Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthal:
In my letter to you of September 12, I presented the testimony of Erwin Schulz to
the effect that in the few days prior to the arrival of German forces in Lviv in 1941,
some 5,000 inhabitants of the Lviv region, predominantly Ukrainians and Poles, had been
killed, and that the killing had been conducted "under the leadership of Jewish
functionaries and with the participation of the Jewish inhabitants of Lemberg."
The continuing question before us can be broken down into two parts: (1) Were
such large numbers of Ukrainians and Poles killed? (2) What ethnic groups were most
responsible for the killing?
On the first question, there does not appear to be much doubt - every one of the
half-dozen sources that I consulted agree that the slaughter did take place. In fact,
in the last quotation of the following set of six, you yourself, Mr. Wiesenthal, can be
seen to agree:
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 Bolsheviks succeeded in annihilating some 10,000 political
prisoners in Western Ukraine before and after the outbreak of
hostilities (massacres took place in the prisons in Lviv, Zolochiv,
Rivne, Dubno, Lutsk, etc.). (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume
1, p. 886)
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)
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)
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)
The first question having been settled - I trust - to the satisfaction of all, we
turn now to the second question: Is there any ethnic group that might have been