a Division Of course the members of any military unit will be required to swear oaths of obedience to the Commander-in-Chief. No fighting force can function without such an oath, and the members of the Galicia Division were unable to avoid swearing one. However, compare the differences in the German SS oath and the Ukrainian Waffen-SS oath: German SS Oath "I swear to you Adolf Hitler, as Leader and Chancellor of the Reich, loyalty and valor. I vow to you and all those you place over me obedience until death, so help me God." Ukrainian Waffen-SS Oath "I swear by God this holy oath, that in the struggle against Bolshevism I will give the Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces, Adolf Hitler, absolute obedience, and if it be his will, as a fearless soldier, I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath." (Richard Landwehr, Fighting for Freedom: The Ukrainian Volunteer Division of the Waffen-SS, Bibliophile Legion Books, Silver Spring, Maryland, 1985, p. 45) Here are three revealing differences between the above oaths: (1) The German SS oath swears to Adolf Hitler who happens to be leader, whereas the Ukrainian Waffen-SS oath swears to the leader who happens to be Adolf Hitler. (2) The German SS oath does not restrict the Germans to any limited role, but the Ukrainian Waffen-SS oath does restrict the Ukrainian role to the "struggle against Bolshevism." (3) In the words "obedience until death," the German SS oath appears to imply obedience for the rest of one's life, whereas the Ukrainian Waffen-SS oath limits the duration of the obedience to the period of service "as a fearless soldier." These are not insignificant differences - they constitute an affirmation that the Ukrainians had their own goals, and that these overlapped with German goals only on the matter of opposing the Soviet re-occupation of Ukraine. For the Ukrainians to have won an even greater variance from the fundamental German SS oath would have been for the Germans to accept into their armed forces members who were openly declaring recalcitrance and insubordination. The Ukrainian motivation for permitting the formation of the Galicia Division was threefold: (1) the existence of the division would serve to improve German treatment of Ukrainians in the occupied territories, (2) the Division would form the nucleus of a national army which might promote Ukrainian aspirations to statehood, and (3) the Division would be thrown into the fight to oppose the Soviet re-occupation of Ukraine. Even though both Canada and the U.S. have Nazi-hunting units within their respective Justice Departments, not a single member of the Division has ever been convicted of any war crime and none has ever been charged. The absence of evidence of any wrongdoing not only of the Division as a whole, but also of any member of the Division, during his membership in the Division or before or after, is widely recognized. Judge Jules Deschenes, heading Canada's Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, concluded that: The members of the Galicia Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, neither in 1950 when they were first preferred, nor in 1984 when they were renewed, nor before this Commission. ... In the absence of evidence of participation in or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution. (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 12) Judge Deschenes cites a 1947 report of a British Screening Commission which was filed just prior to the Galicia Division being moved from Italy to Britain (note that these are the words of the 1947 British Screening Commission, not of Judge Deschenes): They probably were not, and certainly do not now seem to be at heart pro-German, and the fact that they did give aid and comfort to the Germans can fairly be considered to have been incidental and not fundamental. (in Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 253) A 1950 British Foreign Office report to the Canadian Department of External Affairs concerning the Galicia Division was also cited by Judge Deschenes (note that these are the words of the 1950 British Foreign Office, not of Judge Deschenes): While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity. Their behaviour since they came to this country has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology. ... From the reports of the special mission set up by the War Office to screen these men, it seems clear that they volunteered to fight against the Red Army from nationalistic motives which were given greater impetus by the behaviour of the Soviet authorities during their earlier occupation of the Western Ukraine after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Although Communist propaganda has constantly attempted to depict these, like so many other refugees, as "quislings" and "war criminals" it is interesting to note that no specific charges of war crimes have been made by the Soviet or any other Government against any members of this group. (in Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 252) Judge Deschenes concludes: It is an acknowledged fact that the members of the Division were volunteers who had enlisted in the spring and summer of 1943, essentially to combat the "Bolsheviks"; indeed, they were never used against Western allies. (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 255) Although as we have just seen "no specific charges of war crimes have been made by the Soviet or any other Government against any members of this group," Mr. Safer ventures to do what no one has done before - where angels fear to tread, Mr. Safer rushes in to lay a specific crime at the feet of the Galicia Division: SAFER: Thousands of Ukrainians joined the SS and marched off to fight for Naziism. In the process, they helped round up Lvov's Jews, helped march more than 140,000 of them to extinction - virtually every Jew in Lvov. However, the rounding up of Lviv's Jews was begun in 1941 and was largely completed in 1942, so that by 1943 when the Galicia Division was formed, there were not 140,000 Jews left in Lviv to round up. In truth, the Galicia Division never participated in the rounding up of Jews in Lviv or anywhere else. To repeat: the Galicia Division was a combat unit. More particularly, the Galicia Division saw action on only a single occasion - in facing the Soviets in the Battle of Brody in July 1944. Talk of the Galicia Division Induces Paralysis of the Comparative Function The broad topic of "Paralysis of the Comparative Function" is discussed within its own larger section below, but such a paralysis becomes evident in other places throughout this essay, as for example in discussions of the Galicia Division. In such discussions, the comparison - the elementary and obvious comparison - that is not made is that between the Ukrainian contribution to German armed forces of Waffen SS troops and the similar contribution made by other peoples. Below, I reproduce a quote from an interview by Slavko Nowytski of Professor Norman Davies, historian at the University of London, and author of the recent Europe: A History, published by Oxford University Press: In discussing the question of collaborating with Germany Prof. Davies noted that, "A large number of the volunteers for the Waffen SS came from Western Europe. The nation which supplied it the largest number of divisions was the Netherlands [four]. There were two Belgian divisions, there was a French Waffen SS. To my mind, it's rather surprising that Ukraine, which is a much larger country [than the Netherlands or Belgium] supplied only one Waffen SS Division.... It's surprising that there were so few Ukrainians [in the German Army]. Many people don't know, for example, that there were far more Russians fighting alongside the Wehrmacht or in the various German armies than there were Ukrainians.... Thanks to Soviet propaganda, the Russian contribution to the Nazi war effort has been forgotten, whereas the Ukrainian contribution has been remembered, I think, too strongly." (Andrew Gregorovich, Forum, No. 95, Spring, 1997, p. 34) And so the information in the above quotation leads to several questions: (1) As the population of The Netherlands is small, and as The Netherlands contributed the largest number of Waffen SS divisions, this gives The Netherlands the largest per capita contribution to the Waffen SS of any country. Would Mr. Safer conclude from this that the people of The Netherlands are the most anti-Semitic in the world? And following the same line of reasoning, would he conclude that the people of Belgium are the next most anti-Semitic? And also that as the population of France is approximately equal to the population of Ukraine, and as each of these contributed one Waffen SS division, that the French are approximately as anti-Semitic as the Ukrainians? (2) As Mr. Safer attacks the former members of the Galicia Division as war criminals, I wonder why he does not attack former members of The Netherlands, Belgium, and French Waffen SS divisions in the same way? Why does he single out the Galicia Division? How is the Galicia Division different from the other Waffen SS divisions? (3) If in comparison to several other countries, Ukraine contributed proportionately fewer numbers to the Waffen SS, or to any of the German armed forces, then why didn't Mr. Safer commend Ukrainians for their relatively small contribution to the German war effort? (4) It would have been instructive of Mr. Safer to inform 60 Minutes viewers whether the Waffen SS divisions of other countries were created under the same proviso - that they not be used against the Western Allies, but only against the Soviets on the Eastern Front? Perhaps Ukrainians are to be commended again for limiting the role that their Waffen SS troops played within the German military. (5) Finally, given that Canada's Deschenes Commission on War Criminals failed to identify even a single member of the Galicia Division as calling for further investigation; and given that not a single member of the Division has ever been convicted of any crime, or even tried for any crime; and, most importantly, given that nobody has ever specified any crime of which the Galicia Division as a whole, or any member of the Galicia Division, might have been guilty - given all this, it would have been instructive of Mr. Safer to inform 60 Minutes viewers whether the Waffen SS divisions of The Netherlands, Belgium, and France have proven to be as free from blame as has the Ukrainian Galicia Division. Why Did Himmler Want a Waffen SS? If the Wehrmacht was the combat arm of the German forces, and Himmler's SS was dedicated to running the concentration camps, then why were there combat units within the SS? Why weren't non-German combat units such as the Galicia Division considered to be part of the Wehrmacht rather than part of the SS? The suspicion in the mind of the impartial observer might readily be that any unit that was considered part of the SS may in fact have performed some duties that were uniquely SS, and thus was more likely to be guilty of war crimes than a Wehrmacht unit. Israeli historian Leni Yahil provides an answer - the war effort had taken center stage; Himmler wanted to remain on center stage; and it is for that reason that Himmler defined certain combat units as falling within the SS: The very fact that Himmler and his executors became the central force directing the implacable war against the Jews accorded them, and primarily Himmler as their leader, a crucial position in the hierarchy of Nazi rule wherever it extended. Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the importance he ascribed to solving the Jewish problem according to his concept were among the factors that ensured Himmler's status as the man who carried out the fuhrer's program. It might have been assumed that in wartime, when stress is necessarily laid on the military struggle, the influence of the SS would have declined, since it no longer held the center stage. If Hitler had lost interest in Himmler's activities, the latter's own political career would have come to an end. He forestalled the danger in two ways: one was by associating the SS with the war effort through the establishment of the armed or Waffen SS while being careful to prevent the army's influence over these corps from overriding his own. (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, Oxford, New York, 1990, p. 145) The Nightingale Unit 60 Minutes also mentioned the Nightingale Unit, otherwise known as the Nachtigall Unit. The Nachtigall Unit was eventually merged with the Ukrainian Roland Unit, some 600 Ukrainian soldiers in all. These two units were formed on German territory prior to the outbreak of World War II by Ukrainians who had either not fallen within the Soviet zone of occupation, or who had escaped from it, and who anticipated German assistance in liberating Ukraine from Soviet rule. These units too, however, fail to support the picture of Ukrainians "marching off to fight for Hitler." Specifically, shortly after the entry of the Germans into Lviv, Stepan Bandera, "(supported by members of the Nachtigall Unit) decided - without consulting the Germans - to proclaim on 30 June 1941, the establishment of a Ukrainian state in recently conquered Lviv. ... Within days of the proclamation, Bandera and his associates were arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated" (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 463-464). Refusing to rescind the proclamation, Bandera spent July 1941 to September 1944 in German prisons and concentration camps. (Stepan Bandera is mentioned at this point because he was supported by the Nachtigall Unit; Bandera was not a member of the Nachtigall Unit.) "Because of their opposition to German policies in Ukraine, the units were recalled from the front and interned. ... Toward the end of 1942, the battalion was disbanded because of the soldiers' refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler" (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, p. 1088). "The battalion was disarmed and demobilized, and its officers were arrested in January 1943. Shukhevych, however, managed to escape and join the UPA" (Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Volume 4, p. 680). Roman Shukhevych who had been the highest-ranking Ukrainian officer of the Nachtigall unit went on to became commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a partisan group opposing all foreign occupation, and which during the Nazi occupation was directed primarily against the Nazis. Ukrainians in the Nachtigall and Roland Units, then, were also not Ukrainians marching off to fight for Hitler, but rather they were Ukrainians calculating that an alliance with German forces would promote their national interests, they were Ukrainians whose willingness to fight for Hitler or to promote Nazi interests proved to be close to non-existent, and they were Ukrainians who fell out with their Nazi sponsors in the early stages of the war. It must be noted also that unlike the Galicia Division, the Nachtigall and Roland Units were not part of the SS, and so that Mr. Safer was in error when he stated that "Roman Shukhevych ... was deputy commander of the SS Division Nightingale." It is another mark of 60 Minutes' biased coverage that in objecting to streets being named after the above-mentioned Stepan Bandera, it did not mention that he spent most of the war in German captivity, nor that he lost two brothers at Auschwitz; and in objecting to the commemoration of the above-mentioned Roman Shukhevych, it did not mention that he escaped from German captivity and commanded the Ukrainian guerrilla war against the German occupation. These omissions are part of a pattern of distortions and misrepresentations used by 60 Minutes to create the false impression of undeviating commitment to Naziism on the part of Ukrainians. Take Ukraine's staunchest opponents of Naziism, let 60 Minutes' makeup crew touch them up for the camera, and somehow they appear on the air with swastikas smeared on their foreheads. And so 60 Minutes has painted a picture entirely at variance with the historical record. The idea of Ukrainians en masse unselfconsciously celebrating the SS is preposterous and on a par with the image of Jews sacrificing Christian children to drink their blood. These sorts of fantastic and inflammatory charges are leveled by the more hysterical elements within each community, are passed along by the more irresponsible members of the mass media, and are aimed at consumption by the more naive and gullible members of their respective groups. 60 Minutes' allegations have smeared members of the Galicia Division and Ukrainians generally with a reckless disregard of evidence that is readily available to any researcher who is interested in presenting an impartial picture. It is a blatant calumny for 60 Minutes to hold out any of the above-mentioned units as evidence that Ukrainians "marched off to fight for Hitler" and it overlooks also that on the Soviet side fighting the Nazis were about two million Ukrainians which in view of their much larger number, 60 Minutes could have taken as evidence of Ukrainians "marching off to fight against Hitler" and it overlooks as well the large number of Ukrainians fighting against Hitler in the various national armies of the Allied forces. Morley Safer's Contempt for the Intelligence of his Viewers. Morley Safer states that "Nowhere, not even in Germany, are the SS so openly celebrated," and while he is saying this, we might rightly expect that the scenes presented will be supportive of his statement. What we do see is elderly veterans of the Galicia Division at a reunion in Lviv. What details of these scenes support Morley Safer's strong conclusion? Let us consider ten possibilities. (1) Perhaps Mr. Safer counted swastikas, and their large number supported his strong conclusion? But no, that can't be it - for there is not a single swastika to be seen anywhere. Not one! But how is it possible to hold the world's most open celebration of the SS without a single swastika? Mr. Safer's conclusion does not seem to be supported by the scene presented - in fact, his conclusion seems to be contradicted by the scene presented. Well, but perhaps there were other clues? (2) Surely at the world's most open celebration of the SS, one would find the "SS" insignia in plentiful supply? But no, there is not a single "SS" visible anywhere. The camera scans the veterans, we can see their medals and decorations, but we cannot see a single "SS." So far, then, we have the world's most open celebration of the SS, but without a single swastika and without a single "SS." But let us move ahead more quickly. (3) The number of portraits of Hitler, commander-in-chief of all the German armed forces, and so commander-in-chief of the SS? Zero! (4) The number of portraits of Himmler, head of the SS? Zero! (5) The number of portraits of any member of the Nazi hierarchy, or indeed of any German? Zero! (6) Any Nazi salutes being made? No, not one! (7) Any Nazi songs being sung? None! (8) A single word of German spoken? No, not one! (9) Perhaps there was literature circulated during the reunion which revealed Nazi sympathies? But no such literature was shown. How about at any time prior to the reunion - even during the entire 50 or so years following the formation of the Division and up until the reunion? 60 Minutes does not appear to have discovered any such Nazi literature. (10) As these veterans have been living for more than 50 years predominantly in Canada, the United States, and Australia, then they can readily be interviewed, and so perhaps 60 Minutes interviewers managed to elicit pro-Nazi statements from them? No, this golden opportunity too was passed over, not a single question was asked, not a single word spoken, and not a single pro-Nazi statement was to be heard. What then are we left with? We seem to be left with Morley Safer making a fantastic claim while presenting as evidence images devoid of the slightest detail supporting that claim. We are left, in short, with Morley Safer revealing his contempt for the intelligence of the 60 Minutes viewer. 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 Quality of Translation Were all those Ukrainians really saying "kike" and "yid"? In one instance, I could make out the Ukrainian word "zhyd." Following conventions of Ukrainian transliteration into English, by the way, the "zh" in "zhyd" is pronounced approximately like the "z" in "azure," and the "y" in "zhyd" is pronounced like the "y" in "myth." Quite true, to continue, that in Russian "zhyd" is derogatory for "Jew" and "yevrei" is neutral. In Ukrainian, the same is true in heavily Russified Eastern Ukraine, and even in Central Ukraine. But in the less Russified Western Ukraine old habits persist, and here - especially among the common people - "zhyd" continues to be as it always has been the neutral term for "Jew," and "yevrei" sounds Russian. Thus, in non-Russified Ukrainian, the "Jewish Battalion" of the Ukrainian Galician Army formed in 1919 was the "zhydivskyi kurin". "Judaism" is "zhydivstvo." A "learned Jew" is "zhydovyn." "Judophobe" is "zhydofob" and "Jodophile" is "zhydofil." The adjective "zhydivskyi" meaning "Jewish" was used by Ukrainians and Jews alike in naming Jewish orchestras and theater groups and clubs and schools and government departments. The Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971, Volume 11, p. 616) shows the May 18, 1939 masthead and headlines of the Lviv Jewish newspaper which was published in Polish. The Polish language is similar to Ukrainian, but uses the Roman rather than the Cyrillic alphabet. The headline read "Strejk generalny Zydow w Palestynie" which means "General strike of Jews in Palestine." The third word "Zydow" meaning "of Jews" is similar to the Ukrainian word that would have been used in this context, and again serves to illustrate that the Jews of this region did not view the word "zhyd" or its derivatives as derogatory. We find this same conclusion in the recollections of Nikita Khrushchev (in the following quotation, I have replaced the original translator's "yid" which rendered the passage confusing, with the more accurate "zhyd"): I remember that once we invited Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles ... to a meeting at the Lvov opera house. It struck me as very strange to hear the Jewish speakers at the meeting refer to themselves as "zhyds." "We zhyds hereby declare ourselves in favour of such-and-such." Out in the lobby after the meeting I stopped some of these men and demanded, "How dare you use the word "zhyd"? Don't you know it's a very offensive term, an insult to the Jewish nation?" ... "Here in the Western Ukraine it's just the opposite," they explained. "We call ourselves zhyds...." Apparently what they said was true. If you go back to Ukrainian literature ... you'll see that "zhyd" isn't used derisively or insultingly. (Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 1971, p. 145) But 60 Minutes' mistranslation went even further than that - upon listening to the broadcast more carefully, it is possible to hear that where the editor of the Lviv newspaper For a Free Ukraine was translated as saying in connection with a joke circulated among the common people - "In terms of the Soviet Union which is abbreviated SSSR, that stands for three kikes and a Russian," - in fact he was using the unarguably neutral term "yevrei" which it is obligatory to translate not as "kike" but as "Jew" not only in Russian, but in Eastern and Western Ukrainian as well. Thus, in at least two instances, and possibly in all, the 60 Minutes' translator was translating incorrectly, and in such a manner as to make the Ukrainian speakers appear to be speaking with an unrestrained anti-Semitism, when in fact they were not. On top of that, the translator gratuitously spit out his words and gave them a venomous intonation which was not present in the original Ukrainian. And then too, where the speaker spoke in grammatical Ukrainian, the translator on one occasion at least, offered a translation in ungrammatical English, making the Ukrainian appear uneducated or unintelligent - specifically, the Ukrainian "We Ukrainians do not have to rely on..." was rendered into the English "We Ukrainians not have to rely on...." Since "zhyd" is currently held to be derogatory in much of Ukraine, any speaker of contemporary Ukrainian who wishes to give no offense may choose to view it as derogatory in all of Ukraine, and switch to "yevrei" in all contexts and in all parts of the country. The fact that a Western Ukrainian old enough to have escaped thorough Russification has not as yet made this switch, however, is not evidence of his anti-Semitism, and his use of "zhyd" cannot rightly be taken to be derogatory. In non-Russified Western Ukrainian, there is only one word for Jew, and that is "zhyd," and there is no word corresponding to the derogatory "kike" or "yid" or "hebe" of English. A further discussion of the use of "zhyd" vs "yevrei" can be found within the Ukrainian Archive in a discussion of the Sion-Osnova Controversy. 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 Ukrainian Homogeneity In his every statement, Mr. Safer reveals that he starts from the assumption that Ukrainians are homogeneously anti-Semitic and Nazi in their inclinations. In doing so, Mr. Safer does not stop to wonder how it is that Ukrainians can be so entirely different in this respect from all other peoples. Take Americans, for instance. Surely we all agree that among Americans, there are some who would pitch in and help if they saw Nazis killing Jews, and others who would risk their lives - and give their lives - to stop that very same killing, and of course the great bulk in the middle who would consider immediate self-interest first, and look the other way and pretend to see nothing. But Ukrainians, if we are to believe Mr. Safer, are a people apart - exhibiting no such heterogeneity, clones one of another, genetically programmed to hate Jews. To suggest such a thing is, of course, preposterous. The obvious reality is that Ukrainians do exhibit a normal degree of heterogeneity. Had 60 Minutes wanted to, it could have found plenty of evidence of this: (1) Since the city of Lviv was featured in the 60 Minutes broadcast, 60 Minutes could have mentioned - in fact, it was duty-bound to mention - the heroism of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's effort on behalf of Jews. (2) Since 60 Minutes was throwing blanket condemnations over Ukrainians collectively not only for being the world's greatest anti-Semites, but for the most extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity, it was incumbent on 60 Minutes to notice the vast number of instances that can be found of Ukrainian sacrifices to save Jews. (3) Since the city of Lviv was featured on the 60 Minutes broadcast, as were Ukrainian auxiliary police units, as was Simon Wiesenthal, 60 Minutes should have mentioned that in the city of Lviv, just such a Ukrainian police auxiliary by the name of Bodnar risked his life - possibly sacrificed his life - to save the life of Simon Wiesenthal himself. Let us consider each of these points in turn. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky 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) Raul Hilberg adds concerning Sheptytsky: He dispatched a lengthy handwritten letter dated August 29-31, 1942 to the Pope, in which he referred to the government of the German occupants as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks. (Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 267) Unbiased reporting might have mentioned such details as the following: One of those saved by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was Lviv's Rabbi Kahane whose son is currently the marshal commander of the Israeli Air Force. (Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9) Sheptitsky himself hid fifteen Jews, including Rabbi Kahane, in his own residence in Lvov, a building frequently visited by German officials. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 410) Vast Ukrainian Sacrifices to Save Jews And Sheptytsky's actions are not unique - Ukrainians risking their lives and giving their lives to save Jews was not a rare occurrence. In the first Jewish Congress of Ukraine held in Kiev in 1992, "48 awards were handed out to Ukrainians and people of other nationalities who had rescued Jews during the second world war" (Ukrainian Weekly, November 8, 1992, p. 2). References to specific cases are not hard to find: Prof. Weiss [head of the Israeli Knesset] reminisced about Ukraine, the country of his childhood, and gratefully acknowledged he owed his life to two Ukrainian women who hid him from the Nazis during World War II. (Ukrainian Weekly, December 13, 1992, p. 8) In the Volhynian town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter and their daughter's young friend, for seventeen months, refusing to deny them refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was endangering a Christian household. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 403) Help was given even though the probability of detection was substantial and the penalties were severe: Sonderkommando 4b reported that it had shot the mayor of Kremenchug, Senitsa Vershovsky, because he had "tried to protect the Jews." (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308) Consulting the original Einsatzgruppe report reveals that a Catholic priest, Protyorey Romansky, was involved in the above plot to save Jews, though Romansky's punishment is not specified: The fact that Senitsa, the mayor of Kremenchug, was arrested for sabotaging orders, demonstrates that responsible officials are not always selected with the necessary care and attention. Only after the Einsatzkommandos had interrogated the official could it be established that he had purposely sabotaged the handling of the Jewish problem. He used false data and authorized the chief priest Protyorey Romansky to baptize the Jews whom he himself had selected, giving them Christian or Russian first names. His immediate arrest prevented a larger number of Jews from evading German control. Senitsa was executed. (Einsatzgruppe C, Kiev, Operational Situation Report USSR No. 177, March 6, 1942, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, editors, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections From the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943, 1989, p. 304) Similarly illustrative of help being given despite severe penalties is the following: A German police company in the village of Samary, Volhynia, shot an entire Ukrainian family, including a man, two women, and three children, for harboring a Jewish woman. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 201) This is not to say that all or most Jews found refuge with Ukrainians, nor that all or most Ukrainians offered refuge to Jews. Far from it. Many stories can be found of Jews being refused refuge or even being betrayed - but what else could anyone expect? To expect more from Ukrainians would be to expect them to be saints and martyrs, which would be setting a very high standard: Whoever attempted to help Jews acted alone and exposed himself as well as his family to the possibility of a death sentence from a German Kommando. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308) But despite the severity of the punishment, Ukrainians did help. Andrew Gregorovich (Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 24) reproduces a public announcement issued by the "SS and Head of Police for the District of Galicia" in Sambir, Ukraine, March 1, 1944. The announcement lists ten Ukrainians who have been sentenced to death by the Germans. Number 7 is Stefan Zubovych, Ukrainian, married - for the crime of helping Jews. One wonders what Stefan Zubovych might have thought had he been told just prior to his execution that in decades to come, some among the people that he was giving his life for would attempt to obliterate his memory and the memory of other Ukrainians like him, and would attempt instead to depict Ukrainians as irredeemable anti-Semites. One wonders what the surviving family of Stefan Zubovych, if any did survive, think today of the thanks that they receive from Morley Safer for the sacrifice that they have borne. Given the severity and the imminence of the punishment, it is a wonder that Ukrainians offered any help at all. Jews who had been saved by Ukrainians have subsequently admitted that in view of the extreme danger, had their roles been reversed they would not have extended the same help to the Ukrainians. Ukrainian help was not limited to a few isolated cases, but rather was widely given: "It is unfortunate," declared a German proclamation issued in Lvov on April 11 [1942], "that the rural population continues - nowadays furtively - to assist Jews, thus doing harm to the community, and hence to themselves, by this disloyal attitude." (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 319) [In 1943] tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General Government, the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for them were continuous. (Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, 1986, p. 553) It would be incorrect to imagine the Germans rounding up and executing all the Jews within a region, with only a few of the Jews being saved; rather, in Ukrainian cities - which offered more avenues of escape and concealment than did villages and towns - the Jews repeatedly receded before the advancing German killing units and then flowed back in again after the killing units had passed - something that would have been possible only with the knowledge and the cooperation of the indigenous Ukrainians: Although we succeeded in particular, in smaller towns and also in villages in accomplishing a complete liquidation of the Jewish problem, again and again it is, however, observed in larger cities that, after such an execution, all Jews have indeed disappeared. But, when, after a certain period of time, a Kommando returns again, the number of Jews still found in the city always considerably surpasses the number of the executed Jews. (Erwin Schulz, commander of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, Editor, The Holocaust, Volume 18, 1982, p. 98) Whenever the Einsatzgruppe had left a town, it returned to find more Jews than had already been killed there. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 342) Olena Melnyczuk in a Courage to Care Award ceremony (sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers/Anti-Defamation League) in which she and other members of her family were honored for having hidden a Jewish couple during World War II in Ukraine made the following remarks, the concluding sentence of which bears a particular relevance to our present discussion of 60 Minutes: "At the time we were fully aware of consequences that might expect us. We were aware that our family were doomed to perish together with the people we sheltered if detected. But sometimes people ask 'would you do it again?' And the answer is short. Yes. We tell them point blank that our Christian religion taught us to love your neighbor as yourself, be your brother's keeper," she stated. "Sometimes," she continued, "we hear the people asking why so few did what we did. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure there were many, many people like us risking their lives while hiding Jews, but how many of those rescued had the courage to report the names of their rescuers to Yad Vashem? Somehow being free of danger they have forgotten what risk those people took." (Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9, emphasis added) The Forgotten Bodnar Yes, how some of them do seem to have forgotten. Take Simon Wiesenthal, for example. The chief focus of discussion between him and Morley Safer seems to have been whether Ukrainians are all 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 them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis, then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when the Kiev soccer team - Dynamo - beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the German reward: Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21) If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being starved: Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population. Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw 120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow - if we are to believe Morley Safer - being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for Naziism: Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books were shipped out to Germany. We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan Franko. Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko Museum. As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries, exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster, November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23) Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they were being treated as Untermenschen: Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population of the east than four years of primary school. This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school, no other kind of school must be allowed in the east.... The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture, they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263) The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis - or if we are to believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves - is a colossal fiction based on colossal prejudice: A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480) 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 Simon Wiesenthal Discovered Under the Floorboards In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards: In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end. As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled, leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53) To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday - how impressive! And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory: He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before. He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent mentioned by someone - all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And, just like a computer, he can call them up at any time. This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated, as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic memory: he is a man who cannot forget. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.) But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less - one expects just such exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events were traumatic and seared into his memory. As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards: One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 11) But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr. Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the "SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function. And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all. As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case of the Rusinek slap. The Rusinek Slap Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face - just as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over, and the Jews are still being beaten." ... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12) That is one version, but here is another: A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked. "I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69) These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic - so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a knock-out. Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which office they spend the entire night cleaning. And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller - and yet, as noted above, that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too, Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he was shot - where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr. Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift coffin. And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal himself? - According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious, stopped to pray. But what an incongruous juxtaposition - Ukrainians at once deeply Christian and deeply genocidal. If Christianity invited the murder of Jews, then this would make sense, but in fact - in modern times at least - Christianity has stood against such practices, and more emphatically so in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else, as we have already noted above. But what has Mr. Wiesenthal's inability to come up with a consistent or credible biography got to do with the quality of his professional denunciations? - The evidence suggests that the two are equally shoddy. Had 60 Minutes looked into Mr. Wiesenthal's professional background, it would quickly have found much to wonder at. It would, for one thing, have quickly come across the case of Frank Walus, The Nazi Who Never Was. Frank Walus: The Nazi Who Never Was In 1976 Simon Wiesenthal, in Vienna, had gone public with charges that a Polish emigre living in Chicago, Frank Walus, had been a collaborator involved in persecuting Polish Jews, including women and children, as part of a Gestapo-led auxiliary police unit. Walus, charged Wiesenthal, "performed his duties with the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over numerous Jews to the Gestapo." (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193) Walus, in turn, was convicted by judge Julius Hoffman, who ran the trial with an iron hand and an eccentricity that bordered on the bizarre. He allowed government witnesses great latitude, while limiting severely Korenkiewicz's cross-examination of them. When Walus himself testified, Hoffman limited him almost entirely to simple yes and no answers. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193) Despite weaknesses in the prosecution case, Judge Hoffman went on to convict Walus, and later despite accumulating evidence of Walus's innocence, refused to reconsider his verdict. But then a formal appeal was filed. The process took almost two years, but in February 1980, the court ruled. It threw out Hoffman's verdict and ordered Walus retried. In making the ruling, the court said that it appeared the government's case against Walus was "weak" but that Hoffman's handling of the trial had been so biased that it could not evaluate the evidence properly. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195) In view of irrefutable documentary and eye-witness evidence that Walus had served as a farm laborer in Germany during the entire war, he was never re-tried. And what, we may ask, was the occasion for Simon Wiesenthal's fingering Walus in the first place? Only later was the source of the "evidence" against Walus that had reached Simon Wiesenthal identified. Walus had bought a two-family duplex when he came to Chicago. In the early 1970s, he rented out the second unit to a tenant with whom he eventually had a fight. Walus evicted the tenant, who then started telling one and all how his former landlord used to sit around and reminisce about the atrocities he had committed against Jews in the good old days. Apparently one of the groups to which he told the story was a Jewish refugee agency in Chicago, which passed the information along to Simon Wiesenthal. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195) For a statement concerning the Walus case made by Frank Walus himself, please read Frank Walus's letter to Germany. The Deschenes Commission But is the Walus case a single slipup in Simon Wiesenthal's otherwise blemish-free career? No, other slipups can be found - in one instance a batch of 6,000 others. Simon Wiesenthal kicked the ball into play with the accusation that Canada harbored "several hundred" war criminals (Toronto Star, May 19, 1971). The Jewish Defense League caught the ball, found it soft and inflated it to "maybe 1,000" (Globe and Mail, July 5, 1983) before tossing it to Edward Greenspan. Edward Greenspan mustered enough hot air to inflate it to 2,000 (Globe and Mail, November 21, 1983) before tossing it to Sol Littman whose lung capacity was able to raise it to 3,000 (Toronto Star, November 8, 1984). The ball, distended beyond recognition, was tossed back to Wiesenthal who boldly puffed it up to 6,000 (New York Daily News, May 16, 1986) and then made the mistake of trying to kick it - but poof! The ball burst! Judge Jules Deschenes writing the report for Canada's Commission on War Criminals first certifies that the ball had indeed reached the record-breaking 6,000 Canadian war criminals: The Commission has ascertained from the New York Daily News that this figure is correct and is not the result of a printing error. (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 247) But now the big ball was gone, and all that was left was the deflated pigskin which Mr. Wiesenthal lamely flopped on the Commission's table - a list of 217 names (which in other places becomes a list of 218 or 219 names). The list was focussed on Ukrainians - Mr. Wiesenthal's Vienna Documentation Center Annual Report for 1984 claimed that "218 former Ukrainian officers of Hitler's S.S. (elite guard), which ran death camps in Eastern Europe, are living in Canada." Upon subjecting the deflated ball to close and prolonged scrutiny, Judge Deschenes, arrived at the following conclusions: Between 1971 and 1986, public statements by outside interveners concerning alleged war criminals residing in Canada have spread increasingly large and grossly exaggerated figures as to their estimated number ... [among them] the figure of 6,000 ventured in 1986 by Mr. Simon Wiesenthal.... (p. 249) The high level reached by some of those figures, together with the wide discrepancy between them, contributed to create both revulsion and interrogation. (p. 245) It was obvious that the list of 217 officers of the Galicia Division furnished by Mr. Wiesenthal was nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government, through the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and this Commission, to a considerable amount of purposeless work. (p. 258) The Commission has tried repeatedly to obtain the incriminating evidence allegedly in Mr. Wiesenthal's possession, through various oral and written communications with Mr. Wiesenthal himself and with his solicitor, Mr. Martin Mendelsohn of Washington, D.C., but to no avail: telephone calls, letters, even a meeting in New York between Mr. Wiesenthal and Commission Counsel on 1 November 1985 followed up by further direct communications, have succeeded in bringing no positive results, outside of promises. (p. 257) From the conclusions of the Deschenes Commission alone, 60 Minutes might have decided that Simon Wiesenthal is not the kind of person whose pronouncements may be aired without verification. Had any Ukrainian come to 60 Minutes carrying such a load of hatred toward Jews as Simon Wiesenthal carries toward Ukrainians, and displaying - or rather flaunting - such credentials of unreliability, 60 Minutes would never have given him air time, or if it did, it would be only to excoriate him. Instead of exposing Mr. Wiesenthal, 60 Minutes has joined him in portraying a world filled with Nazis, and so has lent support to a witch hunt more hysterical than Joe McCarthy's sniffing out of Communists in the 50's. Consider the following excerpts from cases submitted to the Deschenes commission for investigation as suspected Nazi war criminals, and see if you don't agree. In the Commission report, all of the following cases end with the words, "On the basis of the foregoing, it is recommended that the file on the subject be closed." The selection is not intended to be representative, as the overwhelming number of cases are simply dismissed for lack of evidence - but rather is a sample of cases that upon casual browsing stand out as being particularly comical, pathetic, or alarming depending upon one's mood. The sample, furthermore, is far from exhaustive - a vastly greater number of similarly striking cases abound within the Commission report: CASE NO. 73. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by Mr. Sol Littman. Mr. Littman made no particular allegation against the subject, but referred to information obtained from a particular individual as the source of the subject's name. Mr. Littman further indicated that the subject resided at an unspecified address in Canada and had been the object of an extradition request by the government of an Eastern European country. No particulars of this alleged extradition request were provided. ... The Commission confirmed that an extradition request had not been received by the Canadian government and that the Berlin Document Center had no record on the subject. CASE NO. 121. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, whose source of information was the Department of the Solicitor General which, in turn, had received the information from a private citizen. It was alleged that this individual may have been a doctor who experimented on concentration camp prisoners. ... The interview established that the complainant was not in a position to place the subject in a Nazi war camp nor was she in possession of names of witnesses able to connect the subject with wartime criminal activities. ... [T]he subject would have been only 15 to 20 years old during the war, hardly an age to have the position suggested above. CASE NO. 122. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by an anonymous note. The only allegation initially made was that the subject was a war criminal and was living at a certain address in Canada. ... [T]he evidence ... indicates the individual has lived all his life in Canada and was drafted into the Canadian army for a short time in 1942. CASE NO. 133. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, whose source of information was Mr. Sol Littman. It was alleged that the subject under investigation had been a member of the SS. ... These investigations revealed that the subject was born in 1933 and would therefore have been between 6 and 12 years of age during the war. CASE NO. 156. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by Mr. Sol Littman. Mr. Littman alleged only that the subject had been a "propagandist for the party." When contacted by the Commission, Mr. Littman indicated that he had no further evidence or information. ... On the basis of the foregoing [itemized investigation], no evidence of participation in or knowledge of specific war crimes is available. CASE NO. 158. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by a private citizen. The only allegation initially made was that the subject was a war criminal because he was so wealthy and of German background. ... The Commission was advised [by several German sources] that it had a record of the subject which indicated his membership in the Luftwaffe (air force). CASE NO. 171. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by ... the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. ... According to the year of birth, this person would have been only five or six years old at the end of World War II. CASE NO. 179. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by an anonymous letter. The allegation initially made was that the subject was the owner of a shop who behaved curiously regarding the sources of the store's goods. ... The subject is the spouse of the individual who is reported in Case No. 180. Both were denounced in the same anonymous letter. ... The Commission checked the shop itself and concluded that the complaint is entirely spurious and unfounded. CASE NO. 180. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by an anonymous letter. The only allegation initially made was that the subject was the owner of a shop who behaved curiously regarding the sources of the store's goods. ... The Commission also checked the shop itself and concluded that the complaint is entirely spurious and unfounded. CASE NO. 190. This family's surname was brought to the attention of the Commission by Mr. David Matas [chairman of the Jewish National Legal Committee], whose source of information was an anonymous letter claiming the family came from a foreign country and deserved investigation because they were "recluses." There was no specific allegation of involvement in war crimes made against this family. CASE NO. 202. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose source of information was a private citizen. There was no specific allegation of involvement in war crimes made against this individual, and the information received was irrational. ... The Commission contacted the wife of the subject, who stated that she did not know the citizen (who made the allegation) and that her husband never had any business dealings with a person by that name. The Commission also tried to locate the complainant but to no avail. CASE NO. 247. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose source of information was a private citizen. There was no specific allegation of involvement in war crimes made against the individual. ... The Commission was advised by the German Military Service Office ... that it had a record of a person with the same name as the subject, which indicated that he was a pilot in the Allied Air Force and had been taken prisoner by the Germans. CASE NO. 269. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose source of information was a private citizen. It was alleged that this individual is a physician whose physical description resembles that of the notorious war criminal Dr. Mengele. ... Personal data of the subject taken from various documentation reveal the following in comparison with the information contained in the Commission file with respect to Dr. Mengele: Year of Birth Height Weight Eyes Face Chin Subject 1913 6'3"+ 195-215 lbs Blue Oval (from Photo) - Dr. Mengele 1911 5'8"+ Medium build Brown Round Round In addition, the picture of the subject appearing in the various documents received, does not suggest that he resembles Dr. Mengele. All other search responses were negative. CASE NO. 431. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, whose source of information was Mr. Sol Littman. Mr. Littman had forwarded a letter to the RCMP from a private individual. It was alleged in the letter that the subject under investigation had been in charge of an unnamed camp and was believed to have shot civilians. ... The Commission interviewed the individual who submitted the subject's name to Mr. Littman and was advised that this individual had subsequently determined that the subject under investigation had been a prisoner of war and further that the complaint was unfounded. CASE NO. 433. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, whose source of information was an anonymous informant. The only allegation made was that the subject was "a possible German involved in war crimes". No specific allegation or evidence against the subject was provided. ... The Commission reviewed material available from the RCMP and CSIS, which determined that the subject was born in 1933, and for that reason could not have been involved in the commission of war crimes between 1939 and 1945. CASE NO. 526. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose source of information was a private individual. It was alleged that the subject under investigation might be Dr. Josef Mengele. ... The Department of External Affairs reported that it had a record in respect of the individual, but that the individual had been born in 1928 in Canada.... ... Furthermore, the subject's name is not one of the aliases used from time to time by Josef Mengele. CASE NO. 561. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, whose source of information was the Canadian Jewish Congress. It was alleged that the subject was responsible for the deaths of "hundreds of Jews." No specific evidence of the alleged war crimes was provided. ... Records of the Department of Employment and Immigration ... indicate that the subject was born in 1941.... CASE NO. 588.1. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by the RCMP, who were investigating the suspicions of the Department of Employment and Immigration officials that the individual might be older than he claims and might be hiding a questionable past, which may have involved the Nazi Party. ... It was verified [through various investigations] that the subject is indeed who he claims to be and that he was indeed born in 1929. He was barely 10 years old at the start of the war. Sol Littman's Mengele Scare As another piece of evidence that we are in the midst of a witch hunt - a witch hunt in which Simon Wiesenthal plays the role of chief inquisitor - consider Sol Littman's Mengele Scare. On December 20, 1984, Mr. Littman - Canadian representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center - wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada unequivocally affirming that Mengele, employing the alias of Dr. Joseph Menke, applied to the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires for admission to Canada as a landed immigrant in late May or early June, 1962. (In Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 67) Then on January 23, 1985, Ralph Blumenthal wrote an article in the New York Times captioned "Records indicate Mengele sought Canadian visa": Other records indicate that Mengele applied to the Canadian Embassy in Buenos Aires for a Canadian visa in 1962 under a pseudonym and that the Canadians informed American intelligence officials of this attempt. This information was widely reprinted and broadcast. Subsequently, both Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Littman affirmed that the information in this article concerning Josef Mengele came solely from Mr. Littman. However, following its thorough investigation, the Commission concluded: There is no documentary evidence whatsoever of an attempt by Dr. Joseph Mengele to seek admission to Canada from Buenos Aires in 1962. The affirmation has come from Mr. Sol Littman, and from him alone. ... The advice which Littman solicited [in the course of his own research] ... did not support his assumptions, but put him on notice about their fragility. As stated at the outset, all that Littman could rely on was "speculation, impression, possibility, hypothesis". Yet he chose to transmute them into statements of facts which he publicized.... This is a case where not a shred of evidence has been tendered to support Mr. Littman's statement to the Prime Minister of Canada on 20 December 1984, or Mr. Ralph Blumenthal's article in the New York Times on 23 January 1985. (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 70) In view of Sol Littman's irresponsibility in engineering the Mengele Scare, it is not a little ironic to note that it was this very scare which was the prime cause of the Canadian government constituting the Jules Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals. We see this demonstrated when the reasons for the Commission being constituted are laid out, and Sol Littman's Mengele disinformation - at the time accepted as information - appears at the top of the list: WHEREAS concern has been expressed about the possibility that Joseph Mengele, an alleged Nazi war criminal, may have entered or attempted to enter Canada.... (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 17) What we see in Sol Littman, then, is a case somewhat paralleling that of Morley Safer - a single Jew creates a story out of thin air, and gets it disseminated to tens of millions of people through a Jewish-controlled media which conveniently neglects to verify it prior to publication. In Littman's case, he goes well beyond dissemination - he further succeeds in pressuring the Canadian government to waste taxpayer money (always in short supply for education and health care) on a costly inquiry which turns up just about nothing, and whose only appreciable benefit is not to the Canadian people, and not even to Jews collectively, but only to Sol Littman personally - which benefit is the stirring up of Jewish anxiety on the one hand together with anti-Jewish resentment on the other, both of which are necessary to increasing the flow of Jewish contributions into Sol Littman's coffers. Sol Littman, in short, is a parasite upon the Jewish people, preying on the fears of the more gullible of them, essentially playing a role not unlike that of Stephen King in which the bigger a scare he is able to elicit out of his audience by means of the fantastic stories he is able to concoct, the greater is his success. Repeating the same principle in different words, we may say that the more anti-Semitism Sol Littman is able to provoke, the greater is his success. How does Sol Littman come to be in the vanguard of the fight to suppress hate on the Internet? Consider the information on Sol Littman which can be found on The Ukrainian Archive: (1) Reviewing the sampling higher above of irresponsible denunciations submitted to the Deschenes Commission, we note that four of them were submitted by Sol Littman, suggesting that in the full list of denunciations, his contribution would have been substantial. (2) The Sol Littman Mengele scare immediately above. (3) My 27May98 letter to Demjanjuk persecutor Neal Sher, in which I present data supporting the conclusion that Neal Sher and Sol Littman are members of a subculture who lie not only to those who are not members of their subculture, but to each other as well, thus steeping themselves in untruths. Still more information is available on a web site unconnected to UKAR devoted exclusively to exposing Sol Littman. Given the present UKAR disclosure of Sol Littman's irresponsibility, and given the similar disclosure on other sites on the Internet, as the one cited above, it is little wonder that Sol Littman is today a leading exponent for society bestowing upon him (and others like him) the power to suppress information on the Internet when he decides (or they decide) that it expresses "hate." Perhaps a suspicion that it would be healthy to occasionally entertain is that those who call loudest for the suppression of information may be those with the most to hide. Salem's Was Not the Last Witch Hunt Surely the above data convinces us that many of the horrors that we all despise - that even Mr. Safer might profess to despise - are being realized as contemporary actualities. Slanderous and unfounded allegations. Anonymous letters of accusation. Government agencies investigating people for no other reason than that someone has submitted their names. McCarthyism. A witch hunt. Individuals accused of having committed war crimes while they were still in diapers. And instead of standing back from this mass hysteria or exposing it, 60 Minutes has chosen instead to play a contributory role. The Deschenes Commission cites 31 newspaper accounts between 1971 and 1986 of Nazi war criminals residing in Canada, and points out that this list is not exhaustive. Decades of coverage of such sensational accusations leaves a permanent impression on the minds of the public, while the Deschenes Commission refutation takes place only once, and does not carry the same lurid appeal. The net effect is a propaganda victory for the false accusers. 60 Minutes is making its contribution to this phenomenon - its false accusations in "The Ugly Face of Freedom" were long and sensational and will be remembered by many, its retraction will be short and dull and will be remembered by few. 60 Minutes hands Ukrainophobes another victory. Letters to Simon Wiesenthal I have written a number of letters to Simon Wiesenthal asking for his clarification on the issues raised above, and on other issues relating to his credibility and to his calumniation of Ukraine. These letters can be found by clicking the above link. Other material relating to Simon Wiesenthal can be found scattered throughout the UKAR site, and can be located using the Internal Search Engine whose link can be found on the Home Page. One item particularly worth mentioning might be my sixth letter to Michael Jordan, Chairman of Westinghouse. Following examination of any of these materials, clicking BACK on your browser will return you to this location (if your browsing trail has not been too long). 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 What Happened in Lviv? According to Simon Wiesenthal on the 60 Minutes broadcast, in three days following the evacuation of the Communist forces and before the arrival of the German troops, Ukrainian police killed between five and six thousand Jews: SAFER: He [Simon Wiesenthal] remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian police went on a 3-day killing spree. WIESENTHAL: And in this 3 days in Lvov alone between 5 and 6 thousand Jews was killed. ... SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here. Some 60 Minutes viewers may have been struck by the curious observation that while the 60 Minutes expert witness - Simon Wiesenthal - claimed that the number of Jews killed was "between 5 and 6 thousand," in three days, the interviewer - Morley Safer - chose to reduce that number killed to "3,000" and the duration of the killing to two days - but without informing the viewer on what grounds he did so. Let us begin our examination of this claim by reviewing the historical context. Historical Context of the Lviv Pogrom Eight Years Previously. Although Western Ukraine was spared the induced famine of 1932-1933 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, Western Ukrainians were nevertheless aware of the famine in adjacent Soviet Ukraine and aware that it was administered at the top by Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, and was supported at the bottom by cadres, many said to be Jewish, who moved from village to village confiscating grain and livestock. During the previous 21 months. Western Ukraine was annexed by Soviet forces in 1939 for a period of