Talk:Lviv Civilian Massacre (1941)
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[edit] Merge back
I see no need for a separate "controversies" article. Most of this unit's activity consists of such "controversies". Seems like putting skeletons in the closet on the backburner. --Irpen 23:07, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
- It isn't technically "merge back", I was the one who recommended this separtate article because all you see here was originally in the Roman Shukhevych article. You must agree that it is pretty off topic for his article. It seems far too long for inclusion in the Nachtigall article also. Ostap 00:25, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it belongs to Shukhevych article, but for Nachtigall itself, certainly yes. --Irpen 00:28, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
- But then the "controversies" section would be almost twice as long as the actual article. I suppose that's the legacy some leave... Ostap 00:35, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
- Exactly. If you are dealing with the organization whose entire existence is a list of "controversies" that makes up its article. And this material needn't be in a "section" but properly integrated into the text in the chronological order of events. --Irpen 00:49, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I didn't write any of the article, I just thought it was getting to long for the Shukhevych article. I don't know how to add it to the Nachtigall article and make it look good, maybe let Bandurist try. Ostap 01:14, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I would keep it for the time being. 1) The subject is currently very topical with Yushchenko having travelled to Israel and once again
2) making the round of many of the websites and blogs etc discussing Shukhevych and Nachtigal, many (in particular Russian language ones) continue to quote and requote erronious materials released by the KGB in 1958. Here we have a chance of laying out all the facts and refining the information expecially now that the Memorial Society is actually posting photocopies of original documents.
The article is too large to past back into the Shukhevych and Nachtigal articles as it stands at present. It needs to be trimmed down, but trimming down makes it difficult to adequately cover the materials. I feel it should stand until it is refined and reviewed. Each of the sources needs to be viewed and chaecked. Bandurist (talk) 02:11, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
Shouldn't this be merged with Lviv pogroms? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 22:55, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Act of the Restoration of the Ukrainian State
The act doesn't really have anything to do with the attrocities. In fact it was rescinded 3 days later. Also it is misquoted. The original calls for the establishment of a Ukrainian state, and not its re-establishment.
The book includes the full text of the "Act of the Restoration of the Ukrainian State" (Акт о восстановлении украинского государства), published in Lviv on June 30, 1941, which include the following proclamation: "3. The Restored Ukrainian State will closely collaborate with the Nazi Reich, which is creating a New Order in Europe and the World, under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, and helps the Ukrainian people liberate themselves from the Moscow occupation." [17].
The quotation given is incorrect and should be removed. It also is a poor translation from the book. The word Moscovs'ke is the old Ukrainian ethnonym for Russian and not Moscow, and should be translated as Moscovite or Russian. Bandurist (talk) 12:25, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Ukrainian Red Cross
There actually existed a Ukrainian (not Soviet) Red cross during WWII. I will put the materials up in a day or two about who set it up and how it functioned. Bandurist (talk) 12:34, 3 March 2008 (UTC).
[edit] A lot of info from Ukraine's Acadamy of Sciences
How is your Ukrainian vk?
http://history.org.ua/oun_upa/upa/2.pdf
Page 12:
"It's an important fact, that the murdered Polish professors in Lviv belong to those elements of the Polish intelligentsia that from 1940-1941 worked together with the Soviet regime. They were members of soviet professional organizations, members of soviets, delegates of Lviv's Polish community who in October 1940 had met with Stalin and discussed the possibility of forming a pro-Soviet Polish government (in opposition to the exiled Polish government in London). Thus, of 160 Polish professors, only 38 were chosen for execution for collaboration with Stalin's regime."
The chapter also includes a lot of antisemitic statements by the OUN from 1939-1941, generally along the lines of Jews= Bolsheviks, including calls for exterminating Jews/Bolsheviks. It explained this in part by noting that Jewish youths dominated pro-Soviet organizations in Lviv prior to the war and dominated local Bolshevik organizations durin gthe Soviet occupation, such that much of the population equated Jews and Bolsheviks.
In terms of Nachtigalls participation in the anti-Jewish massacres, the authors state that it's quite likely that individual OUN members took part in the murders of Jews alongside other murderous civilians, but stated that Nachtigall itself was outside the city when this occurred. It stated that one can't rule out that some members may have taken part, but the unit itself did not. It repeated that the Soviet prosecutors themselves, at Nurnberg, blamed Germans for the killings of the professors.
The authors noted that Nachtigall controlled Lviv for only about 5-6 hours, and that separate teams of Einsatzgruppen "C" groups were finding their way around western Ukraine. Thousands of German Ensatzgruppen and police were in the city by 5 AM on July 1st.
Furthermore, prior to releasing Nachtigall from combat duty on July 1st, Shukhevich told his men "do not carry out any commands by the Germans or others, unless ordeed to do so by our commanders. Do not take anyone's blood on your hands. Do not allow any crimes or revenge against our enemies the Poles and the Jews, because it's not our matter to take part in this."
Some Ukrainian eyewitnesses claimed that Poles committed much of the revenge attacks (not unlikely, as most of the city's population was Polish and many of the NKVD's victims were Poles) and even that the Poles put on blue and yellow ribbons while doing so. It's no secret that Lviv and western Ukraine was the electoral stronghold of Roman Dmowski's antisemitic Polish "National Democrats." No witnesses in the 1940's suggested that Ukrainian military units were involved in any of the massacres, although the use of the Ukrainian langiage was widespread among the killers.
Speaking of the accuations that suddenly surfaced in 1959, the authors were dismissive, noting sarcastically, (page 68) "all the gathered "documents", "eyewtiness accounts", "memories" etc. were published in the book, "The Truth about Oberlander." Strange, that the fact remains that the infromation about these "facts" appeared 18 years afterward and 14 years after their investigation by competent organs, even though it was claimed that the information was just "sitting" on the top and was gathered within only a month by nonprofessional researchers and amateurs.
They then noted numerous inconsistencies in the "evidence". For example only the names of three alleged killers from Nachtigall were produced, one of whom confessed to killing Bartel in early July even though Bartel was confirmed meeting with Himmler on July 25th and executed the next day. In terms of the anti-Jewish pogroms, none of the eyewitnesses could confirm that Nachtigall was involved, only that Ukrainian-speaking people were.Bulat Meladze (talk) 23:48, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm currently reading Шоа в Львові by Nakonechnyj who also gives some really detailed and interesting information. It comes from a Ukrainian who witnesses this period first hand, being the only Ukrainian family living in a building which was primarily occupied by Jews. He tells the tail of what he saw and the fate of all the occupants of the building and their families with a lot of background information. It is well written and quite an easy read. I will put up the info as soon as I finish reading it. Bandurist (talk) 04:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Article in the Kyiv Post about Nachtigall
Probably this information should be integrated into the article:
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/editorial/28581/
Shukhevych charges a phantom of Soviet propaganda needing closure by Editorial , Kyiv Post Mar 12 2008, 23:55
Halya Coynash
General Roman Shukhevych and the 300 men who formed the Nachtigal battalion made their choices at a very difficult time which I did not live through and am not entitled to judge.
This approach would not be appropriate if atrocities and crimes against humanity were involved.
Since these are the charges frequently bandied about, the need to check their source and validity is paramount.
As early as February 2007, Yosef Lapid, chair of the Yad Vashem Council, told a Ukrainian newspaper the Nachtigal battalion under the command of Gen. Shukhevych committed pogroms during the summer of 1941.
The newspaper’s political slant may have led some to ignore the charges, however Lapid repeated his criticism during President Viktor Yushchenko’s visit to Israel and then in December on the Deutsche Welle radio station.
During that interview he stated, “We have a whole dossier which shows that Shukhevych was one of those implicated in mass murder. Ukraine has not yet asked us to hand over these documents.”
We will expose the inaccuracy of this claim later.
First, however, a brief account of three crucial moments in history.
The Nazis and Einsatzgruppe C, tasked with hunting down and murdering Jews and others, entered Lviv on July 1, 1941.
Shukhevych also arrived with the Nachtigal battalion formed by the Nazis three months earlier.
One of the Nazis’ standard tactics was to provoke pogroms. In Lviv, they used the killing of Ukrainian political prisoners by the NKVD in the wake of the Soviet retreat as a pretext to link Jews with the Bolsheviks.
Given the terrible atrocities committed, it is reasonable to ask where Shukhevych and his men stood. A document found quite recently in the State Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) archive fortunately casts light on this.
The document, “From the Book of Facts,” is basically a chronicle of the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from March to September 1941. It describes the Nazi methods used to incite the population to pogroms and goes on as follows:
“OUN leaders, having learned of this, informed their members that this was German provocation to compromise Ukrainians through pogroms, to provide a pretext for intervening and ‘establishing order,’ and most importantly to deflect the attention and energy of the Ukrainian population away from political problems, the struggle for independence onto the slippery path towards anarchy, crime and pillage.”
Does this demonstrate that the members of Nachtigal were appalled by the pogroms and murders? We hope they were, but of course it does not.
That however is a matter for each of us and our conscience.
What can only be in question is whether they were themselves complicit. The document is not the only grounds for confidently stating that they were not.
A Soviet commission was set up immediately after the end of the war to investigate the mass murder of Jews and Poles in Lviv during those first days of the occupation.
The main perpetrators were named and a huge amount of archival material, including eyewitness testimony, was gathered, none of which implicated Nachtigal in any anti-Jewish actions or in the killing of Polish professors.
The results of the Soviet commission’s investigation were affirmed by the Nuremburg Commission during two sessions on Feb. 15 and Aug. 30, 1946. Nobody questioned these results for 13 years.
On Oct. 24, 1959, Albert Norden, an East German professor, gave a press conference at which he declared that the mass murders in Lviv were organized and carried out by Ukrainians fighting in the Nachtigal battalion.
The main target of his charges was in fact Teodor Oberlander, who was the German liaison officer for the Ukrainian battalion, according to prominent Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Viatrovych.
Judging by one revealed directive from Moscow, the entire campaign was launched at the request of the ‘Stasi’ East Germany’s secret police.
By the end of November, 19 articles of “proof” of Nachtigal’s and Oberlander’s alleged involvement in Nazi crimes in Lviv were gathered.
Declassified documents found in the SBU archives give a clear impression of the role played by the KGB in this “search.”
The first KGB directive indicating the need for evidence arrived from Moscow on Oct. 2, 1959.
The first results didn’t satisfy anyone but the KGB.
Either none of the alleged crimes could be attributed to Nachtigal, or there was no sign of its presence in certain purported regions.
A new instruction issued in Moscow spelled the task out more clearly:
“In preparing the witnesses for interrogation, you should use articles published about the crimes of Nachtigal.”
The order had that hideously Soviet flavour to it: the testimony was being influenced by material written “about” the crimes, rather than the actual basis.
The “evidence” was swiftly collected and soon published all around the world in a brochure, “Oberlander’s Bloody Crimes.”
A great deal was said about the “bloody crimes” in the Soviet Union.
Judging by numerous statements from some Russian political figures, the accusing words remained in their memory for life.
In the GDR, the response was also efficient, with Oberlander being found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Things did prove more difficult in West Germany where stubborn judges insisted on examining the “evidence” carefully.
In no case did they find sufficient proof for any of the alleged crimes attributed to Nachtigal.
After German unification in 1990, Oberlander successfully appealed against the guilty verdict passed by the GDR court.
The uproar last year over the President’s honouring of Shukhevych brought the standard stereotypes not just of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, but of Ukrainians in general, into sharp focus.
Any criticism can provide valuable impetus for reflection.
But the wild accusations from Russia’s leaders of late, based on falsified material from KGB archives, are less than constructive.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we will be charitable and assume the accusations are due to a lack of familiarity with the archival material.
We would respectively suggest that following Ukraine’s example by making NKVD and KGB archival material available for study would facilitate the quest for historical truth and contribute to better understanding based on fact, not Soviet disinformation.
The same, in fact, applies to all archives. I don’t know how many other individuals wrote to Yad Vashem following the Deutsche Welle interview in which Lapid spoke of a dossier allegedly proving Shukhevych’s involvement in atrocities, but I wrote three times and did not receive a single answer.
My letters signed from a human rights organization made it entirely clear that I had no interest in concealing the truth, whatever it was.
More importantly, the Ukrainian State Archive Committee and the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance both wrote to Yad Vashem asking to be shown the alleged dossier. They also received no reply.
In the face of such silence, an official delegation was sent from the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
It turned out there was no actual dossier. Material produced by Yad Vashem’s archives director was “testimony” from two people published in the propaganda brochure in 1960, as well as an account which only speaks vaguely of members of Nachtigal “killing Soviet citizens.”
It is still conceivable that somebody has clear evidence of crimes committed by Nachtigal and its leader.
If so, make them publicly available. However, for all our sake, please do not confine yourself to vague accusations. Provide verifiable documentation and references.
The spectre of communism roamed Europe for far too long, spreading lies and hatred. It’s time to lay all the phantoms it generated to rest.
Halya Coynash is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.Bulat Meladze (talk) 15:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] More info
Even better:
http://www.khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1204840935
(there is more on that website)
No dossier on Shukhevych
The Security Service [SBU] has just reported on a visit to Yad Vashem in Israel undertaken by the Head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance Ihor Yuknovsky and his colleague and adviser on research issues Volodymyr Vyatrovych.
In reporting back on Tuesday, 4 March, Mr Vyatrovych explained that Ukraine had twice approached the heads of Yad Vashem asking to see the material of the dossier on Roman Shukhevych which was spoken of publicly on 6 December 2007 by the Head of the Memorial Council Josef Lapid. The first letter was sent on 18 December from the Ukrainian State Archive Committee. A second similar letter was a few days later written from the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance and passed on by the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
No answer was received over a period of two months, so a government delegation was sent to Israel on 27 February, with Mr Yuknovsky and Mr Vyatrovych, in order to see the documents held in the Yad Vashem Archive on Roman Shukhevych.
They had a meeting with the Director of Yad Vashem on 28 February in Jerusalem.
The Ukrainian delegation passed over copies of documents from SBU archives giving accounts of the situation in Lviv in summer 1941, and KGB material about how the legend of the “Nachtigal” division’s involvement in anti-Jewish actions was created.
The Israeli side responded that they were not ready to hand over material about Roman Shukhevych from their archives since this was not collected together into one file and might be spread over the entire archives and would require special and long research.
The Director of the Yad Vashem Archive Department Chaim Gertner confirmed that there was no dossier on Shukhevych in the archives. He said that Josef Lapid who had claimed there was such a file was not an employee of the archives.
As grounds for accusations of Shukhevych’s involvement in anti-Jewish actions, Mr Gertner handed the Ukrainian delegation two small folders with copies of documents on 7 and 18 pages respectively.
The first is the protocol of a KGB interrogation of an UPA [Ukrainian Resistance Army] sergeant Luka Pavlyshchyn from 13 May 1986. This contains only general phrases regarding “Nactitigal”’s involvement in “killing Soviet people”. The same folder provides testimony of Yaroslav Shpytal (who like Luka Pavlyshchyn never served in Nachtigal). This gives a more detailed account of the “crimes” of Ukrainian nationalists. The document is known to historians since Shpytal’s testimony was published back in 1960 in the Soviet propagandist brochure “Oberlander’s bloody crimes”. Information about how this testimony is produced on the instructions of the KGB was published on 6 February 2008 at public history hearings at the SBU “The accusations against Nachtigal – historical truth and political technology”.
The second folder contains the testimony, translated into German, of another “hero” of the above-mentioned brochure – Hryhory Melnyk, former Nachtigal fighter who is in the list of those, in accordance with KGB instructions from 13 November 1959, needed to be “properly prepared for interrogation”. Moreover, documents uncovered in the SBU archive show that Melnyk was recruited by the KGB to take part in the trial. Soon afterwards his “testimony” and that of Yaroslav Shpytal, were used as the base for a trial in East Germany, aimed at discrediting one of the Germany commandants of Nachtigal, Teodor Oberlender.
Volodymyr Vyatrovych stated that “There is thus no dossier on Shukhevych in the Yad Vashem archives, the copies of documents received from them are fragments of material fabricated by the KGB and can in no way be the basis for accusations against Roman Shukhevych. The information campaign aimed at discrediting him has no historical foundation and is based solely on Soviet propaganda material and testimony fabricated by the Soviet Security Service”.
One of the largest sources of documentation on the life and activities of Roman Shukhevych, and the struggle of the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] and UPA, are actually in the State Archive of the SBU which are open to all researchers.
On 6 December 2007 the Head of the Council of the Yad Vashem Memorial Josef Lapid stated on the radio station Deutsche Welle that the Yad Vashem Archives contained a collection of documents gathered from German and Soviet sources which supposedly proved that the Nachtigal battalion under the command of Roman Shukhevych had been involved in repressive operations against the civilian population of Lviv during the summer of 1941.
“We have a whole dossier which shows that Shukhevych was one of those implicated in mass murder. Ukraine has not yet asked us to hand over these documents. If such a request is made, I think we will meet it”. The story received wide publicity in both the Ukrainian and foreign media.
It is this assertion that was the main argument against declaring the Chief Commander of UPA Roman Shukhevych a Hero of Ukraine. Some media outlets spoke of the “mysterious reluctance of the Ukrainian side to see the dossier and its silence on this subject”.
As can be seen, there was no silence. Bulat Meladze (talk) 15:30, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Article on Nachtigall in Russian and Ukrainian
Too lengthy to cut and paste here:
http://www.zn.ua/3000/3150/62036/
http://www.dt.ua/3000/3150/62036/
Bulat Meladze (talk) 15:34, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Nachtigall video
Interesting video about Machtigall on U-tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q0NFUGhN0U Bandurist (talk) 04:14, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
