Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

had enlisted in the spring and summer of 1943, essentially to combat the

"Bolsheviks"; indeed, they were never used against Western allies. (Jules

Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 255)

Although as we have just seen "no specific charges of war crimes have been made by the Soviet or

any other Government against any members of this group," Mr. Safer ventures to do what no one

has done before - where angels fear to tread, Mr. Safer rushes in to lay a specific crime at the

feet of the Galicia Division:

SAFER: Thousands of Ukrainians joined the SS and marched off to fight for

Naziism. In the process, they helped round up Lvov's Jews, helped march more

than 140,000 of them to extinction - virtually every Jew in Lvov.

However, the rounding up of Lviv's Jews was begun in 1941 and was largely completed in 1942, so

that by 1943 when the Galicia Division was formed, there were not 140,000 Jews left in Lviv to

round up. In truth, the Galicia Division never participated in the rounding up of Jews in Lviv

or anywhere else. To repeat: the Galicia Division was a combat unit. More particularly, the

Galicia Division saw action on only a single occasion - in facing the Soviets in the Battle of

Brody in July 1944.

Talk of the Galicia Division Induces Paralysis of the Comparative Function

The broad topic of "Paralysis of the Comparative Function" is discussed within its own larger

section below, but such a paralysis becomes evident in other places throughout this essay, as

for example in discussions of the Galicia Division. In such discussions, the comparison - the

elementary and obvious comparison - that is not made is that between the Ukrainian contribution

to German armed forces of Waffen SS troops and the similar contribution made by other peoples.

Below, I reproduce a quote from an interview by Slavko Nowytski of Professor Norman Davies,

historian at the University of London, and author of the recent Europe: A History, published by

Oxford University Press:

In discussing the question of collaborating with Germany Prof. Davies noted

that, "A large number of the volunteers for the Waffen SS came from Western

Europe. The nation which supplied it the largest number of divisions was the

Netherlands [four]. There were two Belgian divisions, there was a French

Waffen SS. To my mind, it's rather surprising that Ukraine, which is a much

larger country [than the Netherlands or Belgium] supplied only one Waffen SS

Division.... It's surprising that there were so few Ukrainians [in the German

Army]. Many people don't know, for example, that there were far more Russians

fighting alongside the Wehrmacht or in the various German armies than there

were Ukrainians.... Thanks to Soviet propaganda, the Russian contribution to

the Nazi war effort has been forgotten, whereas the Ukrainian contribution has

been remembered, I think, too strongly." (Andrew Gregorovich, Forum, No. 95,

Spring, 1997, p. 34)

And so the information in the above quotation leads to several questions:

(1) As the population of The Netherlands is small, and as The Netherlands contributed the

largest number of Waffen SS divisions, this gives The Netherlands the largest per capita

contribution to the Waffen SS of any country. Would Mr. Safer conclude from this that the

people of The Netherlands are the most anti-Semitic in the world? And following the same line

of reasoning, would he conclude that the people of Belgium are the next most anti-Semitic? And

also that as the population of France is approximately equal to the population of Ukraine, and

as each of these contributed one Waffen SS division, that the French are approximately as

anti-Semitic as the Ukrainians?

(2) As Mr. Safer attacks the former members of the Galicia Division as war criminals, I wonder

why he does not attack former members of The Netherlands, Belgium, and French Waffen SS

divisions in the same way? Why does he single out the Galicia Division? How is the Galicia

Division different from the other Waffen SS divisions?

(3) If in comparison to several other countries, Ukraine contributed proportionately fewer

numbers to the Waffen SS, or to any of the German armed forces, then why didn't Mr. Safer

commend Ukrainians for their relatively small contribution to the German war effort?

(4) It would have been instructive of Mr. Safer to inform 60 Minutes viewers whether the Waffen

SS divisions of other countries were created under the same proviso that they not be used

against the Western Allies, but only against the Soviets on the Eastern Front? Perhaps

Ukrainians are to be commended again for limiting the role that their Waffen SS troops played

within the German military.

(5) Finally, given that Canada's Deschenes Commission on War Criminals failed to identify even a

single member of the Galicia Division as calling for further investigation; and given that not a

single member of the Division has ever been convicted of any crime, or even tried for any crime;

and, most importantly, given that nobody has ever specified any crime of which the Galicia

Division as a whole, or any member of the Galicia Division, might have been guilty - given all

this, it would have been instructive of Mr. Safer to inform 60 Minutes viewers whether the

Waffen SS divisions of The Netherlands, Belgium, and France have proven to be as free from blame

as has the Ukrainian Galicia Division.

Why Did Himmler Want a Waffen SS?

If the Wehrmacht was the combat arm of the German forces, and Himmler's SS was dedicated to

running the concentration camps, then why were there combat units within the SS? Why weren't

non-German combat units such as the Galicia Division considered to be part of the Wehrmacht

rather than part of the SS? The suspicion in the mind of the impartial observer might readily

be that any unit that was considered part of the SS may in fact have performed some duties that

were uniquely SS, and thus was more likely to be guilty of war crimes than a Wehrmacht unit.

Israeli historian Leni Yahil provides an answer - the war effort had taken center stage; Himmler

wanted to remain on center stage; and it is for that reason that Himmler defined certain combat

units as falling within the SS:

The very fact that Himmler and his executors became the central force

directing the implacable war against the Jews accorded them, and primarily

Himmler as their leader, a crucial position in the hierarchy of Nazi rule

wherever it extended. Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the importance he

ascribed to solving the Jewish problem according to his concept were among the

factors that ensured Himmler's status as the man who carried out the fuhrer's

program.

It might have been assumed that in wartime, when stress is necessarily laid

on the military struggle, the influence of the SS would have declined, since it

no longer held the center stage. If Hitler had lost interest in Himmler's

activities, the latter's own political career would have come to an end. He

forestalled the danger in two ways: one was by associating the SS with the war

effort through the establishment of the armed or Waffen SS while being careful

to prevent the army's influence over these corps from overriding his own.

(Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, Oxford, New

York, 1990, p. 145)

The Nightingale Unit

60 Minutes also mentioned the Nightingale Unit, otherwise known as the Nachtigall Unit. The

Nachtigall Unit was eventually merged with the Ukrainian Roland Unit, some 600 Ukrainian

soldiers in all. These two units were formed on German territory prior to the outbreak of World

War II by Ukrainians who had either not fallen within the Soviet zone of occupation, or who had

escaped from it, and who anticipated German assistance in liberating Ukraine from Soviet rule.

These units too, however, fail to support the picture of Ukrainians "marching off to fight for

Hitler."

Specifically, shortly after the entry of the Germans into Lviv, Stepan Bandera, "(supported by

members of the Nachtigall Unit) decided - without consulting the Germans - to proclaim on 30

June 1941, the establishment of a Ukrainian state in recently conquered Lviv. ... Within days

of the proclamation, Bandera and his associates were arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated"

(Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 463-464). Refusing to rescind the proclamation,

Bandera spent July 1941 to September 1944 in German prisons and concentration camps. (Stepan

Bandera is mentioned at this point because he was supported by the Nachtigall Unit; Bandera was

not a member of the Nachtigall Unit.) "Because of their opposition to German policies in

Ukraine, the units were recalled from the front and interned. ... Toward the end of 1942, the

battalion was disbanded because of the soldiers' refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler"

(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, p. 1088). "The battalion was disarmed and

demobilized, and its officers were arrested in January 1943. Shukhevych, however, managed to

escape and join the UPA" (Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Volume 4, p. 680). Roman Shukhevych who had

been the highest-ranking Ukrainian officer of the Nachtigall unit went on to became

commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a partisan group opposing all foreign

occupation, and which during the Nazi occupation was directed primarily against the Nazis.

Ukrainians in the Nachtigall and Roland Units, then, were also not Ukrainians marching off to

fight for Hitler, but rather they were Ukrainians calculating that an alliance with German

forces would promote their national interests, they were Ukrainians whose willingness to fight

for Hitler or to promote Nazi interests proved to be close to non-existent, and they were

Ukrainians who fell out with their Nazi sponsors in the early stages of the war.

It must be noted also that unlike the Galicia Division, the Nachtigall and Roland Units were not

part of the SS, and so that Mr. Safer was in error when he stated that "Roman Shukhevych ... was

deputy commander of the SS Division Nightingale."

It is another mark of 60 Minutes' biased coverage that in objecting to streets being named after

the above-mentioned Stepan Bandera, it did not mention that he spent most of the war in German

captivity, nor that he lost two brothers at Auschwitz; and in objecting to the commemoration of

the above-mentioned Roman Shukhevych, it did not mention that he escaped from German captivity

and commanded the Ukrainian guerrilla war against the German occupation. These omissions are

part of a pattern of distortions and misrepresentations used by 60 Minutes to create the false

impression of undeviating commitment to Naziism on the part of Ukrainians. Take Ukraine's

staunchest opponents of Naziism, let 60 Minutes' makeup crew touch them up for the camera, and

somehow they appear on the air with swastikas smeared on their foreheads.

And so 60 Minutes has painted a picture entirely at variance with the historical record. The

idea of Ukrainians en masse unselfconsciously celebrating the SS is preposterous and on a par

with the image of Jews sacrificing Christian children to drink their blood. These sorts of

fantastic and inflammatory charges are leveled by the more hysterical elements within each