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not uniquely German, but rather were universal; (2) they were demonstrating to the intimidated
Ukrainian population that Bolsheviks and Jews need no longer be feared and that they could be
attacked with impunity; and (3) they were taking a first step toward dragging a handful of
Ukrainians into complicitous guilt.
Bodies on the Ground
One photograph inserted into the middle of these "remnants of a film" was of bodies lying in
rows on the ground. Of course Morley Safer does not identify the photograph - he does not
attribute it to a source, he mentions no date or place. As the photograph is being shown, Mr.
Safer is saying that Simon Wiesenthal "remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian
police went on a three-day killing spree." The impression left in the viewer's mind, therefore,
is that these must be some of the 5,000 to 6,000 victims of that killing spree.
Three details of this photograph, however, suggest otherwise: (1) The bodies are shown lying in
snow, whereas the killing spree was supposed to have taken place in the three days before the
German occupation of Lviv on June 30, 1941. (2) The legs of one of the bodies are visible, and
these legs are skeletally thin, which suggests a famine victim and not the victim of a pogrom,
or else suggests that this is an exhumed corpse. If these are in reality famine victims, then
they are more likely to be Ukrainians than Jews. (3) Most of the shapes on the ground resemble
small heaps rather than bodies, which suggests that the photograph is one of exhumed remains
from some old mass grave - and we may reflect that in June 1941 (if that was when this
photograph was taken), the inhabitants of Ukraine's many mass graves were predominantly
Ukrainians and not Jews. Thus, there is a very real possibility that Morley Safer is using a
photograph of Ukrainians killed by Jews as evidence of Jews killed by Ukrainians.
The Wallowing Photograph
The last scene of this Nazi propaganda footage that was presented by Morley Safer has a
notorious history of being presented in various publications with wildly different
interpretations - of which Time Magazine's "Wallowing Photograph" fiasco of 22Feb93 is but one
instance. In fact, this photograph is taken from the wallowing-in-the-gutter German propaganda
film that we have been discussing above. Whereas Time magazine editors did not go so far as to
concede this, they were able to muster enough integrity to express ignorance and confusion, and
also to retract and to apologize:
Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to pin down exactly what
situation the photograph portrays. But there is enough confusion about it for
us to regret that our caption, in addition to misdating the picture, may well
have conveyed a false impression. (Time, April 19, 1993)
And yet this same notorious photograph has been recycled yet again by 60 Minutes and broadcast
as if it had unequivocal significance. Time admitted that it was wrong, Morley Safer cannot
escape having to do the same.
It is a curious incongruity that while professing to oppose Naziism, Morley Safer nevertheless
broadcasts a Nazi propaganda film and invites 60 Minutes' viewers to take it at face value. The
propaganda of one era is, half a century later, dredged up to become the propaganda of another
era, but with a switch from approval to disapproval - the Germans used the film to portray
Ukrainians as good anti-Semites, and so why shouldn't Mr. Safer use the same film to portray
Ukrainians as bad anti-Semites?
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
Collective Guilt
What was the rate of Ukrainian criminal collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World
War? I do not ask here for the rate of perfunctory and non-culpable collaboration - not, for
example, for a count which includes Ukrainian prisoners of war who, to save their lives, donned
German uniforms and then found themselves serving out the war as reluctant camp guards, which
have been more accurately referred to as "prisoner guards" because even while serving as guards,
such Ukrainians continued to be themselves prisoners. No, not that low level of culpability,
but rather an active collaboration palpably greater than would have been necessary for survival,
well beyond the minimum that would be offered by all but the few saints and martyrs among us
in short, collaboration of a magnitude that could plausibly lead to criminal prosecution. Let
us imagine several possibilities. As the population of Ukraine at the time was 36 million,
different collaboration rates give us a different number of collaborators:
Rate of Criminal Collaboration
Number of Criminal Collaborators
1/100,000
1/ 10,000
1/ 1,000
360
3,600
36,000
Were there 360 Ukrainians known to have criminally collaborated with the Nazis during World War
II? Perhaps there were, though I do not know of any such definitive list, and wonder if one
exists. However, 360 criminal collaborators only makes for one criminal collaborator out of
every 100,000 Ukrainians.
Could there have been 3,600 criminal collaborators? I doubt it, and I challenge anyone to come
up with a credible list this long. Note that I do not challenge someone to pull a number out of
the air equal to or exceeding 3,600 - likely there is more than one researcher at 60 Minutes who
would find such a task not difficult - but rather, I challenge someone to come up with a
documented list of names of Ukrainians who criminally participated in Nazi war crimes, where the
list includes a description of the crimes, their locations, their dates, and credible supportive
evidence. I repeat - this has not been done and cannot be done. And yet 3,600 certified
criminal collaborators would make for only one criminal collaborator out of every 10,000
Ukrainians.
And what about 36,000 criminal collaborators? The notion is preposterous. No documentation
exists to support such a fantastic claim. And yet 36,000 criminal collaborators would make for
only one criminal collaborator out of every 1,000 Ukrainians.
The middle figure - one criminal collaborator for every 10,000 Ukrainians - is possibly a wild
exaggeration, and would give us 3,600 criminal collaborators - more than enough to account for
all the stories of Ukrainian savagery, brutality, and sadism, even the ones that aren't true.
Such speculations as the above happen to coincide approximately with published estimates. For
example Professor Stefan Possony reports that "The records of Israel's War Crimes Investigations
Office indicate that throughout occupied Europe some 95,000 nazis and nazi collaborators were
directly connected with anti-Jewish measures, massacres, and deportations...." (The
Ukrainian-Jewish Problem, Plural Societies, Winter 1974). The middle column below contains the
rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column
contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail
to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the
extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any
research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is
it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated - we may wonder when Russians together
with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we
know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of
Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian
rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian,
Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity
to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is
low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of
Russians found themselves under German occupation.
Balts
Austrians
Russians and Byelorussians
Germans
Poles
Ukrainians
Western Europeans
20
10
8
6
4
3
0.5
11,000
8,500
9,000
45,000
7,500
11,000
3,000
______
95,000
The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of
3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what
constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained
too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence
criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal
prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or
three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.
And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by
something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three
Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be
brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this
primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One
individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,
it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How
refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many
generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of
course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no
more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally
useful, it is never shelved.
Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal
collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish
people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today
bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why
stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a
Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face
of Freedom."
Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand
people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews:
they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi
policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary
police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death,
collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:
The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called,
furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone
the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men
strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310)
Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of
Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to
find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving
one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also
excelled?
But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate
the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish
police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos:
The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew
whether for life or death - be exclusively left up to the decisions of the
"councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a
general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the
individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the
enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish
police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in
accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through
moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims
Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 119-120,
emphasis added)
In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the
administrative tasks and policing required by the Nazis was placed in Jewish hands, that Jewish
collaborators were ubiquitous, and that it was Jewish collaborators who rendered the Jewish
Holocaust feasible and who stood as obstacles in the path of Jewish resistance:
Falsification of the Holocaust
Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir,
Jerusalem.
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