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genetically programmed to be worse anti-Semites than the Nazis (Mr. Morley's position), or
whether it was just Ukrainian police units that deserve this description (Mr. Wiesenthal's
position). Now to balance this image of unrelieved Ukrainian anti-Semitism, Mr. Wiesenthal
could have mentioned that on numerous occasions Ukrainians risked their lives, perhaps even gave
their lives, to save his (Mr. Wiesenthal's) life - and not only civilians, but the very same
Ukrainian police auxiliaries whom both Mr. Safer and Mr. Wiesenthal agree were uniformly
sub-human brutes. Here, for example, is Mr. Wiesenthal's own story (as told to Peter Michael
Lingens) concerning a member of a Ukrainian police auxiliary who is identified by the Ukrainian
surname "Bodnar." The story is that Mr. Wiesenthal is about to be executed, but:
The shooting stopped. Ten yards from Wiesenthal.
The next thing he remembers was a brilliant cone of light and behind it a
Polish voice: "But Mr. Wiesenthal, what are you doing here?" Wiesenthal
recognized a foreman he used to know, by the name of Bodnar. He was wearing
civilian clothes with the armband of a Ukrainian police auxiliary. "I've got
to get you out of here tonight."
Bodnar told the [other] Ukrainians that among the captured Jews he had
discovered a Soviet spy and that he was taking him to the district police
commissar. In actual fact he took Wiesenthal back to his own flat, on the
grounds that it was unlikely to be searched so soon again. This was the first
time Wiesenthal survived. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice
Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)
Bodnar must have known that the punishment for saving a Jew from execution and then helping him
escape would be death. And how could he get away with it? In fact, we might ask Mr. Wiesenthal
whether Bodnar did get away with it, or whether he paid for it with his life, for as the
escapees were tiptoeing out, they were stopped, they offered their fabricated story, and then:
The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar's face and said:
"Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like,
then later we'll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver
them [Wiesenthal along with a fellow prisoner]." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal
File, 1993, p. 37)
These passages invite several pertinent conclusions. First, we see a Ukrainian police auxiliary
having his face slapped by a German sergeant, which serves to remind us that Ukraine is under
occupation, to show us who is really in charge, to suggest that the German attitude toward
Ukrainians is one of contempt and that the expression of this contempt is unrestrained. We see
also that Bodnar's flat is subject to searches, indicating that although he is a participant in
the anti-Jewish actions, he is a distrusted participant, and a participant who might feel
intimidated by the hostile scrutiny of the occupying Nazis. But most important of all, we see
that the German sergeant is waiting for Bodnar to report back. Alan Levy writes that "Bodnar
was ... concerned ... that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners" (p.
37). If Bodnar reports back with the news that Wiesenthal and the other prisoner escaped, then
how might Bodnar expect the face-slapping German sergeant to respond? For Bodnar at this point
in the story to actually allow Wiesenthal and the other prisoner to escape is heroic, it is
self-sacrificing, it is suicidal. And yet Bodnar does go ahead and effect Wiesenthal's escape,
probably never imagining that to Wiesenthal in later years this will become an event unworthy of
notice during Wiesenthal's blanket condemnation of Ukrainians.
And so these three things - the heroic actions of Lviv's Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the
self-sacrificing intervention of the Ukrainian police official, Bodnar, in saving Mr.
Wiesenthal's own life, and the existence of numerous other instances of Ukrainians saving Jews
these are things that were highly pertinent to the 60 Minutes broadcast, and they are things
that would have begun to transform the broadcast from a twisted message of hate to balanced
reporting, but they are things that were deliberately omitted. It is difficult to imagine any
motive for this omission other than the preservation of the stereotype of uniform Ukrainian
brutishness.
Following the writing of the above section on the topic of Ukrainians saving Jews, a flood of
similar material - actually more striking than similar - has come to my attention, far too great
a volume to integrate into the present paper. Therefore, I merely take this opportunity to
present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is
evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest
number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like
Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr
Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans
of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the
Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are
not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the
present paper seems undesirable.
& CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?
Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those
mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told
the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of
the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to
eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it
is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the
artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the
deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western
Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the
Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:
The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.
The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In
the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were
annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS
special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy
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
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