Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

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: