Controversy surrounding the Lviv pogroms of 1941

The Lviv pogroms of June and July 1941 took the lives of an estimated number of between 4,000–9,000 people, many of whom were Polish Jews murdered in Lviv. Some confusion has arisen from the conflation of separate, but closely related atrocities carried out in just one-month span during the German offensive. The first one was the massacre by the Soviet Security forces (NKVD) of an estimated 4,000 political prisoners (and class enemies) inside the NKVD prisons in Lviv (some of them Jewish) immediately prior to the Soviet evacuation. The second one was the anti-Jewish pogrom by the civilian population encouraged by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in which 4,000 Jews were killed in the streets immediately before and after the takeover of Lviv by the German forces. The third massacre (thus the second one against the Polish Jews within days) was committed by the newly arrived Einsatzgruppe C under the guise of retaliation for the NKVD killings, whereby some 2,500 to 3,000 Jews were herded into a stadium and than taken by lorries to a remote execution site at Janowska. The antisemitic killing spree culminated before the end of July in the so-called "Petlura Days" massacre of more than 2,000 more Jews by the Ukrainian nationalists under the watchful eye of the Nazi administration.

Controversy exists regarding the exact dates in which these atrocities took place, the numbers affected, and the sources of information. The confusion is amplified by the political agenda of parties involved including national viewpoints in a variety of sources as to the alleged involvement of prominent political and historic figures and groups in the massacre, notably Theodor Oberländer, Roman Shukhevych and the Nachtigall Battalion in the Lviv civilian massacres.

Background

Prior to 1939, the current Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, or Polish: Lwów, was located in the south-eastern part of the Second Polish Republic. It was an urban enclave with the Polish-speaking majority surrounded by a predominantly Ukrainian and Rusyn rural population. Elements of ethnic violence were already present in the region for at least a decade prior to the Soviet invasion of Poland. On 12 July 1930, activists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) helped by UVO began the so-called sabotage action, during which Polish estates were burned, roads, rail lines and telephone connections were destroyed. The OUN used terrorism and sabotage in order to force the Polish government into actions that would cause the more moderate Ukrainian politicians ready to negotiate with the Polish state to lose support. OUN directed its violence not only against the Poles, but also against Jews and other Ukrainians who wished for a peaceful resolution to the Polish – Ukrainian conflict.

There were 110,000 Jews living in Lviv prior to World War II. The Polish population of the city numbered 131,000 and the Ukrainian population numbered 13,000 according to local source associated with OUN. The Polish census of 1931 (see originals) gives different numbers. According to the census, among the 312,231 citizens of Lwów the Poles numbered 198,212 (63.5%) of the total, with Jews numbering 75,316 (24.1% both Yiddish and Hebrew); the Ukrainians numbered 24,245 and the Rusyns 10,892 (combined at 11.3%).

In general terms, over 3 million Jews lived in the Polish Republic before World War II. An estimated 20 percent of world Jewry belonged in Poland (in 1887, it was an estimated at 30%), many of them in the former Austrian crown-land of Galicia after the military partitions of Poland in 1772–1795. Eastern Galicia is where the Hasidic movement was founded, Yiddish literature flowered, and a wealth of Jewish historic thought, writers, artists and scientists had their birth.

On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland as previously agreed to in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany and took over 52.1% of Polish territory. Eastern Galicia was annexed and incorporated into Soviet Ukraine in the atmosphere of terror. Under the new Soviet administration, of the 7,000 Polish schools in 1939, only 984 remained in 1940. The number of Ukrainian schools in the region soon after annexation grew from 371 to 5,536 and Jewish schools from 23 to 103. All that changed was the language of instruction, with the actual net loss of about 1,000 schools in short order. Already since the rebirth of Poland the Jewish population of Lwów was involved primarily in trade and professions.

Investigation and the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46)

Immediately after World War II, the Soviet Union began examining the German mass murder of civilians perpetrated in the summer of 1941 specifically in the Distrikt Galizien and in Reichskommissariat Ukraine because both regions remained part of the Soviet Ukraine after Europe's postwar reorganization. The Soviets formed a special commission to examine the crimes (only the German crimes) and to name the culprits. The Extraordinary State Commission published its findings in Kyiv in 1945 and delivered them to Nuremberg. According to the report by "Extraordinary State Commission on Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Territory of the Lvov Region", even before the German seizure of Lviv on 30 July 1941, the Gestapo detachments were preparing lists of the most prominent representatives of the intelligentsia who were to be annihilated. The mass arrests and executions began immediately after the takeover of Lviv. The Soviet Chief Prosecutor Roman Rudenko stated that the murder of Soviet [sic] citizens was not done by separate bandit groups of German officers and soldiers, but "according to organized plans" by the German army, the police and the SS.

Meanwhile, the German SD documents introduced by the prosecution in the principal trial at Nuremberg and later at the American trial of SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf (Nuremberg Trial No. 9) show that the civilian population of the city participated in the abuses in the presence of Sicherheitsdienst; for instance, an SD report informed that: "the population rounded up some 1,000 Jews and drove them to the prison that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht ... The Lvov prisons were full with the corpses of murdered Ukrainians ... between 3,000 and 4,000. Reliable information also indicates – stated the report – that some 20,000 Ukrainians, of whom at least 80 percent belong to the intelligentsia, were deported to inner Russia. Similar conditions were observed in the neighboring towns, e.g., Dobromil, Sambor, and vicinity ... As reprisal for these atrocities 7,000 Jews were picked up and shot" (dated 31 July 1941).

Book by Albert Norden (1959)

In 1959 the East German professor Albert Norden in his sensational Braunbuch exposé (translated into 10 languages) alleged that the killings in Lviv perpetrated in part by members of the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion, remain linked to an active minister in the West German government, Theodor Oberländer. A committee was formed in East Berlin to look into his allegations concerning the possible participation of Oberländer, a former German officer attached to the Battalion, in the atrocities in Lviv. According to Українська правда, of the 19 witnesses who testified against him, only three had ever been to Lviv where the atrocities were to have taken place, and all three had been there only in transit. Nevertheless the East German court found him guilty and sentenced Oberländer in absentia to life imprisonment. The London AJR paper reported that he was sentenced to death should he ever step on East German territory.

File:Oberlander1.jpg

Ukrainian document on the action against Theodor Oberländer and Nachtigall Battalion, 1959.

Another court investigation was launched in West Germany. Among the forthcoming new documents were statements by the former members of the Nachtigall Battalion from the Soviet Union, translated and forwarded in April 1960 to Ludwigsburg. The indictment stated that the Nachtigall Battalion killed Jews and Poles in Lviv, Zolochiv, Sataniv, Yuzvyn (Yuzvin, now Nekrasovo), Mykhalpol (spelled Mihalpol, also Mihampol) and on the night of 3–4 July they shot hundreds of Polish intellectuals. The West German courts examined the documents. According to Українська правда, the examiners came to the conclusion that most of the members of the Nachtigall Battalion knew about the terrible killings done by the NKVD, and that among the victims were members of the families of a number of the soldiers. The NKVD had murdered over 5,000 prisoners in jails before the German occupation. Shukhevych's younger brother was one of those killed. Some 232 witnesses testified and, according to Українська правда, Oberländer was cleared of any wrongdoing along with the others.

At the same time Soviet sources, in order to cover up their participation in the murder of thousands of Ukrainian and Polish civilians in Lviv, also spread a rumor that Oberlander had ordered the murder of Stepan Bandera, which was disproved when Bandera's Soviet assassin, Bohdan Stashynsky, defected to the West and confessed.

Book by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (1979)

In his book The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle), the Cuban-American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, known for defending the rights of German expellees from Eastern Europe, wrote about the German discovery of the prison massacres in the following way.

In the early hours of 30 June 1941 the Polish-Ukrainian city of Lvov was occupied by the 1st Mountain Division of the German 49th Army Corps. There was little resistance, since Soviet troops had already abandoned the area. The intelligence section of the 49th Army Corps observed in its first report, dated that same day: According to the account of Major Heinz, commander of a battalion of Regiment 800, thousands of brutally murdered persons were found in the Lvov prisons. The 1st and 4th Mountain Divisions are hereby ordered to assign journalists and photographers to cover these atrocities. The chief military judge of the Corps and the liaison officer of the Foreign Office with the High Command of the 17th Army have been sent to Lvov to carry out in-depth investigations. — de Zayas

According to de Zayas, on 7 July 1941 the Ukrainian Red Cross delivered an appeal to the German city commander meant for the Swiss, Swedish, and Dutch Red Cross societies, urging them to take measures to protect the lives of people who were endangered so that they may still be saved. The appeal did not specify who the endangered people were.

In his book, Zayas attempted to refute the position of Wiesenthal and Safer by asserting that the anti-Jewish pogroms by civilians "were of comparatively small scale." He wrote that the pogroms were committed only in retaliation for the massacres of Ukrainians and Poles "by the Jewish-dominated NKVD" according to him. Zayas alleged that these massacres were carried out by civilians against the will of Nazi administration which came to the rescue of Jews from the local civilian population. He wrote that "the German military authorities had issued orders to prevent violence against the Jewish population ... He quoted General Egbert Picker who said: "the Ukrainian population immediately started to drag the Jews out of their homes and to abuse them in the streets ... The provisional commander of Lvov ... succeeded in stopping [these excesses]." Zayas quoted also General Egbert Picker who was told by Ludwig Kübler that "he had ordered such acts of violence by the civilian population against Jewish persons to be immediately stopped". However, almost all claims made by de Zayas with regard to the Nazi pro-Jewish stance are contradicted directly by the so-called Katzmann Report written by SS-Gruppenführer Fritz Katzmann, one of the most prolific mass murderers in the SS responsible for the liquidation of the Lwów Ghetto. Katzmann was the Higher SS and Police Leader of Distrikt Galizien since August 1941 and conducted numerous massacres and most deportations himself.

According to de Zayas, in the fall of 1959, the Soviet Ukrainian press unfairly accused German Nazis, including the Adenauer cabinet minister Theodor Oberländer, of participating in these murders in Lviv. Oberländer was an advising officer of the Nachtigall Battalion.

On 5 September 1959, the Radianska Ukraina newspaper wrote: "Eighteen years ago the fascists committed a horrendous crime in Lviv on the night of 29–30 June 1941. On the basis of prepared lists, the Hitlerites arrested hundreds of Communists, Communist youth, and non-party members and murdered them in brutal fashion in the courtyard of the Samarstinov Prison." These accusations were picked up by the Western press and eventually led to Oberländer's resignation. An investigation by the district attorney's office in Bonn completely cleared Oberländer of these allegations.

According to de Zayas, an international commission was set up at The Hague in the Netherlands to carry out independent investigations. The members were four former anti-Hitler activists, Norwegian lawyer Hans Cappelen, former Danish foreign minister and president of the Danish parliament Ole Bjørn Kraft, Dutch socialist Karel van Staal, Belgian law professor Flor Peeters, and Swiss jurist and member of parliament Kurt Scoch. Following its interrogation of a number of Ukrainian witnesses between November 1959 and March 1960, the commission concluded:"After four months of inquiries and the evaluation of 232 statements by witnesses from all circles involved, it can be established that the accusations against the Battalion Nachtigall and against the then Lieutenant and currently Federal Minister Oberländer have no foundation in fact."

Veterans of the group testified that the Nachtigall Battalion was attached to the Wehrmacht and not to any SS formation and that during the 4 days in which the pogroms are claimed to have taken place (30 June to 3 July), they were relaxing and waiting for next the military operation under Wehrmacht command.

Book by Tadeusz Piotrowski (1998)

In his book Poland's Holocaust, Polish-American sociologist and World War II historian Tadeusz Piotrowski provided eyewitness accounts of the Lviv massacres, and quoted Professor Czesław Łuczak's claim that Nachtigall regiment took part in the murder of Polish and Jewish populace of Lwów before moving on to Złoczów, Tarnopol, Satanów, Proskurov and Vinnitsa. Local eyewitnesses: A. Rzepicki and Wanda Ossowska (pl) saw Ukrainian soldiers, believed to come from Nachtigall, rounding up Jews (covered in blood) and making them carry the bodies of Ukrainians. Piotrowski quoted the 1989 study by Professor Włodzimierz Bonusiak (pl) who wrote the following.

The arrests and murders were carried out by four different formations. They were: the Ukrainian police, "Nachtigall", Feldgestapo, and Einsatzkommando.... On the evening of July 3, 1941 around 10:00 p.m., groups consisting of officers and non-commissioned officers of the Gestapo and field gendarmerie together with soldiers from the Nachtigall battalion moved on to the various streets of Lwów in order to arrest the Polish intellectuals on the basis of lists provided. — Bonusiak, Kto zabił profesorów lwowskich, KAW, 1989.

On May 2, 1966, the Hamburg Procurator von Belov wrote: "Findings inside and outside the country produced the following conclusions. ... The Ukrainian militia and the 'Ukrainian Liberation Army' took part in these outrages which also involved arbitrary killings." According to Piotrowski, both Albert Norden and Werner Brockdorff concur that between 1–7 July 1941 Nachtigall and OUN-B under Mykola Lebed killed 3,000 Jews and Poles in the city: "Anyone who fell into their hands during these hours, lost his life."

Book by Sergei Chuyev (2004)

Russian historian Sergei Chuyev in his book on the Ukrainian Legion SS Galicia based on Russian archival sources wrote about the German takeover of Lviv in the following way.

On June 30 in Lviv the German administration started mass repressions. The commander of the Einzatzgruppen C Dr. Rasch had attributed the death of those incarcerated in the Lviv jails to the "Jews from the NKVD," which became the spark for the terror against the Jews and Poles of Lviv. In the bloody murder of the Jews, the Einsatzgruppen under the command of brigadeerfuhrer SS Karl Eberhard Schenhardt took prominence. The sections of this group under the command of H. Kruger and Walter Kutschmann on July 4 murdered 23 Polish professors and their families. On July 11, 2 more were killed, and later the former prime-minister of Poland, Professor Bartel. In the Autumn of 1941 a ghetto was formed in Lviv.

Chuyev also wrote about the atrocities by quoting others:

According to the Ukrainian historian Vitaly Maslovskiy, between July 1 and July 6, Nachtigall and Roland battalions exterminated nearly 3 thousand Soviet activists, as well as Polish and Jewish residents.

Chuyev quoted the full text of the Act of the Restoration of the Ukrainian State (Акт о восстановлении украинского государства), which was published in Lviv on 30 June 1941, which includes the following proclamation: "3. The Restored Ukrainian State will closely collaborate with the Nazi Reich, which is creating a New Order in Europe and the World, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, and helps the Ukrainian people liberate themselves from the Moscow occupation."

Accounts by Holocaust scholars

Holocaust scholars attribute the killing of Jews to Ukrainians under the direction of the Ukrainian nationalists. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust states: "In June–July 1941 it is estimated that over 4,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms in Lvov and other cities in Western Ukraine. The Nachtigall Battalion, under the command of Shukhevych, took part in these pogroms. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also states that the Nachtigall Battalion participated along with the Germans in pogroms where over 4,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv in July, 1941. Professor Himka from the University of Alberta states that evidence vindicates Nachtigall but that it also shows other OUN members engaged in the murder of Jews at that time.

On 6 December 2007, the then Chairman of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Tommy Lapid, stated in an interview with the radio network Deutsche Welle that the Yad Vashem has a dossier from both German and Soviet sources showing that the Nachtigall Battalion took part in the pogroms in Lviv in the summer of 1941. "Until now, the Ukrainian side has so far not asked us for these documents", said Lapid and invited both Ukrainian historians and President Yushchenko to study them together. He added that part of these documents has already been used in the writing of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in 1990.

Yushchenko's visit to Israel (2007)

In November 2007 the then President Viktor Yushchenko's visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Government minister Tommy Lapid approached him voicing his disapproval of awarding Roman Shukhevych with Ukraine's highest title of "Hero of Ukraine," stating that Shukhevych had taken part in the Lviv pogroms as commander of the Nachtigall Battalion. Yushchenko replied: "No archives today can confirm any action of a punitive nature, in which soldiers of the UPA and other similar organizations took part", and stated that he was confident about it. At a foreign policy forum in Jerusalem, Yushchenko defended the award of Hero of Ukraine given posthumously to Roman Shukhevych for his role in fighting for Ukraine's independence. Addressing the charges from Holocaust researchers that Nachtigall took part in anti-Jewish atrocities in Lviv in June–July 1941, Yushchenko replied: "I have materials, documents, saying that in the course of grander context of Ukrainian rebellion, Shukhevych signed a petition that prohibited massive persecutions (of civilians)." During Yushchenko 's visit to Israel, he and the Israeli President Shimon Peres agreed to form a joint Israeli-Ukrainian working group to study their common history, including Shukhevych's role in it.

On 12 December 2007, Yushchenko met with the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Avner Shalev, and announced formal contacts to develop a number of initiatives for the study of relationships between the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples particularly during the tragic years of World War II.

Commenting on the Israeli materials that he has not seen yet, Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Serhiychuk expressed his doubts in the seriousness of the documents mentioned by Lapid. "If there were such documents in Israel, particularly the ones passed on to them from the Soviet Union, they would have been published long ago, because the USSR was interested in compromising Shukhevych. If the materials were found in German archives they would also be known". Vladyslav Hrynevych, the researcher of the Ukrainian-Jewish relationship for the period of World War II and co-worker of the Institute of political and ethnopolitical research in the National Academy of Science in Ukraine, said: "All archives regarding this problem, which are in Israel, were copied form European sources, particularly from the USSR, and as a result we also have these documents". Lenta.ru titled its article that Israeli invited Ukrainian historians to research about Roman Shukhevych, although in the article itself there is no such information accept that Josef Lapid is awaiting the official invitation from the Ukrainian side. Stanislav Kulchytskyi, the deputy of the director of scientific research of the NASU Institute of history, said that there had been no invitation from the Israeli side to familiarize with their documents yet.

Ukrainian historian Vladyslav Hrynevych states that he cannot say anything definite concerning the documents that he has not seen yet, but hypothesised that there is a version regarding the shooting of the Lviv professors, of whom a number were Jewish; however Hrynevych has so far seen no evidence that this was committed by the Nachtigall Battalion. "We do not know if this was spontaneous single activity, or a planned act, and whether it was done according to the command of Roman Shukhevych. The latter is very doubtful. If such facts were true they would have been immediately documented by the Germans, who were interested in the pogroms and even provoked them".

Immediately after Yushchenko's visit to Israel, the Head of the Kyiv Chapter of the Ukrainian Memorial Society issued an open letter to the Ukrainian President to give the Security Services of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory the documents at Yad Vashem regarding Roman Shukhevych "to be reviewed and examined for falsification by Ukrainian criminalists so that insinuations and manipulations of community memory can be halted regarding this question".

On 2 March 2008, Yad Vashem informed the Ukrainian delegation that it held no dossier on Shukhevich, and was not in possession of any documents that could incriminate him in the Lviv massacres. Moreover, Yad Vashem stated that Tommy Lapid, former justice minister and one of Yad Vashem's trustees who originally made the allegation, was not am employee of the museum, and was not authorized to make such claims on museum's behalf.

Ukrainian Security Service

In February 2008, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) archive representative Oleksander Ishchuk showed declassified documents, which provided an objective basis to the claim that the actual leadership of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) (OUN) sought to avoid participating in violence against the civil population of Lviv between June 22 and September 1941, and provided no official orders to conduct pogroms.

In February 2006, the Ukrainian Memorial Society published on its website transcriptions and photo reproductions of original secret documents from the KGB files which pertained to the activities of the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion and various allegations made against it.

According to Ishchuk, the declassified documents of SBU indicate that on 4–7 July 1941, representatives of Gestapo, who arrived in Lviv, turned to the Ukrainian population inciting them to carry out an anti-Jewish pogrom. "The OUN leadership, having got to know about that, informed its members that it was a German provocation in order to compromise Ukrainians with massacres", the document reads. Television commentary from 2008 by the Ukrainian channel 5 of the release of the latest documents dealing with the Lviv civilian massacre is available online.

Announcements by Volodymyr Viatrovych (Ukraine)

On April 5, 2008, the Ukrainian newspaper "Den'" («День») published an article by the then director of the Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, Volodymyr Viatrovych titled "The end of the Legend about Nachtigall". Viatrovych wrote that on February 28, 2008 a government delegation from Ukraine led by the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory I. Yukhnovsky and by Viatrovych himself visited Yad Vashem to closer acquaint themselves with the Shukhevych archive. According to Viatrovych, two documents were made available by Dr. Haim Gertner, Director of Archives. One 7 pages and another 18 pages long. The first was a copy of the interrogation minutes of Luka Pavlyshyn who, according to Viatrovych, did not serve in the Nachtigall Battalion, by the KGB. According to Viatrovych, this document was well known as the basis for what he referred to as the "propaganda brochure published in 1960 to incriminate Oberlander". The second was the German translation of a deposition by Hryhory Melnyk, who according to Viatrovych, "had been trained by the KGB on 13 November 1959 and was given instructions to lie in court during the proceedings against Oberlander".

Viatrovych, held a press conference on 4 March 2008 at which he presented these documents along with his criticism of what he called "the Lapid announcement and the manner in which it was carried out by Joseph Lapid to discredit Roman Shukhevych". In Viatrovych's opinion, "all that was uncovered were distorted facts and false testimony which go against judicial principles and logic." Viatrovych also stated that the man, who had previously approached president Yushchenko - the former chairman of the Yad Vashem complex (Tommy Lapid) - was not an employee of the Yad Vashem archive.

In response, on 19 March 2008, Yad Vashem issued an official press release titled "Response to Misinformation Regarding Meeting Held Between Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister's Delegation and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem Last Month", which states that Avner Shalev, who replaced Joseph Lapid upon his illness as the Chairman of Yad Vashem, sent a letter to Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Ivan Vasyunik, "following misinformation from their meeting earlier this month that has been reported in Ukraine". According to Avner Shalev, this response expressed "disappointment with a most unfavorable and objectionable development that has been reported to us from Kiev", namely, as Avner Shalev stated, to a press conference "during which glaring and offensive inaccuracies regarding our institution and its supposed positions were belligerently expressed". He continued: "I object strenuously both to the misleading statements ascribed to Yad Vashem, as well as to the circumstances in which a guest whom we had welcomed cordially and genuinely now seeks, without any prior notice, to publicly misrepresent us. Academic research, conducted and published around the world, points to the support of, and intensive and widespread collaboration with, the German Nazi occupation of Poland and Ukraine, by Nachtigal and its commander at the time, Roman Shukeyvich.".

Regarding Viatrovych's statement that they had been told by Chaim Gertner that "no such a separate archive existed and that the documents were scattered throughout the complex", Gertner responded: "Furthermore, I most explicitly stated that Yad Vashem's Archives is not organized according to personal files, but rather organizes its close to 75 million pages of documentation according to archival collections, based on provenance. Among these documents is material from various sources related to Nachtigal's activities during World War II. During our meeting, my colleagues and I expressed our willingness to collate the material and to provide you with copies. We saw this meeting as the beginning of our dialogue, as originally envisioned by President Yuschenko, and not as the end."