Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

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