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