Страница:
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
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.
Available online at:
http://www.kaiwan.com/codoh/newsdesk/890519.HTML
I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system
has managed to instil a 'Holocaust awareness' in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir
12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the
Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that 'a
half-truth is worse than a lie') which has been instilled here.
As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in
Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily
life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the
first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German
soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of
transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by
Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the
planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews
in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every
Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising
could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated
the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was
taught, and this saved the lives of some them "if you enter a square from which
there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and
one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and
then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew".
One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground
killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943,
I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other
children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary.
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire
Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from
the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work
for them. But does anybody now know about this? This, and not what is
'instilled' was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem - Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak at all. It, and its
vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis
are truly beneath contempt.
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would
at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now
eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish
to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime.
Kind regards,
[Israel Shahak]
To bring closer to home and closer to the present day the inadvisability of attributing
collective guilt, we may note that more than one out of every hundred Americans is presently
sitting in jail, and yet we do not from this condemn Americans as a nation of criminals. And so
if we extract from this the conclusion that a participation rate as high as one out of every
hundred is insufficient to depict the entire population as participants, then Ukrainians should
be allowed a total of 360,000 criminal collaborators - a number never yet broached - without
Ukrainians being collectively condemned as Nazis.
The plea to avoid ascribing collective guilt is not new to Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and has
been put forward by both sides. It is time that the plea was heeded:
Even as we Jews justly disclaim responsibility for the acts of the Jewish
Bolshevist commissars and for the disgraceful actions of those Jews who
participated in the work of the Bolshevist chekas (Secret Police), the
Ukrainian people has a full right to disclaim any responsibility for those who
have besmirched themselves by pogrom activities. (Arnold Margolin, The Jews of
Eastern Europe, 1926, p. 124, in Andrew Gregorovich, Jews and Ukrainians, Forum
No. 91, Fall-Winter, 1994, p. 30)
Additional material on Jewish collaboration with the Nazis can be found in my discussion of the
Jewish Ghetto Police in my Letter 17 to Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Justice.
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
Paralysis of the Comparative Function
Positions taken by Morley Safer acquire meaning - can only be evaluated - following relevant
comparisons, but Mr. Safer fails to make these comparisons. For example, Ukrainian assistance
to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust acquires significance - indeed, may be thrown into a wholly
new light - when compared to Jewish assistance to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust, but Mr.
Safer does not make such a comparison. Ukrainian cruelty on behalf of the Nazis acquires
significance when compared to Jewish cruelty on behalf of the Nazis, but Mr. Safer does not make
this comparison. Ukrainians saving Jews (a possibility totally ignored by Mr. Safer) is given a
new significance when compared with Jews saving Ukrainians at times when such aid was possible
and of course Mr. Safer never reaches a point where he could make such a comparison.
Comparison 1: Ukrainians Helping Jews Compared to Jews Helping Jews
We have seen above that countless Ukrainians risked their lives and gave their lives to save
Jews. And what, let us now ask, were those who today level accusations of genetic anti-Semitism
against Ukrainians doing at the same time? What, for example, were American Jews doing? The
generous view is that they were doing little:
No American Jew appeared to have altered his life style once news of the
Holocaust was revealed. Even at the time, some observers were repelled by the
often festive atmosphere of Jewish social life in a period of wartime
prosperity. (Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, 1992, p. 550)
Over the centuries the dispersion of the Jews had a functional utility:
whenever some part of the Jewish community was under attack, it depended on
help from the other Jews. In the period of the Nazi regime, this help did not
come. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1052)
This question has haunted me ever since the war: Why did the Jews of the free
world act as they did? Hadn't our people survived persecution and exile
throughout the centuries because of its spirit of solidarity? ... When one
community suffered, the others supported it, throughout the Diaspora. Why was
it different this time? (Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea,
1995, p. 63)
A less indulgent view, however, is that Jews not under Nazi occupation - particularly American
and British Jews - knowingly, willfully, calculatedly sacrificed their trapped European
coreligionists:
In his book, "In Days of Holocaust and Destruction," Yitzchak Greenbaum
writes, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish
Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again,
'NO!' ... one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to
secondary importance."
In January, 1943, the leadership of the absorption and enlisting fund
decided to bar all appeals on behalf of rescuing Jews. It is explicitly stated
in the "Sefer Hamagbis" (Book of Appeals) that the reasons for this prohibition
were because of other obligations in Eretz Yisroel.
In the beginning of February, 1943, Yitzchak Greenbaum addressed a meeting
in Tel Aviv on the subject, "the Diaspora and the Redemption," in which he
stated:
"For the rescue of the Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our
excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have. When they come to us
with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption
of the land [in Palestine] - I vote, without a second thought, for the
redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the
greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the
Hebraization of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying
packages of food [for Jews in Nazi captivity] with the money of the "Keren
Hayesod" (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a
thing? No! And once again No!" (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims
Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 26, emphasis
added)
Mr. Schwalb expressed the complete Zionist ideology and stated clearly and
openly the politics of the Zionist leaders in the area of rescue: the shedding
of Jewish blood in the Diaspora is necessary in order for us to demand the
establishment of a "Jewish" state before a peace commission. Money will be
sent to save a group of "chalutzim" (pioneers), while the remainder of Czech
Jewry must resign itself to annihilation in the Auschwitz crematoria. (Reb
Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish
War Criminals, 1977, p. 28, emphasis added)
We have previously quoted the words of Yitzchak Greenbaum, chairman of the
"rescue committee" of the Jewish Agency in Eretz Yosroel, who refused to
allocate even one dollar of United Jewish Appeal funds for food to those who
were fighting off the pangs of hunger. This approach was totally in consonance
with his famous slogan, to the effect that, "one goat in Eretz Yisroel is more
important than an entire community in the Diaspora." How could he thus
withhold a package of straw from a Holy Land goat in order to send food to a
starving infant? But if that is not enough, the Zionists acted like the fiend
who declared that he not only would not give, but he also would not let others
give (whom our Sages called a "rosho" - a wicked person). The Zionist leaders
weren't satisfied merely with the crime of sitting idly by and doing nothing.
They labored with all their might to forcefully prevent others from helping the
sufferers in the ghetto. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse:
Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 44-45)
One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland. (Yitzchak
Greenbaum in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and
Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 116)
The Antonescu Offer. Reb Moshe Shonfeld's book documents several instances of offers being
made, sometimes by the Nazis, to release Jews for a fixed price, and of the offers being
declined by Zionist leaders. The Romanian government, for example, offered 70,000 Jews at $50
apiece. These Jews could have been transported to Palestine via Turkey - a few days' ride by
truck. The Romanian offer was confirmed by the U.S. State Department. The offer would become
void once Romania was occupied by the Germans - an occupation that was imminent. Ben Hecht in
his book Perfidy relates placing the following ad in New York newspapers:
FOR SALE
70,000 JEWS
AT
$50 APIECE
GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS
Zionist leaders, however, denied the existence of such an offer and sabotaged fund-raising
efforts. As a result, the 70,000 Romanian Jews perished. Ben Hecht's indignation is
unrestrained:
But in 1943, we, who called out the plight of the Romanian Jews to the
world, were discredited by the Zionist unions, the established Zionist
leadership and their associated philanthropies, as scandalmongers. Our attempt
to get the Jews out of Romania before the Germans came was scotched.
The 70,000 Jews who might have been saved were herded into barns by the
Germanized Romanians under General Antonescu, hosed with gasoline, ignited, and
shot down when they came blazing and screaming out of their cauldrons.
Was it for this the conspirators of Silence had been holding their
high-level meetings, fraternizing with presidents and prime ministers and
keeping intact Weizmann's ... policy of an 'exclusive' ... Palestine? This
Silence, this wretched business of Jewish leaders lying about the slaughter of
Europe's Jewry - trying to hide it, soft-pedal it - for what?
These organizations, these philanthropists, these timorous Jewish lodge
members in Zion, in London and America - these Zionist leaders who let their
six million kinsmen burn, choke, hang, without protest, with indifference, and
even with a glint of anti-Semitic cunning in their political plannings - I sum
up against them. These factotums, these policy-makers, the custodians of the
Jewish future in Palestine ... these Zionist men and women - I haul into the
prisoner's dock of this book. (Ben Hecht, Perfidy, in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The
Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals,
1977, p. 102)
The Eichmann Offer. The war afforded more than one opportunity to save Jews. Here is another
significant opportunity, the offer this time coming directly from Adolph Eichmann:
So I am ready to sell you - a million Jews. ... What do you want to save?
Virile men? Grown women? Old people? Children? Sit down - and talk. ...
Now I am going to prove to you that I trust you more than you trust me. When
you ... tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will [as an initial
demonstration of good faith, even before you make any payment] dissolve
Auschwitz and move 10 percent of the promised million to the border. You take
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
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.
Available online at:
http://www.kaiwan.com/codoh/newsdesk/890519.HTML
I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system
has managed to instil a 'Holocaust awareness' in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir
12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the
Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that 'a
half-truth is worse than a lie') which has been instilled here.
As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in
Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily
life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the
first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German
soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of
transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by
Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the
planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews
in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every
Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising
could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated
the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was
taught, and this saved the lives of some them "if you enter a square from which
there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and
one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and
then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew".
One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground
killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943,
I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other
children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary.
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire
Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from
the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work
for them. But does anybody now know about this? This, and not what is
'instilled' was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem - Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak at all. It, and its
vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis
are truly beneath contempt.
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would
at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now
eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish
to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime.
Kind regards,
[Israel Shahak]
To bring closer to home and closer to the present day the inadvisability of attributing
collective guilt, we may note that more than one out of every hundred Americans is presently
sitting in jail, and yet we do not from this condemn Americans as a nation of criminals. And so
if we extract from this the conclusion that a participation rate as high as one out of every
hundred is insufficient to depict the entire population as participants, then Ukrainians should
be allowed a total of 360,000 criminal collaborators - a number never yet broached - without
Ukrainians being collectively condemned as Nazis.
The plea to avoid ascribing collective guilt is not new to Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and has
been put forward by both sides. It is time that the plea was heeded:
Even as we Jews justly disclaim responsibility for the acts of the Jewish
Bolshevist commissars and for the disgraceful actions of those Jews who
participated in the work of the Bolshevist chekas (Secret Police), the
Ukrainian people has a full right to disclaim any responsibility for those who
have besmirched themselves by pogrom activities. (Arnold Margolin, The Jews of
Eastern Europe, 1926, p. 124, in Andrew Gregorovich, Jews and Ukrainians, Forum
No. 91, Fall-Winter, 1994, p. 30)
Additional material on Jewish collaboration with the Nazis can be found in my discussion of the
Jewish Ghetto Police in my Letter 17 to Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Justice.
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
Paralysis of the Comparative Function
Positions taken by Morley Safer acquire meaning - can only be evaluated - following relevant
comparisons, but Mr. Safer fails to make these comparisons. For example, Ukrainian assistance
to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust acquires significance - indeed, may be thrown into a wholly
new light - when compared to Jewish assistance to Jews during the Jewish Holocaust, but Mr.
Safer does not make such a comparison. Ukrainian cruelty on behalf of the Nazis acquires
significance when compared to Jewish cruelty on behalf of the Nazis, but Mr. Safer does not make
this comparison. Ukrainians saving Jews (a possibility totally ignored by Mr. Safer) is given a
new significance when compared with Jews saving Ukrainians at times when such aid was possible
and of course Mr. Safer never reaches a point where he could make such a comparison.
Comparison 1: Ukrainians Helping Jews Compared to Jews Helping Jews
We have seen above that countless Ukrainians risked their lives and gave their lives to save
Jews. And what, let us now ask, were those who today level accusations of genetic anti-Semitism
against Ukrainians doing at the same time? What, for example, were American Jews doing? The
generous view is that they were doing little:
No American Jew appeared to have altered his life style once news of the
Holocaust was revealed. Even at the time, some observers were repelled by the
often festive atmosphere of Jewish social life in a period of wartime
prosperity. (Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, 1992, p. 550)
Over the centuries the dispersion of the Jews had a functional utility:
whenever some part of the Jewish community was under attack, it depended on
help from the other Jews. In the period of the Nazi regime, this help did not
come. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 1052)
This question has haunted me ever since the war: Why did the Jews of the free
world act as they did? Hadn't our people survived persecution and exile
throughout the centuries because of its spirit of solidarity? ... When one
community suffered, the others supported it, throughout the Diaspora. Why was
it different this time? (Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea,
1995, p. 63)
A less indulgent view, however, is that Jews not under Nazi occupation - particularly American
and British Jews - knowingly, willfully, calculatedly sacrificed their trapped European
coreligionists:
In his book, "In Days of Holocaust and Destruction," Yitzchak Greenbaum
writes, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish
Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again,
'NO!' ... one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to
secondary importance."
In January, 1943, the leadership of the absorption and enlisting fund
decided to bar all appeals on behalf of rescuing Jews. It is explicitly stated
in the "Sefer Hamagbis" (Book of Appeals) that the reasons for this prohibition
were because of other obligations in Eretz Yisroel.
In the beginning of February, 1943, Yitzchak Greenbaum addressed a meeting
in Tel Aviv on the subject, "the Diaspora and the Redemption," in which he
stated:
"For the rescue of the Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our
excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have. When they come to us
with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption
of the land [in Palestine] - I vote, without a second thought, for the
redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the
greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the
Hebraization of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying
packages of food [for Jews in Nazi captivity] with the money of the "Keren
Hayesod" (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a
thing? No! And once again No!" (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims
Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 26, emphasis
added)
Mr. Schwalb expressed the complete Zionist ideology and stated clearly and
openly the politics of the Zionist leaders in the area of rescue: the shedding
of Jewish blood in the Diaspora is necessary in order for us to demand the
establishment of a "Jewish" state before a peace commission. Money will be
sent to save a group of "chalutzim" (pioneers), while the remainder of Czech
Jewry must resign itself to annihilation in the Auschwitz crematoria. (Reb
Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish
War Criminals, 1977, p. 28, emphasis added)
We have previously quoted the words of Yitzchak Greenbaum, chairman of the
"rescue committee" of the Jewish Agency in Eretz Yosroel, who refused to
allocate even one dollar of United Jewish Appeal funds for food to those who
were fighting off the pangs of hunger. This approach was totally in consonance
with his famous slogan, to the effect that, "one goat in Eretz Yisroel is more
important than an entire community in the Diaspora." How could he thus
withhold a package of straw from a Holy Land goat in order to send food to a
starving infant? But if that is not enough, the Zionists acted like the fiend
who declared that he not only would not give, but he also would not let others
give (whom our Sages called a "rosho" - a wicked person). The Zionist leaders
weren't satisfied merely with the crime of sitting idly by and doing nothing.
They labored with all their might to forcefully prevent others from helping the
sufferers in the ghetto. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse:
Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 44-45)
One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland. (Yitzchak
Greenbaum in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and
Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, p. 116)
The Antonescu Offer. Reb Moshe Shonfeld's book documents several instances of offers being
made, sometimes by the Nazis, to release Jews for a fixed price, and of the offers being
declined by Zionist leaders. The Romanian government, for example, offered 70,000 Jews at $50
apiece. These Jews could have been transported to Palestine via Turkey - a few days' ride by
truck. The Romanian offer was confirmed by the U.S. State Department. The offer would become
void once Romania was occupied by the Germans - an occupation that was imminent. Ben Hecht in
his book Perfidy relates placing the following ad in New York newspapers:
FOR SALE
70,000 JEWS
AT
$50 APIECE
GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS
Zionist leaders, however, denied the existence of such an offer and sabotaged fund-raising
efforts. As a result, the 70,000 Romanian Jews perished. Ben Hecht's indignation is
unrestrained:
But in 1943, we, who called out the plight of the Romanian Jews to the
world, were discredited by the Zionist unions, the established Zionist
leadership and their associated philanthropies, as scandalmongers. Our attempt
to get the Jews out of Romania before the Germans came was scotched.
The 70,000 Jews who might have been saved were herded into barns by the
Germanized Romanians under General Antonescu, hosed with gasoline, ignited, and
shot down when they came blazing and screaming out of their cauldrons.
Was it for this the conspirators of Silence had been holding their
high-level meetings, fraternizing with presidents and prime ministers and
keeping intact Weizmann's ... policy of an 'exclusive' ... Palestine? This
Silence, this wretched business of Jewish leaders lying about the slaughter of
Europe's Jewry - trying to hide it, soft-pedal it - for what?
These organizations, these philanthropists, these timorous Jewish lodge
members in Zion, in London and America - these Zionist leaders who let their
six million kinsmen burn, choke, hang, without protest, with indifference, and
even with a glint of anti-Semitic cunning in their political plannings - I sum
up against them. These factotums, these policy-makers, the custodians of the
Jewish future in Palestine ... these Zionist men and women - I haul into the
prisoner's dock of this book. (Ben Hecht, Perfidy, in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The
Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals,
1977, p. 102)
The Eichmann Offer. The war afforded more than one opportunity to save Jews. Here is another
significant opportunity, the offer this time coming directly from Adolph Eichmann:
So I am ready to sell you - a million Jews. ... What do you want to save?
Virile men? Grown women? Old people? Children? Sit down - and talk. ...
Now I am going to prove to you that I trust you more than you trust me. When
you ... tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will [as an initial
demonstration of good faith, even before you make any payment] dissolve
Auschwitz and move 10 percent of the promised million to the border. You take