which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a
consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.
At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian
nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the
Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including
Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...
Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and
several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a
group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of
Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In
Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of
the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several
dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local
administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the
All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43
there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,
Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.
When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the
population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to
apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass
shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in
the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even
minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.
The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers
began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by
arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.
(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)
Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941
announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev
and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been
shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941
again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This
should serve as a warning to the population."
The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,
or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.
If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone
who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed
for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio
program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three
women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were
executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with
its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,
Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of
which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the
acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society
has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.
The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army
(UPA):
The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of
the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine
and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian
guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan
"neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p.
884)
During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and
the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major
losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned:
Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in
May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091)
Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by
guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers
were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World
War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
Photograph of partisans
executed by the Nazis.
Photograph of young woman executed by the Nazis, and
young man about to be executed, for partisan activities.
If Morley Safer feels impelled to instruct 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were loyal Nazis,
then he should also pause to explain how it is that the Ukrainians were able to reconcile their
loyalty with German contempt:
When the time came to appoint the Nazi ruler of Ukraine, Hitler chose Erich
Koch, a notoriously brutal and bigoted administrator known for his personal
contempt for Slavs. Koch's attitude toward his assignment was evident in the
speech he delivered to his staff upon his arrival in Ukraine in September 1941:
"Gentlemen, I am known as a brutal dog. Because of this reason I was appointed
as Reichskommissar of Ukraine. Our task is to suck from Ukraine all the goods
we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of
the native population." On another occasion, Koch emphasized his loathing for
Ukrainians by remarking: "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the
same table with me, I must have him shot." (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A
History, 1994, p. 467)
Koch often said that Ukrainian people were inferior to the Germans, that
Ukrainians were half-monkeys, and that Ukrainians "must be handled with the
whip like the negroes." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum,
No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 15)
If Morley Safer wishes to proclaim to the 60 Minutes audience that Ukrainians were enthusiastic
Nazis, then he should simultaneously explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their
enthusiasm as 2.3 million of them were being shipped off to forced labor in Germany:
By early 1942, Koch's police had to stage massive manhunts, rounding up young
Ukrainians in bazaars or as they emerged from churches or cinemas and shipping
them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469)
If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis,
then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when
the Kiev soccer team - Dynamo - beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the
German reward:
Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are
not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired
the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich,
World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he
should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being
starved:
Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that
Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis
intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short
run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a
result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to
move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population.
Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw
120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed
and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History,
1994, p. 469)
Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its
intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow - if we are to
believe Morley Safer - being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for
Naziism:
Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical
research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books
were shipped out to Germany.
We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and
Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first
printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan
Franko.
Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of
Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko
Museum.
As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team
leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries,
exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and
expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster,
November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew
Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23)
Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could
have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they
were being treated as Untermenschen:
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian
intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade
school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as
to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the
Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were
established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial