Lviv pogroms (1941)
Date | June 1941 | – July 1941
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Location | Lviv, Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine |
Coordinates | 49°30′36″N 24°00′36″E / 49.510°N 24.010°E |
Type | Beatings, sexual abuse, robberies, mass murder |
Participants | Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, local crowds |
Deaths | Thousands of Jews (see estimates) |
The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive pogroms and massacres of Jews in June and July 1941 in the city of Lwów in German-occupied Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine (now Lviv, Ukraine). The massacres were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN), German death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and urban population from 30 June to 2 July, and from 25 to 29 July, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were killed both in the pogroms and in the Einsatzgruppen killings.
Ukrainian militia as well as Ukrainian residents and to a lower degree Poles targeted Jews in the first pogrom,[1][2] which was triggered by the discovery of thousands of bodies in three Lviv prisons of victims of the Soviet NKVD prisoner massacres, which were widely blamed on "Jewish Bolsheviks". The subsequent massacres were directed by the Germans in the context of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. The pogroms have been widely debated in the historiography, including the extent to which Ukrainian nationalists played a central or complicit role.[3][4]
Background
According to Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) records, nearly 9,000 prisoners were murdered in the Ukrainian SSR in the NKVD prisoner massacres, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941.[7] Due to the confusion during the rapid Soviet retreat and incomplete records, the NKVD number is most likely an undercounting. According to estimates by contemporary historians, the number of victims in Western Ukraine was probably between 10,000 and 40,000.[8] By ethnicity, Ukrainians comprised roughly 70 per cent of victims, with Poles at 20 per cent.[9]
According to scholar
As the historian John-Paul Himka writes, the OUN at this point was a divided organization: in Lviv, the splinter faction loyal to Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B, led locally by Yaroslav Stetsko, "a prominent lieutenant of Bandera’s as well as an extreme anti-Semite", took over the nationalist movement. In 1939, Stetsko published an article in which he claimed that Jews were "nomads and parasites", a nation of "swindlers" and "egotists" whose aim was to "corrupt the heroic culture of warrior nations". Stetsko also railed against the supposed conspiracy between Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists.[11] The OUN-B nationally called Jews props of the Bolsheviks, but explicitly called on Ukrainians to eschew anti-Jewish pogroms (seen as a diversion from targeting the real enemy, Moscow) at its Second Great Congress, held in Kraków in April 1941.[12] Nonetheless, the local OUN-B's preparations for the anticipated German invasion included May 1941 instructions for ethnic cleansing to its planned militia units: “At a time of chaos and confusion it is permissible to liquidate undesirable Polish, Russian, and Jewish activists, especially supporters". "Russians, Poles, Jews" were hostile to the Ukrainian nation and were to be "destroyed in battle".[13]
Pogroms and mass killings
First pogrom
External videos | |
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Published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | |
Atrocities Against Jews |
At the time of the German attack on the Soviet Union, about 160,000 Jews lived in the city;[15] the number had swelled by tens of thousands due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from German occupied Poland in late 1939.[16]
Lviv was occupied by the Wehrmacht in the early hours of 30 June 1941; German forces consisted of the 1st Mountain Division and the Abwehr-subordinated Nachtigall Battalion staffed by ethnic Ukrainians. That day, Jews were press-ganged by the Germans to remove bodies of NKVD's victims from the prisons and to perform other tasks, such as clearing bomb damage and cleaning buildings. Some Jews were abused by the Germans and even murdered, according to survivors. During the afternoon of the same day, the German military reported that the Lviv population was taking out its anger about the prison murders "on the Jews ... who had always collaborated with the Bolsheviks".[17] During the morning of 30 June, an ad hoc
During the evening of 30 June, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state. Signed by Stetsko, the proclamation ("Act of restoration of the Ukrainian state") declared OUN's affinity and future collaboration with Nazi Germany which, according to OUN, was "helping the Ukrainian people liberate themselves from Muscovite occupation".[21] At the same time, the news was spreading around the city about the discovery of thousands of corpses in three city prisons in the aftermath of the NKVD massacres.[22]
A full-blown
According to Himka, although Jews were not considered by the OUN to be their primary enemies (this role was reserved for Poles and Russians), they likely targeted Lviv Jews in an attempt to curry favour with the Germans, in the hopes of being allowed to establish a puppet Ukrainian state. The antisemitism of OUN's leaders, especially Stetsko's, was also a contributory factor.
Jeffrey Kopstein shows that the Germans eagerly facilitated anti-Jewish violence by locals, but that such violence occurred in places where they were not present, so their presence in Lvov facilitated it and made it more brutal, but was not the sufficient or necessary cause. He notes that resentment towards Soviet occupation was clearly a factor, but that known ethnic Ukrainian Soviet collaborators were spared. The role of Ukrainian nationalists was therefore significant, but "any account [of the pogroms] as primarily an OUN operation misses something important. The OUN was a small organization spread thinly on the ground. They tried to recruit locals, but adherence was spotty and opportunistic... excessive focus on their role risks overlooking an essential feature...: the participation of broad segments of the Ukrainian population in the pogrom's mass, carnivalesque character." Kopstein also emphasises the role of Zionism as a powerful current among Lvov Jews (in contrast to parts of western Ukraine where Zionist support was low or Communist support was high, which tended to have fewer pogroms) that meant it was seen as a threat by both Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.[29]
Einsatzgruppen killings
Sub-units of Einsatzgruppe C arrived on 2 July, at which point violence escalated further. More Jews were brought to the prisons where they were shot and buried in freshly dug pits.[30] It was also at this point that the Ukrainian militia was subordinated to the SS.[31] In addition to participation in the pogrom, Einsatzgruppe C conducted a series of mass-murder operations which continued for the next few days. Unlike the "prison actions", these shootings were marked by the absence of crowd participation. With assistance from Ukrainian militia, Jews were herded into a stadium, from where they were taken on trucks to the shooting site.[32]
The Ukrainian militia received assistance from the organisational structures of OUN, unorganized ethnic nationalists, as well as from ordinary crowds and underage youth.[33] German military personnel were frequently on the scene as both onlookers and perpetrators, apparently approving of the anti-Jewish violence and humiliation. During the afternoon of 2 July, the Germans stopped the rioting, confirming that the situation was ultimately under their control from the beginning.[34]
"Petliura Days"
A second pogrom took place in the last days of July 1941 and was called "Petliura Days " (Aktion Petliura) after the assassinated Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura.[16] The killings were organized with German encouragement, while Ukrainian militants from outside the city joined the fray with farm tools. In the morning of 25 July, militants began to assemble at the city's police stations. Accompanied by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, they assaulted Jews on the streets with clubs, axes and knives. In the afternoon, arrests and looting began. Consulting prepared lists, policemen arrested Jews in their homes, while civilians participated in acts of violence against Jews in the streets. Many were killed out of sight. According to Yad Vashem, about 2,000 people were murdered in approximately three days.[35]
Number of victims
The estimates for the total number of victims vary. A subsequent account by the Lviv Judenrat estimated that 2,000 Jews disappeared or were killed in the first days of July. A German security report of 16 July stated that 7,000 Jews were "captured and shot". The former is possibly an undercounting, while the German numbers are likely exaggerated, in order to impress higher command.[36]
According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, the first pogrom resulted in 2,000 to 5,000 Jewish victims. An additional 2,500 to 3,000 Jews were shot in the Einsatzgruppen killings that immediately followed. During the so-called "Petliura Days" massacre of late July, more than 1,000 Jews were killed.[16] According to the historian Peter Longerich, the first pogrom cost at least 4,000 lives. It was followed by the additional 2,500 to 3,000 arrests and executions in subsequent Einsatzgruppen killings, with "Petliura Days" resulting in more than 2,000 victims.[37]
The historian Dieter Pohl estimates that 4,000 of Lviv's Jews were killed in the pogroms between 1 and 25 July.[38] According to the historian Richard Breitman, 5,000 Jews died as a result of the pogroms. In addition, some 3,000 mostly Jews were executed in the municipal stadium by the Germans.[39]
Aftermath
German propaganda passed off all victims of the NKVD killings in Lviv as Ukrainians, although about one-third of the names on the Soviet prisoner lists were distinctly Polish or Jewish.
In declaring the Ukrainian state, the OUN leadership hoped that the Nazi authorities would accept a fascist Ukraine as a puppet state. These hopes had been fueled by the circle around Alfred Rosenberg, who was subsequently appointed as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and within Abwehr. Hitler, however, was adamantly opposed to Ukrainian statehood, having set his sights on the ruthless economic exploitation of the newly acquired colonial territories. Bandera was arrested on 5 July and placed under house arrest in Berlin. On 15 September, he was again arrested and spent the next three years as a privileged political prisoner in Germany. He was released in October 1944 to resume his cooperation with the Germans.[41]
The Nachtigall Battalion was not directly implicated in the Lviv pogrom as an organised formation. Survivors observed Ukrainians in Wehrmacht uniforms participating in the pogroms, but it remains unclear what role the battalion played. The Ukrainian speakers may have been translators attached to other units. Nevertheless, records show that the Nachtigall Battalion subsequently took part in the mass shootings of Jews near Vinnytsia in July 1941.[42]
The
For decades after the war, the pogroms in Western Ukraine received limited academic attention and were mostly discussed in the context of the series of photographs taken during the Lviv pogrom.[44] The photographs have been variously described by historians as "infamous",[44] "horrific",[15] and "almost iconic".[45] Some of the footage and photographs of the first pogrom were misinterpreted as showing NKVD's victims. In fact, these images showed Jewish victims killed after they had exhumed the bodies. They can be identified by white shirts and suspenders, which would have been prohibited in prisons, along with the haphazard body positions. In contrast, NKVD's victims were laid out neatly in rows and had dull-grey clothes.[46]
Historiography and historical memory
The memory and historiography of the pogroms have been widely contested. Soviet historiography downplayed the ethnicity of both victims and perpetrators, emphasising Nazi German violence against Soviet citizens. Ukrainian nationalist accounts have typically downplayed the role of the OUN in the violence, and some recent historians, such as Per Anders Rudling and John-Paul Himka have sought to rebalance this, emphasised the role of antisemitism in the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and documented OUN attempts to absolve Ukrainians of responsibility. Other historians, such as Alexander J. Motyl, have criticised Himka's position as one-sided, and emphasised the complexity of the events, including Polish participation.
According to Rudling, OUN's denials of its role in the Holocaust began in 1943 after it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. In October 1943, OUN issued instructions for preparation of materials that would suggest that Germans and Poles bore responsibility for anti-Jewish violence. Further, OUN wanted to spread disinformation that Lviv's Jewish council blamed Ukrainians for the pogroms only because it was under pressure from Germans to do so. The tone of OUN's leaflets and proclamations also changed, omitting the explicit antisemitic references which they had previously contained.[47][48]
According to Rudling, the "whitewashing" continued after the war, with OUN's propaganda describing its legacy as a "heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists".
Modern Lviv is 90 per cent Ukrainian.
In 2008, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) released documents which it stated indicated that the OUN may have been involved to a lesser degree than originally thought. According to scholars John-Paul Himka, Per Anders Rudling, and Marco Carynnyk, this collection of documents, titled "For the Beginning: Book of Facts" (Do pochatku knyha faktiv), was an attempt at manipulating and falsifying of World War II history. For example, one of the documents released was an allegedly contemporaneous chronicle of OUN's activities in 1941. In fact, it was clear from the document itself that it was a post-war production. According to Himka, all that this document proved was that OUN wanted to dissociate itself from anti-Jewish violence to aid in its goals of establishing a relationship with the West. The SBU also relied on the "memoirs" of a Stella Krenzbach, who was purportedly a Ukrainian Jew fighting in the ranks of the UPA. The memoirs and the figure of Krenzbach herself were likely post-war fabrications by the nationalist Ukrainian diaspora.[54][55][56]
More recently, Ksenya Kiebuzinski and
See also
- History of the Jews in Poland
- History of the Jews in Ukraine
- Jedwabne pogrom
- Kaunas pogrom
- Żydokomuna
References
Notes
- ^ Kopstein 2020, pp. 219–220: Kopstein writes: "On June 30, 1941, on the eighth day of operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a pogrom broke out in Lviv, the capital city of Eastern Galicia. Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent Poles, massacred their Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. ... For the next two days Lviv witnessed terrible anti-Jewish violence at the hands of the local Ukrainian population and the Ukrainian militia, and under the Nazis' approving eyes.".
- ISBN 9783110671261.
Ukrainian militiamen and civilians chased down Jews, took them to the prisons, forced them to exhume bodies of killed prisoners, mistreated and finally killed them.
- ^ Kopstein 2020, pp. 215–228.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, pp. 56–65.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 210.
- ^ Gross 2002, pp. 17, 28–30.
- ^ Berkhoff 2004, p. 14.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, pp. 30–31.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, p. 41.
- ^ Kopstein 2020, pp. 219.
- ^ Himka 2011, pp. 222–223.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, pp. 58-59: "The Jews in the USSR are the most faithful prop of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite-Bolshevik government uses the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Ukrainian masses to divert their attention from the true cause of their misfortune and to direct them at a time of upheaval into carrying out pogroms against Jews. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists combats the Jews as a prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime, while simultaneously making the masses conscious of the fact that Moscow is the principal enemy".
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 224.
- ^ Beorn 2018, p. 138.
- ^ a b Beorn 2018, p. 136.
- ^ a b c d Kulke 2012, p. 802.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 211.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 227.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 229.
- ^ Rudling 2011, pp. 8–9.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 223.
- ^ Himka 2011, pp. 210–211.
- ^ Himka 2011, pp. 211–212.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 213.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 218.
- ^ Himka 2015.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 234.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, pp. 44–47.
- ^ Kopstein 2020, pp. 220–223.
- ^ Beorn 2018, p. 137.
- ^ Himka 2011, pp. 220–221.
- ^ Himka 2011, pp. 219–220.
- ^ Breitman 2010, p. 75: "In Lwów, a leaflet warned Jews that, 'You welcomed Stalin with flowers. We will lay your heads at Hitler's feet.' At a 6 July 1941 meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined: 'We must finish them off...'".
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 228.
- ^ Yad Vashem (2005). "July 25: Pogrom in Lwów". Chronology of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 11 March 2005.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 221.
- ^ Longerich 2010, p. 194.
- ^ Lower 2012, p. 204.
- ^ Breitman 1991.
- ^ a b c Himka 2014.
- ^ Rudling 2011, pp. 9–10.
- ^ Rudling 2011, p. 9.
- ^ Claudia Koonz (2 November 2005). "SS Man Katzmann's "Solution of the Jewish Question in the District of Galicia"" (PDF). The Raul Hilberg Lecture. University of Vermont: 2, 11, 16–18. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 February 2015. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
- ^ ISBN 978-3865832405. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ISBN 978-0199945580. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ^ Himka 2011, p. 217.
- ^ Rudling 2011, pp. 14–15.
- ^ Kopstein & Wittenberg 2018, p. 92.
- ^ Rudling 2011, p. 16.
- ^ Rudling 2011, pp. 19–20.
- ^ a b Blacker 2014, p. 3.
- ^ Blacker 2014, p. 1.
- ^ Blacker 2014, p. 10.
- ^ "Falsifying World War II history in Ukraine". Kyiv Post. 8 May 2011. Archived from the original on 21 September 2011. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
- ^ "Історична напівправда гірша за одверту брехню". LB.ua. 5 November 2009. Archived from the original on 2 January 2015. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
- ^ Rudling 2011, p. X.
- ^ Kiebuzinski & Motyl 2017, pp. 57–59.
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- Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis (2004). Harvest of Despair. ISBN 0674020782.
- Blacker, Uilleam (2014). "Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L'viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience". S2CID 191468364. Routledge.
- Breitman, Richard (2010). Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War. DIANE Publishing. ISBN 978-1437944297.
- Breitman, Richard (1991). "Himmler and the 'Terrible Secret' among the Executioners". Journal of Contemporary History. 26 (3/4): 431–451. S2CID 159733077.
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- S2CID 159577084. Taylor & Francis.
- Himka, John-Paul (2014). "Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder: 'Krakivs'ki visti', the NKVD Murders of 1941, and the Vinnytsia Exhumation". Chapter: Ethnicizing the Perpetrators. University of Alberta. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
- Himka, John Paul (2015). "Ще кілька слів про львівський погром. ФОТО: Михайло Печарський". Lviv pogrom of 1941. Історична правда. Retrieved 6 March 2015.
- Kiebuzinski, Ksenya; Motyl, Alexander (2017). "Introduction". In Ksenya Kiebuzinski; Alexander Motyl (eds.). The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook. ISBN 978-90-8964-834-1.
- Kopstein, Jeffrey S.; Wittenberg, Jason (2018). Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-1527-3.
- Kopstein, Jeffrey S. (3 December 2020). "Pogroms". Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 215–228. S2CID 240643166.
- Kulke, Christine (2012). "Lwów". In ISBN 978-0-253-00202-0.
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