But even this milder version of an anti-Jewish eruption - now a post-German one - is not easy to
credit. The arrest of one thousand targeted individuals within a city is something that can
only be done by a large team of professionals backed by a research staff, weapons,
telecommunications equipment, vehicles. Before anyone would undertake such a daunting task,
furthermore, they would need to be assured that the thousand prisoners would be wanted and that
they could be processed - only an ambivalent gratitude might be expected for having herded a
thousand prisoners through the streets to the local police station which was not expecting them
- and so it is implausible that local inhabitants would act without at the very least
consultation and coordination with the occupying authorities. From what we have discussed
above, we would expect the local inhabitants to be devoid of initiative, able to follow orders
perfunctorily in order to save their lives, but quite unable to muster the resources to round up
one thousand individuals on their own. If any such round-up did occur, then, it would more
plausibly have been at the instigation of, and under the direction of, the German occupiers.
But to return to 60 Minutes, the reality is that the sort of pogrom described by Simon
Wiesenthal - massive in scale and initiated by Ukrainians independently of German instigation
never took place. The most that the Germans could incite a small number of Ukrainians to
contribute - and who knows exactly how large a contribution these few Ukrainians really made
alongside the Germans in such actions - was closer to the following:
In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets. When some of
the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors circulated that the
Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles full of boiling water. The Ukrainian
population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews and beating them to death with
clubs. ... The Ukrainian violence as a whole did not come up to
expectations. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p.
204)
But on the principle that the person readiest to contradict Simon Wiesenthal is Simon Wiesenthal
himself, we turn to other statements that he has made:
The Ukrainian police ... had played a disastrous role in Galicia following the
entry of the German troops at the end of June and the beginning of July 1941.
(Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 34, emphasis added)
In the same account, Wiesenthal does mention a Lviv pogrom of three day's duration, but
unambiguously places it after the German occupation:
Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating
Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period:
among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the
Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were
Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities
committed by the Soviets.
All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is
said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three
days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989,
p. 36, emphasis added)
In conclusion, Mr. Wiesenthal's story of a massive pre-German Lviv pogrom is contradicted by
other testimony, some of it his own. Mr. Safer had the good sense to subtract 3,000 fatalities
from Mr. Wiesenthal's upper estimate of 6,000, suggesting that he too is aware of Mr.
Wiesenthal's unreliability. Had Mr. Safer dared to subtract another 3,000, he would have hit
the nail right on the head. If one were to sum up within one short statement the picture that
emerges from a consideration of the evidence, and if in doing so one were to be uninhibited by
considerations of political correctness, then an apt summary might be that during the very