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