or not, some Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of
the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. For instance, it was
pointed out to me by a resident of Western Ukraine that a high NKVD
official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was Jewish, despite his
Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological Problems and
Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations
During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter
J. Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical
Perspective, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton,
1990, footnotes deleted)
(22) From 15,000 to 40,000 prisoners were killed
In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet
authorities were not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners
they had arrested, mostly during their last months of rule in
western Ukraine. Their solution, implemented at the end of June
and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates regardless of
whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being held
for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to
40,000 prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern
Galicia and western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of
Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)
However, the Membership of this NKVD was
Predominantly Jewish
What was the membership of this NKVD that we see above being so repeatedly blamed
for the massacre of Ukrainians in the days before occupation by German forces? In
my analysis of data presented by Yuri Shapoval, I arrive at the conclusion that the
senior membership in Ukraine of the organization one of whose names became the NKVD
was as follows:
Out of every 10 senior members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine:
6 were Jewish,
2 were Russian,
1 was Ukrainian, and
1 was other.
Statements made by others support the conclusion that the NKVD was predominantly a
Jewish organization. For example, Yoram Sheftel, Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense
attorney, reports that in connection with his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB
headquarters in 1990, a plaque memorializing the "KGB" dead of the war showed that
all thirty of the thirty names were Jewish:
On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with
the names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in
the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was
shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and
the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like
Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan - all Jews. The best of Jewish youth
in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to
the Red Devil. (The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a
Show-Trial, Victor Gollancz, London, 1994, p. 301)
Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative
of the entire NKVD in Ukraine; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is