Kubijovyc, editor, Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, Volume 1, p. 886)
Before fleeing the German advance the Soviet occupational regime murdered
thousands of Ukrainian civilians, mainly members of the city's [Lviv's]
intelligentsia. (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Volume 3, p. 222)
The Soviets' hurried retreat had tragic consequences for thousands of political
prisoners in the jails of Western Ukraine. Unable to evacuate them in time,
the NKVD slaughtered their prisoners en masse during the week of 22-29 June
1941, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for major or minor
offenses. Major massacres occurred in Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in
Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia,
where another 5000 perished. Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and
growing Soviet terror, these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians'
abhorrence of the Soviets. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 461)
When the German attack came on 22 June the Soviets had no time to take with
them the people they had locked up. So they simply killed them. Thousands of
detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating Soviets. (Simon
Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 35)
Right after the entry we were shown 2,400 dead bodies of Ukrainians liquidated
with a shot at the scruff of the neck at the city jail of Lemberg [Lviv] by the
Soviets prior to their marching off. (Hans Frank, In the Face of the Gallows,
p. 406)
In Lvov, several thousand prisoners had been held in three jails. When the
Germans arrived on 29 June, the city stank, and the prisons were surrounded by
terrified relatives. Unimaginable atrocities had occurred inside. The prisons
looked like abattoirs. It had taken the NKVD a week to complete their gruesome
task before they fled. (Gwyneth Hughes and Simon Welfare, Red Empire: The
Forbidden History of the USSR, 1990, p. 133)
We learned that, before the Russian troops had left, a very great number of
Lemberg citizens, Ukrainians and Polish inhabitants of other towns and
villages had been killed in this prison and in other prisons. Furthermore,
there were many corpses of German men and officers, among them many Air Corps
officers, and many of them were found mutilated. There was a great bitterness
and excitement among the Lemberg population against the Jewish sector of the
population. (Erwin Schulz, from May until 26 September, 1941 Commander of
Einsatzkommando 5, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, editor,
The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes, Garland, New York,
1982, Volume 18, p. 18)
On the next day, Dr. RASCH informed us to the effect that the killed people in
Lemberg amounted to about 5,000. It has been determined without any doubt
that the arrests and killings had taken place under the leadership of Jewish
functionaries and with the participation of the Jewish inhabitants of
Lemberg. That was the reason why there was such an excitement against the
Jewish population on the part of the Lemberg citizens. (Erwin Schulz, from
May until 26 September, 1941 Commander of Einsatzkommando 5, a subunit of
Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, editor, The Holocaust: Selected Documents
in Eighteen Volumes, Garland, New York, 1982, Volume 18, p. 18)
Chief of Einsatzgruppe B reports that Ukrainian insurrection movements were
bloodily suppressed by the NKVD on June 25, 1941 in Lvov. About 3,000 were