SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian
militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.
Some 60 Minutes viewers may have been struck by the observation that while the 60
Minutes expert witness - Simon Wiesenthal - claimed that the number of Jews killed
was "between 5 and 6 thousand" in three days, you - supposedly the neutral
interviewer - chose to reduce the number killed to "3,000" and the duration of the
killing to two days - but without informing the viewer on what grounds you did so.
One wonders what reason you would have had for undermining the testimony of your
chief - and only - witness. One wonders what superior authority you discovered for
your revised statistic, and why you did not bring this superior authority forward to
testify in front of the CBS cameras instead of Simon Wiesenthal whose testimony you
apparently distrusted and chose to contradict. And one wonders that you could have
such low regard for the intelligence of 60 Minutes viewers that you would broadcast
discrepant accounts without explaining the discrepancy.
However, I Can't Find Anyone Else
Substantiating the Wiesenthal-Safer
Pre-German Lviv Pogrom
In my reading, I have yet to come across a single account which supports the
Wiesenthal-Safer claim of anywhere from 3,000 Jews killed in 2 days to 5,000-6,000
Jews killed in 3 days in Lviv during the pre-German interval. Had the
Wiesenthal-Safer pogrom taken place, then it would have been one of the biggest
pogroms of the war, and possibly the very biggest, and thus obligatory to describe
in every history of the Holocaust, if not in every history of the Second World War.
What I found, in contrast, was statements contradicting the possibility of the
Wiesenthal-Safer pogrom, most notably the following three made by Raul Hilberg:
From the Ukraine Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C reported as
follows:
Almost nowhere can the population be persuaded to
take active steps against the Jews. This may be
explained by the fear of many people that the Red
Army may return. Again and again this anxiety has
been pointed out to us. Older people have remarked
that they had already experienced in 1918 the
sudden retreat of the Germans. In order to meet
the fear psychosis, and in order to destroy the
myth [...] which, in the eyes of many Ukrainians,
places the Jew in the position of the wielder of
political power, Einsatzkommando 6 on several
occasions marched Jews before their execution
through the city. Also, care was taken to have
Ukrainian militiamen watch the shooting of Jews.
This "deflation" of the Jews in the public eye did not have the
desired effect. After a few weeks, Einsatzgruppe C complained once
more that the inhabitants did not betray the movements of hidden
Jews. The Ukrainians were passive, benumbed by the "Bolshevist
terror." Only the ethnic Germans in the area were busily working
for the Einsatzgruppe. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the
European Jews, 1961, p. 202)
The Slavic population stood estranged and even aghast before the