killings are never solved, and those who order them are never punished.
Today, Borys Derevyanko is dead, and Eduard Hurvits, barred by his corruption from
holding the office of mayor of Odessa, continues his criminal career as a member of the
Ukrainian parliament. Photographs of Derevyanko and Hurvits are shown below:
Newspaper editor
Borys Derevyanko
Odessa Mayor
Eduard Hurvits
The table which I began in my letter to you of 30Jun99 can now be elaborated with
another entry:
Date of my letter
Subject of my letter
Date of Attack
Violence that you should have reported in your 23Oct94 The Ugly Face of Freedom
15May99
Who murdered Volodymyr Ivasiuk?
April 1979
30Jun99
Who murdered Vadim Boyko?
February 14, 1992
Violence that you might have caused by your 23Oct94 The Ugly Face of Freedom
09Apr99
Who blew the hands off Maksym Tsarenko?
Summer 1995
17May99
Who murdered Volodymyr Katelnytsky?
July 7-8, 1997
01Jul99
Who murdered Borys Derevyanko?
August 11, 1997
As the conclusion of your 23Oct94 60 Minutes story, The Ugly Face of Freedom, was that
Ukraine is a place in which Ukrainians practice violence against Jews, it is highly
relevant that Borys Derevyanko is Ukrainian and Eduard Hurvits is Jewish. You went to
Ukraine looking for evidence of Ukrainians harming Jews, you failed to find such
evidence, but you broadcast your conclusion anyway. The true story that you would not
broadcast, and that was readily documentable, is that Ukraine is a place in which Jews
harm Ukrainians. The plainest moral to be drawn from the Derevyanko-Hurvits story is
that when a muckraking Ukrainian editor takes on a corrupt Jewish politician, the
Ukrainian editor ends up dead. That is the reality of Ukraine. It was the reality of
Ukraine when you visited it in 1994, it was the reality of Ukraine before 1994, and it
has been the reality of Ukraine since 1994.
As in earlier letters, I fault you for not reporting such incidents as are in the above
table that took place before 1994, and I fault you for precipitating such incidents that
took place after 1994. Thus, to the blood that is already on your hands, I add the
blood of Borys Derevyanko. You had the opportunity in your 1994 broadcast to come out
on the side of the victims against the butchers, but you preferred to side with the
butchers against the victims, and Borys Derevyanko has been one of the casualties of
your decision.
Lubomyr Prytulak
cc: Yaakov Bleich, Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney,
Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace, Simon Wiesenthal.
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 2082 hits since 04Jul99
Morley Safer Letter 13 04Jul99 The Wiesenthal-Safer Calumny
Thus, it is possible that you contributed to Maksym Tsarenko losing his hands, and to
Volodymyr Katelnytsky together with his mother, and Borys Derevyanko, losing their
lives.
Additional information on the Lviv massacre can be found in Alfred M. de Zayas, The
Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945.
July 4, 1999
Morley Safer
60 Minutes, CBS Television
51 W 52nd Street
New York, NY
USA 10019
Morley Safer:
You Broadcast to 30 Million 60 Minutes
Viewers that in the Days Prior to German
Occupation, Ukrainians Killed Jews
In your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom, you joined with
Simon Wiesenthal in charging that in the days preceding the arrival of German forces
in June 1941, Lviv Ukrainians killed thousands of Jews:
SAFER: He [Simon Wiesenthal] remembers that even before the
Germans arrived, Ukrainian police went on a 3-day killing spree.
WIESENTHAL: And in this 3 days in Lvov alone between 5 and 6
thousand Jews was killed.
[...]
SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian
militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.
Some 60 Minutes viewers may have been struck by the observation that while the 60
Minutes expert witness - Simon Wiesenthal - claimed that the number of Jews killed
was "between 5 and 6 thousand" in three days, you - supposedly the neutral
interviewer - chose to reduce the number killed to "3,000" and the duration of the
killing to two days - but without informing the viewer on what grounds you did so.
One wonders what reason you would have had for undermining the testimony of your
chief - and only - witness. One wonders what superior authority you discovered for
your revised statistic, and why you did not bring this superior authority forward to
testify in front of the CBS cameras instead of Simon Wiesenthal whose testimony you
apparently distrusted and chose to contradict. And one wonders that you could have
such low regard for the intelligence of 60 Minutes viewers that you would broadcast
discrepant accounts without explaining the discrepancy.
However, I Can't Find Anyone Else
Substantiating the Wiesenthal-Safer
Pre-German Lviv Pogrom
In my reading, I have yet to come across a single account which supports the
Wiesenthal-Safer claim of anywhere from 3,000 Jews killed in 2 days to 5,000-6,000
Jews killed in 3 days in Lviv during the pre-German interval. Had the
Wiesenthal-Safer pogrom taken place, then it would have been one of the biggest
pogroms of the war, and possibly the very biggest, and thus obligatory to describe
in every history of the Holocaust, if not in every history of the Second World War.
What I found, in contrast, was statements contradicting the possibility of the
Wiesenthal-Safer pogrom, most notably the following three made by Raul Hilberg:
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 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)
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)
Fearing that substantiation for the Wiesenthal-Safer Lviv pogrom did exist somewhere
and that I had merely overlooked it, I made enquiry to leading Holocaust historian,
Raul Hilberg, on 15Sep97. Professor Hilberg was good enough in his reply of 15Dec97
to outline for me instances that he knew of anti-Jewish activity conducted in that
area at that time, and none of these instances gave credence to the Wiesenthal-Safer
Lviv pogrom.
Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence that the Wiesenthal-Safer Lviv pogrom was
a fabrication is unearthed upon trying to substantiate it in Simon Wiesenthal's own
writing. In one place, Simon Wiesenthal has the anti-Jewish activity postdating the
arrival of the Germans, and mentions neither the number of fatalities nor the
duration:
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)
And later in the same account, Simon Wiesenthal does mention a Lviv pogrom of three
day's duration, but again without mentioning the number of fatalities, and again
unambiguously placing 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)
Also, whereas on your 60 Minutes broadcast you gave the impression that Simon
Wiesenthal was making his appearance on 60 Minutes in the role of an eyewitness to
the Wiesenthal-Safer Lviv Pogrom, or at least as a researcher who had documented it,
yet in the quotation immediately above, Simon Wiesenthal's use of "It is said that"
gives the contrasting impression that he is no more than passing along a rumor
concerning events that he has neither witnessed nor verified.
In conclusion, the Wiesenthal-Safer story of a massive pre-German Lviv pogrom is not
supported in historical writing, and is even contradicted by other testimony, some