Lviv pogroms
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lviv pogroms was a massacre of Jewish people living in and near the city of Lvov in the Ukrainian SSR (now Lviv in Ukraine) that took place in July 1941 during World War II.
Before the war, Lviv had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland, which swelled further to over 200,000 Jews as war refugees entered the city. Immediately after the Germans entered the city, Einsatzgruppen and civil collaborants organized a massive pogrom, which they claimed was in retaliation for the NKVD's earlier killings (though Jews were also killed during the NKVD purge). Many Holocaust scholars attribute much of the killing to the Ukrainian nationalists. However the killers' actual political orientation and relation to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is still subject to debate.[1]
During the four-week pogrom from the end of June to early July, 1941, nearly 4,000 Jews were murdered. On July 25, 1941, a second pogrom, called "Petliura Days" after Symon Petliura[2][3], was organized; nearly 2,000 more Jews were killed in Lviv, mostly shot in groups by civilian collaborators after being marched to the Jewish cemetery or to Lunecki prison.
The Lwów Ghetto was established after the pogroms, holding around 120,000 Jews, most of whom were deported to the Belzec extermination camp or killed locally during the following two years. Following the pogroms, Einsatzgruppen killings, harsh conditions in the ghetto, and deportation to the Nazi concentration camps, including the Janowska labor camp located on the outskirts of the city, resulted in the almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population. By the time that the Soviet forces reached Lviv in 1944 driving out the Nazi occupation, only 200–300 Jews remained.
[edit] Investigation
Russian sources are quite specific with regard to the pogroms. The Russian historian Sergei Chuguyev (who I understand was a former KGB archivist wrote: "That on June 30 in Lviv the German administration started mass repressions. The commander of the "Einzatzgruppen C" Dr. Rasch had incriminated the death of those incarcerated in the Lviv jails to the "Jews from the NKVD" which became the spark for the terror against the Jews and Poles of Lviv. In the bloody murder of the Jews the Einsatzgruppen under the command of brigadeerfuhrer SS Karl Eberhard Schenhardt took prominence. The sections of this group under the command of H. Kruger and W. Kutshman on July 4 murdered 23 Polish professors and their families. On July 11 2 more were killed, and later the former prime-minister of Poland, professor Bartel. In the Autum of 1941 a ghetto was formed in Lviv"[4].
Also the initial number of 4,000 deaths was originally the number ascribed to the Ukrainian and Polish Political prisoners who were killed in their cells by the Soviets during their withdrawal. It seems to have wandered over to this tragedy.
An international commission was set up at The Hague in the Netherlands in 1958 to carry out independent investigations. The members were four former anti-Hitler activists, Norwegian lawyer Hans Cappelen, former Danish foreign minister and president of the Danish parliament Ole Bjørn Kraft, Dutch socialist Karel van Staal, Belgian law professor Flor Peeters, and Swiss jurist and member of parliament Kurt Scoch. Following its interrogation of a number of Ukrainian witnesses between November 1959 and March 1960, the commission concluded: "After four months of inquiries and the evaluation of 232 statements by witnesses from all circles involved, it can be established that the accusations against the Battalion Nachtigall and against the then Lieutenant and currently Federal Minister Oberländer have no foundation in fact.[5]"
A valuable source of a detailed study of the recently released archival documents of this period are in de Zayas's book "The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945" University of Nebraska Press, Rockport, Maine, 2000 edition [6]. Sections regarding the investigation of the Lviv atrocities are available online[1].
[edit] Soviet accusations
In the fall of 1959 the Soviet press mounted a major press campaign against the then minister in the West German Adenauer cabinet, Theodor Oberländer, who at the commencement of WWII was commander of the Nachtigall Battalion made up of a couple of hundred Ukrainian volunteers.[7] The Soviets accused him and the Ukrainian division of participating in the SS murders in Lviv. On 5 September 1959 the "Radianska Ukraina" newspaper wrote: "Eighteen years ago the fascists committed a horrendous crime in Lviv in the night of 29 - 30 June 1941. The Hitlerites arrested on the basis of prepared lists hundreds of Communists, Communist youth, and non-party members and murdered them in brutal fashion in the courtyard of the Samarstinov Prison."
These accusations were picked up by the Western press and eventually led to Oberländer's resignation. The investigation by the district attorney's office in Bonn, however, cleared him.[8] However, the accusations against him and the Nachtigall Battalion keep resurfacing in Western sources, based on the fact that he was a former assistant to the infamous Gauleiter Erich Koch and also because of his then political alliances to far-right movements. A new investigation of Oberländer was started in 1996.[9]
[edit] References
- ^ Gitelman, Zvi (2001). "The Holocaust", A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Indiana University Press, 115-143. ISBN 0-253-21418-1. “The facts remain that in Lvov, two days after the Germans took over, a three-day pogrom by Ukrainians resulted in the killing of 6,000 Jews, mostly by uniformed Ukrainian "militia," in the Brygidky prison. July 25 was declared "Petliura Day," after the Ukrainian leader of the Civil War period who was assassinated by the son of the Jewish pogrom victims. Over 5,000 Jews were hunted down and most of them killed in honor of the "celebration." Emigres from Ukraine and Ukrainians from Poland were in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which pledged Hitler its "most loyal obedience" in building a Europe "free of Jews, Bolsheviks and plutocrats.”
- ^ Lvov. Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- ^ July 25: Pogrom in Lvov. Chronology of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem (2004).
- ^ * RUSSIAN:Chuyev, Sergei Ukrainskyj Legion - Moskva, 2006 p. 180
- ^ LembergNKWEmassacres The Battalion Nachtigall: legend and truth Embassy of Ukraine
- ^ The Lviv Massacre
- ^ The Ink of Hate
- ^ The Lviv Massacre
- ^ German War Crime Inquiry
