incarcerated for major or minor offenses. Major massacres occurred in
Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners
died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia, where another 5000 perished.
Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and growing Soviet terror,
these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians' abhorrence of
the Soviets. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 461)
Right after the entry we were shown 2,400 dead bodies of Ukrainians
liquidated with a shot at the scruff of the neck at the city jail of
Lemberg [Lviv] by the Soviets prior to their marching off. (Hans Frank,
In the Face of the Gallows, p. 406)
In Lvov, several thousand prisoners had been held in three jails. When
the Germans arrived on 29 June, the city stank, and the prisons were
surrounded by terrified relatives. Unimaginable atrocities had
occurred inside. The prisons looked like abattoirs. It had taken the
NKVD a week to complete their gruesome task before they fled. (Gwyneth
Hughes and Simon Welfare, Red Empire: The Forbidden History of the
USSR, 1990, p. 133)
When the German attack came on 22 June the Soviets had no time to take
with them the people they had locked up. So they simply killed them.
Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating
Soviets. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 35)
The first question having been settled - I trust - to the satisfaction of all, we
turn now to the second question: Is there any ethnic group that might have been
particularly responsible for the killing? Well, if the slaughter was conducted by the
NKVD or was directed by the NKVD, then the question reduces to What was the ethnic
composition of the NKVD?
The evidence that I have come across points to the conclusion that the NKVD was
dominated by Jews. Here is one such piece of evidence. The speaker is Yoram Sheftel,
John Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, describing his visit to the Simferopol,
Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 - what Sheftel seems to be saying is that out of a
sample of some 30 members of the wartime NKVD, every last one was a Jew:
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)
Of course a 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)
The question that I would be interested in hearing your views on, then, Mr.
Wiesenthal, is whether the assertion you made on the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face
of Freedom of October 23, 1994 may have been diametrically opposite to the truth
specifically, that whereas you held out that during the interval prior to the
occupation of Lviv by German forces Ukrainians were slaughtering Jews by the thousands,
in reality during this same interval it may have been closer to the truth to say that
Jews were slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands.
Sincerely yours,
Lubomyr Prytulak
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 826 hits since 18Jan98
Wiesenthal Letter 21 Sep 14/97 Altered dates of death
September 14, 1997
Simon Wiesenthal
Jewish Documentation Center
Salztorgasse 6
1010 Vienna
Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthaclass="underline"
In connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, Morley
Safer (in his 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of October 23, 1994)
inserted into the pre-German interval two 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 your mother, and (2) the shooting of your mother-in-law:
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 bracketed in Mr. Safer's discourse by these two references happened
during that same pre-German interval. Specifically, Mr. Safer gives the distinct and
unmistakable impression that the pre-German anti-Jewish activities on the part of
Ukrainians cannot be doubted because among the events that occurred during these
activities were the arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law.
However, examining your biographies for confirmation of these two events - the
arrest of your mother and the shooting of your 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 Morley Safer seems to have advanced the date of arrest of your
mother as well as the shooting of your 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.
As this error appears to be Mr. Safer's and not your own, I do not ask you to
account for it. However, I do ask if you at any time subsequent to the 60 Minutes
broadcast became aware of Mr. Safer's error, and if so, if you as a result asked him to
issue a correction?
Also, if you are only now for the first time learning of Mr. Safer's error, I
wonder if you could tell me if you now intend to ask Mr. Safer to issue a correction?
Sincerely yours,
Lubomyr Prytulak
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 886 hits since 18Jan98
Wiesenthal Letter 23 Sep 23/97 The pious executioners
September 23, 1997
Simon Wiesenthal
Jewish Documentation Center
Salztorgasse 6
1010 Vienna
Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthaclass="underline"
I wonder if you are aware that during the German occupation of Lviv, the Greek
Catholic church, headed by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was courageous and outspoken
in defense of Jews? Here are four quotations which provide some details as to the role
played by Sheptytsky, and which demonstrate that this role is widely acknowledged:
There is little doubt as to the almost saintly role of Ukrainian
(Greek) Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky. Sheptytsky,
Archbishop of L'viv and head of the church, was widely known as being
sympathetic to the Jews. ... The elderly metropolitan wrote directly
to SS commander Heinrich Himmler in the winter of 1942 demanding an end
to the final solution and, equally important to him, an end to the use
of Ukrainian militia and police in anti-Jewish action. His letter
elicited a sharp rebuke, but Sheptytsky persisted even though the death
penalty was threatened to those who gave comfort to Jews. In November
1942 he issued a pastoral letter to be read in all churches under his
authority. It condemned murder. Although Jews were not specifically
mentioned, his intent was crystal clear.
We can never know how many Ukrainians were moved by Sheptytsky's
appeal. Certainly the church set an example. With Sheptytsky's tacit
approval, his church hid a number of Jews throughout western Ukraine,
150 Jews alone in and around his L'viv headquarters. Perhaps some of
his parishioners were among those brave and precious few "righteous
gentiles" who risked an automatic death penalty for themselves and
their families by harbouring a Jew under their roof.
The towering humanity of Sheptytsky remains an inspiration today.
(Harold Troper Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds, 1988, pp. 17-18)