"the Bolsheviks deporting Ukrainians," but he does not furnish any
overall figures. But on the basis of a German document (RSHA
IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR no. 28, 20 July 1941, No-2943),
which I was unable to verify, he recounts one particularly horrible
episode:
In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the
Soviets. When some of the exhumed corpses were found
without skin, rumors circulated that the Ukrainians
had been thrown into kettles of boiling water. The
Ukrainian population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews
and beating them to death with clubs.
He also quotes the French collaborator Dr. Frederic as saying that
the Bolsheviks killed eighteen thousand Ukrainian political
prisoners in Lviv and its outskirts alone.
Basing his remarks on an anonymous article entitled "The
Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR," in the dissident journal
Ukrainian Herald, Issue 7-8, the Ukrainian-American publicist Lew
Shankowsky gives the following number of victims of Bolshevik
terror in Galicia and Volhynia: as many as forty thousand killed in
the prisons of Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Dubno, Ternopil, Stanyslaviv
(now Ivano-Frankivsk), Stryi, Drohobych, Sambir, Zolochiv and other
towns and settlements. The fact of the matter is that, justifiably
or not, some Ukrainians felt that some Jews were in the employ of
the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. For instance, it was
pointed out to me by a resident of Western Ukraine that a high NKVD
official in Lviv, a certain Barvinsky, was Jewish, despite his
Ukrainian name. (Yaroslav Bilinsky, Methodological Problems and
Philosophical Issues in the Study of Jewish-Ukrainian Relations
During the Second World War, pp. 373-394, in Howard Aster and Peter
J. Potichnyj (eds.), Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical
Perspective, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton,
1990, footnotes deleted)
(22) From 15,000 to 40,000 prisoners were killed
In their hasty and often panic-stricken retreat, the Soviet
authorities were not about to evacuate the thousands of prisoners
they had arrested, mostly during their last months of rule in
western Ukraine. Their solution, implemented at the end of June
and in early July 1941, was to kill all inmates regardless of
whether they had committed minor or major crimes or were being held
for political reasons. According to estimates, from 15,000 to
40,000 prisoners were killed during the Soviet retreat from eastern
Galicia and western Volhynia. (Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of
Ukraine, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1996, p. 624)
However, the Membership of this NKVD was
Predominantly Jewish
What was the membership of this NKVD that we see above being so repeatedly blamed
for the massacre of Ukrainians in the days before occupation by German forces? In
my analysis of data presented by Yuri Shapoval, I arrive at the conclusion that the
senior membership in Ukraine of the organization one of whose names became the NKVD
was as follows:
Out of every 10 senior members of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine:
6 were Jewish,
2 were Russian,
1 was Ukrainian, and
1 was other.
Statements made by others support the conclusion that the NKVD was predominantly a
Jewish organization. For example, Yoram Sheftel, Ivan Demjanjuk's Israeli defense
attorney, reports that in connection with his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB
headquarters in 1990, a plaque memorializing the "KGB" dead of the war showed that
all thirty of the thirty names were Jewish:
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, Victor Gollancz, London, 1994, p. 301)
Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative
of the entire NKVD in Ukraine; 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
