ГУЛаг Палестины

The Bolsheviks succeeded in a

prisoners in Western Ukraine before and after the outbreak of

hostilities (massacres took place in the prisons in Lviv, Zolochiv,

Rivne, Dubno, Lutsk, etc.). (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume

1, p. 886)

The Soviets' hurried retreat had tragic consequences for thousands of

political prisoners in the jails of Western Ukraine. Unable to

evacuate them in time, the NKVD slaughtered their prisoners en masse

during the week of 22-29 June 1941, regardless of whether they were

incarcerated for major or minor offenses. Major massacres occurred in

Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners

died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia, where another 5000 perished.

Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and growing Soviet terror,

these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians' abhorrence of

the Soviets. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 461)

Right after the entry we were shown 2,400 dead bodies of Ukrainians

liquidated with a shot at the scruff of the neck at the city jail of

Lemberg [Lviv] by the Soviets prior to their marching off. (Hans Frank,

In the Face of the Gallows, p. 406)

In Lvov, several thousand prisoners had been held in three jails. When

the Germans arrived on 29 June, the city stank, and the prisons were

surrounded by terrified relatives. Unimaginable atrocities had

occurred inside. The prisons looked like abattoirs. It had taken the

NKVD a week to complete their gruesome task before they fled. (Gwyneth

Hughes and Simon Welfare, Red Empire: The Forbidden History of the

USSR, 1990, p. 133)

When the German attack came on 22 June the Soviets had no time to take

with them the people they had locked up. So they simply killed them.

Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating

Soviets. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 35)

The first question having been settled - I trust - to the satisfaction of all, we

turn now to the second question: Is there any ethnic group that might have been

particularly responsible for the killing? Well, if the slaughter was conducted by the

NKVD or was directed by the NKVD, then the question reduces to What was the ethnic

composition of the NKVD?

The evidence that I have come across points to the conclusion that the NKVD was

dominated by Jews. Here is one such piece of evidence. The speaker is Yoram Sheftel,

John Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, describing his visit to the Simferopol,

Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 - what Sheftel seems to be saying is that out of a

sample of some 30 members of the wartime NKVD, every last one was a Jew:

On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the

names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the

Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked

and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and the last

Levinstein, and all those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller

and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle

of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil. (The

Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, 1994, p. 301)

Of course a sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the

entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious

hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction:

As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there

so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the

most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I ca

(Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on

Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147)

Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery

especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the

NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the

prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the

hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins

of real power in the new state for themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The

Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, Slavonic and East

European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165)

The question that I would be interested in hearing your views on, then, Mr.

Wiesenthal, is whether the assertion you made on the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face

of Freedom of October 23, 1994 may have been diametrically opposite to the truth

specifically, that whereas you held out that during the interval prior to the

occupation of Lviv by German forces Ukrainians were slaughtering Jews by the thousands,

in reality during this same interval it may have been closer to the truth to say that

Jews were slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands.

Sincerely yours,

Lubomyr Prytulak

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 826 hits since 18Jan98

Wiesenthal Letter 21 Sep 14/97 Altered dates of death

September 14, 1997

Simon Wiesenthal

Jewish Documentation Center

Salztorgasse 6

1010 Vie

Austria

Dear Mr. Wiesenthal:

In co

Safer (in his 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of October 23, 1994)

inserted into the pre-German interval two events which gave the viewer the impression

that the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being

doubted: (1) the arrest of your mother, and (2) the shooting of your mother-in-law:

SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia,

the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.

LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true!

SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal - like thousands of Lvov

Jews, his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police.

These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian

brutality. The German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as

'praiseworthy.'

WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go

so fast.

SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners.

WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman

because she couldn't walk fast.

SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out

the guilty, to bring justice.

The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it

ends with a reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine

that the events bracketed in Mr. Safer's discourse by these two references happened

during that same pre-German interval. Specifically, Mr. Safer gives the distinct and

unmistakable impression that the pre-German anti-Jewish activities on the part of

Ukrainians ca

activities were the arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law.

However, examining your biographies for confirmation of these two events - the

arrest of your mother and the shooting of your mother-in-law - turns up the following

(it will help at this point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June

30, 1941):

In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods