Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

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 Bolsheviks and Jews need no longer be feared and that they could be

attacked with impunity; and (3) they were taking a first step toward dragging a handful of

Ukrainians into complicitous guilt.

Bodies on the Ground

One photograph inserted into the middle of these "remnants of a film" was of bodies lying in

rows on the ground. Of course Morley Safer does not identify the photograph - he does not

attribute it to a source, he mentions no date or place. As the photograph is being shown, Mr.

Safer is saying that Simon Wiesenthal "remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian

police went on a three-day killing spree." The impression left in the viewer's mind, therefore,

is that these must be some of the 5,000 to 6,000 victims of that killing spree.

Three details of this photograph, however, suggest otherwise: (1) The bodies are shown lying in

snow, whereas the killing spree was supposed to have taken place in the three days before the

German occupation of Lviv on June 30, 1941. (2) The legs of one of the bodies are visible, and

these legs are skeletally thin, which suggests a famine victim and not the victim of a pogrom,

or else suggests that this is an exhumed corpse. If these are in reality famine victims, then

they are more likely to be Ukrainians than Jews. (3) Most of the shapes on the ground resemble

small heaps rather than bodies, which suggests that the photograph is one of exhumed remains

from some old mass grave - and we may reflect that in June 1941 (if that was when this

photograph was taken), the inhabitants of Ukraine's many mass graves were predominantly

Ukrainians and not Jews. Thus, there is a very real possibility that Morley Safer is using a

photograph of Ukrainians killed by Jews as evidence of Jews killed by Ukrainians.

The Wallowing Photograph

The last scene of this Nazi propaganda footage that was presented by Morley Safer has a

notorious history of being presented in various publications with wildly different

interpretations - of which Time Magazine's "Wallowing Photograph" fiasco of 22Feb93 is but one

instance. In fact, this photograph is taken from the wallowing-in-the-gutter German propaganda