17.
The Jews restricted to living in the Pale of Settlement,
primarily in Ukraine and Belarus, did not claim Ukrainian identity but
Russian, even though they were not allowed to live in Russia proper,
their allegiance to the Russian authority was obvious. This used
to baffle me that Jews in Kiev would identify themselves as Russian
Jews; whereas Ukrainians refused to be labeled Russian, unless, of
course, they were transplants from Russian boundaries which was Stalin's
plan to homogonize Ukraine. (This later is illustrated clearly by
the Orange Revolution in 2005, where the Eastern half of Ukraine
wanted the Russian-backed Victor Yanukovych, while the Western half
wanted Victor Yushenko, the Ukrainian candidate.)
18.
Ukrainians were the only group that was committing suicide rather
than be deported back to USSR as per the Yalta agreement population
exchange.
19. The
Ukrainian / Jewish conflict escalated when famed Nazi hunter,
Wiesenthal, went after low-level Ukrainian guards such as John
Demjaniuk; while
upper level officers like Wiesenthal were excused from prosecution.
Wiesenthal is accused first of collaborating with the Soviets and
later with the Nazis to save his hide.
"Did
Wiesenthal voluntarily work for his wartime
oppressors? That's the accusation leveled by Austrian Chancellor
Bruno Kreisky, himself of Jewish ancestry and leader for many years
of his country's Socialist Party. During an interview with foreign
journalists in 1975, Kreisky charged Wiesenthal with using 'Mafia
methods', rejected his pretense of 'moral authority', and suggested
that he was an agent for the German authorities" (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n4p-8_Weber.html,
2004).
Ukrainian
author Myron B. Kuropas wrote about Wiesenthal:
"In
1939, he claims to have bribed an NKVD commissar and
was spared deportation to Siberia along with other bourgeois Jews
in Galicia. In 1941, he was saved from execution by
a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman named Bodnar who spirited him away
from the Nazis during the night. Later, Mr. Wiesenthal was singled
out of a line of Jews – all of whom were summarily executed minutes later
– by an SS officer who later provided him with double food rations.
One can't help but wonder if these incidents were really
the miracles Mr.
Wiesenthal claims they were... Having studied Mr. Wiesenthal's
recent releases and publications from Vienna and Los
Angeles, I am increasingly convinced that he may be collaborating closely
with the KGB and that in addition to wanting to live
to see the last living Nazi on earth hanged, he appears to have an
almost pathological need to discredit the Ukrainian and Baltic communities
in the free world" (http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/188613.shtml, 2004).
20.
Richard C. Lukas wrote:
"The
genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of as many
Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews, thus making them co-victims in a Forgotten Holocaust.
This Holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have
written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret
the tragedy in exclusivistic terms--namely, as the most tragic period
in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was
unique to the Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing
to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles,
who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known.
Little wonder that many people who experienced these events share
the feeling of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who anxious when the
meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so
that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively,
as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians,
Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities." -- Richard C.
Lukas, preface to The Forgotten
Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944 (http://www.uca.edu/divisions/academic/history/cahr/holocaust.htm, 2004).
21. "Historical
literature of the Holocaust has focused on the six million Jewish
victims to the exclusion of the sixteen to twenty million Gentile
victims," Karen Silverstrim, MA Candidate, University
of Central Arkansas.
22.
Before Jews became the primary target, Poles were shipped
to Auschwitz by the tens of thousands.150,000 Polish Catholics
went to Auschwitz. In Sachsenhausen, 20,000
Poles perished, in Mauthausen, 30,000, in Neuengamme,
17,000 (Lukas 38); 35,000 went to Dachau, 33,000 Polish
women went to Ravensbrück many of them to be experimented
upon, with glass and other objects implanted in their uteruses.
In view of that, to hear from uninformed members of the Jewish
community that Poles participated in the annihilation of Jews makes
you ask, "has
the world really gone mad?"... "Yet even in these
circumstances, at least one million people were
involved in sheltering Jews (Lukas 150). In these
circumstances, every one of them was a saint, a
hero, deserving no fewer accolades than Raul Wallenberg
who was sheltered from Nazi retribution by his
nationality, wealth and social status. In contrast,
Poles who helped Jews were protected by nothing," (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/498/thompson.html,
2004).
23. "Poland's
population losses during World War II were proportionately
by far the greatest
[Davies biasely forgetting
the Ukrainian 10 million loss] of
any nation participating in the war. Of its 35 million
people before the war, Poland lost 6.5 million. An estimated
664,000 were battlefield deaths (this figure exceeds
combined losses of the United States and Great Britain
in WW II), and the remainder, or 90 percent, were civilians
of all ages" (Norman
Davies, Europe: A History,
Oxford 1996, 1328; Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust, Univ.
of Kentucky Press 1986, 39; The 1992 Almanac, Houghton Mifflin
310) (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/498/losses.html,
2004).
24. California
State University Dominguez Hills professor and author, Aaron Hass,
perpetuates the myth that the Jews were the only ones who suffered;
suffered the most, and especially, weren't helped by any other nationality.
I took his class and lecture after lecture, he kept stating that
the Jewish Holocaust (6 million) was the biggest genocide in history,
ignoring the 7-10 million Stalin genocide of Ukrainians, even after
I brought it up. In Hass' book, The Aftermath, Living with the
Holocaust, he wrote that "Even the Palestinian Jews resented
European Jews coming into Palestine," jealously
guarding the precious hard-fought land and resources
with other Jews.
25.
Holocaust writer, Alexander Kimel also adds fuel to the Ukrainian-Jewish
fire, perpetuating the long-standing arguments that Ukrainians
were not only bystanders but PARTNERS with the Nazis. His thesis
is full of accusations and half-truths, blaming the Ukrainians
rather than allow that they were victims themselves, succumbing
to as many deaths as the Jews. Kimel would be more accurate if
he said SOME Ukrainians in every sentence that he writes because
Ukrainians weren't acting in a cohesive group but were taking orders
either from Soviets or Nazis. Historians forget quickly that World
War II, fought on Ukrainian soil with large-scale battles in Kyiv,
Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Sevastopol (http://members.aol.com/shukhevych/) and that it was a life and death struggle for the Ukrainian people.
Kimel says Ukrainians played an extensive role in the Final Solution,
which is a gross exaggeration of their powers under Hitler's command.
He uses 17th Century Bogdan Chmielnicki (correct spelling Khmel'nyts'ki)
example as proof of the Ukrainian serf bloody uprising against
the Poles and killing the Jews when in fact, his bloody period
was NOT about the Jews. The Cossack warrior Khmel'nyts'ki 's entire
family was killed by the Poles, his estate was confiscated, he
was bloody angry and he had nothing else to lose. The war he unleashed
was about survival and struggle for land and they were ALL killing
each other, with the Cossack being the victors. And yes, the Jews
sided with the Poles and were the enemy to the Galician peasants.
Kimel knows very little about Ukrainian history and inaccurately writes:
"Ukrainians were
never a free people, always under the Polish or Russian yoke" when
in truth Ukraine's history is older than
the Russian history, i.e., -- beginning
in 850s, the Kievan Rus reached the height
of his power in the 10th century.
You
can't trust Kimel's interpretation of history since it is one-sided
and bares only a slight resemblance to the truth.
I'm not defending atrocities; the atrocities were dealt by both
two-sides of the Khmel'nyts'ki's peasant revolt (http://www.kimel.net/Ukraine.html 2004).
26. As
all Ukrainians weren't on the same side, not all Jews were either.
According to Bryan Mark Rigg (B.A. Yale, M.A. and Ph.D. Cambridge)
there were at least 150,000 Jews devotedly helping 'der Fuehrer'
to conquer the world. Among these Nazi lackeys were decorated veterans
and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals (see the 526-page
historical treatise HITLER'S JEWISH SOLDIERS by Bryan
Mark Rigg, the University Press of Kansas, May 2002, ISBN 0-7006-1178-9).
27.
Ukraine, whenever it was free to rule itself, had no anti-Jewish
legislation.
"Ukrainian
paper currency from this period [1917] is
probably the only money in the world which was printed in four languages--Ukrainian,
Polish, Russian and Yiddish" (The Ukrainians in America,
Myron B. Kuropas,1972, pg. 29).
28. Author
Yakov Suslensky, imprisoned for seven years for speaking of anti-Soviet
propaganda, spoke of the Volksdeutch:
Among
the collaborators and residents at the time were those
called Ukrainians,
but who were of German descent, with strong German
allegiance, born in Ukraine but were not of Ukrainian
Rus history and nationality. "These were
the ones who joined the Einisatszkommando
or the Gestapo" (http://isurvived.org/Frameset4References/-Mirchuk-onJudenrat.html). Yakov Suslensky's 1995 book is They Were True Heroes: Citizens
of Ukraine-Righteous Among the Nations.
29.
The Jewish commemorate the 65th anniversary of the tragedy of Babyn
Yar, however, for the sake of objectivity, it should be recalled
that at least half the victims at Babyn Yar (if not more)
were gypsies and Ukrainians, who were viciously destroyed by the Nazis.
According to official German records 33,771 Jews were killed in two
days; but the killing did not stop there. Babiy Yar became the burial
place not only of Jews but of Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs,
gypsies and prisoners of war. No
one will ever know how many people died at Babiy Yar, but estimates put
the figures at more than 100,000, 33,771 Jews.
Among the victims were also entire crews of ships of the famous Dnipro
Flotilla as well as the defenders of Kyiv-soldiers and commanders of
the Southwestern Front. Here is the grave of the unvanquished Olena Teliha
and other Ukrainian patriots shot by the Gestapo in 1942, whose memory
are for some reason not being honored on the state level. (PRESS
CONFERENCE, UNIAN,
Kyiv, Ukraine, Thu, Sep 28, 2006, Action Ukraine Report (AUR) #770, Article
5, Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday, October 8, 2006)
30.
About half of the 200,000 Ukrainians were resettled by the International
Refugee Organization (IRO) to USA, UK, Australia and Canada.
Marta Dyczok provides an explanation why the Grand Alliance [Roosevelt,
Churchill, Stalin] did not recognize the Ukrainian nationality
of the refugees. In the words of one Western official, Ukrainian
patriots were to be considered as fascists and enemies
of the people. The
Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees, (2000; ISBN 0-333-71109-2)
Marta Dyczok, Assistant Professor, Departments of History and
Political Science University of Western Ontario, Chapter 3
(p. 47).
31.
Stefan Lemieszewski writes: Furthermore, part of Stalin's tactics
used in forced repatriation included a propaganda campaign falsely
smearing Ukrainian refugees as Nazi war criminals (today, a continuing
campaign).
32.
General Eisenhower, who initially supported the forcible
repatriation (from Germany to Russia) policy, gradually became appalled
by the "suicides
among individuals who preferred to die than return to
their native lands.'' On 4 September 1945 he overstepped his authority
and suspended the use of force in repatriation in the US zones of
operation in Germany. Two months later Field Marshall Montgomery introduced
a similar suspension in the British zones. (http://www.dpcamps.org/repatriation.html)
33.
In best-selling novel of 1983, Poland, author/researcher James
A Michener wrote:
Ukraine
would become one of the world's greatest tragedies,
a land in which the oppressors would allow ten million citizens
to starve to death [1932-33], where the native language would be
outlawed, and where all kinds of depredations would be visited
upon a distrusted and despised subject people. In despair, in 1939
the Ukrainians would try to side with Hitler in hopes that he might
rescue them from Russian domination, and when this proved a fatal
miscalculation, the revenge of the Communist victors would be harsher
than ever.
34.
The archives even contain documents proving
that in the 1950s, in order to divert attention from Russia’s
crimes in the Holodomor, Russia convinced the
East German secret police, the Stasi, to forge documents alleging
that Ukrainian nationalists had collaborated with the Nazis
against Jews during World War II. [SSU
(SBU) site English version: http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/index and
http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=74497&cat_id=80545&mustWords=„Štazi&searchPublishing=1]
In
fact, the opposite is true – Ukrainians and their
military, political and religious leaders proactively
opposed German persecution of Jews and worked to protect and rescue
Jews from Nazis. Article
by Peter Borisow, New York, New York; Canadian American
Slavic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3, (Fall 2008). Pg. 251-265;
Charles Schlacks, Publisher, Idyllwild, CA;[See Herbert
Romerstein, “Divide and Conquer: The KGB Disinformation
Campaign against Ukrainians and Jews,” Ukrainian
Quarterly, LX, no. 3 (Fall 2004).]
35.
The Jews will not honor Archbishop Metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi - Reason why Archbishop Sheptitsky has not (yet) been honored with Righteous Gentile award:
Turned down after consideration by Yad Vashem’s Commission for the Designation of the Righteous Among the Nations (the commission convenes more than 20 times each year in closed sessions) more than a dozen times since 1964, Metropolitan Sheptitsky remains arguably Yad Vashem’s most difficult case. While no one denies that he was responsible for the rescue of many Jews, his critics point to many factors that have made him ineligible to be named a Righteous Gentile: as Ukraine’s highest-ranking cleric, he putatively faced no personal danger for opposing the Germans’ Final Solution; as the acknowledged leader of the wartime Ukrainian nationalist movement, he originally welcomed the Nazis, seeing them as a means to Ukrainian independence; as the head of the Uniate church, he gave his blessings to the formation of two Ukrainian SS divisions; as a man with longtime sympathetic relations to the Jewish community, he did not proactively seek out Jews to assist but did open his church’s doors to people who approached him.
For more of the story, see:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/international-news/righteous-gentile-or-nazi-supporter
Submitted by: Lavrentiy
36. OUN-UPA-
Both the Nazis and Russians tried to make Ukrainians look bad re the Jewish
issue.
In
closing:
The
Ukrainian point of view is: "My God, Ukrainian blood was shed all
over Europe, in Ukraine, in Germany, in Poland and in Russia, in
far greater numbers than any other nationality. The Jews are trying
to rewrite history to show they were most impacted and that Ukrainians
were co-conspirators to Hitler."
What
happened to the six millions Jews in World War II was horrific!
What happened to the five million Poles was horrific! What happened
to the 10 million Ukrainians was horrific! World War II was a raging
hell for more than just the Jews. So yes, Jewish blood was on Ukrainian
hands and Ukrainian blood was on Jewish hands. We've got to
start the healing exchange between the Jews and the Ukrainians, not
teach new generations to continue the hate. It's such an injustice
to those million of Ukrainians who perished brutally between 1930
and 1950s.
Yehuda
Bauer, Alexander Kimel, CBS's Morley Safer and Aaron Hass are divisive
spokesmen. New kind of leaders are emerging who bring understanding
between Jews and Ukrainians. Radio talk show host and commentator,
Dennis Prager, teaches cohesiveness to Jews and Christians; encouraging
them to support each other in common goals. Marco Carynnyk, is writer
and spokesman on Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Together and Apart
in Brzezany, by Dr. Shimon Redlich writes of the conflict in
inter-war Galicia was between Ukrainians, Jews and Poles, pointing
out prejudices, hatreds and how Poles, Jews and Ukrainians have perceived
each other.
In
2005 the new Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, vowed to bridge
the gap caused by trouble relations under Czarist and Soviet regimes.
He said on his last trip to Auschwitz he had gathered up soil,
which he presented to a meeting of Ukrainian Jews. "And I will
guarantee that in Ukraine there will never be anti-Semitism, xenophobia
or hatred between people," he said. "There will never again be
a Jewish question in my country. The tragedy of the past will never
be repeated on the soil of Ukraine." Yuschenko's father, Andriy,
was one of 14,000 Soviet [Ukrainian] soldiers, tattooed and held
as slave labor in Auschwitz. (From article by Ron
Popeski, Reuters, Krakow, Poland, January 27, 2005.)
New
York, Monday, November 21, 2005 - The American Jewish Committee (AJC)
welcomed the U.S. Senate vote to lift the trade restrictions on Ukraine
that were imposed on the Soviet Union in 1974 when Congress adopted
the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to press for freedom of emigration. AJC urged the U.S. House of Representatives to vote in support
of lifting the restrictions on Ukraine, so the measure can be delivered
to the White House for signature by President Bush. |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Divide and Conquer:
The KGB disinformation campaign
against Ukrainians and Jews
http://www.iwp.edu/news/newsID.139/news_detail.asp
Ukrainian Quarterly November 8, 2004
By Herbert Romerstein
Herbert Romerstein is
an adjunct professor at the Institute of World
Politics. He was a professional staff member of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence of the US House of Representatives and
served as chief of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active
Measures at the United States Information Agency.
PAPERS & STUDIES
Ukrainian Quarterly
Publication Date: Fall 2004
Introduction
The Soviet
regime had
a serious image
problem in
the 1970s and
'80s. While
the communist propaganda apparatus was trying to present Soviet Russia as
a normal peaceful state, in the United States and other free countries, people
of Ukrainian, Jewish and Baltic origin were working together to expose
the repressive and imperialist nature of the communist dictatorship. They picketed
Soviet embassies, provided the press with names of prisoners in the Soviet
Gulag and demanded freedom for the peoples of the Soviet empire.
The Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party assigned the KGB to solve this
problem. The Soviet secret police and intelligence service had a long history
of using disinformation to discredit political opponents. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991, Leonid Shabarshin, who formerly headed the
First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of the KGB, explained to the
Moscow newspaper Trud that one of the jobs of the KGB was disinformation for "compromising
anti-Soviets.'"
In Shebarshin's words, "during the Cold War the essence of our active measures
was to inflict political and moral damage on our basic opponent, the
United States ... [so] we compromised political figures, organs of the press,
and Americans whose activities were in some way unwelcome [to the Soviets]." The
KGB veteran revealed that every "active measure" against the enemies
of the Soviet Union abroad was submitted by KGB to the Politburo "and
was implemented only with its permission. The results of the action were
also reported to the Politburo."
The KGB was given the important job of creating division in the anti-Soviet
camp. English language propaganda books and pamphlets were prepared with
KGB assistance for dissemination in the West. One such pamphlet complained
that Ukrainian nationalists arrange noisy demonstrations in support of
the Israeli aggressors (as has happened in West Germany), while the Zionist
chieftains declare their ‘firm intention to continue close cooperation'
with the OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] killers. Therefore,
both partners in this wicked marriage publicly admit the real nature
of the sinister alliance between Zionists and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.
To the Soviets, those who opposed them would only do so on orders of
the CIA.
The pamphlet went on "The malignant partnership of the Magen David [Star
of David] and the nationalist trident [the Ukrainian national emblem], fostered
by the CIA, has long become a reality."
The Soviets used foreign communists to spread the disinformation.One
of them, Michael Hanusiak, a member of the Communist Party of the United
States (CPUSA), visited Ukraine in the early 1970s, where the KGB provided
him with information on Ukrainians who were supposedly Nazi war criminals.
Soviet attempts to discredit Jews
During World War II, as a young communist,
Hanusiak looked to Michael
Tkach as his friend and mentor. Tkach was the head of the Ukrainian section
of the International Workers Order, a communist front, and was editor
of the communist newspaper Ukrainian Daily News, based in New York. He
was also an agent of the NKVD, subsequently known as KGB, spying against the
United States. Later Hanusiak replaced Tkach as the editor of The Ukrainian
News. It was no longer a daily but continued to publish Soviet propaganda
in New York.
In 1993 Hanusiak celebrated his 80th birthday. Gus Hall, head of
the CPUSA, wrote him, "On this special occasion we want to congratulate
you on your many years of outstanding contributions in the leadership
of the Communist Party, USA, as well as other progressive organizations." Hanusiak's
Communist Party comrade and close friend Lewis Moroze wrote to him, "My
wife Dora and I have a dream that in the not too distant future the
Soviet peoples will restore socialism to the Soviet Union, and the
Morozes and the Hanusiaks will join hands in a walk side by side
down the Krishchatik in the city of Kyiv in the Ukraine." It was too
late for them: Ukraine was free and the Soviet Russian empire could never
be reestablished.
Hanusiak used some of the KGB information in a 1973 book called Lest
We Forget. It was republished in Canada in 1976 with introductions
that revealed
its real purpose. One introduction signed Joshua Gershman complained, "It
is no secret that leaders of the capitalist political parties in
Canada - including Jews - are often honored guests at celebrations
of the Ukrainian nationalists and other chauvinist ethnic community
organizations, particularly at the time of elections.They express solidarity
with the misleading slogans calling for the 'liberation' of the Ukraine
and other Soviet Republics. . . . Thus we witnessed in Canada, in
1971, during the official friendship visit of Soviet Premier Kosygin, the
ugly collaboration of cold warriors among the Jewish, Ukrainian,
Hungarian and other ethnic groups, demonstrating against the Soviet
Union."
In another introduction to the book, Peter Krawchuk complained that
the Ukrainian nationalists and Zionists "in their hatred of the
Soviet Union
... have become partners." In reality, many of the Jews who opposed the
communist empire were not Zionist. The communists used the term "Zionist" as
a synonym for Jews. During World War II the NKVD used the code word "Rats" for
both Jews and Zionists. When the NKVD assigned agent Robert Soblen
(Ruvelis Sobolevicius) to take over the spying on Trotskyites and Jews
in New York, the secret communication referred to them under the code-names "polecats" and "rats."
It is interesting to note that at the same time, the Nazis in occupied Ukraine
tried to divide Ukrainians and Jews by distributing a leaflet saying that "Jews
are like rats." It showed a picture of a rat superimposed on the Star
of David, the same Jewish symbol that the above-mentioned Soviet propaganda
pamphlet, complained was in partnership with the Ukrainian trident.
KGB methodology to divide Jews from Ukrainians and Lithuanians
The KGB methodology in attempting to
divide Jews from Ukrainians and other
ethnic groups can best be understood by examining a collection of secret
KGB materials discovered in Lithuania by the French scholar Francoise Thom.
The KGB used both agents and "co-optees." The KGB's official definition
of agent was "An individual who consciously, systematically and clandestinely
carries out particular intelligence assignments in his own country
or abroad." The difference was that the agent was a full time operative
of any nationality, while the co-optee was a Soviet citizen, only occasionally
called upon to carry out KGB orders.
In July 1980 the KGB in Lithuania wrote a memorandum on "Suggestions on active
measures in connection with the attempts of the Zionists and Lithuanian
nationalist émigrés to coordinate their activities." According
to the memo, the "Zionists" had launched an anti-Soviet campaign
which had been reported in the Lithuanian language press in the West.
The leaders of the Lithuanian nationalist groups made contact with Jewish groups "with
the aim of coordinating hostile activities against the Soviet Union with them."
The campaign against the Lithuanians was assigned to two KGB agents code named "Aleksas" and "Germanas" and
two cooptees, Yu. Ronderis and Ya. Vinitskas. (While the agents mentioned
in KGB reports were given code names, the co-optees were listed by their
real names.) The KGB cooptee Yu. Ronderis was assigned to find people
in Israel who could sign statements addressed to American Jews attacking
the Lithuanians.
By 1987 the KGB's problems had intensified. Lithuanian nationalists were publicly
active in Lithuania. Morever, Lithuanian Jews were active in the nationalist
movement. One in particular, Emmanuel Zingeris, was a member of the national
board of the Lithuanian national rebirth movement, "Sajudis." He
is not a Zionist and describes himself as "a Lithuanian of Jewish background." Zingeris
is now chairman of the Lithuanian Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights.
Zingeris became a particular target of KGB disinformation.
A top secret cable dated September 23, 1987 from the KGB in Moscow to
the KGB
in Vilnius revealed that an agent with the code name "Yablonsky" had been
assigned to travel to Israel to try to discredit Zingeris. According to the
cable, "Before his departure for Israel 'Yablonsky' received an assignment
from Service Z of the Lithuanian KGB to discredit Zingeris with Zionist
circles." Service Z was the local section of Directorate Z (formerly
5th Directorate) of the KGB which had the job of persecuting dissidents.
'Yablonsky' had relatives at Kol Israel broadcasting service. He was ordered
to tell them, as well as officials of the charitable organization, The
Jewish Agency, that Zingeris was involved with Lithuanian nationalists who
had murdered Jews. That was a lie, and 'Yablonsky' failed in his mission.
He explained to his KGB masters that The Jewish Agency, which provided
financial support to help Jews abroad, was receiving money from the Joint
Distribution Committee in the United States which would be angry with anyone
who attacked Zingeris. "Yablonsky" may not have given the KGB a true excuse,
but Zingeris was justifiably held in high regard by American Jews.
The role of East Germany's Stasi
The East German Ministry for State
Security, known as Stasi, worked closely
with the KGB. Like the KGB it was responsible for both internal repression
and espionage abroad. Naturally Stasi played an important role in the
disinformation campaign. With German efficiency, Stasi explained in a 1969
report how it conducted disinformation:
Periodicals will address specific persons and groups. One can select actual
events, problems etc. using a mixture of truths, half truths, fiction and
other well conceived interpretations, so the recipient finds them believable,
thus causing the anticipated success. Exact knowledge of conditions within
the particular government in the operational area is imperative. Absolutely
necessary is thorough knowledge of western language use, as well
as psychological, sensitive tactics in approach.
Stasi also explained how it responded to those who exposed human rights violations
in the communist empire. It considered the truth about communism "harassment" and
said in its report, "Through distribution of aggressively directed
messages, the enemy will be disinformed and forced to abandon his harassment
campaign thus keeping him disturbed and pointlessly occupied." These
activities were coordinated with the appropriate officials of the Communist
Party (SED). Stasi reported, "There are near daily conversations with
the member of the Politburo responsible for agitation in the West, Comrade
[Albert] Norden or Comrade [Werner] Lamberz, Secretary of the Central
Committee and Chairman of the Agitation Commission of the Politburo." Albert
Norden had been a German Communist Party activist since he was 16 years
old, in 1920. During World War II he operated in the United States as
a communist propagandist. In East Germany he served as the loudest and
most vicious voice against the West in the communist dictatorship.
In 1959 he led the smear campaign against the West German Federal Minister
of Refugees, Theodor Oberlander. Norden issued a book attacking Oberlander
and at a press conference in East Berlin on October 22, 1959, Norden
identified Oberlander as the political commander of the Ukrainian Nachtigall
Unit, which together with the German Wehrmacht fought against the Soviet
Union. That was the true part of Norden's story.
The false part was the claim that the military unit was involved in a pogrom
against the Jews of Lviv. The official reports of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen
of actions against the Jews, instigated by the Nazi propaganda that the
Jews were responsible for the communist atrocities against Ukrainians,
do not show that Nachtigall was involved. In a report date July 16, 1941,
we read, "In the first hours after the Bolshevik withdrawal, the
Ukrainian populations displayed commendable activity against the Jews.
For example, the Dobromil synagogue was set on fire and 50 Jews were
killed by the enraged crowd at Sambor. Maltreating them, the Lvov inhabitants
rounded up about 1000 Jews and took them to the GPU [i.e., NKVD] prison
which has been occupied by the Wehrmacht."
Active measures against Ukrainian leader Stephan Bandera
Norden's book was the usual vile disinformation,
but its worst charge related
to the murder of the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,
Stephan Bandera. According to Norden, Bandera "the Commander of
Nachtigall" was murdered on October 15, 1959 to prevent him from revealing
what he knew about the supposed crimes of Oberlander.
The commander of Nachtigall was not Bandera, but Roman Shukhevych,
who later commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Bandera was
head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the political
movement, which on June 30, 1941, proclaimed reestablishment of an independent
Ukrainian state headed by Yaroslav Stetsko. The KGB then destroyed
Bandera with the most intense method on the active measures spectrum: assassination.
Bogdan Stashynsky, the KGB assassin, later defected to West Germany
and revealed how Soviet intelligence had ordered him to murder the
Ukrainian leader. He served a prison sentence in West Germany for his
crime.
Bandera was hated both by the communists and the Nazis. On
July 2, 1941,
SS Einsatzgruppe B reported to the Chief of the Security Police that "measures
against the Bandera group, in particular against Bandera himself, are
in preparation.They will be carried out as soon as possible." On
July 9 the Ukrainian nationalist leaders, including Bandera (arrested
already on July 5) and Stetsko, were arrested by the SS. They spent
most of the war as prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
A Gestapo report dated August 18, 1941, reveals that "The OUN in
Lvov sells
war-loan stamps and releases pamphlets demanding Bandera's return. From
Lvov, posters are released declaring that a ‘free and independent
Ukraine' must be created according to the motto "Ukraine for the Ukrainians, under
the leadership of the OUN.' Orders of the German Army are frequently ignored.
..."
While persecuting the OUN, the Nazis agitated the population
against the Jews. The communists had helped them by murdering Ukrainian intellectuals, officially
considered enemies of Soviet power, before fleeing the German invasion.
An Einsatzgruppe reported on July 16th that about twenty thousand Ukrainians
had disappeared from Lviv, eighty percent of them belonging to the
intelligentsia. The prisons were crammed with the bodies of murdered
Ukrainians. In Dobromil eighty-two bodies were found. Four were of Jews.
One Ukrainian witness to the pre-war Soviet mass murders was the journalist
Apollon Trembowetskyi, also called Petro Pavlovych, who testified before
the United States House Committee on Un-American Activities that he wondered
at the time "why so many were arrested, especially Ukrainians, those
of Polish decent - half Polish, half Ukrainian and many Jewish people who
were arrested in our town. ..."
Another eyewitness, whose identity was protected, gave his evidence to the
Ukrainian Historical Association. He had been a correspondent of Trembowetskyi's
newspaper Vinnytski Visty, and had access to the lists of victims found
by the Nazis in Vinnytsia. The Nazis ordered him to publish the nationality
of Polish and Ukrainian victims but to list Russians, Jews and Gypsies
as "nationality unknown." The Nazis were agitating the population
against the Jews at the time and did not want it revealed that the
communists murdered Jewish intellectuals as well as Ukrainians.
Nazi and Communist triangulation against Ukrainians and Jews
The East German propagandists conveniently
ignored the action of the Soviets,
murdering millions of people of all nationalities - but particularly
intellectuals. The Stasi boasted that its campaign against Oberlander
had been successful and that he had been removed from the West German
government.
In 1974 Oberlander visited Washington, DC and participated in the Congress
of the World Anti-Communist League. British anti-communists had warned
that a neo-Nazi group from Latin America had infiltrated the Congress.
Oberlander joined with Yaroslav and Slava Stetsko and the leaders of
the American delegation, former Congressman Walter Judd and Lee Edwards, to
expose and discredit the neo-Nazis.
The anti-Nazi caucus was successful and the neo-Nazis exposed themselves when
they voted against a resolution presented by Oberlander to condemn the human
rights violations in communist East Germany. The neo-Nazis supported the
communist dictatorship. At this writing, Mrs. Stetsko is a member of Parliament
in Free Ukraine.
Human rights leader Avraham Shifrin headed the Israeli delegation to
the WACL
Congress. He had spent 10 years as a prisoner in a Soviet slave labor camp.
He told this writer that he had become a Zionist in the Gulag and how Ukrainians
and Jews learned to work together when they were both being persecuted
by the same KGB. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, led by Shukhevych, fought
against the Nazis and continued the war against the communists until the
1950s.
The horrors inflicted by both the Nazis and communists brought
Ukrainians and Jews together. Jews participated in the UPA as well
as other anti-communist
and anti-Nazi units. The Soviet propagandists complained,
During the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, many Zionists were members
of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary
Army (UPRA). For example, the Zionist Haim Sigal, alias Sigalenko,
was a chieftain and 'Bulba's' right-hand man. . . . A number of Zionists
such as Margosh, Maximovich, 'Kun' and others were officers in the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army. According to a report by a Nazi Einsatz-commando Zionists
closely cooperated with the Bandera ringleaders. The latter provided them
with the forged German documents.
Only Nazis and communists could complain that Ukrainian nationalists
saved the lives of Jews by providing them with false documents during
the Nazi occupation. That story happens to be true. A report to the Chief
of the Security Police in Berlin dated March 30, 1942 reveled that "Today,
it has been clearly established that the Bandera movement provided forged
passports not only for its own members, but also for Jews."
One Ukrainian who saved hundreds of Jews was the 86 year-old leader
of Ukraine's Catholics, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi. His story was
told by Rabbi David Kahane, one of the Jews he rescued. With the help
of his
brother, Abbot Kliment Sheptytskyi, the Metropolitan hid Jews and, according
to Rabbi Kahane, continued to warn the Ukrainian people against evil and
in his pastoral letters
he endeavored to keep them away from hatred in general and from racial
hatred in particular. He told us he was issuing a pastoral letter to the
Ukrainian people and the clergy on the subject of mercy, in which he stated
emphatically that in these times of trial one must pity not only the Ukrainians
and the Christians, but everyone, regardless of his religion.
Rabbi Kahane later went to Israel where he became the Chief Rabbi of
the Israeli
Air Force.
Manufacturing 'Nazi war criminals'
The communists reviled Metropolitan
Sheptytskyi and stated that he "never ever
raised his voice against the mass annihilation of Lviv residents. . . . " Rabbi
Kahane exposed this lie. Communist hatred of the Jews was obvious when
Soviet propagandists wrote, "We know from history that freedom of thought
and a scientific view of the world have always been mercilessly suppress
by Judaism."
But it was important to them to divide the Jews and Ukrainians in the
West who had joined together to expose the Soviet Russian totalitarian regime.
Thus, the KGB in Ukraine provided American communist Michael Hanusiak
with a list of alleged "Nazi war criminals" from Ukraine. While caring
little if at all for Nazi crimes against Jews, the communists understood
that Americans would want anyone who engaged in such activity, regardless
of their nationality, punished - no matter how long it took.
The KGB wanted to use this legitimate concern of Americans as a weapon
to divide
their Ukrainian and Jewish enemies, to discredit the large immigrant communities
in the United States and Canada, and to discredit any emergence of
Ukrainian nationalism.
One of the names Hanusiak brought to the United States was that of John
Demianiuk (Demjanjuk). His name was given to the United States Justice
Department, which began an investigation of the retired Ohio auto worker.
Soon, Demianiuk was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a brutal guard
at the Nazi Treblinka death camp.
In the horrors that took place in that camp, "Ivan the Terrible" became
a legend as the cruelest of all the murderers. After undergoing a long
legal ordeal, Demianiuk was extradited to Israel where he was convicted
and sentenced to death. The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed access to
KGB files in Ukraine and probably saved the man's life. The evidence showed
that "Ivan the Terrible" was Ivan Marchenko, not Demianiuk. The
Israeli court, after examining the new evidence, reversed the conviction of
Demianiuk and allowed him to return to the United States.
The question is - Who was Marchenko? He was a Soviet prisoner of war
who had
volunteered to work for the Nazis as a camp guard. A 1961 KGB report on the
interrogation of Sergey Vasylyenko revealed that Marchenko was the man the
Jews in the camp called "Ivan the Terrible."
According to Vasylyenko, "He exhibited special savagery in dealing with people
in the killing process, he killed people with an obvious satisfaction and
beat them with whatever was at hand and however he fancied." More
importantly, the KGB knew that toward the end of the war that Marchenko
had gone to Yugoslavia and joined with Tito's communist partisans. He remained
in Yugoslavia after the war and the KGB knew of his whereabouts in
1948-1949.
In the summer of 1948, Stalin broke with Tito. Soviet propaganda accused
Tito, who remained a committed communist, of being a fascist. In October
1949, the New York County Communist Party issued a Discussion Outline
and Study Guide entitled The Struggle Against the Tito Fascists -
Agents of Imperialism.
This theme permeated worldwide Soviet propaganda. However, KGB propaganda
never pointed out that the Tito government was harboring Ivan Marchenko,
the Nazi war criminal known as "Ivan the Terrible." This issue raises
the question as to whether Marchenko was not in fact a Soviet agent carrying
out his atrocities on the order of the NKVD (KGB). We know of other cases
where KGB operatives pretended to be anti-communists and carried out atrocities
to blame them on their enemies and seize the moral high ground.
The main piece of Soviet-provided evidence against Demianiuk was a supposed
identity card showing his name and picture at the Travniki training camp
for guards. The authenticity of the document was challenged as it was apparent
that the picture had come from another document and that the card contained
other inaccuracies. That was not enough to acquit Demianiuk, but the
KGB's internal files released after the Soviet collapse convinced the Israelis
of Demianiuk's innocence.
Internal KGB reports describe Soviet operations against Ukraine
In 1980 a report was prepared by KGB
Colonel V. Medvedev titled "More Culture
in the Work on the Nazi Criminals." It was published in the internal,
secret KGB magazine Sbornik KGB.
Colonel Medvedev boasted of the materials provided by KGB to the Western governments
to prosecute Nazi war criminals. However, he complained that "the
quality of the materials ... sometimes make it impossible to send the materials
abroad." Such documents, he said, are usually sent back by KGB headquarters
to be redone: "The analysis of the weak points shows that sometimes
they are the result of the inattentiveness and inaccuracy of the functionaries."
KGB technicians often took a long time to fix them. As a result there
was a
delay in providing the documents to the Western governments. In Medvedev's words, "Practice
shows that concrete evidence of the witnesses thoroughly interrogated
on a high professional level appear to be very important proof in the
Nazi criminal's cases." Some of the old interrogation transcripts were
so "standardized" that the constant repetition of phrases by different witnesses
made it apparent that they were false.
We had not seen these admissions during the 1980s when this writer was
a staff
member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, but anti-communists
such as Congressman John Ashbrook (R-Ohio), understood not to trust the
KGB. In retrospect it might seem strange to point out that U.S. government
officials, including lawyers, senior political appointees and elected
officials, did indeed trust the KGB-furnished information and were critical
of the skeptics. But the lawmaker saw fit to warn his colleagues and
the public.
In the Congressional Record of May 28, 1981 Congressman Ashbrook said, "World
War II ended 36 years ago but many of us still remember its horrors. We
should never forgive and never forget the atrocities committed by the
Nazis against the Jews. The Nazi murders of 6 million Jews and millions
of Christians
are crimes that require punishment of all who are guilty. At the
same time, we must not forget the Communist murders of even greater
millions of Christians, Jews, and Moslems. And we cannot forgive these
crimes. Hitler and Stalin and most of their top henchmen are dead. But,
the present leadership in the Soviet Union were all part of the Stalin murder
machine."
Ashbrook continued, "We cannot condemn anyone based on Soviet evidence, but
we must make sure that no Nazi or Communist criminal should receive sanctuary
here. We can be sure of this be using our basic American laws of evidence.
Soviet evidence is tainted and should not be utilized in American courts."
Now we have available the evidence from the Soviet and other communist
archives of what really happened in the past. In the future, we must
honor those who fought and died against communist dictatorship and learned
in that struggle how people of different religions and nationalities
could work together against the common enemy.
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Stalin's Jews
We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times
were Jewish
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
Published: 12.21.06, 23:35 / Israel Opinion
Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago,
between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik
revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment
of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution
and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.
Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest
state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed
every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD,
and later to KGB.
We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible
for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least
20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger,
large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at
Gulags.
Whole population
strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members
of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor
movement activists, "opposition members" who
were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist
party itself.
In his new, highly
praised book "The War of the World," Historian
Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind
devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as
did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel
Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was
unique in that it was directed internally.
Lenin, Stalin, and
their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale
cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel
interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts,
and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western
Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided
it with a kosher certificate.
All these things
are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet
Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But
who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been
brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service.
The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question
of "How could it have happened to us?" As
opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle
the score with their Stalinist past.
And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without
ever hearing the name ' Genrikh Yagoda,' the
greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's
deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda
diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible
for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies
established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer
viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced
as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty
dwarf."
Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife.
In his book 'Stalin: Court of the Red Star', Jewish
historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of
terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin
was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.
Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central
Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes
him as the 'first Stalinist' and adds that those starving
to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human
kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not
move Kaganovich.
Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution
and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one
more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the
organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.
In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those
holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were
of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in
the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University
convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror
as a 'carnival of mass murder', ' fantasy of purges',
and ' essianism of evil'. Turns out that Jews too, when
they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers,
among the greatest known by modern history.
The Jews active in
official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad)
and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but
rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore,
we find it easy to ignore their origin and 'play dumb': What
do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view
is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered
a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered
part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.
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