NKVD or was directed by the NKVD, then the question reduces to What was the ethnic
composition of the NKVD?
The evidence that I have come across points to the conclusion that the NKVD was
dominated by Jews. Here is one such piece of evidence. The speaker is Yoram Sheftel,
John Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, describing his visit to the Simferopol,
Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 - what Sheftel seems to be saying is that out of a
sample of some 30 members of the wartime NKVD, every last one was a Jew:
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, 1994, p. 301)
Of course a sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the
entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious
hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction:
As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there
so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators - including many of the
most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it.
(Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on
Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147)
Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery
especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the
NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the
prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the
hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins
of real power in the new state for themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The
Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, Slavonic and East
European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165)
The question that I would be interested in hearing your views on, then, Mr.
Wiesenthal, is whether the assertion you made on the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face
of Freedom of October 23, 1994 may have been diametrically opposite to the truth
specifically, that whereas you held out that during the interval prior to the
occupation of Lviv by German forces Ukrainians were slaughtering Jews by the thousands,
in reality during this same interval it may have been closer to the truth to say that
Jews were slaughtering Ukrainians by the thousands.
Sincerely yours,
Lubomyr Prytulak
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE WIESENTHAL 826 hits since 18Jan98
Wiesenthal Letter 21 Sep 14/97 Altered dates of death
September 14, 1997
Simon Wiesenthal
Jewish Documentation Center
Salztorgasse 6
1010 Vienna
Austria
Dear Mr. Wiesenthal: