members of the Nachtigall Unit) decided - without consulting the Germans - to proclaim on 30
June 1941, the establishment of a Ukrainian state in recently conquered Lviv. ... Within days
of the proclamation, Bandera and his associates were arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated"
(Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 463-464). Refusing to rescind the proclamation,
Bandera spent July 1941 to September 1944 in German prisons and concentration camps. (Stepan
Bandera is mentioned at this point because he was supported by the Nachtigall Unit; Bandera was
not a member of the Nachtigall Unit.) "Because of their opposition to German policies in
Ukraine, the units were recalled from the front and interned. ... Toward the end of 1942, the
battalion was disbanded because of the soldiers' refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler"
(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, p. 1088). "The battalion was disarmed and
demobilized, and its officers were arrested in January 1943. Shukhevych, however, managed to
escape and join the UPA" (Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Volume 4, p. 680). Roman Shukhevych who had
been the highest-ranking Ukrainian officer of the Nachtigall unit went on to became
commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a partisan group opposing all foreign
occupation, and which during the Nazi occupation was directed primarily against the Nazis.
Ukrainians in the Nachtigall and Roland Units, then, were also not Ukrainians marching off to
fight for Hitler, but rather they were Ukrainians calculating that an alliance with German
forces would promote their national interests, they were Ukrainians whose willingness to fight
for Hitler or to promote Nazi interests proved to be close to non-existent, and they were
Ukrainians who fell out with their Nazi sponsors in the early stages of the war.
It must be noted also that unlike the Galicia Division, the Nachtigall and Roland Units were not
part of the SS, and so that Mr. Safer was in error when he stated that "Roman Shukhevych ... was
deputy commander of the SS Division Nightingale."
It is another mark of 60 Minutes' biased coverage that in objecting to streets being named after
the above-mentioned Stepan Bandera, it did not mention that he spent most of the war in German
captivity, nor that he lost two brothers at Auschwitz; and in objecting to the commemoration of
the above-mentioned Roman Shukhevych, it did not mention that he escaped from German captivity
and commanded the Ukrainian guerrilla war against the German occupation. These omissions are
part of a pattern of distortions and misrepresentations used by 60 Minutes to create the false
impression of undeviating commitment to Naziism on the part of Ukrainians. Take Ukraine's
staunchest opponents of Naziism, let 60 Minutes' makeup crew touch them up for the camera, and
somehow they appear on the air with swastikas smeared on their foreheads.
And so 60 Minutes has painted a picture entirely at variance with the historical record. The
idea of Ukrainians en masse unselfconsciously celebrating the SS is preposterous and on a par
with the image of Jews sacrificing Christian children to drink their blood. These sorts of
fantastic and inflammatory charges are leveled by the more hysterical elements within each
community, are passed along by the more irresponsible members of the mass media, and are aimed
at consumption by the more naive and gullible members of their respective groups. 60 Minutes'
allegations have smeared members of the Galicia Division and Ukrainians generally with a
reckless disregard of evidence that is readily available to any researcher who is interested in
presenting an impartial picture. It is a blatant calumny for 60 Minutes to hold out any of the
above-mentioned units as evidence that Ukrainians "marched off to fight for Hitler" and it
overlooks also that on the Soviet side fighting the Nazis were about two million Ukrainians
which in view of their much larger number, 60 Minutes could have taken as evidence of Ukrainians
"marching off to fight against Hitler" and it overlooks as well the large number of Ukrainians
fighting against Hitler in the various national armies of the Allied forces.
Morley Safer's Contempt for the Intelligence of his Viewers.
Morley Safer states that "Nowhere, not even in Germany, are the SS so openly celebrated," and
while he is saying this, we might rightly expect that the scenes presented will be supportive of