John-Paul Himka The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd ABSTRACT: This study examines three actors in the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941: the Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, and the urban crowd. It argues that the Germans created the conditions for the outbreak of the pogrom and encouraged it in the first place. They also shot Jews en masse, both during and after the pogrom. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) set up a short-lived government in Lviv on 30 June headed by a vehement anti-Semite. It simultaneously plastered the city with leaflets encouraging ethnic cleansing. It formed a militia that assumed leadership in the pogrom, arresting Jews for pogrom activities. The militiamen were also present at the execution of Jews. The day after the pogrom they began to work directly for the Einsatzgruppen, again arresting Jews for execution. OUN co-operated in these anti-Jewish actions to curry favour with the Germans, hoping for recognition of a Ukrainian state. OUN’s anti-Semitism facilitated assistance in anti-Jewish violence, but it was not an independent factor in the decision to stage a pogrom. The urban crowd, composed of both Poles and Ukrainians, took advantage of the particular conjuncture of high politics to act out an uninhibited script of robbery, sexual assault, beating, and murder. Particularly since the publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors, describing the brutal murder of a town’s Jewish inhabitants by their gentile neighbours, the investigation of the violence of the summer of 1941 has moved to the forefront of Holocaust studies. The outbreak of pogroms and mass executions in Poland’s eastern borderlands and the Baltic states seems to offer clues about the Germans’ thinking in the very first days of the war against the Soviet Union, as they were formulating their deadly policy toward Jews. Determining the responsibility of various actors in these violent events has been very difficult, however, and therefore it has become necessary to study them on the micro level, with the hope that eventually clear patterns will emerge. 1 The present 1 Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Jürgen Matthäus, “Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust,” in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, by Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004) 244–277. Dieter Pohl, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Western Ukraine—A Research Agenda,” in Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, edited by Eleazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007) 305–313. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada and the Pinchas and Mark Wisen Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 / juin-septembre-décembre 2011 210 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA article looks closely at the pogrom and executions that took place in the city of Lviv, in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine, in early July 1941. After a general survey of the course of the pogrom and of the executions that continued in its aftermath, the article examines the individual actors: the Ukrainian nationalist militia, whose role has been most clearly documented; the crowd that contributed to and helped shape the contours of the violence; and the Germans, whose role is difficult to establish with certainty or precision. THE COURSE OF THE POGROM Lviv was a multinational city on the eve of World War II. In 1939 Poles formed a slight majority (157,490 of a total population of 312,231, i.e., just over 50 percent), followed by Jews (99,595 or 32 percent) and Ukrainians (49,747 or 16 percent).2 The national composition of the city changed radically during and as a result of the war: the Jews were murdered, the Poles deported, and numerous Russians immigrated. Before war broke out, Lviv had been in Poland, but from September 1939 until the end of June 1941 it came under Soviet rule and was joined to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It changed hands again on 30 June 1941, when the Germans took the city. The pogrom in Lviv occurred against the background of the proclamation of a Ukrainian state in that city on the first day of the German occupation, a subject to which we shall return. The other important contextual circumstance of the Lviv pogrom of 1941 was the discovery of thousands of decomposing corpses of political prisoners who had been murdered by the NKVD in the days previous, as the Soviets realized that the Germans were advancing too rapidly for them to evacuate the prisons.3 The stench of bodies emanated from the prisons, which Memorial Museum (USHMM) for supporting the research on which this article is based. As this article was going to press, I learned of two new important studies on closely related themes: Wendy Lower, “Pogroms, Mob Violence and Genocide in Western Ukraine, Summer 1941: Varied Histories, Explanations and Comparisons,” Journal of Genocide Research 13.3 (September 2011): 217–246; David Alan Rich, “Armed Ukrainians in L'viv: Ukrainian Militia, Ukrainian Police, 1941 to 1942,” Canadian- American Slavic Studies, forthcoming. I have not been able to incorporate their findings in the present article. 2 Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv Under Soviet and Jewish Occupation, 1939–1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46.2 (2011): 339. 3 On the NKVD murders, see Bogdan Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente sind zu erschießen”: Die Brutalisierung des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Sommer 1941 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2000) (there is also a Polish-language version), but see also the critique by Dieter Pohl in H-Soz-u-Kult (internet), 30 April 2001: <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/id=546> (Accessed 15 October 2011), and Per Anders Rudling, “Bogdan Musial and the Question of Jewish Responsibility for the Pogroms in Lviv in the Summer of 1941,” East European Jewish Affairs 35.1 (June 2005): 69–89. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 211 were on fire when the Germans arrived on Monday 30 June. Many Ukrainian nationalists were among the victims. The Germans had the corpses retrieved, by Jews, and laid out for public display. Relatives of the prisoners searched among the bodies, looking for their loved ones. The bodies were found in three prisons: the Zamarstyniv street prison; the Brygidki prison; and the prison on Lontskoho. These three prisons became the main stages of pogrom activities. The Zamarstyniv street prison and Brygidki were located near the Jewish quarter of Lviv. The German military reported already in the late afternoon of 30 June that the population of Lviv was taking out its anger at the NKVD murders “on the Jews living in the city, who had always collaborated with the Bolsheviks.” 4 Already on this day, Jewish men were pressed into labour in the so-called “prison action,” i.e., exhuming and carrying out corpses from the prisons. Jews were forced to work on that day and on subsequent days at other tasks as well. The drafting of Jews for labour was a commonplace during pogroms and anti- Jewish incidents in Nazi-occupied Europe.5 In Lviv about ten Jews were forced to help with Ukrainian nationalist printing operations on 30 June. 6 German troops made Jews repair Lviv streets damaged from bombardment. 7 Jewish survivors speak of being made to clean houses and toilets as well. 8 Sometimes the impressment for labour turned deadly. Czeslawa Budynska, her sister, and a neighbour girl were taken by the Germans to clean up battle sites. They were beaten and pushed while performing their tasks. Others were put to work as well, including men, about a hundred fifty persons all together. Later the Germans made the men go into a nearby swimming pond, forcing them to go in deeper and deeper. One of the Germans had a boat hook and used it to drown them. The women witnessed this, but there was nothing they could do.9 Tuesday 1 July witnessed a full-blown pogrom. For this article I am using Raul Hilberg’s straightforward definition: “What are pogroms? They are short, 4 Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, Freiburg (hereafter BA-MA), Darstellung der Ereignisse, RH 24–49–8, f. 176. 5 Tomasz Szarota, U progu Zagłady: zajście antyżydowskie i pogromy w okupowanej Europie: Warszawa, Paryż, Amsterdam, Antwerpia, Kowno (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2000) 21. 6 Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre (Winnipeg), “Konkurs na spohady,” No. 40 (memoirs of Dmytro Honta), f. 40-16. 7 Kost' Pan'kivs'kyi, Vid derzhavy do komitetu (New York and Toronto: Zhyttia i mysli, 1957) 35. 8 USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (hereafter Shoah Foundation), 9640 Ana Merdinger, 31. A. R. Diukov, Vtorostepennyi vrag. OUN, UPA i reshenie “evreiskogo voprosa,” 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Fond “Istoricheskaia pamiat',” 2009) 69. 9 Shoah Foundation, 21303 Czeslawa Budynska, 31–42. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 212 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA violent outbursts by a community against its Jewish population.” 10 On this day the violence took on a more ritualized form: Jews, men and women, were made to clean the streets; Jewish women were singled out for humiliation; and Jews were made to perform various rituals that identified them with communism. The Lviv pogrom of 1941 drew precedents from an earlier pogrom in the city perpetrated in November 1918 by Polish soldiers and civilians; it also adopted tropes and rituals from anti-Jewish actions that occurred elsewhere in Nazi- occupied Europe. Just as in Lviv in 1918, in Vienna in March 1938, and in various localities in Poland in September 1939, in Lviv in 1941 Jews were forced to clean the streets. The point was to make Jews, who were prominent in the free professions and in business, engage in demeaning physical work. As a Jewish survivor remarked: “What a terribly debasing feeling it was when doctors and professors cleaned the streets with shovels in their hands [...].”11 According to a teenage girl, Germans and Ukrainians made a neighbour get her toothbrush to clean the street. They also made a Jewish man clean horse manure from the street by putting it in his hat.12 Judging by photographs, gentiles in Lviv found the Jewish cleaners amusing (see Figure 1). To some extent, the pogrom was a carnival. Figure 1. Jewish men and women are being made to clean a street near the opera house. Two men are in charge, while a crowd of onlookers enjoys the spectacle, particularly the woman in the centre of the photo. (Courtesy of David Lee Preston). 10 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961) 203. 11 Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (AŻIH), 301/1181, Lilith Stern, 2. 12 AŻIH, 301/3510, Felicja Heller, 1. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 213 One of the characteristic features of the pogrom was the maltreatment and humiliation of Jewish women. The scenes at Zamarstyniv street were photographed by a German camera crew; 13 there is also a film of the abuse. 14 There were some precedents for this in pogroms in Nazi-occupied Poland. Women were forcibly undressed in Kraków in December 1939,15 and many members of OUN, and particularly those who were to form the backbone of the Bandera movement, were in Kraków at that time, waiting out the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine; there is no reason to suspect that they took part in these incidents, but they may well have witnessed them. In the Easter season pogrom in Warsaw in 1940 teenagers preyed on women, especially to rob them.16 A clearer precedent for what happened in Lviv in 1941 is what happened in Lviv in 1918; Joseph Tenenbaum, who was an eyewitness to the 1918 pogrom, wrote: “Women had to disrobe and stand naked to the delight of the crude mob.”17 In Lviv in 1941 women were shoved, kicked, beaten in the face and elsewhere with sticks and tools, pulled by the hair, and tossed from one pogromist to another. Many of the women were stripped naked and exposed to the crowd. Some were chased through the street. 18 Rose Moskowitz had a school friend who had become an active communist. A gang caught her, cut off her hair, and ran her down the street, naked, screaming. The girl went home and killed herself.19 A Polish rescuer saw “a boy like Hercules” beating a twelve- year old Jewish girl with a chain. 20 Not surprisingly, rapes were also reported.21 13 The major collection of photographs is in the Wiener Library, photos 1615, 1618, 1635–1650, 1676–1677 (photo 1647 actually shows a naked and bloodied man). These photos are frequently reproduced. Some are in John-Paul Himka [Ivan Khymka], “Dostovirnist' svidchennia: reliatsiia Ruzi Vagner pro l'vivs'kyi pohrom vlitku 1941 r.,” Holokost i suchasnist' 2.4 (2008): 43–73. Another photo from this same incident is in USHMM, Photo Archives, 86319. 14 USHMM Film Archive, tape 402, story RG-60.0441. This film is in very damaged condition. But many stills made from a less deteriorated copy are available in USHMM, Photo Archives, 73666–718. 15 Roman Rosdolsky, “The Jewish Orphanage in Cracow,” The Online Publication Series of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe 4 (2009): 3. Available on-line: <http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/publications/> (Accessed 26 May 2010). Katarzyna Zimmerer, Zamordowany świat. Losy Żydów w Krakowie 1939–1945 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004) 30. 16 Szarota 25. 17 Cited in William W. Hagen, “The Moral Economy of Ethnic Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31.2 (April-June 2005): 203–226. 18 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 46, 53–56, 58, 62. 19 Shoah Foundation, 9851 Rose Moskowitz, 19. 20 Shoah Foundation, 28371 Jerzy Grzybowski, 24–25. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 214 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA Pregnant women were hit or kicked in the stomach. 22 The pogromists stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, lodged a baton in her vagina, and marched her past the post office to the prison action at Lontskoho. 23 The women were robbed as well.24 Róża Wagner said she even saw prostitutes with their pimps requisitioning shoes and other items of apparel from the Jewish women.25 The victims were chosen at random, as long as they were Jewish. 26 The pogrom of 1 July was accompanied by anticommunist spectacles and rituals. Larysa Krushel'nyts'ka, the well-known Ukrainian intellectual and memoirist, remembered the gigantic poster with a portrait of Stalin near the main post office. She and her mother watched as it was taken down. She was then about thirteen and remembers that people were happy there because the Soviet horror had ended. The German newsreel on the liberation of Lemberg apparently shows this very scene, and a large crowd is indeed shown cheering and applauding. Afterwards, Krushel'nyts'ka remembers, everyone began to stomp on the poster.27 A ten-year-old Jewish girl was also at the post office on the same day and remembered the scene quite differently: “In front of the post office people stood with shovels, and Ukrainians beat them and shouted ‘Jude! Jude!’”28 Each girl registered an impression reflective of her own position and perspective. Jewish pogrom victims were incorporated into the anticommunist rituals. A Pole remembered that Jews in Lviv were made to walk four abreast, sing Russian march songs, and shout praise to Stalin. 29 A Jewish witness corroborates: she saw a crowd surrounding a group of two to three hundred young Jewish men and women who, with raised hands, were forced to sing “the Russian Communist song, ‘My Moscow.’” 30 Another witness, a Ukrainian 21 AŻIH, 302/58, Alfred Monaster, 13–14. A quasi-official report on the Lviv pogrom of 1918 noted that parents reported over a dozen rapes, but “a certain number of others have been concealed out of shame.” Hagen 208. 22 AŻIH, 301/1794, Stefania Cang-Schutzman, 2 (her own sister, five months pregnant, was kicked in the stomach and lost the child). AŻIH, 302/58, Alfred Monaster, 13. 23 Tadeusz Zaderecki, “Gdy swastyka Lwowem władała... (Wycinek z dziejów okupacji hitlerowskiej),” Yad Vashem Archives, 06/28, 12. The source does not mention Lontskoho, but that would be the prison that could require taking a route past the post office. 24 “What they had on them they had to give up.” Janina Hescheles, Oczyma dwunastoletniej dziewczyny (Kraków: Centralny Komitet Żydow Polskich, 1946) 19 (speaking of persons seized from her apartment building). 25 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 47–48. 26 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 46, 48. 27 Interview with Larysa Krushel'nyts'ka, 15 June 2009. 28 Hescheles 18. 29 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 177. 30 Alizia Rachel Hadar, The Princess Elnasari (London: Heinemann, 1963) 16. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 215 woman, remembered seeing Ukrainians near the citadel escorting about a hundred men with their hands in the air, making them shout “We want Stalin!” 31 Such rituals were conducted elsewhere that summer. In Kolomyia, about 165 kilometres to the southwest, the statues of Stalin and Lenin were destroyed. Ukrainians forced a Jew to stand on one of the empty pedestals while other Jews were made to shout: “Stalin, you are an idiot!” 32 Jews were collected for the pogrom activities by Ukrainian militiamen. To get Jews for the Zamarstyniv prison and Brygidki, they went from house to house in the Jewish neighbourhoods.33 To recruit Jews for exhumation and abuse at Lontskoho, the militiamen arrested Jews on the streets. The arrests on Copernicus street, which leads from the centre of the city and the post office towards Lontskoho, are well documented photographically.34 In Lviv, as elsewhere in Galicia in the first days of the German invasion, 35 Jewish men were forced to exhume the corpses of NKVD victims and were maltreated and even murdered in the process. The corpses in Lviv began to be exhumed and put on display already on 30 June, and this continued on 1 and 2 July.36 Although eyewitnesses differ in their dating, my reading of their testimony is that the prison actions lasted three days, but the public pogrom took place on a single day, 1 July. Jews were beaten as they were escorted to the prisons on 1 July. A Jewish girl witnessed boys beating Jews they were taking to Brygidki with brooms, carpet-beaters, and stones.37 Tamara Branitsky said that she and her family had to keep their arms in the air as they walked the ten or fifteen minutes to Lontskoho prison. As they marched through the street, people would run in front of them and hit them on the head with sticks. The crowd was also ripping stones out of the pavement to throw at them and shouting obscenities. No one tried to help us, Branitsky remembered; on the contrary, the crowd seemed to derive 31 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 177. Jews were also marched with their hands in the air to Lontskoho prison. Jan Rogowski, “Lwów pod znakiem Swastyki,” Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich we Wrocławiu, 16711/II, 50. Grzegorz Rossolinski- Liebe provided me with a copy of this source. 32 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 179. 33 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 45. Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 177–178. Hescheles 19. Shoah Foundation, 14797 Lusia “Lisa” Hornstein, 14; 29911 Maria Gesiola, 10. 34 See below pp. 235–236, fn. 134. 35 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 178–179. 36 German documentation in BA-MA, Anlagen zu der Denkschrift “Kriegsverbrechen der russischen Wehrmacht 1941,” Teil II (Nr. 91–172), RW 2/148, ff. 337, 340, 350–351, establishes that the work of exhumation began immediately on 30 June and that the “corpse show” (Leichenschau) was continued on 1 and 2 July. 37 Hescheles 19. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 216 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA great pleasure from this.38 Eyewitness accounts39 mention, and photographs 40 show, that some of the Jews taken to the prisons were made to crawl on their hands and knees. Leszek Allerhand said that several hundred people were crawling on their hands and knees three kilometres to Brygidki prison, kicked and beaten on their way.41 Although some accounts say that only Jewish men were taken to work in the prisons, others say that women and children were there as well. 42 The general gist of the testimonies is that able-bodied men were actually put to work in the exhumation, while most women and the elderly were simply brought to the prisons for abuse. Women were also employed, however, to clean corpses. Young children were usually, but not always, 43 spared. A photograph in the collection of David Lee Preston illustrates the situation very well. No faces are visible, but a man is dressed in a suit, with street shoes, and he is digging out a body with a pick. He has obviously been taken right off the street. Next to him is a man with proper boots and pants; we see only his legs, but probably he was in uniform. On the back of the photo, taken privately by a soldier, is the inscription: “A Jew at the exhumation of blood-victims.”44 A film shows Jewish women with wet branches brushing off the corpses.45 Many of the Jewish men recruited for work at the prisons were murdered after they performed their task. A number of photographs show the victims of the prison action, although they have sometimes been misinterpreted as photographs of NKVD victims.46 We can use as an example one that shows the Brygidki courtyard from the Preston collection (Figure 2). 38 Shoah Foundation, 51593 Tamara Branitsky, 50–51. 39 I. K. Patryliak, Viis'kova diial'nist' OUN (B) u 1940–1942 rokakh (Kyiv: Kyivs'kyi natsional'nyi universytet imeni Tarasa Shevchenka Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, 2004) 335 (citing the testimony of a Polish woman from Lviv). Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 176 (also a Polish woman from Lviv, testifying in 1992; it is not clear to me if this is the same testimony as the one previously cited). Shoah Foundation, 1339 Leon Berk, 43. 40 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente,” photo between pages 176 and 177. This photo is also in USHMM, Photo Archives, 73218. Another photo, from a different location, is in USHMM, Photo Archives, 14026. 41 Shoah Foundation, 27779 Leszek Allerhand, 56. 42 Patryliak 335 (citing the testimony of a Polish woman from Lviv). Shoah Foundation, 27779 Leszek Allerhand, 53–57 (Allerhand was then nine years old; after crawling to the prison and after a beating and a kick in the face, he was told to go home). 43 AŻIH, 301/230, Jakub Dentel, 1. 44 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 50–51. 45 See below pp. 231–232, fn. 121. 46 Bogdan Musial, “Bilder einer Ausstellung: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Wanderausstellung ‘Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944,’” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47.4 (October 1999): 581. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 217 Figure 2. Corpses of Jewish men in the courtyard of Brygidki prison. The reverse of the photo carries the inscription “Bluthof Lemberg,” i.e., blood courtyard Lviv. (Courtesy of David Lee Preston). Unlike the corpses from the NKVD murders, which were laid out in neat rows, the corpses in the Preston picture are piled up every which way in a heap. The clothes in the Preston photograph are fairly bright—particularly striking are the white shirts, while the clothes in photographs of the NKVD victims are dirty and greyish. One of the figures in the foreground of the Preston photo is wearing suspenders—if he had been an NKVD prisoner, these would have been removed. Also in the Preston photo are the long poles and tools that the Jewish victims used to exhume the bodies of the NKVD victims. 47 A certain Gold, who recorded the events in Lviv after the Germans arrived, heard that at about 1:30–2:00 pm on the afternoon of 1 July, about thirty people were executed at Brygidki.48 Herman Kac said that he was lined up to be shot there. He was number forty-eight; forty-seven had already been executed; a German soldier was taking aim at him when an officer came up and said, 47 On how to distinguish victims of the prison action from NKVD victims, see Bernd Boll, “Złoczów. July 1941: The Wehrmacht and the Beginning of the Holocaust in Galicia: From a Criticism of Photographs to a Revision of the Past,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, edited by Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan (New York: The New Press, 2002) 61–99, 275–283. 48 Gold diary in “Teka Lwowska,” sketch 1, Yad Vashem Archives, T-32/50, 4. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 218 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA “Enough for today.” He and other survivors were forced to dig the grave for those executed.49 Kurt Lewin has left a detailed account of his experience at the Brygidki prison action. He described savage beatings by both Germans and Ukrainians. One Ukrainian particularly carved himself into Lewin’s memory. Elegantly dressed in a beautiful embroidered shirt, he beat the Jews with an ironclad cane. Strips of skin flew with every blow, sometimes an ear or an eye. When the cane broke, he found a large charred piece of wood and smashed a Jew’s skull, sending brains flying in every direction, including on Lewin’s face and clothing. Lewin witnessed the Germans shoot a large number of Jews. He even watched helplessly as they executed his father, a rabbi. Germans photographed the brutal scenes continually, which he found humiliating. He saw a general shoot a very young-looking nineteen-year-old and then announce that “the action is over.” What he meant was that no more victims were to be brought that day to Brygidki. The Ukrainian militia went home, but the Gestapomen continued to maltreat the Jews and some went around the site shooting the wounded. Then, he wrote, “soldiers of the Ukrainian Bandera legion” (i.e., the Nachtigall battalion, to be discussed below) arrived and began to beat the Jews again with fresh energy. Around 9:00 pm those who remained alive were expelled, with kicks and blows, from the Brygidki premises. They were told to return for work at 4:00 am the next morning. “From two thousand people not quite eighty were left.” From Lewin’s apartment building, thirteen men had been taken; only three returned.50 Lusia Hornstein lived right next to Brygidki prison; in fact, it bordered on her back courtyard and her family could see into it. On 1 July Lusia and her mother saw Germans and Ukrainians in uniform on the prison grounds. They could hear Jews being shot, but could not see it from their house. The shooting and screaming lasted through the day. Lusia’s father and brother had been taken to Brygidki for the exhumation. In the evening her father returned, looking terrible. He had hidden in a bathroom or another small room. From his hiding place he could see them bringing wave after wave of Jews. First they brought them to take the bodies out, but when they no longer needed more people to do that, they took them into a corner and shot them. Lusia realized that her brother was among those shot.51 The experience at Lontskoho has been described in detail by Tamara Branitsky. What she saw when she arrived there was Jewish women, older men, and children standing in a corner under the wall. On the other side of the yard were mounds of dead people, and Jewish men were sorting them. They had to 49 AŻIH, 301/2299, Herman Katz, 1. 50 Kurt I. Lewin, Przeżyłem. Saga Świętego Jura spisana w roku 1946 przez syna rabina Lwowa (Warsaw: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2006) 58–63. 51 Shoah Foundation, 14797 Lusia “Lisa” Hornstein, 14. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 219 move them from one place to another. Inside the yard there were SS and Gestapo. She and her mother and sisters were kept there for about an hour, although it seemed to them an eternity. Eventually her mother worked up the courage to approach an officer and ask in German what they intended to do with them. He responded: We will put you all under the wall and shoot you. However, later, high-ranking Gestapo officers came and told all the women and children to go home. As they went home, the people on the sidewalk continued to throw rocks at them. Her mother extended an arm to protect her sister—she was hit by a rock, and blood gushed from her arm. Eventually they made their way home.52 Matylda Wyszynska and her family also experienced Lontskoho. Her father was taken first. He was brought home a day and a half or two days later completely unconscious. He stank of corpses. He remained unconscious for a long time, nervous movements and screams being the main signs of life. She and her stepmother were also taken. They were saved by a Ukrainian militiaman at the scene who was the brother of a school friend 53—those with the power to do harm also have the power to save. According to a Jewish source, a German officer put a stop to the mob violence at Lontskoho. A German non-commissioned officer tried to protect the Jewish labourers while the crowds on the rooftops demanded their death. The mob was quelled only when a German officer intervened and shouted with indignation: “We are not after all Bolsheviks.”54 At Zamarstyniv street prison, according to one Jewish man who was forced to work there, a machine gun was brought to the site, and Jewish men were made to line up against the wall several times. But each time higher Gestapo functionaries prevented the execution.55 The Wehrmacht suppressed the pogrom on the evening of 1 July, although isolated violent incidents continued for the next few days. Separate from the pogrom as such were the systematic murders perpetrated over the next few days by the Germans, perhaps even at Hitler’s direct order.56 These murders differ from the pogrom proper by the absence of crowd participation. It was an operation conducted by the German Einsatzgruppe C with the aid of the Ukrainian militia of the Stetsko government. The Einsatzgruppe-soldier Felix Landau wrote in his diary on 3 July 1941 that he took part in the execution of five hundred “defenceless men—even if they were only Jews.”57 Edward Spicer was caught in the roundup of Jews for execution. What follows is a slightly condensed and edited version of his testimony: 52 Shoah Foundation, 51593 Tamara Branitsky, 53–57. 53 Shoah Foundation, 22876 Matylda Wyszynska, 36–39. 54 Gold diary 4. 55 AŻIH, 301/2242, Zygmunt Tune, 1. 56 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 252–253. 57 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 255. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 220 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA [Days after the pogrom] I was caught by a group of Ukrainians not too far from where I lived, and we were taken to a place near the railroad station. First they were beating us all the way; then they pushed us down the staircase, until we were piled up one on top of another five-six high. We lay there for an hour or so; then they asked us to go back up the staircase. They lined us up, they were beating us, and then they marched us to [...] a large place; I think it was a hockey arena. They made us lie face down on the ground. Someone kicked me in the head. We had to lie there with our hands stretched out until the morning. During the night if anyone made a move, they killed them with their rifle butts. There were only men lying there. The second day was a hot day. They didn’t give us any water. Anything to eat—forget it. Then they got groups of people to go, supposedly, to work. They selected a group of about forty people. They were all lined up, and we were all jealous that they were going to work. In the meantime what we saw was just horrible. The Germans were beating that group with their rifle butts. Ukrainian civilians were coming around the place just to help the Germans to beat us. They used heavy pieces of wood like baseball bats. Then they took people away on trucks. We stayed one more night with our heads down, the same routine. In the morning some more trucks came up. Some Ukrainians came in with shovels, with all kinds of things. I didn’t believe people could do this to people. I’ve never seen atrocities like it. On the next day they were taking people again on trucks. I pushed myself forward to go on the truck, but a German SS officer grabbed me by the neck and wouldn’t let me go on the truck. When he looked away, I tried to sneak in again. He still wouldn’t let me go on the truck. Little did I realize that all of [those being taken away in the truck] were being shot. And the Ukrainians were digging the ditches. From what I understand there were over two thousand hostages killed [...]. How did I get out? They stopped suddenly taking people away, and one of the guards told us we were going to be released. But then he told us they were going to play with us a little bit: You’re going to have to rise up and fall down. Auf, lauf, hinlegen. Auf, lauf, hinlegen.58 Then I saw a lot of Ukrainians, civilians, in that place. They made us run around in circles, and each German and Ukrainian was beating Jews, and I could see a lot of them lying down, either dead or completely unconscious. I was lucky because I saw a German with a small stick so I was running around him. He was hitting me but I really didn’t feel any pain. You become numb. Then they let us all out, out of this place. I was at that time twenty- two years old. I slowly, painfully made my way back home. 59 The Ukrainians who co-operated with the Germans in these executions were not actually civilians, but members of the militia, only a minority of whom wore uniforms. As of 2 July 1941 the Ukrainian militia in Lviv was operatively 58 A Polish memoirist also remembers passing in that part of Lviv and seeing a group of Jews being made to go up and down. Stefan Kryński, “Kartki ze wspomnień,” 20: <http://www.lwow.home.pl/weigl/krynski.html> (Accessed 24 March 2009). 59 Shoah Foundation, 12729 Edward Spicer, 18–26. A very similar story, but dated to 10 July, can be found in AŻIH, 301/1864, Salomon Goldman, 1–5. Another similar account: AŻIH, 302/26, Lejb Wieliczker, 4–12; a later version of the same: Leon Wiliczker Wells, The Janowska Road (New York: Macmillan, 1963) 36–43. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 221 subordinated to the German SS. It was assigned “order duties inside the city,” according to Professor Hans Joachim Beyer, who was serving as a high official of the Sicherheitsdienst in the city and was deeply implicated in atrocities against Poles and Jews.60 The Ukrainian activist Kost' Pan'kivs'kyi, who spent a lot of time with Beyer,61 also recalled the subordination of the militia in Lviv to the SS as of 2 July and that “the Germans immediately began to use the militia for their own aims, especially in what might be termed anti-Jewish matters.” 62 The detailed account of a Jewish survivor also explicitly identified the Ukrainians involved here as members of the militia. 63 Even though the militia was serving the Einsatzgruppe, Stetsko still regarded it as a force in the service of his Ukrainian government.64 The Lviv Judenrat estimated that two thousand Jews disappeared in the pogrom and executions of the first days of July 1941, 65 but an internal German security report dated 16 July said that “police captured and shot some 7000 Jews” at that time.66 Arriving at a reasonable estimate of victims in cases of mass murder is often difficult. In this particular case, we might posit that the Judenrat underestimated the number of victims, because they counted the number of Jews they knew to be missing; they could have overlooked some. The German shooters, however, might have inflated the numbers to demonstrate how zealous they were in the performance of their duty. In any case, it is clear that thousands of Jews perished in Lviv in early July. UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST ACTORS Inquiry into other pogroms under Nazi occupation by Tomasz Szarota has shown that the modus operandi of the Germans was always to work with some 60 Orest Dziuban, ed., Ukrains'ke derzhavotvorennia. Akt 30 chervnia 1941. Zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv (Lviv-Kyiv: Piramida, 2001) 153; this document is a reprint of “Podii na zakhidn'o-ukrains'kykh zemliakh (Interviu z dots. d-rom H. I. Baierom),” Krakivs'ki visti 6 July 1941. On Beyer, see Karl Heinz Roth, “Heydrichs Professor: Historiographie des ‘Volkstums’ und der Massenvernichtungen: Der Fall Hans Joachim Beyer,” in Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945, edited by Peter Schöttler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) 262–342. 61 Pan'kivs'kyi, Vid derzhavy do komitetu 38, 48, 64–68. 62 Kost' Pan'kivs'kyi, Roky nimets'koi okupatsii (New York and Toronto: Zhyttia i mysli, 1965) 401. 63 AŻIH, 302/26, Lejb Wieliczker, 4–12; Wells, The Janowska Road 36. 64 Iaroslav S. Stets'ko, 30 chervnia 1941. Proholoshennia vidnovlennia derzhavnosty Ukrainy (Toronto: Liga vyzvolennia Ukrainy, 1967) 256. 65 Jacob Gerstenfeld-Maltiel, My Private War: One Man’s Struggle to Survive the Soviets and the Nazis (London: Vallentine Mitchell & Co. Ltd., 1993) 54. 66 Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939–1944 (Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 2004) 83. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 222 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA organized local group, which would spearhead each incident. As Dieter Pohl has observed: One should not underestimate the practical problems these SS men faced when they entered the Western Ukrainian towns. They did not know the population, the topography, and of course neither did they know the language. Thus, they were totally dependent on interpreters, local administrations or the militias that surfaced in June 1941.67 In “a kind of tacit division of labor,” in Jurgen Matthäus’s phrase, local agents helped by identifying and persecuting Jews as well as carrying out pogroms. 68 In Lviv in 1941, the natural candidate for this kind of partnership was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which had been working closely with the Germans for some years previously and looked at National Socialism as a model. On 2 May 1939 the head of OUN, Andrii Mel'nyk, assured German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that his organization was “related in world outlook to the same type of movements of Europe, in particular to National Socialism in Germany and fascism in Italy.” 69 Kost' Pan'kivs'kyi, who himself collaborated with the Germans and took OUN to task for breaking with the Germans later in 1941, identified the members of OUN as “people who for years had had contacts with the Germans, who were ideologically linked with fascism and nazism, who in word and in print and in deed had for years been preaching totalitarianism and an orientation on Berlin and Rome.” 70 At the time that the Lviv pogrom broke out, OUN was a divided organization. In Lviv the faction led by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B) took over the nationalist movement. It was the Bandera faction of OUN that proclaimed a Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941. The head of the Ukrainian government was Yaroslav Stetsko, a prominent lieutenant of Bandera’s as well as an extreme anti-Semite. In spring 1939 he had published an article in Novyi shliakh, a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper in Canada, that articulated his thinking about Jews. Orest Martynowych has summarized Stetsko’s piece as follows: [...] Stetsko [...] insisted that Jews were “nomads and parasites,” a nation of “swindlers, materialists, and egotists,” “devoid of heroism, and lacking an idea that could inspire them to sacrifice.” Jews were only interested in “personal profit,” found “pleasure in the satisfaction of the basest instincts,” and were determined “to corrupt the heroic culture of warrior nations.” Ukrainians, Stetsko concluded, were “the first people in Europe to understand the corrupting work of Jewry,” and as a result they had separated themselves from the Jews centuries ago, thereby retaining 67 Pohl, “Anti-Jewish Pogroms,” 308. 68 Matthäus 268. 69 Auswärtiges Amt, Politisches Archiv, AA, R 104430, Po. 26, No. 1m Pol. V. 4784, f. 2. This source was made available to me by Ray Brandon. 70 Pan'kivs'kyi, Roky nimets'koi okupatsii 13. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 223 “the purity of their spirituality and culture.” Stetsko’s article also placed Jews at the centre of an international conspiracy by suggesting that Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists were collaborating to promote Jewish interests.71 Stetsko’s autobiography, written within two weeks after the proclamation of the Ukrainian state and addressed to the Germans who had subsequently arrested him, contained the following passage: I consider Marxism to be a product of the Jewish mind, which, however, has been applied in practice in the Muscovite prison of peoples by the Muscovite-Asiatic people with the assistance of the Jews. Moscow and Jewry are Ukraine’s greatest enemies and bearers of corruptive Bolshevik international ideas. Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.72 Stetsko’s proclamation of statehood, known by Ukrainian nationalists as the Act of 30 June 1941, did not have anything explicit to say about Jews, but it clearly declared its affinity with Nazi Germany: By the will of the Ukrainian people, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera proclaims the renewal of the Ukrainian State, for which whole generations of the finest sons of Ukraine have paid with their lives [...]. The renewed Ukrainian State will collaborate closely with National Socialist Greater Germany, which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler is creating a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian people liberate themselves from Muscovite occupation [...]. 71 Orest T. Martynowych, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Attitude of Ukrainian War Veterans in Canada to Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939,” in Re-imagining Ukrainian Canadians: History, Politics, and Identity, edited by Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) 189–190. 72 Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude Toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets'ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23.3–4 (1999): 170–171. I have used their translation of the autobiography. The underlining is in the original. The authenticity of Stetsko’s autobiography has been challenged by Taras Hunczak (“Problems of Historiography: History and Its Sources,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25.1–2 [2001]: 129–142), but unconvincingly. For a refutation, see Taras Kurylo and John-Paul Himka [Ivan Khymka], “Iak OUN stavylasia do ievreiv? Rozdumy nad knyzhkoiu Volodymyra V''iatrovycha,” Ukraina Moderna 13 (2008): 253. In addition to what is said there, a comparison of the phraseology in the two texts of 1939 and 1941 confirm that they were written by the same author. Iaroslav Stets'ko [Zynovii Karbovych], “Zhydivstvo i my,” Novyi shliakh 8 May 1939. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 224 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA Long live the Sovereign United (Soborna) Ukrainian State, long live the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, long live the Leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Stepan Bandera!73 The Germans did not recognize this state and only tolerated its proclamation for a few days. They then arrested the nationalist leaders, including Stetsko and Bandera.74 The nationalists hoped the Germans would reconsider, and OUN-B held a series of meetings across Galicia to petition the Germans to recognize Ukrainian statehood and release the nationalist leadership. At these meetings it was stressed that resurgent Ukraine would take its place among the fascist states of the new Europe.75 The Bandera faction of OUN had a clearly enunciated program of “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” which was the actual heading of a poster that OUN members pasted on walls all over Lviv as of 30 June.76 OUN had begun to plan ethnic cleansing as soon as it became aware of the likelihood of a German attack on the Soviet Union. Already in May 1941, when planning what it should do after the German invasion, OUN-B gave instructions to its militias to cleanse the terrain of hostile elements: “At a time of chaos and confusion it is permissible to liquidate undesirable Polish, Russian, and Jewish activists, especially supporters of Bolshevik Russian imperialism.” 77 The instructions devoted a special section to “minorities policy.” National minorities “that are hostile to us, Russians, Poles, Jews” were marked for “destruction in battle.”78 The head of the OUN underground, Ivan Klymiv (Legenda), prepared leaflets before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war that were distributed or affixed in public spaces in Lviv on the day of the pogrom. One of them announced revolutionary tribunals that were to punish enemies of the Ukrainian movement, applying “mass (family and national) responsibility for all offenses against the Ukrainian State, the 73 Dziuban 123. 74 John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Littleton, CO.: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1980) 77–84. 75 Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “The ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’ of 1941: Discourse and Practice of a Fascist Movement,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12.1 (Winter 2011): 83–114. 76 Oseredok, “Konkurs na spohady,” No. 40 (memoirs of Dmytro Honta), f. 40-15. Ievhen Nakonechnyi, “Shoa” u L'vovi, 2nd ed. (Lviv: Piramida, 2006) 118. 77 Patryliak 468. Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth: Ukrainian Nationalist Discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers 39.3 (May 2011): 330. Here and elsewhere when referring to the latter source, I have used Carynnyk’s translation. His publication of OUN statements on the Jews is highly authoritative; he quotes from archival originals and reproduces legible photographs of the most important original texts. 78 Patryliak 323. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 330. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 225 Ukrainian Army, and the OUN.”79 Another proclaimed: “People! Know! Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, the Jews are your enemies! Destroy them!” 80 Furthermore, the Banderites were convinced that Jews were the main supporters of the communists and particularly responsible for repressive actions against Ukrainians. The May 1941 instructions told OUN propagandists who were to work on Red Army soldiers to emphasize the Jewishness of communism: “Marxism is a Jewish invention” and “Stalinist and Jewish commissars are the arch-enemies of the people!”81 The identification of Jews with the Bolsheviks became particularly explosive in the summer of 1941, because of the NKVD massacres of political prisoners. Aside from motivations for anti-Jewish violence, OUN also had the means to implement it. The particular arm of OUN-B that was primarily responsible for organizing the pogrom was once considered to be a Ukrainian nationalist legion in German service, the Nachtigall battalion. But this version of events has proven to be a Soviet falsification intended to undermine the government of Konrad Adenauer in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1959–1960 one of Adenauer’s ministers, Theodor Oberländer, was tried in absentia in an East German court for his role as the German liaison with Nachtigall and found guilty of abetting the pogrom. A West German court looking into the evidence exonerated Oberländer and, at least as a unit, Nachtigall; it indicated that the East German evidence included Soviet fabrications. Ivan Patryliak, a specialist in the history of OUN and sympathetic to the organization, has provided a good review of the basic issues.82 An important argument that Nachtigall did not play a prominent role in the Lviv pogrom is the argument from silence. If it had, then this fact would have been mentioned in pre-1959 accounts of the persecution and extermination of Lviv’s Jewish population, such as in works by Philip Friedman,83 Eliyahu Yones,84 and Tadeusz Zaderecki. In early February 2008 the Security Service of Ukraine released into wide circulation KGB documents that detailed how it had been fabricating the case. 85 It is true that Nachtigall 79 Dziuban 131. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 330. 80 Dziuban 129. The same document, but misdated to the end of 1941, is in O. Veselova et al., eds., OUN v 1941 r.: dokumenty, 2 parts (Kyiv: Instytut istorii Ukrainy NAN Ukrainy, 2006) 576. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 330. 81 Veselova 566–568. Carynnyk, “Foes of Our Rebirth,” 332. 82 Patryliak 321–368. 83 Filip Friedman, Zagłada Żydów lwowskich w okresie okupacji niemieckiej (Munich, 1947). Philip Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi Occupation,” in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, by Philip Friedman, edited by Ada June Friedman (New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980) 176–208. 84 Yones’s text was originally written in the 1950s. 85 “U Sluzhbi bezpeky Ukrainy vidbulys' Hromads'ki istorychni slukhannia ‘Zvynuvachennia proty “Nakhtihaliu”—istorychna pravda chy politychni tekhnolohii,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 226 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA executed Jews on its subsequent march to Vinnytsia, 86 but it seems not to have taken part, as a unit, in the Lviv pogrom or executions. There are, however, a few testimonies taken before 1959, when systematic falsification began, that state that members of Nachtigall participated in the pogrom. 87 It is possible that the soldiers in these few cases were indeed from Nachtigall, but it is also possible that they were misidentified. Nachtigall had no insignia that distinguished it from other German units, so the identification could have been made solely on the basis of the language the soldiers in German uniform spoke. The Germans reported that their Ukrainian translators were intensely anti- Semitic and believed that every Jew should be killed, 88 so it is possible that these soldiers were translators being “rewarded” for their services rather than members of Nachtigall. Scholars now incline to the opinion that it was the militia set up by the OUN government on 30 June 1941 that spearheaded the pogrom on the following day.89 Indeed, Nachtigall veteran Myroslav Kalba, in arguing the innocence of his battalion during the pogrom, cited an alleged order from battalion commander Roman Shukhevych: “Do not commit any crimes or retaliation against our enemies, whether Poles or Jews, because it is not our task to deal with them.” In the opinion of Patryliak, if such an order did indeed exist, then the meaning of Shukhevych’s words was that Nachtigall was to serve as one of the nuclei of a Ukrainian army, whose main task would be to fight at the front, while the destruction of enemies from the civilian population was the responsibility of others, namely “special German groups, the Banderite security service, the militia, and so forth.”90 The Ukrainian National Militia was part of a long-term plan of OUN’s to militarize the nationalist movement and prepare for a national uprising under the Press Release of the Security Service of Ukraine, 6 February 2008: <http://www.ssu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=74369&cat_id=74549> (Accessed 10 March 2011). “Iak tvorylasia lehenda pro Nachtigall,” Dzerkalo tyzhnia 16 February 2008, available on the website of the Security Service of Ukraine: <http://www.ssu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=74855&cat_id=74589> (Accessed 10 March 2011). 86 Patryliak 362. 87 Zygmunt Tune was taken to the Zamarstyniv street prison, where he was beaten, including by “members of the Ukrainian legion standing at the gate.” AŻIH, 301/2242, Zygmunt Tune, 1. Kurt Lewin also remembered members of Nachtigall at Brygidki. See above p. 218. 88 BA-MA, Anlagen zu der Denkschrift “Kriegsverbrechen der russischen Wehrmacht 1941,” Teil II (Nr. 91–172), RW 2/148, f. 379. 89 For example: “But the emissaries of the OUN had formed a local militia which turned against the Jewish population. Ukrainian militiamen and civilians chased down Jews, took them to prisons, forced them to exhume the bodies, mistreated and finally killed them.” Mick 348. 90 Patryliak 333–334. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 227 leadership of its own trained cadres. In March 1940 OUN-B ordered the formation of a “military section” in each OUN cell in every village. Specific, detailed instructions for units identified as militias were drawn up in May 1941 as part of OUN’s planning for the war. Although according to plan the militias were to be centralized, centralization proved impossible to realize in practice. 91 The first mention of the actual formation of a Ukrainian militia was 25 June 1941 in the village of Młyny (today in Poland). An OUN expeditionary group from Kraków was following the Germans as they advanced on Galicia. In the vicinity of Młyny, according to a telegram Stetsko sent to Bandera, “a Jew” shot a German soldier and his horse, but the Germans killed “two conscious nationalists” in retaliation. Later that same day “Jews” killed another German soldier. “The Jews deliberately provoke,” he wrote. “They say they find the situation intolerable (im nema zhyttia), so they want to destroy our people and our population.” He announced to Bandera: “We are making a militia which will help to remove the Jews and protect the population.”92 This seems to have been a purely local militia. The formation of the militia in Lviv began in earnest on the morning of 30 June 1941. Stetsko wrote in his memoirs that he entrusted the formation of the militia to Ivan Ravlyk,93 who had accompanied him to Lviv as part of the OUN expeditionary group from Kraków. From other memoir literature, however, it is clear that Roman Shukhevych, the commander of Nachtigall, also played some role in appointing the militia leadership.94 In fact, the militia recruited on St. George’s Hill, right where Nachtigall was encamped. 95 A 1947 memoir of the Ukrainian activist Dmytro Honta indicates that the militia in Lviv was set up by the Bandera movement in a semi-conspiratorial manner. Honta related that most of those who volunteered for it were students. They were given an armband in the national colours to wear on their left arm. Honta, who had served in the army some twenty years previously, also tried to sign up, thinking his military experience could prove useful, but he was discouraged from joining. First, a young man from the countryside told him that “we’re in charge here,” but did not explain who the “we” were. Then some men who clearly were in charge told him to find something else to do—younger 91 Patryliak 104, 108–109, 112–113, 396, 525–563. 92 Dziuban 76–77. 93 Stets'ko, 30 chervnia 1941 181–182. 94 Bohdan Kazanivs'kyi, Shliakhom Legendy. Spomyny (London: Ukrains'ka vydavnycha spilka, 1975) 212–213. 95 Kazanivs'kyi 212. Oseredok, “Konkurs na spohady,” No. 40 (memoirs of Dmytro Honta), f. 40-13. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 228 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA people would serve as militiamen. He took off his armband and later that day served the Ukrainian movement by printing nationalist leaflets.96 Two men who played a major role in the Lviv militia barely survived the NKVD prison massacres. One was Bohdan Kazanivs'kyi, whom Shukhevych entrusted to appoint a militia commander for Lviv; another was Omelian Matla, the man whom Kazanivs'kyi appointed.97 We can obtain an insight into their mindset from their testimony in early July before a German commission investigating the NKVD murders in Lviv. Matla had been incarcerated at the Zamarstyniv street prison and Brygidki. At Brygidki he was particularly mistreated. A fist to his face knocked out four teeth. He was beaten all over his body with a rubber baton. Frequent beatings left blood in his urine even after his release. Usually two men worked him over thoroughly as they interrogated. They would find what caused him the most pain and repeat that again and again. Often they would hit him with a fist under the chin and at the same time kick him in the groin. After the German-Soviet war broke out, the NKVD went on a rampage of murder. The perpetrators, he said, were for the most part Jews.98 The other survivor, Kazanivs'kyi, said he was beaten unconscious with the blunt edge of a cavalry sabre, later with fists and pistol stocks by five NKVD- men at once, deprived for days of food and water. He told of disgusting sanitary conditions in a temporary holding pen, actually a stable, in which prisoners were forced to defecate without removing their pants. In the NKVD prison in Sokal, he was taken to a dungeon, laid on a table, and tortured. The torture included waterboarding. He managed to escape from Brygidki before the murders began.99 Kazanivs'kyi had nothing to say about Jewish involvement in these outrages, however. Although the men’s description of the horrendous conditions of the Soviet prisons and interrogations may sound exaggerated, it does not diverge radically from what we know of Stalinist interrogation practices. 100 Clearly, their experiences in the prisons would have generated a great deal of anger. 96 Oseredok, “Konkurs na spohady,” No. 40 (memoirs of Dmytro Honta), f. 40-13 – 40- 14; this portion of Honta’s memoir has been published: Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 64 n. 27. 97 Kazanivs'kyi 212–214. 98 BA-MA, Anlagen zu der Denkschrift “Kriegsverbrechen der russischen Wehrmacht 1941,” Teil II (Nr. 91–172), RW 2/148, ff. 342–344. I am grateful to Kai Struve for providing me with a copy of this material. 99 BA-MA, Anlagen zu der Denkschrift “Kriegsverbrechen der russischen Wehrmacht 1941,” Teil II (Nr. 91–172), RW 2/148, ff. 355–360. 100 On these practices, see Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 91. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Dialectics of Pain: The Interrogation Methods of the Communist Secret Police in Poland, 1944–1955,” Glaukopis 2–3 (2004–2005): 1–54. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 229 Thus two sources of the militia that was being formed on 30 June 1941 were OUN activists who had come to Lviv from Kraków and members of the OUN already in Lviv who were registering at St. George’s Hill. A third source was former Soviet Ukrainian militiamen. There was a minority of Ukrainian National Militiamen who wore navy blue uniforms, and they would have acquired them from serving in the Soviet militia. 101 Pogrom survivor Leopold Iwanier recognized some of the militiamen: “These were the same Ukrainians who were in the Soviet militia. They replaced the stars on their caps with tryzubs [stylized tridents—Ukrainian national symbols]. We knew them because we lived on their beat.”102 The former Soviet militiamen may have switched allegiance because, as Timothy Snyder has noted, “in some cases people took part in German anti-Semitic policies to distance themselves, in the eyes of their new masters, from their own previous involvement in the Soviet administration.”103 Another possibility is that some of these men had already been in OUN and infiltrated the Soviet militia to gain police experience.104 In any case, OUN valued professionalism and would have welcomed the participation of trained police personnel. In his memoirs published twenty-six years later, Stetsko categorically denied that the militia which his government set up was involved in any anti- Jewish actions.105 Yet the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Dozens of eyewitness testimonies identify militiamen as prime actors during the pogrom. For example, Ryszard Ryndner wrote that “the Ukrainian militia seized Jews on the streets [and] took them to various assembly points, where they were mercilessly beaten.”106 Felicja Heller remembered that when the Germans came, “Ukrainian nationalists organized ‘a Ukrainian police’” which seized Jews from 101 Oberstaatsanwalt Bonn, 8 Js 344/59, Verfahren gegen Oberländer und das Bataillon “Nachtigall,” cited in Günter Plum, [Report on OUN involvement in 1941 pogroms] (Munich: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1965) 17, typescript in Mykola Lebed archives, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, box 1, file 3. A memoirist observed two uniformed militiamen on either side of the gates by Lontskoho prison during the Lviv pogrom. Edmund Kessler, Przeżyć Holokaust we Lwowie (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2007) 38. 102 Shoah Foundation, 48148, 45–47. 103 Timothy Snyder, “What We Need to Know About the Holocaust,” New York Review of Books 30 September 2010: 81. 104 During the first period of Soviet rule in Bukovina (1940–1941) OUN ordered its new recruits to join the Soviet militia. Ivan Fostii, “Diial'nist' OUN na Bukovyni u 1940–1941 rr.,” 6: <http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/doccatalog%5Cdocument?id=42164> (Accessed 24 May 2011). 105 Stets'ko, 30 chervnia 1941 182, 246. 106 Ryndner also stated that Rabbi Ezechial Lewin approached Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky to intervene with “the Ukrainian authorities and the militia” to stop the violence against the Jews. AŻIH, 301/18, 1. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 230 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA their apartments and took them to clean streets and work at the prisons.107 Lusia Hornstein said “the Ukrainians, police or militia or whatever they were,” were rounding up Jews and came to her family’s apartment. 108 Matylda Wyszynska, who was taken to Lontskoho during the prison action, was actually released by a Ukrainian militiaman at the scene whom she knew personally. 109 Sometimes the eyewitnesses did not specifically identify the militia, but mentioned the blue and yellow armbands, worn on the left arm, which served as the militia insignia (except for those militiamen, already mentioned, who had uniforms). Janisław Korczyński, for instance, saw “a group of Ukrainians with yellow and blue armbands” taking about seventy Jews to the Zamarstyniv street prison.110 Professor Maurycy Allerhand noted in his diary on the day of the pogrom that he witnessed twenty or so Ukrainians beating Jews with sticks and whips: “That they were Ukrainians was evident not only from the blue and yellow armbands on their left arm but also from the curses directed against the Jews in the Ukrainian language.”111 Tamara Branitsky, then nineteen, saw Ukrainian guards, armed with rifles and wearing blue and yellow armbands on their left shoulders, forcing their way into apartments, eventually into hers as well; the Ukrainian guards slapped her mother and took her and her sisters to be beaten and humiliated at Lontskoho prison. 112 A certain Gold recorded that a “man with a ribbon in Ukrainian colours” demanded to see his passport, determined that he was a Jew, and sent him off to exhume bodies at Brygidki.113 There are a number of other related testimonies. 114 Witnesses in denaturalization proceedings against alleged Ukrainian policemen who immigrated to the US made reference to Ukrainian militiamen active in the violence in Lviv in 1941. One of them, Chaim Shlomi, remembered 107 AŻIH, 301/3510, Felicja Heller, 1. 108 Shoah Foundation, 14797, 14. 109 Shoah Foundation, 22876, 39. 110 AŻIH, 301/1809, 1. 111 AŻIH, 229 [Teka Lwowska]/22, 1 and 153. His son Leszek Allerhand told the Shoah Foundation that Ukrainians with blue and yellow armbands arrested his parents and him on the street shortly after the Germans arrived; they were beaten near the Roman Catholic cathedral, trampled and spat upon, and kicked. Shoah Foundation, 27779 Leszek Allerhand, 54. 112 Shoah Foundation, 51593 Tamara Branitsky, 49–50. 113 Gold diary 4. 114 Lilith Stern remembered Ukrainian militia with blue and yellow bands on their left arms as leading the Lviv pogrom. (AŻIH, 301/1181, 2–3.) Salomon Goldman recorded that “in the first days [of the occupation] Ukrainians with militia bands on their arms took Jews to clean the prisons on Lontskoho and Zamarstyniv street.” (AŻIH, 301/1864, 1.) Bronisław Holcman identified the men who mistreated his wife as policemen wearing blue and yellow armbands. (Diukov, Vtorostepennyi vrag 69.) THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 231 the seizure of Jews from their apartments: “[...] the Ukrainian Police that began the organization in the beginning there—they were still civilians without uniforms; they only had a blue and yellow band—they also began to remove Jews from the houses and to catch them on the streets.” 115 When Abraham Goldberg was asked how he knew that those who arrested him were Ukrainian police, he responded: “They [...] wore bands that were blue and yellow, which were Ukrainian symbols. They had a rifle and they spoke Ukrainian.” 116 It is not only the large quantity of such testimony that makes it difficult to dismiss. It is also that this testimony has been collected in many different localities and at different times over a period of more than sixty years. The eyewitness testimony includes Jewish survivor accounts recorded by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland right after the war 117 as well as videotaped interviews collected all over the world by the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s and 2000s.118 In addition to testimony in these two large collections, other Jewish memoirs and testimonies, written or recorded in different times, places, and circumstances, confirm that Ukrainian militiamen were playing the leading role in the Lviv pogrom.119 There are also Polish witnesses to the role of the Ukrainian militia.120 Understandably, Ukrainian memoirs are silent on the point of militia participation in the Lviv pogrom. What is said in the testimony is confirmed by photographic evidence. A film of one of the exhumations and prison actions shows a militiaman, recognizable by his armband, beating a Jewish man.121 A still from a film that is 115 USHMM RG-06.09.01*43, Box 45, case of George Theodorovich, 8 March 1985, 652; see also the testimonies of Joseph Romanski and Abraham Goldberg, 6 March 1985, 515–517, 597–598. 116 Goldberg 598. 117 In addition to those just cited, other testimonies collected by the Commission that implicate the Ukrainian militia are AŻIH, 301/4654, Henryk Szyper, 11; 301/1160, Renata Braun, 1; 301/4626, Anna Maria Peiper, 1; and Lewin 59–60 (although published much later, Lewin’s memoir Przeżyłem was originally commissioned by the Commission in 1946). 118 In addition to those just cited: Shoah Foundation, 1339 Leon Berk, 42. 119 Additional such sources: Leo Heiman, “They Saved Jews: Ukrainian Patriots Defied Nazis,” Ukrainian Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1961): 326. “Diary” [actually a series of sketches towards a memoir] of J. Berman in “Teka Lwowska,” sketch 2, Yad Vashem Archives, T-32/50, 3. Maltiel 53–54, 162. Kessler 34–37. 120 Musial, “Konterrevolutionäre Elemente” 176. Shoah Foundation, 28371 Jerzy Grzybowski, 25. Zaderecki 11. Rogowski, “Lwów pod znakiem Swastyki,” 50. 121 USHMM Film Archive, tape 202B, story RG-60.0328. The time code for the start of this film of the prison action is 5:07:11; the beating by the militiaman occurs at 5:08:18– 24. There are some stills from this film in USHMM Photo Archive, 23044 and 23094, but none shows the beating by the militiaman. An abridged version of the film is available on a YouTube film entitled Lemberg 1941, but this version has been edited to focus almost Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 232 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA now largely deteriorated shows a uniformed militiaman pulling a partially undressed woman by the hair at the Zamarstyniv street prison (Figure 3). Figure 3. A uniformed militiaman at Zamarstyniv street prison seizes a half-clad woman by her hair. This is a still from a now largely deteriorated film of the sexual abuse. (Public domain, National Archives and Records Administration; copy courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Another photo shows a uniformed militiaman with his armband on his left upper arm taking part in the arrest of Jews on a Lviv street. 122 In addition to these exclusively on the NKVD murders and barely shows the abuse of the Jews. For example, in the full USHMM film, a young woman is shown viciously beating a Jewish man and then crying as a German soldier comforts her. In the YouTube abridgement, however, one sees the same woman weeping and being comforted, but not her beating the man. On YouTube, there is only one scene of a Jew being beaten, but not by the militiaman. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dDONW2EU3Y> (Accessed 7 May 2010). Although this film later shows the exterior of Brygidki prison, it is unclear where the interior shots of the prison action and exhumation were taken. (I thank Kai Struve for pointing out to me that the interior footage may well have been taken in a different prison.) 122 USHMM, Photo Archive, 21418. I am uncertain of the location in the city. Yad Vashem identified the photo as being from the first days of the German occupation of Lviv, but dated it, for some reason to August 1942. The photo is unquestionably from 30 June or 1 July 1941. It is reproduced in Eliyahu Yones, Die Strasse nach Lemberg: THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 233 photos of militiamen in uniform and/or with armbands, plainclothes militiamen have been identified at Zamarstyniv street by Jeffrey Burds. 123 In the women’s action of 1 July, memoirs and photographs show the perpetrators as mainly grown men, but also teenagers and even children (Figure 4). Figure 4. A woman stripped to her underwear is being chased by a uniformed boy with a stick as well as by an adolescent. The action is taking place near Zamarstyniv street prison, on a street then called Pompierska. Now that street is called Vesela, that is, Happy Street. (Courtesy of Wiener Library). Zwangsarbeit und Widerstand in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999) 23. 123 Jeffrey Burds’ research is as yet unpublished. He matched up pogromists from photos in the Wiener Library collection with identification cards of Ukrainian militiamen. See Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 61, 63–64. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 234 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA A ten-year-old Jewish girl witnessed six-year-old boys near Brygidki prison pulling out women’s hair and old men’s beards.124 Maria Gesiola remembers that while she and her aunt were negotiating with the Ukrainians who came to their apartment about leaving her uncle alone, a nine-year-old boy stepped forward and settled the issue by telling the uncle: Come, you old Jew. 125 Certainly, some of these children simply joined the pogrom for adventure, but others were child soldiers of the national revolution. Szarota’s comparative analysis of pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe shows that youth and even children were involved in pogroms elsewhere, for example, in Warsaw and Paris, and that usually they were recruited from right-radical youth groups.126 In Western Ukraine, youth associated with the Bandera movement were the most likely child and adolescent perpetrators. In Galicia, the best organized and most numerous youth organization active in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal was the OUN-B youth group (iunatstvo), which had seven thousand members in the underground in April 1941.127 Why did OUN use its militia in Lviv to organize a pogrom and round up Jews for the Germans to kill? Partially, this flowed from the anti-Semitism of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and its leaders. Yet, anti-Semitism does not necessarily translate directly into such violence. In fact, OUN seemed to perceive the Poles as much more important enemies than the Jews. In September 1939, when OUN acted openly and took advantage of the civil war conditions created by the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine, OUN units killed thousands of Poles. In summer 1941, as the Germans invaded, OUN militias and related organizations were involved in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, but of relatively few Poles. 128 When the OUN-led Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) definitively broke with the Germans in the late winter/early fall of 1943, it focused its attention on Poles, killing tens of thousands of them. In its official pronouncements, OUN always put Russians at the top of its enemy list. Hence the focus on violence against Jews in the first days of the German occupation seems to be somewhat anomalous. The anomaly is most plausibly explained as an attempt by OUN to demonstrate to the Germans that it shared their anti-Jewish perspectives and that it was worthy to be entrusted with the formation of a Ukrainian state. 124 Hescheles 19. 125 Shoah Foundation, 29911 Maria Gesiola, 11. 126 Szarota 10, 60. 127 Patryliak 171. In Volhynia the OUN-B youth group was said to have taken over all the secondary schools on the eve of the German invasion. Patryliak 181. 128 Ewa Siemaszko estimated that OUN-led violence took the lives of at least 1036 Poles in Volhynia and 2242 in Galicia in 1939, with the comparable figure for both Volhynia and Galicia in 1941 being 443. Ewa Siemaszko, “Bilans zbrodni,” Biuletyń Instytut Pamięci Narodowej 7–8.116–117 (July-August 2010): 80–81. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 235 THE CARNIVAL CROWD In addition to the politically driven Ukrainian militia, many civilians of Lviv took part in the violence. Some Jewish testimonies ignored or were ignorant of the political dimension and simply identified the pogromists as Ukrainian thugs or a Ukrainian mob.129 It was indeed the norm in such pogroms elsewhere in Europe for lumpen elements to join in the violence. The identification of the perpetrators as riff-raff (the term usually used in Ukrainian literature is shumovynnia) is even more common in Ukrainian memoirs and interpretations.130 That the Ukrainians involved in the pogrom were merely thugs, marginal social elements, is the explanation favoured by those concerned to uphold the reputation of OUN: the atrocities committed by the Soviet NKVD, the incitement by Germans, and the presence of criminal elements resulted in a violent conflagration without the involvement of any particular organization. 131 But there are serious problems with the spontaneous combustion theory. The co-ordination of actions around the three prisons and throughout the city bespeaks some overall planning. Paul R. Brass, a political scientist who has studied riots and pogroms in a wide-ranging comparative perspective, believes that “the kinds of violence that are committed in ethnic, communal, and racial ‘riots’” are largely the work of “specialists,” including “local militant group leaders.” He largely discounts what he terms the “‘riff-raff’ theory,” while pointing out that these violent incidents can often involve heterogeneous social elements. “In practice,” he writes, “there are virtually always some elements of organization and planning before riots as well as pogroms. Moreover, much of the organization and planning which does go on is designed both to give the appearance of spontaneity and to induce spontaneous actions on the part of the populace.”132 OUN itself opposed genuinely spontaneous outbursts and believed that its task was to “take control of the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses.” 133 Two films of the arrests of Jews in Lviv on 30 June give the strong impression that there are certain leaders who act in concert and know exactly what they are doing.134 It is difficult to imagine that the OUN militia, which was definitely on 129 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 46, 63. 130 Pan'kivs'kyi, Vid derzhavy do komitetu 35. Nakonechnyi 112. 131 Andriy J. Semotiuk, “The Stepan Bandera Quandary,” Kyiv Post 19 April 2010: <http://kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/64386/> (Accessed 28 April 2010). Nakonechnyi 100–101. 132 Paul R. Brass, “Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism, and Violence,” in Riots and Pogroms, edited by Paul R. Brass (New York: New York University Press, 1996) 12, 16–21, 33. 133 Instructions of May 1941 cited in Patryliak 113. 134 One is a German newsreel: Deutsche Wochenschau – Nr. 566 / 29 / 10.07.1941. For information on this film see <http://www.cine-holocaust.de/cgi-bin/gdq?efw00 Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 236 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA the scene in Lviv, would have let these outrages occur if they did not at least approve of them. Ukrainian memoirists emphasize that there was a large Polish participation in the violence. Kost' Pan'kivs'kyi said that since Poles made up the majority of the lumpen population of Lviv, it was natural that they were the ones who were beating Jews in the streets.135 Both Pan'kivs'kyi and Ievhen Nakonechnyi wrote that Polish pogromists would often don yellow-and-blue armbands, but they could be recognized by how feebly they spoke Ukrainian. 136 It may well be true that Polish criminals used the occasion of the pogrom to rob Jewish apartments,137 but it is significant that they chose to disguise themselves as Ukrainian militiamen. The presence of Polish pogromists in Lviv in 1941 finds reflection in other documentation. As Tamara Branitsky remembered the crowd that tormented her, she said that they looked like Ukrainians to her and her family, but probably Polish people were there too.138 Rose Moskowitz identified the crowds that attacked Jews in Lviv as Poles. After the Germans took Lviv in July, they let the Polish population do what they pleased, she said; “and you can imagine what they liked to do”—they were beating up Jewish people on the streets. 139 A member of the Mel'nyk wing of OUN sent a situational report to the leadership that characterized the Lviv pogrom as a demonstration of Polish power: “Between the departure of the Bolsheviks and the arrival of the Germans, the Poles on their own authority organized a Jewish pogrom in order perhaps to certify the Polishness of Lviv.”140 Thus, the urban crowd that participated in the pogrom was of mixed nationality. fbw000826.gd> (Accessed 19 August 2008). A silent copy of most of this film is in USHMM RG-60.0267, tape 201. The second film was brought to my attention by Arianna Silecky in 2008. This silent footage shows men and some women being arrested, mainly on Copernicus street. It was taken by a photographer with the First Alpine Division (1. Gebirgs-Division). It was in the possession of the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre in Toronto, which did not allow other institutions to make copies; at present, however, the original has been lost. (A digital copy is in the possession of the author.) 135 Pan'kivs'kyi, Vid derzhavy do komitetu 35. 136 Nakonechnyi 112–113, 115. Pan'kivs'kyi, Vid derzhavy do komitetu 35–36. 137 During the Anschluss pogrom in Vienna in 1938, criminals also donned Nazi armbands and robbed Jewish homes of their money, jewelry, silverware, furniture, and carpets. Leonidas E. Hill, “The Pogrom of November 9–10, 1938 in Germany,” in Brass 97. 138 Shoah Foundation, 51593 Tamara Branitsky, 50. 139 Shoah Foundation, 9851 Rose Moskowitz, 18. 140 “Zvit pro polozhennia na Ukrains'kykh Zemliakh zaniatykh nim. armiieiu,” 12 July 1941, Hontivka, Chernivtsi raion, Vinnytsia oblast, in Library and Archives Canada, THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 237 The crowd tormented the Jews as militiamen marched them through the street and held them prisoner in the courtyards of the prisons. As depicted by Jewish survivors, the people in the crowd were motivated by blood lust and base instincts. The pogrom was an orgiastic experience. It also had important elements of carnival. Much of what William W. Hagen wrote about the motivations and behaviour of the pogrom crowd in Lviv in 1918 also applies to the crowd in Lviv in 1941. His observation that the pogrom of 1918 was a social ritual playing out “public dramas designed to repair a society fallen out of the rightful order”141 can certainly apply to 1941. This was the meaning of the rituals that identified Jews with communism. The perception that Jews had risen from near the bottom of the social hierarchy before the war to near the top under the Bolsheviks explains the vehement insistence on putting the Jews back in their place.142 The social advancement of Jews under the Soviets violated “a deep- seated insistence” within Polish and Ukrainian popular culture that Jews should remain “passive, powerless, and defenseless.” 143 As in 1918, “carnavalesque elements were central” to the “character and purpose” 144 of the 1941 pogrom. This is borne out by the impressment of Jewish professionals to clean streets and latrines during both pogroms.145 Furthermore, “the carnival tradition warranted sexual license,”146 and violent sexual display was characteristic of both pogroms. The crowd was not the initiator of the pogrom of 1941, but it influenced the course of what happened. Although rituals and sexual humiliation and violence sometimes accompanied more secluded and systematic executions of Jews during the Holocaust, the large place these phenomena occupied in Lviv on 1 July 1941 derives from the presence of the crowd. The organizers of the pogrom played to the crowd, allowing it to perform its rituals and live out its riotous carnival in the interstices of their more systematic arrests and executions. The Andriy Zhuk Collection, MG 30 C167, vol. 147, file 33. I am grateful to Marco Carynnyk for providing me with a copy. 141 Hagen 203. 142 I owe this point to Sofia Grachova: “And is not the explanation for the diffusion of the myth of the Jew-communist not the fact that the abolition of discriminatory restrictions under Soviet rule was understood by the non-Jewish population as a threat to their own dominant position? And was not one of the reasons for the extraordinary ferocity of the pogromists in the summer of 1941 the desire to terrify and humble the Jews, ‘to put them in their place’?” Sofia Grachova [Sofiia Hrachova], “Vony zhyly sered nas?” Krytyka 9.4 (2005): 26. 143 Hagen 219. 144 Hagen 204. 145 For 1918, see Hagen 214–215. 146 Hagen 214. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 238 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA crowd also built off its own fury and lust, expanding the space and time for its particular interests, as many of the testimonies already cited make clear. 147 THE GERMANS Matthäus has observed that crimes such as the Lviv pogrom “would not have been committed without Operation Barbarossa,” and hence, “German policy is key to the understanding of non-German involvement.”148 This broad level of responsibility seems apparent. It is also apparent that the German military were in charge of the situation in Lviv, and had they wished to put a stop to the pogrom, they would have and could have; in fact, eventually they did, turning off the violence as if it flowed from a tap. German soldiers were frequently on the scene. Wolf Lichter remembered that the Jews who were being tormented by Ukrainians hoped that the Germans would restore order, but the majority of Germans either joined in or just passed by.149 During the humiliation of women, Róża Wagner and other Jewish women asked German soldiers walking by the Zamarstyniv street prison courtyard to intervene with the pogromists on their behalf. “That is the revenge of the Ukrainians,” they replied, with evident approval of the violence. A German film crew took photos of the naked women, which they said would appear in Der Stürmer (but never did).150 A photograph in the possession of David Preston shows a beaten Jew lying on the street and a German soldier walking by (Figure 5). 147 See above, especially pp. 215–216, 219. 148 Matthäus 268. 149 Shoah Foundation, 29342 Wolf Lichter, 11. 150 Himka, “Dostovirnist' svidchennia,” 46–47, 60, 62. Although the Germans carefully photographed anti-Jewish incidents, they did not actually use them for propaganda purposes. Szarota 66. I would like to thank Oksana Mykhed for searching Der Stürmer for me. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 239 Figure 5. A Jewish man lies in the street. In the foreground, a German soldier passes by. In the background are onlookers; they hold kerchiefs over their mouths and noses to protect them from the smell of the corpses of the NKVD victims in Brygidki prison. (Courtesy of David Lee Preston). Alexander Redner, who was then twelve, remembers German soldiers inciting Ukrainians to participate in the Lviv pogrom.151 It also emerges from the testimonies that Germans were executing Jews by shooting both on the day of the pogrom, at the three prisons, and in the following days, after gathering Jews in a hockey arena. The shootings that occurred on 2 July and after were clearly the work of Einsatzgruppe C. It is unclear, however, who was shooting Jews on the day of the public pogrom, 151 Shoah Foundation, 7394 Alex Redner, 41, 44. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 240 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA since it could have been the First Alpine Division of the Wehrmacht, the main occupation force in Lviv, or else an advance group of Einsatzgruppe C, namely Einsatzkommando 4b, which arrived in the city on the afternoon of 30 June. 152 I lean to the view that the shooters were members of the Einsatzkommando. At this time, the Einsatzgruppen did not have clear instructions and were feeling their way in the murder of Jews; this was a time when they concentrated on killing men of military age and Jewish intelligentsia,153 and such were the targets of the shootings at the Lviv prisons. It is also unclear whether OUN, in organizing the Lviv pogrom, was directly responding to an order of Richard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. A few months before the Lviv pogrom and a month before drafting instructions for militias, OUN-B went on record as opposing pogroms. Below is the text of a resolution taken by the organization at its “grand assembly” in Kraków in April 1941: The Jews in the USSR are the most devoted support of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the advance guard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite- Bolshevik government exploits the anti-Jewish moods of the Ukrainian masses in order to divert their attention from the real source of evil and in order to direct them during the time of uprising into pogroms against Jews. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists struggles against the Jews as the support of the Muscovite- Bolshevik regime, at the same time making the popular masses aware that Moscow is the main enemy.154 This resolution, which repudiates pogroms as a method of revolutionary struggle, fits well with OUN’s distrust of spontaneity. It is possible, however, that it had to be revised, in light of developments on the very eve of the Germans’ attack on the USSR. At Heydrich’s invitation, dozens of SS and police personnel gathered on 17 June 1941 for a special meeting in Berlin that conveyed instructions regarding the encouragement of so-called “self-cleansing” actions.155 Heydrich’s message was later summarized in a telegram he sent to Einsatzgruppe leaders on 29 June: 152 Kai Struve, “Tremors in the Shatterzone of Empires: Eastern Galicia in Summer 1941,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Identity and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, edited by Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). Tamara Branitsky’s testimony cited above (p. 219) refers to Gestapo and SS in the prison yard and their threat to shoot all the Jews there. 153 Matthäus 254–258. 154 Ukrains'ka suspil'no-politychna dumka v 20 stolitti. Dokumenty i materialy, edited by Taras Hunczak [Hunchak] and Roman Solchanyk [Sol'chanyk], 3 vols. (N.p.: Suchasnist', 1983) 3: 15. 155 Szarota 210–214. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 241 One should not put any obstacle in the way of efforts at self-cleansing arising in anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles on the territories to be newly occupied. On the contrary, one should provoke these, leaving no traces, intensify them if necessary, and direct them on the right track, but in such a way that local “self- defence groups” would not later be able to cite orders or political promises made. 156 There is no direct confirmation that OUN was informed of Heydrich’s intentions; on the other hand, neither can such a possibility be rejected. From Patryliak’s research it is clear that OUN was able to co-ordinate its military activities with the Germans in the second half of June 1941,157 so in principle it could also have co-ordinated with them about pogroms against and executions of Jews. A problem with this scenario, as Kai Struve has pointed out to me in conversations, is that OUN worked most closely with German military intelligence, the Abwehr, rather than with the SS. Perhaps, however, OUN found out from Lithuanian nationalists, who were in contact with both OUN and the SS and who themselves perpetrated a bloody pogrom in Kaunas on 25–29 June 1941. Or perhaps there was a German intermediary who straddled several camps, such as Professor Beyer, mentioned above. A major problem with establishing just how directly the Lviv pogrom was inspired by Reich security is that the particular situation worked against documentation. Heydrich had left specific orders that there were to be no traces connecting Reich security with local nationalists organizing pogroms. OUN itself was a highly conspiratorial organization, one that had been able not only to carry off many political assassinations in interwar Poland but also had managed to survive in the underground under Soviet rule. During the pogrom, it had even taken the precaution, as photographs indicate, to place plainclothes militiamen in public roles. Although therefore the question may never be adequately settled through documentation, the hypothesis that OUN was reacting to Heydrich’s express desires seems to me to flow from the logic or psychology of the situation. From OUN internal documents, including the April 1941 resolution against pogroms as well as the instructions for wartime prepared in May 1941, it is clear that OUN preferred systematic violence that it controlled to public violence that allowed for spontaneity. Research I have been conducting on OUN activities in smaller towns in Galicia confirms this preference: the normal modus operandi of the militias was to round up Jews and take them outside town for execution. Moreover, the crowd in Lviv was to a large extent Polish, but OUN-B would not have wanted Poles to exercise any kind of violent agency. Indeed, the representative of OUN-M, who was not privy to the inner workings of OUN-B, 156 Peter Longereich with Dieter Pohl, eds., Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden: Eine umfassende Dokumentation des Holokaust 1941–1945 (Munich and Zürich: Piper, 1989) 118–119. 157 Patryliak 166–207, esp. 200–201. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 242 JOHN-PAUL HIMKA interpreted the pogrom as a demonstration of Polish nationalism. After all, the pogrom that Lviv had experienced twenty-three years earlier had been precisely that. Thus, it is difficult to imagine that OUN would have decided upon a pogrom purely of its own volition. Something weighty must have motivated it, and the most likely something was Heydrich’s policy. The final question to be considered is why the Germans, or Reich security specifically, were interested in generating pogroms. Hilberg, who believed that German agency was the key to all the pogroms, suggested the following reasons for the pogroms: The administrative principle was very simple: every Jew killed in a pogrom was one less burden for the Einsatzgruppen [...].The psychological consideration was more interesting. The Einsatzgruppen wanted the population to take a part—and a major part at that—of the responsibility for the killing operations [...].[T]he pogroms were to become a defensive weapon with which to confront an accuser, or an element of blackmail that could be used against the local population.158 Although these are reasonable suppositions, there is no proof for them. Szarota also supposed that the Germans were interested in blaming the anti-Jewish violence on local pogromists, and that was why he thought the Germans were so interested in filming them. 159 Yet if the Germans had plans to blame the disappearance of East European Jews on the local populations, they never seriously actualized them. Szarota also hypothesized that the Germans used the pogroms to encourage Jews to accept ghettoization. They could present the ghettos to Jewish leaders as measures aimed at protecting Jews from the wrath of the local population. 160 Indeed, Jews sometimes expressed a certain relief when the pogroms came to an end and the Germans took over. Rose Moskowitz remembered how a relative calm was restored after the Germans stopped the rioting in Lviv. But, she added, they then issued their prohibitive laws against the Jews. 161 In favour of Szarota’s hypothesis is that guidelines regarding ghettoization were issued in August, at the end of the wave of pogroms; these guidelines, however, were “hardly coherent.”162 A ghetto was not established in Lviv until the fall. The lack of clarity regarding the purpose of the wave of pogroms fits well with the thinking of most Holocaust scholars at present that the Germans were still improvising in the earliest phase of the war against the Soviet Union. 158 Hilberg 203. 159 Szarota 32. 160 Szarota 67, 272. 161 Shoah Foundation, 9851 Rose Moskowitz, 20. 162 Matthäus 260. THE LVIV POGROM OF 1941 243 CONCLUSIONS In this study, we have examined three actors in the Lviv pogrom of 1 July 1941. Although it is impossible at present, and probably for the future, to establish all the facts with certainty, the general outline of the actors’ roles emerges with some clarity. The Germans created the conditions for the outbreak of the pogrom. At the very least, they tolerated it, but it is more likely that they had encouraged it in the first place. Although it was others who mainly arrested Jews and made them the objects of a violent carnival, it was the Germans who lined them up and shot them, both during and after the pogrom. It is probable that more responsibility for encouraging the pogrom and executing Jewish men lay with the SS, including Heydrich himself, than with the Wehrmacht. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera provided the engine of the pogrom. It set up a short-lived government in Lviv on 30 June 1941 headed by a vehement anti-Semite. It simultaneously plastered the city with leaflets that encouraged ethnic cleansing. It also formed a militia that assumed a leadership role in the pogrom. Militiamen went from apartment to apartment in Jewish neighbourhoods to arrest Jewish men and women for pogrom activities at two of the prisons; they arrested Jews on the street for a third prison that was more distant from where the Jewish population was concentrated. They conveyed the Jews to the prisons and were also present there at the maltreatment and execution of Jews. The day after the pogrom they began to work directly for the Einsatzgruppen, again arresting Jews for execution by the Germans. OUN co-operated with the Germans in these anti- Jewish actions primarily because it hoped such collaboration would facilitate German recognition of its state. OUN’s anti-Semitism made assistance in anti- Jewish violence palatable, but it is unlikely that it was an independent factor in the decision to stage a pogrom. As to the crowd, which is what made the pogrom a pogrom, its interest was in carnival. It relished role reversal, upturning the social hierarchy—Jewish professionals on their hands and knees cleaning streets. Those who were perceived as having been in charge during the Soviet occupation were now humiliated and forced to admit their guilt in ritualistic spectacles. The stinking corpses of murdered political prisoners seemed to justify an apocalyptical revenge against the perceived perpetrators, namely the Jewish population. A particular conjuncture of high politics allowed the urban crowd to act out an uninhibited script of robbery, sexual assault, beating, and murder, demanding these actions and delighting in them. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011