June 30, 1941 – German troops entered Lviv, and bloody massacres of Jews began in dozens of cities and towns in Western Ukrainian (Lviv, Boryslav, Drohobych, Zolochiv, Sambir, Stryi, Ternopil, Zboriv, Hrymailiv, Skalat, Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), etc.) and then Western Belarusian (Jedvabne, Wonsosh, Radzyliv, Shchuchyn (now the Republic of Poland), etc.) lands.
At the beginning of the German-Soviet war, the Nazis rapidly took over the territories recently (1939) occupied by their former ally (the USSR). The Red Army retreated chaotically, so the Soviet authorities had no opportunity to organize evacuation. A wave of executions swept through prisons: thousands of prisoners were killed without a court decision, so as not to leave a potentially dangerous “element” of the enemy. These actions would become the trigger for the tragedy in most of the pogroms that occurred in the summer of 1941.
Despite the differences in the drama of each of the tragedies, they all broke out mostly according to a similar scenario. For example, in Lviv on June 30, the bodies of executed prisoners were found in three prisons at once: on Lontskoho Street, on Zamarstynivska Street, and in the Brigidki prison. The latter two were located near the Jewish quarter. The Germans invited the relatives of the prisoners to the procedure of identifying the corpses and forced Jewish men to appear for “prison work.” They were required to take the bodies of those murdered by the NKVD executioners from the basements and put them in the yard so that the relatives could identify the dead, and the townspeople could see for themselves the crimes of the communist regime.
In this way, they tried to fill the manipulative Nazi myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and “Jewish Commune” with real meaning, which strongly linked Jews and communists. Nazi propaganda branded Jews as Bolshevik agents, perpetrators of the “Red Terror”, potential rebels who would do everything they could to hinder the development of a “new Europe”. Calls were made for a crusade against “Jewish-Bolshevik barbarity”. Of course, no one provided “wishers” with a list of the names of the NKVD and Soviet administrative institutions. Because among them, not Jewish, but Slavic names of those sent from the deep regions of the USSR prevailed.
Summer heat… The stench of mutilated bodies… A feeling of helplessness, confusion… An intuitive search for the guilty, or at least those on whom one could take revenge… Someone had to bear responsibility for the crime. And this “someone” was nearby – the Jews who were sorting through the piles of corpses, as if admitting their own guilt. Most of those who witnessed the shocking procedure joined the Jewish pogrom after noon. The ancient religious and ethnic prejudices of the local population also played a role.
So, the inflamed hatred, the skillfully generated aggression, erupted into wild violence on the streets. The agitated crowd was cheerful, noisy, and imaginative. Among those who mocked the Jews, there were many young people, even children imitated adults. Hearing the German order to “use the physical labor of the Jews,” the townspeople resorted to savage antics. They began to force the Jews to clean the streets, to repair the paving stones on their knees. However, everything was done as if no one was interested in the result of the work, but the process of humiliating others clearly brought pleasure. Therefore, the demands of the crowd were often of an entertaining nature: intelligent representatives of the liberal professions were offered to clean the street with a toothbrush, collect horse manure in their own hats, etc.
As a sign of liberation from the Bolshevik dictatorship, the spontaneous decommunization of urban spaces continued: Soviet monuments were destroyed, posters with images of hated communist leaders were torn down. Jews were required to shout anti-Soviet slogans. However, all these actions, described by the Canadian historian D.-P. Himka as a “carnival”, took on a much more brutal dimension when young men with sticks appeared in the crowd, and others began to tear off the clothes of Jewish women… Of course, the beneficiaries became more active – small-time robbers who hoped to take advantage of the property of murdered Jewish neighbors and were very interested in ensuring that they did not return home.
The further consequences were not limited to moral traumas – the life of every Jew was under threat. It was not a riotous crowd that took him away, but soldiers with weapons. In Lviv, mass executions of Jews were carried out by the Germans in prison yards. We will not find the finale of the tragedy in the detailed photo chronicle of the Lviv pogrom that they filmed. Because mass executions are unacceptable for photo reporting. But the barbaric “Slavic Sabbath” on the streets was recorded by German cameras in all its shocking details.
We cannot but express our awareness of the Ukrainian factor in the organization of the pogrom. Yes, we must admit: not only the “urban noisemakers” of various ethnic origins, but also the newly formed Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (Ukrainische Hilfsplizei), together with regular units of the German army (Wehrmacht) and special extermination units (Einsatzgruppe), the German police (local – SIPO and secret – ORPO) participated in the organization of pogroms in Lviv, and sometimes in other cities. Ukrainian nationalists, professing the idea of a mono-ethnic independent state, saw the Nazis as their natural allies at that time – so through violence against Jews they proved the seriousness of their allied intentions. Illusions quickly dispelled – the Germans did not recognize the Ukrainian state, and its leaders were arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The theme of crimes in German service became the main one in Soviet propaganda directed against Ukrainian nationalists, one of the most popular arguments to justify the brutal suppression of anti-Soviet resistance in Western Ukraine in the post-war period. The ratio of responsibility for the Jewish pogroms of Germans/Ukrainians, Germans/Poles continues to remain in the focus of historiography and public debate.
Olena Ishchenko
Publications that most influenced the author's position on the subject under consideration:
*Грицак Я. Українці в антиєврейських акціях у роки Другої світової війни // Грицак Я. Страсті за націоналізмом. Історичні есеї. Київ: Критика, 2004.
*Гросс Ян Томаш Соседи. Істория уничтожения єврейского местечка. Москва: Текст, 2002.
*Himka John-Paul The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd. Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes. 2011.№ 53.
*Струве Кай Німецька влада, український націоналізм, насильство проти євреїв. Літо 1941 року в Західній Україні. К.: Дух і Літера», 2022.