ГУЛаг Палестины - Лев Гунин

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

film that we have been discussing above. Whereas Time magazine editors did not go so far as to

concede this, they were able to muster enough integrity to express ignorance and confusion, and

also to retract and to apologize:

Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to pin down exactly what

situation the photograph portrays. But there is enough confusion about it for

us to regret that our caption, in addition to misdating the picture, may well

have conveyed a false impression. (Time, April 19, 1993)

And yet this same notorious photograph has been recycled yet again by 60 Minutes and broadcast

as if it had unequivocal significance. Time admitted that it was wrong, Morley Safer cannot

escape having to do the same.

It is a curious incongruity that while professing to oppose Naziism, Morley Safer nevertheless

broadcasts a Nazi propaganda film and invites 60 Minutes' viewers to take it at face value. The

propaganda of one era is, half a century later, dredged up to become the propaganda of another

era, but with a switch from approval to disapproval - the Germans used the film to portray

Ukrainians as good anti-Semites, and so why shouldn't Mr. Safer use the same film to portray

Ukrainians as bad anti-Semites?

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

Collective Guilt

What was the rate of Ukrainian criminal collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World

War? I do not ask here for the rate of perfunctory and non-culpable collaboration - not, for

example, for a count which includes Ukrainian prisoners of war who, to save their lives, donned

German uniforms and then found themselves serving out the war as reluctant camp guards, which

have been more accurately referred to as "prisoner guards" because even while serving as guards,

such Ukrainians continued to be themselves prisoners. No, not that low level of culpability,

but rather an active collaboration palpably greater than would have been necessary for survival,

well beyond the minimum that would be offered by all but the few saints and martyrs among us

in short, collaboration of a magnitude that could plausibly lead to criminal prosecution. Let

us imagine several possibilities. As the population of Ukraine at the time was 36 million,

different collaboration rates give us a different number of collaborators:

Rate of Criminal Collaboration

Number of Criminal Collaborators

1/100,000

1/ 10,000

1/ 1,000

360

3,600

36,000

Were there 360 Ukrainians known to have criminally collaborated with the Nazis during World War

II? Perhaps there were, though I do not know of any such definitive list, and wonder if one

exists. However, 360 criminal collaborators only makes for one criminal collaborator out of

every 100,000 Ukrainians.

Could there have been 3,600 criminal collaborators? I doubt it, and I challenge anyone to come

up with a credible list this long. Note that I do not challenge someone to pull a number out of

the air equal to or exceeding 3,600 - likely there is more than one researcher at 60 Minutes who

would find such a task not difficult - but rather, I challenge someone to come up with a

documented list of names of Ukrainians who criminally participated in Nazi war crimes, where the

list includes a description of the crimes, their locations, their dates, and credible supportive

evidence. I repeat - this has not been done and cannot be done. And yet 3,600 certified

criminal collaborators would make for only one criminal collaborator out of every 10,000

Ukrainians.

And what about 36,000 criminal collaborators? The notion is preposterous. No documentation

exists to support such a fantastic claim. And yet 36,000 criminal collaborators would make for

only one criminal collaborator out of every 1,000 Ukrainians.

The middle figure - one criminal collaborator for every 10,000 Ukrainians - is possibly a wild

exaggeration, and would give us 3,600 criminal collaborators - more than enough to account for

all the stories of Ukrainian savagery, brutality, and sadism, even the ones that aren't true.

Such speculations as the above happen to coincide approximately with published estimates. For

example Professor Stefan Possony reports that "The records of Israel's War Crimes Investigations

Office indicate that throughout occupied Europe some 95,000 nazis and nazi collaborators were

directly connected with anti-Jewish measures, massacres, and deportations...." (The

Ukrainian-Jewish Problem, Plural Societies, Winter 1974). The middle column below contains the

rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column

contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail

to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the

extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any

research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is

it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated - we may wonder when Russians together

with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we

know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of

Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian

rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian,

Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity

to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is

low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of

Russians found themselves under German occupation.

Balts

Austrians

Russians and Byelorussians

Germans

Poles

Ukrainians

Western Europeans

20

10

8

6

4

3

0.5

11,000

8,500

9,000

45,000

7,500

11,000

3,000

______

95,000

The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of

3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what

constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained

too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence

criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal

prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or

three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.

And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by

something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three

Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be

brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this

primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One

individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,

it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How

refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many

generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of

course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no

more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally

useful, it is never shelved.

Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal

collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish

people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today

bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why

stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a

Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face

of Freedom."

Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand

people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews:

they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi

policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary

police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death,

collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:

The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called,

furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone

the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men

strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul

Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310)

Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of

Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to

find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving

one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also

excelled?

But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate

the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish

police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos:

The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew

whether for life or death - be exclusively left up to the decisions of the

"councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a

general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the

individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the

enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish

police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in

accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through

moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims

Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 119-120,

emphasis added)

In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the

administrative tasks and policing required by the Nazis was placed in Jewish hands, that Jewish

collaborators were ubiquitous, and that it was Jewish collaborators who rendered the Jewish

Holocaust feasible and who stood as obstacles in the path of Jewish resistance:

Falsification of the Holocaust

Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir,

Jerusalem.