police (NKVD) arrived, and shot the children in cold blood with machine guns.
      This ravine, filled with hundreds of bodies of slain children, moved even the
      soldiers, accustomed as they were to the sight of death. (Andriy Vodopyan, A
      Ravine Filled With the Bodies of Children, in S. O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black
      Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian
      Communist Terror, Toronto, 1953, p. 529)
      Rev. J. Chyrva was imprisoned in 1941 when the Russian Communist armies were
      withdrawing from the city of Riwne. He happened to be cast into one of those
      jails in which the communists, fleeing from advancing German armies, attempted
      to rid themselves of as many prisoners as possible by throwing hand-grenades
      into the crowded cells. When the first grenade was thrown into the cell where
      Rev. J. Chyrva was kept, he was the first to fall - his foot shattered. On him
      fell many mutilated bodies, covering him, thus saving his life. Later, when
      people came into the cell, they found all the prisoners dead with the exception
      of Rev. J. Chyrva. He is alive today, a witness of that horrible
      manslaughter. (Rev. Lev Buchak, Persecution of Ukrainian Protestants under the
      Soviet Rule, in S. O. Pidhainy (ed.), The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White
      Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto,
      1953, p. 529)
      The Bolsheviks had arrested thousands of Ukrainian patriots, and prior to their
      retreat, they killed them savagely. For some reason even highly regarded
      Jewish authors understate the number of Ukrainian victims of Bolshevik terror.
      Gerald Reitlinger gives a figure of three to four thousand in Lviv alone.
      Hilberg speaks of "the Bolsheviks deporting Ukrainians," but he does not
      furnish any overall figures. But on the basis of a German document (RSHA
      IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR no. 28, 20 July 1941, No-2943), which I was
      unable to verify, he recounts one particularly horrible episode:
      In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets.
      When some of the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors
      circulated that the Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles of
      boiling water. The Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing
      130 Jews and beating them to death with clubs.
      He also quotes the French collaborator Dr. Frederic as saying that the
      Bolsheviks killed eighteen thousand Ukrainian political prisoners in Lviv and
      its outskirts alone.
      Basing his remarks on an anonymous article entitled "The Ethnocide of
      Ukrainians in the USSR," in the dissident journal Ukrainian Herald, Issue 7-8,
      the Ukrainian-American publicist Lew Shankowsky gives the following number of
      victims of Bolshevik terror in Galicia and Volhynia: as many as forty thousand
      killed in the prisons of Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Dubno, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv (now
      Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi, Drohobych, Sambir, Zolochiv and other towns and
      settlements. The fact of the matter is that, justifiably or not, some
      Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of the Stalinist secret
      police, the NKVD. For instance, it was pointed out to me by a resident of
      Western Ukraine that a high NKVD official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was
      Jewish, despite his Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological
      Problems and Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations
      During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter J.
      Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective,
      Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton, 1990, footnotes deleted)
      In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet authorities were
      not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners they had arrested, mostly
      during their last months of rule in western Ukraine. Their solution,
      implemented at the end of June and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates
      regardless of whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being
      held for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to 40,000
      prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern Galicia and
      western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, University of
      Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)
      Was the Ukrainian perception of disproportionate Jewish participation in the Soviet secret
      police accurate? Observations such as the following suggest that perhaps it was: Yoram Sheftel,
      Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, reports the following in connection with his visit to
      the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990:
      On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of
      about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War,
      as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names:
      the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones
      like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in
      Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil.
      (The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994, p. 301)
      Curious wording, incidentally. In the eyes of Sheftel, this plaque does not list torturers and
      butchers, it lists "youth." These torturers and butchers are not chosen from the "worst" of
      Jews, but from the "best." And whereas a Ukrainian might tend to the view that the members of
      the NKVD were the Red Devil, Sheftel views them as merely having sold their souls to some
      hypothetical Red Devil residing elsewhere. Sheftel, it seems, extends his sympathy not to the
      victims of the torturers and butchers, but to the torturers and butchers themselves, who after
      all are merely "the best of Jewish youth" led astray by some "Red Devil" - in other words, to be
      viewed not as falling among the victimizers, but among the victims. I suppose that there exist
      even today apologists who might speak of Adolf Eichmann as an instance of the best of German
      youth who had sold his soul to the Nazi Devil.
      Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the
      entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious
      hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction:
      As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many
      Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the most terrible?
      It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The
      State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future,
      1994, p. 147)
      Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery especially in
      the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD.... It is
      difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the
      Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hand of the former Russian
      authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for
      themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary
      Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165)
      More recently, I have compiled statistics from data presented by Shapoval which suggests that
      out of every ten leading members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine, 6 were Jewish, 2 Russian, 1
      Ukrainian, and 1 other.
      Now within this historical context - the Ukrainian Holocaust eight years previously, the
      21-month Communist reign of terror, and the recent slaughter of Ukrainians by the retreating
      Communists - would it be surprising if upon the arrival of the Germans, these Western Ukrainians
      had felt liberated by the Germans and at the same time vengeful toward the Communists, and would
      it be surprising if among their first actions was the seeking out and punishment of any
      perpetrators and collaborators who had not been able to flee with the retreating Communists?
      No, it would not be surprising - and yet that is not what happened.
      Zero Retribution
      Prior to the arrival of the Germans, there was no anti-Jewish or anti-Communist violence. If
      any impulse for vengeance existed, then it was inhibited - the Ukrainian population had been
      decimated, deprived of its leadership, throttled into submission. For all they knew, the
      Communists who had just left might return that very same day and resume the slaughter, starting
      first with any who had dared to lift a vengeful hand. For all they knew, this was just the calm
      before a new storm, just a few hours' respite while names were taken for the next round of NKVD
      executions. And the last person to lift a hand against would be a Jew because the Jew had
      traditionally occupied the position of authority:
      From the Ukraine Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C reported as follows:
      Almost nowhere can the population be persuaded to take
      active steps against the Jews. This may be explained by the
      fear of many people that the Red Army may return. Again and
      again this anxiety has been pointed out to us. Older people
      have remarked that they had already experienced in 1918 the
      sudden retreat of the Germans. In order to meet the fear
      psychosis, and in order to destroy the myth ... which, in the
      eyes of many Ukrainians, places the Jew in the position of
      the wielder of political power, Einsatzkommando 6 on several
      occasions marched Jews before their execution through the
      city. Also, care was taken to have Ukrainian militiamen
      watch the shooting of Jews.
      This "deflation" of the Jews in the public eye did not have the desired
      effect. After a few weeks, Einsatzgruppe C complained once more that the
      inhabitants did not betray the movements of hidden Jews. The Ukrainians were
      passive, benumbed by the "Bolshevist terror." Only the ethnic Germans in the
      area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction
      of the European Jews, 1961, p. 202)
      The picture painted by Raul Hilberg is not at all the one of Ukrainians enthusiastically
      slaughtering Jews that was painted by Morley Safer in his 60 Minutes broadcast:
      The Slavic population stood estranged and even aghast before the unfolding
      spectacle of the "final solution." There was on the whole no impelling desire
      to cooperate in a process of such utter ruthlessness. The fact that the Soviet
      regime, fighting off the Germans a few hundred miles to the east, was still
      threatening to return, undoubtedly acted as a powerful restraint upon many a
      potential collaborator. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews,
      1985, p. 308)
      Raul Hilberg is not the only historian testifying to the fact that the Einsatzgruppen organized
      and instigated the pogroms, and that they were disappointed by the results. Leo Heiman below,
      for example, reaffirms this, and adds the detail that the pogromists had a short attention span
      with respect to the German-inspired motive of anti-Semitism, being instead readily diverted by
      "looting and plunder." "Lemberg," of course, is Lviv:
      The results of diligent Nazi efforts to organize "Ukrainian pogrom mobs" were
      disappointing.... According to official German documents introduced by the
      prosecution during the Eichmann trial, the Nazi commander of S.D. Einsatzgruppe
      "Kommando Lemberg" complained to his superiors that "...to rely on local people
      to take the law of retribution in their own hands, and themselves carry out
      final solution measures against Jews, is hopeless. We organized several action
      groups, but they soon degenerated into ordinary pogrom mobs, more interested in
      looting and plunder than in energetic and forceful measures against Jews. The
      number of Jews eliminated by mobs runs less than two thousand in my area of
      operations, and the damage done by mobs to property, as well as the disruption
      of order, does not justify this kind of action. I have no choice but to employ
      my own men." (Leo Heiman, Ukrainians and the Jews, in Walter Dushnyck,
      Ukrainians and Jews: A Symposium, The Ukrainian Congress Committee of American,
      New York, 1966, p. 60)
      In reading the above Einsatzgruppe report, many question come to mind. Just how would a pogrom
      mob be organized? - Might it be staffed entirely by criminals held in custody by the Germans?
      What weapons would be given the pogromists? Would it be safe to give incarcerated criminals
      weapons and then to release them on their own recognisance? Obviously, they would tend to
      escape and then, being armed, would be particularly dangerous to recapture. Wouldn't armed
      Germans have to accompany the pogromists in order to steer them to the proper targets, to keep
      them from getting out of control, and to make sure that weapons were returned? - In which case,
      how much of the killing would be done by the supervising Germans? What was the ethnic
      composition of these pogromists? Above I cited Raul Hilberg stating "Only the ethnic Germans in
      the area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe," which brings us to the realization that a
      pogrom within Ukraine is not necessarily a pogrom perpetrated by Ukrainians, and so brings us
      also to the question of how many of the pogromists were Germans, Russians, Poles, or Jews?
      Raul Hilberg discusses two motives for the Nazis to incite pogroms in Ukraine, the second of
      which will be of particular relevance when we discuss further below the origin of the historical
      documentary footage broadcast by 60 Minutes:
      Why did the Einsatzgruppen endeavor to start pogroms in the occupied areas?
      The reasons which prompted the killing units to activate anti-Jewish outbursts
      were partly administrative, partly psychological. The administrative principle
      was very simple: every Jew killed in a pogrom was one less burden for the
      Einsatzgruppen. A pogrom brought them, as they expressed it, that much closer
      to the "cleanup goal".... The psychological consideration was more
      interesting. The Einsatzgruppen wanted the population to take a part and a
      major part at that - of the responsibility for the killing operations. "It was
      not less important, for future purposes," wrote Brigadefuhrer Dr. Stahlecker,
      "to establish as an unquestionable fact that the liberated population had
      resorted to the most severe measures against the Bolshevist and Jewish enemy,
      on its own initiative and without instructions from German authorities." In
      short, the pogroms were to become the defensive weapon with which to confront
      an accuser, or an element of blackmail that could be used against the local
      population. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 203)
      Two of the conclusions that Raul Hilberg draws concerning pogroms in Ukraine flatly contradict
      the Wiesenthal-Safer story of a massive pre-German pogrom in Lviv:
      First, truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not
      take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the
      Einsatzgruppen. Second, all pogroms were implemented within a short time after
      the arrival of the killing units. They were not self-perpetuating, nor could
      new ones be started after things had settled down. (Raul Hilberg, The
      Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 312)
      Raul Hilberg describes what may have been the chief - or the only Lviv pogrom quite
      differently - it occurred after the arrival of the Germans, and it did not involve the killing
      of 5,000-6,000 Jews:
      The Galician capital of Lvov was the scene of a mass seizure by local
      inhabitants. In "reprisal" for the deportation of Ukrainians by the Soviets,
      1000 members of the Jewish intelligentsia were driven together and handed over
      to the Security Police. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews,
      1961, p. 204)
      But even this milder version of an anti-Jewish eruption - now a post-German one - is not easy to
      credit. The arrest of one thousand targeted individuals within a city is something that can
      only be done by a large team of professionals backed by a research staff, weapons,
      telecommunications equipment, vehicles. Before anyone would undertake such a daunting task,
      furthermore, they would need to be assured that the thousand prisoners would be wanted and that
      they could be processed - only an ambivalent gratitude might be expected for having herded a
      thousand prisoners through the streets to the local police station which was not expecting them
      - and so it is implausible that local inhabitants would act without at the very least
      consultation and coordination with the occupying authorities. From what we have discussed
      above, we would expect the local inhabitants to be devoid of initiative, able to follow orders
      perfunctorily in order to save their lives, but quite unable to muster the resources to round up
      one thousand individuals on their own. If any such round-up did occur, then, it would more
      plausibly have been at the instigation of, and under the direction of, the German occupiers.
      But to return to 60 Minutes, the reality is that the sort of pogrom described by Simon
      Wiesenthal - massive in scale and initiated by Ukrainians independently of German instigation
      never took place. The most that the Germans could incite a small number of Ukrainians to
      contribute - and who knows exactly how large a contribution these few Ukrainians really made
      alongside the Germans in such actions - was closer to the following:
      In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets. When some of
      the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors circulated that the
      Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles full of boiling water. The Ukrainian
      population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews and beating them to death with
      clubs. ... The Ukrainian violence as a whole did not come up to
      expectations. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p.
      204)
      But on the principle that the person readiest to contradict Simon Wiesenthal is Simon Wiesenthal
      himself, we turn to other statements that he has made:
      The Ukrainian police ... had played a disastrous role in Galicia following the
      entry of the German troops at the end of June and the beginning of July 1941.
      (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 34, emphasis added)
      In the same account, Wiesenthal does mention a Lviv pogrom of three day's duration, but
      unambiguously places it after the German occupation:
      Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating
      Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period:
      among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the
      Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were
      Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities
      committed by the Soviets.
      All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is
      said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three
      days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989,
      p. 36, emphasis added)
      In conclusion, Mr. Wiesenthal's story of a massive pre-German Lviv pogrom is contradicted by
      other testimony, some of it his own. Mr. Safer had the good sense to subtract 3,000 fatalities
      from Mr. Wiesenthal's upper estimate of 6,000, suggesting that he too is aware of Mr.
      Wiesenthal's unreliability. Had Mr. Safer dared to subtract another 3,000, he would have hit
      the nail right on the head. If one were to sum up within one short statement the picture that
      emerges from a consideration of the evidence, and if in doing so one were to be uninhibited by
      considerations of political correctness, then an apt summary might be that during the very
      interval that Morley Safer claims that Ukrainians were killing Jews by the thousands, in fact it
      was Jews that were killing Ukrainians by the thousands. George Orwell's 1984 has arrived and is
      in place - now our media drum into us that black is white, love is hate, war is peace,
      Ukrainians killed Jews.
      Morely Safer Invents Corroborative Events
      Furthermore, in connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, 60 Minutes
      insinuated into the pre-German interval three events which gave the viewer the impression that
      the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being doubted: (1) the
      arrest of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother, (2) the shooting of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother-in-law, and (3)
      the scenes depicted in "remnants of a film":
      SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the
      police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.
      LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true!
      SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal - like thousands of Lvov Jews,
      his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police.
      These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian brutality. The
      German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as 'praiseworthy.'
      WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go so
      fast.
      SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners.
      WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she
      couldn't walk fast.
      SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the
      guilty, to bring justice.
      The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it ends with a
      reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine that the events
      mentioned in the same passage happened during the pre-German interval. However, examining Mr.
      Wiesenthal's biographies for confirmation of the first two of these events - the arrest of his
      mother and the shooting of his mother-in-law - turns up the following (it will help at this
      point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June 30, 1941):
      In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods truck at
      Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then sixty-three.
      ... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead by a Ukrainian police
      auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon
      Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)
      "My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon says,
      lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ... Around
      the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife] learned that, back in
      Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was
      being evicted from her home. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41)
      We see, therefore, that 60 Minutes seems to have advanced the date of arrest of Simon
      Wiesenthal's mother as well as the shooting of his mother-in-law by more than a year in order to
      lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the German
      occupation of Lviv.
      Also attributed to the pre-German interval by 60 Minutes were the events depicted in the
      "remnants of a film" quoted above, but as we shall see below, these scenes are not scenes of a
      pogrom and they did not antedate the arrival of the Germans either.
      As a final piece of contradictory evidence, Andrew Gregorivich reports being told by a resident
      of Lviv during those days that there was not a three-day gap between the departure of the
      Soviets and the arrival of the Germans (Jews Ukrainians, Forum, No. 91, Fall-Winter 1994, p.
      29)
      And as a final comment on the possibility of a pre-German Lviv pogrom, one might note that the
      pogrom claimed by Morley Safer is massive in scale, that Simon Wiesenthal claimed to be right in
      the middle of it, and that it was this very pogrom which "compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the
      guilty, to bring justice." One might expect, then, that this particular pogrom would have
      occupied some of Mr. Wiesenthal's attention as a Nazi hunter, and yet we are faced with the
      incongruity that he seems not to have brought any of its perpetrators to justice.
      Impulsive Execution
      We have just seen Mr. Wiesenthal reporting that his mother-in-law was "shot to death by a
      Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast." Such a thing might well have happened, of
      course, but in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's lack of credibility, it behooves us to notice that it is
      somewhat implausible. In fact, impulsive killing of this sort was forbidden by the German
      authorities for many reasons.
      (1) Any optimistic illusions of those arrested concerning their fate were better preserved until
      the last possible moment - this to decrease the possibility of emotional outbursts, protests, or
      resistance.
      (2) As arrests were continuous and unending, there would be the need to prevent forewarning
      those slated for arrest at a later time of the reality that the arrests were malevolently
      motivated. Optimally, all targeted victims should believe that the arrest was part of a
      "relocation," an illusion that a gratuitous shooting in the course of the arrest would dispel.
      (3) There was the desirability also of keeping all killings as secret as possible so as not to
      arouse the fear or indignation of the general populace. Raul Hilberg describes how even the
      roundups themselves were kept as much as possible from view - how much more self-conscious,
      then, would the Germans feel about a public killing:
      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