were to the sight of death. (Andriy Vodopyan, A Ravine Filled With the Bodies of Children, in S. O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, p. 529) Rev. J. Chyrva was imprisoned in 1941 when the Russian Communist armies were withdrawing from the city of Riwne. He happened to be cast into one of those jails in which the communists, fleeing from advancing German armies, attempted to rid themselves of as many prisoners as possible by throwing hand-grenades into the crowded cells. When the first grenade was thrown into the cell where Rev. J. Chyrva was kept, he was the first to fall - his foot shattered. On him fell many mutilated bodies, covering him, thus saving his life. Later, when people came into the cell, they found all the prisoners dead with the exception of Rev. J. Chyrva. He is alive today, a witness of that horrible manslaughter. (Rev. Lev Buchak, Persecution of Ukrainian Protestants under the Soviet Rule, in S. O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, p. 529) The Bolsheviks had arrested thousands of Ukrainian patriots, and prior to their retreat, they killed them savagely. For some reason even highly regarded Jewish authors understate the number of Ukrainian victims of Bolshevik terror. Gerald Reitlinger gives a figure of three to four thousand in Lviv alone. Hilberg speaks of "the Bolsheviks deporting Ukrainians," but he does not furnish any overall figures. But on the basis of a German document (RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR no. 28, 20 July 1941, No-2943), which I was unable to verify, he recounts one particularly horrible episode: In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets. When some of the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors circulated that the Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles of boiling water. The Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews and beating them to death with clubs. He also quotes the French collaborator Dr. Frederic as saying that the Bolsheviks killed eighteen thousand Ukrainian political prisoners in Lviv and its outskirts alone. Basing his remarks on an anonymous article entitled "The Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR," in the dissident journal Ukrainian Herald, Issue 7-8, the Ukrainian-American publicist Lew Shankowsky gives the following number of victims of Bolshevik terror in Galicia and Volhynia: as many as forty thousand killed in the prisons of Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Dubno, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi, Drohobych, Sambir, Zolochiv and other towns and settlements. The fact of the matter is that, justifiably or not, some Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. For instance, it was pointed out to me by a resident of Western Ukraine that a high NKVD official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was Jewish, despite his Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological Problems and Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton, 1990, footnotes deleted) In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet authorities were not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners they had arrested, mostly during their last months of rule in western Ukraine. Their solution, implemented at the end of June and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates regardless of whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being held for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to 40,000 prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern Galicia and western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624) Was the Ukrainian perception of disproportionate Jewish participation in the Soviet secret police accurate? Observations such as the following suggest that perhaps it was: Yoram Sheftel, Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, reports the following in connection with his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990: On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil. (The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994, p. 301) Curious wording, incidentally. In the eyes of Sheftel, this plaque does not list torturers and butchers, it lists "youth." These torturers and butchers are not chosen from the "worst" of Jews, but from the "best." And whereas a Ukrainian might tend to the view that the members of the NKVD were the Red Devil, Sheftel views them as merely having sold their souls to some hypothetical Red Devil residing elsewhere. Sheftel, it seems, extends his sympathy not to the victims of the torturers and butchers, but to the torturers and butchers themselves, who after all are merely "the best of Jewish youth" led astray by some "Red Devil" - in other words, to be viewed not as falling among the victimizers, but among the victims. I suppose that there exist even today apologists who might speak of Adolf Eichmann as an instance of the best of German youth who had sold his soul to the Nazi Devil. Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction: As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147) Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery - especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165) More recently, I have compiled statistics from data presented by Shapoval which suggests that out of every ten leading members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine, 6 were Jewish, 2 Russian, 1 Ukrainian, and 1 other. Now within this historical context - the Ukrainian Holocaust eight years previously, the 21-month Communist reign of terror, and the recent slaughter of Ukrainians by the retreating Communists - would it be surprising if upon the arrival of the Germans, these Western Ukrainians had felt liberated by the Germans and at the same time vengeful toward the Communists, and would it be surprising if among their first actions was the seeking out and punishment of any perpetrators and collaborators who had not been able to flee with the retreating Communists? No, it would not be surprising - and yet that is not what happened. Zero Retribution Prior to the arrival of the Germans, there was no anti-Jewish or anti-Communist violence. If any impulse for vengeance existed, then it was inhibited - the Ukrainian population had been decimated, deprived of its leadership, throttled into submission. For all they knew, the Communists who had just left might return that very same day and resume the slaughter, starting first with any who had dared to lift a vengeful hand. For all they knew, this was just the calm before a new storm, just a few hours' respite while names were taken for the next round of NKVD executions. And the last person to lift a hand against would be a Jew because the Jew had traditionally occupied the position of authority: From the Ukraine Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C reported as follows: Almost nowhere can the population be persuaded to take active steps against the Jews. This may be explained by the fear of many people that the Red Army may return. Again and again this anxiety has been pointed out to us. Older people have remarked that they had already experienced in 1918 the sudden retreat of the Germans. In order to meet the fear psychosis, and in order to destroy the myth ... which, in the eyes of many Ukrainians, places the Jew in the position of the wielder of political power, Einsatzkommando 6 on several occasions marched Jews before their execution through the city. Also, care was taken to have Ukrainian militiamen watch the shooting of Jews. This "deflation" of the Jews in the public eye did not have the desired effect. After a few weeks, Einsatzgruppe C complained once more that the inhabitants did not betray the movements of hidden Jews. The Ukrainians were passive, benumbed by the "Bolshevist terror." Only the ethnic Germans in the area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 202) The picture painted by Raul Hilberg is not at all the one of Ukrainians enthusiastically slaughtering Jews that was painted by Morley Safer in his 60 Minutes broadcast: The Slavic population stood estranged and even aghast before the unfolding spectacle of the "final solution." There was on the whole no impelling desire to cooperate in a process of such utter ruthlessness. The fact that the Soviet regime, fighting off the Germans a few hundred miles to the east, was still threatening to return, undoubtedly acted as a powerful restraint upon many a potential collaborator. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308) Raul Hilberg is not the only historian testifying to the fact that the Einsatzgruppen organized and instigated the pogroms, and that they were disappointed by the results. Leo Heiman below, for example, reaffirms this, and adds the detail that the pogromists had a short attention span with respect to the German-inspired motive of anti-Semitism, being instead readily diverted by "looting and plunder." "Lemberg," of course, is Lviv: The results of diligent Nazi efforts to organize "Ukrainian pogrom mobs" were disappointing.... According to official German documents introduced by the prosecution during the Eichmann trial, the Nazi commander of S.D. Einsatzgruppe "Kommando Lemberg" complained to his superiors that "...to rely on local people to take the law of retribution in their own hands, and themselves carry out final solution measures against Jews, is hopeless. We organized several action groups, but they soon degenerated into ordinary pogrom mobs, more interested in looting and plunder than in energetic and forceful measures against Jews. The number of Jews eliminated by mobs runs less than two thousand in my area of operations, and the damage done by mobs to property, as well as the disruption of order, does not justify this kind of action. I have no choice but to employ my own men." (Leo Heiman, Ukrainians and the Jews, in Walter Dushnyck, Ukrainians and Jews: A Symposium, The Ukrainian Congress Committee of American, New York, 1966, p. 60) In reading the above Einsatzgruppe report, many question come to mind. Just how would a pogrom mob be organized? - Might it be staffed entirely by criminals held in custody by the Germans? What weapons would be given the pogromists? Would it be safe to give incarcerated criminals weapons and then to release them on their own recognisance? - Obviously, they would tend to escape and then, being armed, would be particularly dangerous to recapture. Wouldn't armed Germans have to accompany the pogromists in order to steer them to the proper targets, to keep them from getting out of control, and to make sure that weapons were returned? - In which case, how much of the killing would be done by the supervising Germans? What was the ethnic composition of these pogromists? Above I cited Raul Hilberg stating "Only the ethnic Germans in the area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe," which brings us to the realization that a pogrom within Ukraine is not necessarily a pogrom perpetrated by Ukrainians, and so brings us also to the question of how many of the pogromists were Germans, Russians, Poles, or Jews? Raul Hilberg discusses two motives for the Nazis to incite pogroms in Ukraine, the second of which will be of particular relevance when we discuss further below the origin of the historical documentary footage broadcast by 60 Minutes: Why did the Einsatzgruppen endeavor to start pogroms in the occupied areas? The reasons which prompted the killing units to activate anti-Jewish outbursts were partly administrative, partly psychological. The administrative principle was very simple: every Jew killed in a pogrom was one less burden for the Einsatzgruppen. A pogrom brought them, as they expressed it, that much closer to the "cleanup goal".... The psychological consideration was more interesting. The Einsatzgruppen wanted the population to take a part - and a major part at that - of the responsibility for the killing operations. "It was not less important, for future purposes," wrote Brigadefuhrer Dr. Stahlecker, "to establish as an unquestionable fact that the liberated population had resorted to the most severe measures against the Bolshevist and Jewish enemy, on its own initiative and without instructions from German authorities." In short, the pogroms were to become the defensive weapon with which to confront an accuser, or an element of blackmail that could be used against the local population. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 203) Two of the conclusions that Raul Hilberg draws concerning pogroms in Ukraine flatly contradict the Wiesenthal-Safer story of a massive pre-German pogrom in Lviv: First, truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the Einsatzgruppen. Second, all pogroms were implemented within a short time after the arrival of the killing units. They were not self-perpetuating, nor could new ones be started after things had settled down. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 312) Raul Hilberg describes what may have been the chief - or the only - Lviv pogrom quite differently - it occurred after the arrival of the Germans, and it did not involve the killing of 5,000-6,000 Jews: The Galician capital of Lvov was the scene of a mass seizure by local inhabitants. In "reprisal" for the deportation of Ukrainians by the Soviets, 1000 members of the Jewish intelligentsia were driven together and handed over to the Security Police. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 204) But even this milder version of an anti-Jewish eruption - now a post-German one - is not easy to credit. The arrest of one thousand targeted individuals within a city is something that can only be done by a large team of professionals backed by a research staff, weapons, telecommunications equipment, vehicles. Before anyone would undertake such a daunting task, furthermore, they would need to be assured that the thousand prisoners would be wanted and that they could be processed - only an ambivalent gratitude might be expected for having herded a thousand prisoners through the streets to the local police station which was not expecting them - and so it is implausible that local inhabitants would act without at the very least consultation and coordination with the occupying authorities. From what we have discussed above, we would expect the local inhabitants to be devoid of initiative, able to follow orders perfunctorily in order to save their lives, but quite unable to muster the resources to round up one thousand individuals on their own. If any such round-up did occur, then, it would more plausibly have been at the instigation of, and under the direction of, the German occupiers. But to return to 60 Minutes, the reality is that the sort of pogrom described by Simon Wiesenthal - massive in scale and initiated by Ukrainians independently of German instigation - never took place. The most that the Germans could incite a small number of Ukrainians to contribute - and who knows exactly how large a contribution these few Ukrainians really made alongside the Germans in such actions - was closer to the following: In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets. When some of the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors circulated that the Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles full of boiling water. The Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews and beating them to death with clubs. ... The Ukrainian violence as a whole did not come up to expectations. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 204) But on the principle that the person readiest to contradict Simon Wiesenthal is Simon Wiesenthal himself, we turn to other statements that he has made: The Ukrainian police ... had played a disastrous role in Galicia following the entry of the German troops at the end of June and the beginning of July 1941. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 34, emphasis added) In the same account, Wiesenthal does mention a Lviv pogrom of three day's duration, but unambiguously places it after the German occupation: Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period: among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviets. All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 36, emphasis added) In conclusion, Mr. Wiesenthal's story of a massive pre-German Lviv pogrom is contradicted by other testimony, some of it his own. Mr. Safer had the good sense to subtract 3,000 fatalities from Mr. Wiesenthal's upper estimate of 6,000, suggesting that he too is aware of Mr. Wiesenthal's unreliability. Had Mr. Safer dared to subtract another 3,000, he would have hit the nail right on the head. If one were to sum up within one short statement the picture that emerges from a consideration of the evidence, and if in doing so one were to be uninhibited by considerations of political correctness, then an apt summary might be that during the very interval that Morley Safer claims that Ukrainians were killing Jews by the thousands, in fact it was Jews that were killing Ukrainians by the thousands. George Orwell's 1984 has arrived and is in place - now our media drum into us that black is white, love is hate, war is peace, Ukrainians killed Jews. Morely Safer Invents Corroborative Events Furthermore, in connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, 60 Minutes insinuated into the pre-German interval three events which gave the viewer the impression that the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being doubted: (1) the arrest of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother, (2) the shooting of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother-in-law, and (3) the scenes depicted in "remnants of a film": SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here. LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true! SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal - like thousands of Lvov Jews, his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police. These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian brutality. The German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as 'praiseworthy.' WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go so fast. SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners. WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast. SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the guilty, to bring justice. The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it ends with a reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine that the events mentioned in the same passage happened during the pre-German interval. However, examining Mr. Wiesenthal's biographies for confirmation of the first two of these events - the arrest of his mother and the shooting of his mother-in-law - turns up the following (it will help at this point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June 30, 1941): In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods truck at Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then sixty-three. ... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead by a Ukrainian police auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8) "My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon says, lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ... Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife] learned that, back in Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41) We see, therefore, that 60 Minutes seems to have advanced the date of arrest of Simon Wiesenthal's mother as well as the shooting of his mother-in-law by more than a year in order to lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the German occupation of Lviv. Also attributed to the pre-German interval by 60 Minutes were the events depicted in the "remnants of a film" quoted above, but as we shall see below, these scenes are not scenes of a pogrom and they did not antedate the arrival of the Germans either. As a final piece of contradictory evidence, Andrew Gregorivich reports being told by a resident of Lviv during those days that there was not a three-day gap between the departure of the Soviets and the arrival of the Germans (Jews & Ukrainians, Forum, No. 91, Fall-Winter 1994, p. 29) And as a final comment on the possibility of a pre-German Lviv pogrom, one might note that the pogrom claimed by Morley Safer is massive in scale, that Simon Wiesenthal claimed to be right in the middle of it, and that it was this very pogrom which "compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the guilty, to bring justice." One might expect, then, that this particular pogrom would have occupied some of Mr. Wiesenthal's attention as a Nazi hunter, and yet we are faced with the incongruity that he seems not to have brought any of its perpetrators to justice. Impulsive Execution We have just seen Mr. Wiesenthal reporting that his mother-in-law was "shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast." Such a thing might well have happened, of course, but in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's lack of credibility, it behooves us to notice that it is somewhat implausible. In fact, impulsive killing of this sort was forbidden by the German authorities for many reasons. (1) Any optimistic illusions of those arrested concerning their fate were better preserved until the last possible moment - this to decrease the possibility of emotional outbursts, protests, or resistance. (2) As arrests were continuous and unending, there would be the need to prevent forewarning those slated for arrest at a later time of the reality that the arrests were malevolently motivated. Optimally, all targeted victims should believe that the arrest was part of a "relocation," an illusion that a gratuitous shooting in the course of the arrest would dispel. (3) There was the desirability also of keeping all killings as secret as possible so as not to arouse the fear or indignation of the general populace. Raul Hilberg describes how even the roundups themselves were kept as much as possible from view - how much more self-conscious, then, would the Germans feel about a public killing: During the stages of concentration, deportations, and killings, the perpetrators tried to isolate the victims from public view. The administrators of destruction did not want untoward publicity about their work. They wanted to avoid criticism of their methods by passers-by. Their psychic balance was jeopardized enough, especially in the field, and any sympathy extended to the victim was bound to result in additional psychological as well as operational complications. ... Any rumors or stories carried from the scene were an irritant and a threat to the perpetrator. Precautions were consequently plentiful. In Germany, Jews were sometimes moved out in the early morning hours before there was traffic in the streets. Furniture vans without windows were used to take Jews to trains. Loading might be planned for a siding where human waste was collected. In Poland, the local German administrators would order the Polish population to stay indoors and keep the windows closed with blinds drawn during roundups of Jews, even though such a directive was notice of an impending action. Shooting sites, as in Babi Yar in Kiev, were selected to be at least beyond hearing distance of local residents. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 215) (4) Public executions would create witnesses able to later testify as to Nazi culpability, and gunfire in a city would attract attention. (5) In allowing impulsive killing, mistakes would be made, non-Jews or non-Communists killed. (6) In an arrest, it would hardly be worthwhile to inform the police participants as to the perhaps many purposes of the arrest or the final disposition of those arrested; in some cases, therefore, those arrested, or some among those arrested, might be slated not for extermination but for interrogation: they might have useful information, they might have monetary assets that needed to be ascertained or confiscated, they might have rare skills which could be put into the service of the Nazis - and so permitting the impulsive killing of any of the arrested would interfere with these plans. (7) Perhaps among those arrested might be informants who would be questioned and released, and so again none of those being arrested should be impulsively killed. (8) An impulsive execution would create the problem of what to do with the body of someone impulsively executed in the street - to leave the body in the street would be unacceptable, and yet to send a truck to pick it up would consume scarce resources. (9) An impulsive execution might lead to blood being splattered over the participants, or might lead to a bullet passing through the intended victim and hitting an unintended target. (10) Anyone so trigger-happy as to shoot a woman for walking too slowly posed a danger to everyone, even to his German superiors, and so would not be tolerated within the German forces. (11) The Germans viewed the optimal executioner as one who found killing distasteful, but killed dutifully upon command. Anyone who enjoyed killing, within which category must fall anyone who killed on impulse, was a degenerate and had a corrupting influence on those around him, most importantly on Germans who after the war would be expected to return to Germany and resume civilian life. With respect to German personnel, at least, the attitude was as follows: The Germans sought to avoid damage to "the soul" ... in the prohibition of unauthorized killings. A sharp line was drawn between killings pursuant to order and killings induced by desire. In the former case a man was thought to have overcome the "weakness" of "Christian morality"; in the latter case he was overcome by his own baseness. That was why in the occupied USSR both the army and the civil administration sought to restrain their personnel from joining the shooting parties at the killing sites. [In the case of the SS,] if selfish, sadistic, or sexual motives [for an unauthorized killing] were found, punishment was to be imposed for murder or for manslaughter, in accordance with the facts. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, pp. 1009-1010) The killing of the Jews was regarded as historical necessity. The soldier had to "understand" this. If for any reason he was instructed to help the SS and Police in their task, he was expected to obey orders. However, if he killed a Jew spontaneously, voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he wanted to kill, then he committed an abnormal act, worthy perhaps of an "Eastern European" (such as a Romanian) but dangerous to the discipline and prestige of the German army. Herein lay the crucial difference between the man who "overcame" himself to kill and one who wantonly committed atrocities. The former was regarded as a good soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person without self-control, who would be a danger to his community after his return home. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 326) Every unauthorized shooting of local inhabitants, including Jews, by individual soldiers ... is disobedience and therefore to be punished by disciplinary means, or - if necessary - by court martial. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 327) Although avoiding damage to the Slavic soul would not have had the same high priority to the Nazis as avoiding damage to the German soul, nevertheless, it would have been more difficult to keep Germans from wanton killing if that same wanton killing had been permitted to their Slavic auxiliaries. For these many reasons, then, and in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's overall lack of credibility, one may well wonder whether his mother-in-law really met her end in the manner indicated. CONTENTS: Preface The Galicia Division Quality of Translation Ukrainian Homogeneity Were Ukrainians Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal What Happened in Lviv? Nazi Propaganda Film Collective Guilt Paralysis of the Comparative Function 60 Minutes' Cheap Shots Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Jewish Ukrainophobia Mailbag A Sense of Responsibility What 60 Minutes Should Do PostScript Nazi Propaganda Film Historical documentary footage was shown to 60 Minutes viewers and identified as Ukrainians abusing Jews, and the impression was created that German cameramen happened to come across these spontaneous outrages and filmed them as they were taking place. This too is a falsification. The truth is that when the Germans entered Lviv, they made a propaganda film - they gathered up a handful of street thugs and staged scenes in which mistresses of the recently-fled NKVD were stripped and "wallowed in the gutter" and collaborators of the recently-fled Communist regime, some of whom were probably Jewish, were humiliated and roughed up in the street. That several of the victims are shown naked or half-naked suggests that this was just such a humiliation, and not an arrest. Certainly, as German cameramen were present, the action must have taken place after the arrival of the Germans, and as German soldiers are seen to be in attendance, the action cannot be viewed as having been initiated by Ukrainians. And neither can the action be interpreted as a pogrom, as the civilians are unarmed and no wounding or killing is recorded; in fact, in footage 60 Minutes chose not to show, the women can be seen dressing themselves and leaving the scene: Several women suspected for collaborating with the NKVD were rounded up by street gangs organized by the Nazis, stripped naked, then thrown into the gutters in front of the prison. The event lasted for a few hours. "While the public humiliation of any female is deplorable, the other photos in the series show that these women left the scene intact" ... says Katelynksy. "Moreover," he adds, "this staged outburst of revenge was mild compared with the "bloody reprisals of the liberated French." "In 1944 and 1945, countless women were publicly humiliated and over 15,000 of their compatriots were tortured, hanged, or shot for Nazi collaboration in France. Yet the photographs of these bloody events are, for reasons of sensitivity, not published by the Western press and the events are rarely mentioned by historians." (Ukrainian News, Edmonton, March 1993, No. 3) In short, some and possibly all of the historical footage broadcast by 60 Minutes was not the Ukrainian populace spontaneously attacking Jews, but rather was street criminals directed by the Germans to rough up Communist collaborators among whom were probably Jews. It is, therefore, misleading to represent the scenes as either spontaneous in origin or initiated by Ukrainians or motivated by Ukrainian anti-Semitism. What must be kept in mind is that the Nazis had their reasons for making this film: (1) they were trying to convince Germans back home that Nazi attitudes toward Bolsheviks and Jews were not uniquely German, but rather were universal; (2) they were demonstrating to the intimidated Ukrainian population that Bol