ROMAN SHUKHEVYCH, THE JEWS OF UKRAINE AND THE MGB USSR
From previus issue
Alik Gomelsky
Shukhevych Addendum
The cause of the Lviv pogrom in early 1941 was the mass killings of inmates in the prisons of Lviv, which were carried out by the NKVD prior to the Red Army’s retreat from the city. Einsatzgruppe С opened the city jails to discover the consequences of NKVD brutality. The Nazis forced Lviv Jews to drag out the bodies of the executed prisoners. The victims’ bodies were laid out for inspection, so that relatives could identify and bury their loved ones. The Nazis accused the Jews of these crimes, and conducted masterful agitation amidst the masses, provoking them to commit violent actions against the city’s Jewish population. Nazi propaganda declared that the pogrom was an act of “sacred vengeance” on the part of Ukrainians for the crimes of the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.”
During the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946) it was determined that the reign of terror in Lviv was carried out by a German SD operative group that entered the city shortly after Nachtigall’s arrival (forward units of the battalion entered Lviv on the morning of 29 June 1941, and immediately took control of several targets, including the radio station). The trial established that subunits of Einsatzgruppe C, particularly Einsatzkommando 5 and 6 as well as Sonderkommando 4b, took part in the destruction of the Lviv Jews. It must be clarified that, contrary to popular belief, the composition of Einsatzgruppen was exclusively Aryan, in other words, there were no Ukrainians at all in them. The perpetrators of these crimes testified that the shootings of the Jews were carried out on the Führer’s orders and were presented to the public as an act of vengeance for the killings of Poles and Ukrainians in Lviv by the Soviet authorities between 1939 and 1941.
There are also two very important historical aspects that are ignored by some historians and propagandists. The first of these: According to declassified archives, there was a substantial number of Jewish political prisoners in NKVD prisons. When I perused the lists of political prisoners who were shot in Lviv Prison No. 1 (Lonsky Prison), out of 706 names I discovered 50 whose patronymics and surnames leave no doubt that their background was Jewish. There were also descendants of mixed families or those who were registered under Russified names or surnames.
The second aspect concerns the fact that the Nazis ordered the publication of the nationalities of the Poles and Ukrainians who were killed in such prisons but identified Jews under the category “nationality unknown.” This was done because the Nazis wanted to turn the population against the Jews, and they did not want it to become known that the communists were killing Jewish intellectuals as well as Ukrainians and Poles.
The attempt of some researchers to lay the blame for the Lviv pogrom on the OUN(B) is based on the accusations that this organization had a totalitarian ideology and was anti-Semitic. Efforts to uncover concrete proof of its guilt have encountered reasoned criticism.
The programmatic documents of the OUN(B) that were drawn up at the Second Grand Assembly of this organization in April 1941 reveal the following prediction: “The anti-Jewish moods of the Ukrainian masses will be exploited in order to distract their attention from the actual perpetrator of the troubles and so that, at the moment of disruption, Ukrainians will be aimed at instigating pogroms against the Jews.”
According to the testimony of Kost Pankivsky (a member of Yaroslav Stetsko’s government, formed on 30 June 1941) a mob of pogromists in Lviv, comprised of the urban riffraff, some of whom had donned blue-and-yellow armbands and tried to speak Ukrainian, attacked the members of the Ukrainian administration, including Jews and Poles. It is neither an exception nor make-believe that Jews supported the independence of Ukraine. As German archival documents attest, during the occupation the OUN(B) supplied false documents to Jews who were connected to the organization. The fact that Yad Vashem has officially recognized as Righteous Among the Nations at least two leading members of the OUN—Olena Viter (testimony 421.1 for 1976) and Fedir Vovk (testimony 8152 for 1998) is very revealing.
Alik Gomelsky, is a writer, member of the Canadian Authors Association, historical researcher, founder of Jewish-Ukrainian International Association, expert on Jewish-Ukrainian relations in the twentieth century, essayist, lecturer, blogger, and consultant.
