ГУЛаг Палестины - Лев Гунин

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