We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and
Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first
printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan
Franko.
Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of
Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko
Museum.
As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team
leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries,
exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and
expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster,
November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew
Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23)
Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could
have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they
were being treated as Untermenschen:
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian
intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade
school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as
to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the
Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were
established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial
inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A
History, 1994, p. 469)
There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population
of the east than four years of primary school.
This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple
arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command
that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and
obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school,
no other kind of school must be allowed in the east....
The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people
without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and
workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture,
they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the
German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and
monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short
History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263)
The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis - or if we are to
believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves - is a colossal fiction based on colossal
prejudice:
A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine
was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in
France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a
fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480)
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Simon Wiesenthal
Discovered Under the Floorboards
In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take
this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards:
In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief
inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish
companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied
himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944,
when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end.
As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled,
leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't
even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53)
To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday - how impressive!
And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory:
He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone
numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before.
He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what
colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and
receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from
them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A
