rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column
contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail
to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the
extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any
research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is
it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated - we may wonder when Russians together
with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we
know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of
Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian
rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian,
Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity
to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is
low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of
Russians found themselves under German occupation.
Balts
Austrians
Russians and Byelorussians
Germans
Poles
Ukrainians
Western Europeans
20
10
8
6
4
3
0.5
11,000
8,500
9,000
45,000
7,500
11,000
3,000
______
95,000
The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of
3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what
constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained
too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence
criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal
prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or
three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.
And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by
something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three
Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be
brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this
primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One
individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,
it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How
refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many
generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of
course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no
more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally
useful, it is never shelved.
Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal
collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish
people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today
bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why
stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a
Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face
of Freedom."
Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand
people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews:
they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi
policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary
police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death,
collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:
The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called,
furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone
the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men
strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310)
Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of
Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to
find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving
one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also
excelled?
But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate
