WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go so
fast.
SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners.
WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she
couldn't walk fast.
SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the
guilty, to bring justice.
The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it ends with a
reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine that the events
mentioned in the same passage happened during the pre-German interval. However, examining Mr.
Wiesenthal's biographies for confirmation of the first two of these events - the arrest of his
mother and the shooting of his mother-in-law - turns up the following (it will help at this
point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June 30, 1941):
In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods truck at
Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then sixty-three.
... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead by a Ukrainian police
auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon
Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)
"My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon says,
lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ... Around
the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife] learned that, back in
Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was
being evicted from her home. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41)
We see, therefore, that 60 Minutes seems to have advanced the date of arrest of Simon
Wiesenthal's mother as well as the shooting of his mother-in-law by more than a year in order to
lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the German
occupation of Lviv.
Also attributed to the pre-German interval by 60 Minutes were the events depicted in the
"remnants of a film" quoted above, but as we shall see below, these scenes are not scenes of a
pogrom and they did not antedate the arrival of the Germans either.
As a final piece of contradictory evidence, Andrew Gregorivich reports being told by a resident
of Lviv during those days that there was not a three-day gap between the departure of the
Soviets and the arrival of the Germans (Jews Ukrainians, Forum, No. 91, Fall-Winter 1994, p.
29)
And as a final comment on the possibility of a pre-German Lviv pogrom, one might note that the
pogrom claimed by Morley Safer is massive in scale, that Simon Wiesenthal claimed to be right in
the middle of it, and that it was this very pogrom which "compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the
guilty, to bring justice." One might expect, then, that this particular pogrom would have
occupied some of Mr. Wiesenthal's attention as a Nazi hunter, and yet we are faced with the
incongruity that he seems not to have brought any of its perpetrators to justice.
Impulsive Execution
We have just seen Mr. Wiesenthal reporting that his mother-in-law was "shot to death by a
Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast." Such a thing might well have happened, of
course, but in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's lack of credibility, it behooves us to notice that it is
somewhat implausible. In fact, impulsive killing of this sort was forbidden by the German
authorities for many reasons.
(1) Any optimistic illusions of those arrested concerning their fate were better preserved until
the last possible moment - this to decrease the possibility of emotional outbursts, protests, or
resistance.
(2) As arrests were continuous and unending, there would be the need to prevent forewarning
those slated for arrest at a later time of the reality that the arrests were malevolently
motivated. Optimally, all targeted victims should believe that the arrest was part of a
"relocation," an illusion that a gratuitous shooting in the course of the arrest would dispel.
(3) There was the desirability also of keeping all killings as secret as possible so as not to
arouse the fear or indignation of the general populace. Raul Hilberg describes how even the
roundups themselves were kept as much as possible from view - how much more self-conscious,
then, would the Germans feel about a public killing:
During the stages of concentration, deportations, and killings, the
perpetrators tried to isolate the victims from public view. The administrators
of destruction did not want untoward publicity about their work. They wanted
to avoid criticism of their methods by passers-by. Their psychic balance was
jeopardized enough, especially in the field, and any sympathy extended to the
victim was bound to result in additional psychological as well as operational
complications. ... Any rumors or stories carried from the scene were an
irritant and a threat to the perpetrator.
Precautions were consequently plentiful. In Germany, Jews were sometimes
moved out in the early morning hours before there was traffic in the streets.
