Lviv pogroms (1941)

The Lviv pogroms[a] refer to the massacres of Jews between June and July 1941 in Lwów.[b][1] Ukrainian nationalists[c] and the Nazi German death squads Einsatzgruppen committed the pogroms[d] from 30 June to 2 July, and from 25 to 29 July.[1] Thousands of Jews were killed in the pogroms.[1] The pogroms were part of the Holocaust.

Overview

Further information: NKVD prisoner massacres and Chervyen massacre

Ukrainians and Catholic Poles killed Jews in the first pogrom.[4] They reportedly got angry when they found thousands of bodies from the NKVD prisoner massacres in three Lviv prisons.[4][5] They blamed it on "Jewish Communists". The Germans tapped into their sentiment and incited the pogroms.[4][5] The Lviv pogroms have recently become a controversial issue due to the dynamics of geopolitics.[4][5] The scale of Ukrainian nationalist involvement in the pogroms is still under debate.[4][5]

First pogrom

June 30

When the German-led Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union, about 160,000 Jews lived in Lviv,[6] many of whom were refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland.[7] Lviv was taken over by the Wehrmacht in the morning of June 30, 1941. The German troops included the 1st Mountain Division and the Abwehr-subordinated Nachtigall Battalion staffed by ethnic Ukrainians.

Then, they forced Jews to remove the NKVD prisoner massacres' bodies and clean up the scene. In the afternoon, Ukrainian locals were reportedly angry at "the Jews [...] who had always collaborated with the Bolsheviks".[1]

Ukrainian People's Militia

The Ukrainian People's Militia was formed, which included activists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). They, identified by their yellow and blue armbands, joined the massacre of Jews. Former Soviet policemen, dressed in blue Soviet uniforms and wearing hats with a Ukrainian trident, also helped kill Jews. The OUN handed out flyers to the locals that said:[8]

“ Don't throw away your weapons yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy [...] Moscow, the Hungarians, the Jews ‒ these are your enemies. Destroy them. ”

In the evening, Ukrainian nationalists declared an independent Ukrainian state[e] and future collaboration with Nazi Germany.[1]

July 1

A full-scale pogrom began on July 1. Jews were forced onto the streets, with Jewish women singled out to be stripped naked and beaten.[1] Many Jews who cleaned up the former NKVD prisons were killed.[1]

July 2

Part of the Einsatzgruppe C arrived on July 2, when anti-Jewish violence got worse. More Jews were shot into mass graves, aided by the Ukrainian militia.[4]

Second pogrom

The second pogrom happened in late July 1941. It was called the "Petliura Days", named after the assassinated Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura.[7] Ukrainian militias were backed by the Germans in massacring of Jews, with clubs, axes and knives.[7] More Jews were also arrested and deported.[9]

Death toll

Nazi German estimate

A German security report of July 16 stated that 7,000 Jews were "captured and shot".[1] Some historians said that the German number was an overestimate to impress the Nazi leadership.[1]

Historians

German historian Dieter Pohl said that 4,000 of Lviv's Jews were killed in the pogroms between July 1 and 25, 1941.[10] American historian Richard Breitman put the death toll at 8,000.[11]

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945

According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945[f], the first pogrom killed 2,000 to 5,000 Jews, and 2,500 to 3,000 more were shot by the Einsatzgruppen, while the second pogrom killed over 1,000 Jews.[7]

Aftermath

Ukrainian nationalists' participation in the pogroms did not gain them a Ukrainian state. Instead, Stepan Bandera was arrested on July 5, and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on September 15, where he was detained until September 1944.[12][13]

The Lwów Ghetto was founded in November 1941 on the orders of SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Katzmann, the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of Lemberg.[14] The 120,000 Jews of the ghetto were deported to the Belzec extermination camp or killed locally over the following two years. When Soviet troops reached Lviv on July 21, 1944, less than 1% of Lviv's Jews had survived.[7] Meanwhile, the Soviet regime is said to have never commemorated the Holocaust:

“ The Soviet system never commemorated the Holocaust. One reason for this is that once you define and identify one genocide, you can recognize other genocidal crimes. The Soviet empire didn’t want us to learn our history. Decades of Soviet education and censorship ensured that even after the USSR collapsed, many in Lviv failed to realise the striking proximity of the Holocaust. ”

—Victoria Amelina[15]

Modern Lviv is 90% Ukrainian.[16] In Soviet Ukraine, Jewish deaths were counted as Soviet civilian deaths.[16] In post-Soviet Ukraine, commemorations focused on Lviv's Ukrainian past, while the lost Jews were ignored.[16]

Legacy

Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), co-founder of the OUN, has long been labeled as the pogroms' leader. However, the accusations against Bandera are disputed by other scholars, including German–Polish historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and German political scientist Andreas Umland. They believe that Bandera was not involved in the Holocaust:[17]

“ [There is] no evidence that Bandera supported or condemned ethnic cleansing or killing Jews and other minorities. It was [...] people from OUN and UPA [who] identified with him. ”

Historian John-Paul Himka said that the OUN did not consider Jews their main enemies, but they killed Jews to curry favor with the Germans, hoping that they would be granted a Ukrainian state.[1] The false perception of Jews supporting Communism, shaped by pre-existing antisemitism among Ukrainians and Polish Catholics, also contributed to violence against Jews.[1]

Meanwhile, historian Jeffrey Kopstein said that much anti-Jewish violence happened in where the Germans were not present. Known Ukrainian Communists were spared despite local anti-Soviet sentiment being common.[4] Lviv Jews also had a high level of support for Zionism, which was considered a threat by both Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.[4] Some Western Ukrainian towns with higher Jewish sympathy for communism in turn had fewer pogroms.[4]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hebrew: הפוגרומים בלבוב
    Polish: Pogromy lwowskie
    Ukrainian: Львівський погром
  2. ↑ now Lviv, Ukraine
  3. ↑ Led by Stepan Bandera
  4. ↑ A pogrom is a form of riot that targets an ethnic or a religious group. It is derived from the Russian word погром ("pogrom"); from "громить" IPA: [grʌˈmitʲ] ‒ to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.[2][3]
  5. ↑ The declaration was signed by Yaroslav Stetsko, titled the Act of restoration of the Ukrainian state.[1]
  6. ↑ "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved June 2, 2025.

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 Himka, John-Paul (2011). "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd". Canadian Slavonic Papers. 53 (2–4): 209–243.: "A woman stripped to her underwear is being chased by a uniformed boy with a stick as well as by an adolescent. The action is taking place near Zamarstyniv street prison [Lviv], on a street then called Pompierska. Now that street is called Vesela, that is, HappyStreet. (Courtesy of Wiener Library)" (p. 233). "One of the characteristic features of the pogrom was the maltreatment and humiliation of Jewish women. The scenes at Zamarstyniv street were photographed by a German camera crew; there is also a film of the abuse" (p. 213). Of this image, figure 4: "In the women's action of 1 July, memoirs and photographs show the perpetrators as mainly grown men, but also teenagers and even children (Figure 4)" (p. 233).
  2. ↑
  3. ↑
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8
    • Kopstein, Jeffrey S.; Wittenberg, Jason (2018). Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-1527-3.
    • Kopstein, Jeffrey S. (December 3, 2020). "Pogroms". Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 215–228. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51658-1_17. ISBN 978-3-030-51657-4. S2CID 240643166.
    • Glöckner Olaf (2021). "The Collaboration of Ukrainian Nationalists with Nazi Germany". In Bitunjac, Martina; Schoeps, Julius H. (eds.). Complicated Complicity European Collaboration with Nazi Germany During World War II. De Gruyter. pp. 90–91. ISBN 9783110671261. Ukrainian militiamen and civilians chased down Jews, took them to the prisons, forced them to exhume bodies of killed prisoners, mistreated and finally killed them.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Kiebuzinski, Ksenya; Motyl, Alexander (2017). "Introduction". In Ksenya Kiebuzinski; Alexander Motyl (eds.). The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook. Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978-90-8964-834-1.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Beorn, Waitman Wade (2018). The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1474232227.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Kulke, Christine (2012). "Lwów". In Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.). Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. Vol. II, part A. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 978-0-253-00202-0.
  8. ↑ Rudling, Per Anders (2011). "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths". The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (2107). University of Pittsburgh. ISSN 0889-275X.
  9. ↑ Yad Vashem (2005). "July 25: Pogrom in Lwów". Chronology of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on March 11, 2005.
  10. ↑ Lower, Wendy (2012). "Axis collaboration, Operation Barbarossa, and the Holocaust in Ukraine". In Alex J. Kay; Jeff Rutherford; David Stahel (eds.). Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization. University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-407-9.
  11. ↑ Breitman, Richard (1991). "Himmler and the 'Terrible Secret' among the Executioners". Journal of Contemporary History. 26 (3/4): 431–451. doi:10.1177/002200949102600305. ISSN 0022-0094. JSTOR 260654. S2CID 159733077.
  12. ↑
    • Mirchuk, P. Bandera-symvol revoliutsiinoï bezkompromisovosty (New York–Toronto 1961).
    • Anders, K. Mord auf Befehl-der Fall Staschynskij. Eine Dokumentation aus den Akten (Tübingen 1963).
    • Chaikovs’kyi, D. (ed). Moskovs’ki vbyvtsi Bandery pered sudom: Zbirka materiialiv (Munich 1965).
    • Goi, P.; Stebel’s’kyi, B.; Sanots’ka, R. (eds). Zbirka dokumentiv i materialiv pro vbyvstvo Stepana Bandery (Toronto–New York 1989).
  13. ↑
    • "Bandera, Stepan". Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Retrieved October 25, 2024.
    • Duzhyi, P. Stepan Bandera: Symvol natsiï, 2 vols (Lviv 1996–7).
    • Kuk, V. Stepan Bandera (1909–1999 rr.) (Ivano-Frankivsk 1999).
    • Hordasevych, H. Stepan Bandera: Liudyna i mif, 2nd edn (Lviv 2000).
  14. ↑ Claudia Koonz (November 2, 2005). "SS Man Katzmann's "Solution of the Jewish Question in the District of Galicia"" (PDF). The Raul Hilberg Lecture. University of Vermont: 2, 11, 16–18. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 5, 2015. Retrieved January 30, 2015.
  15. ↑ Nothing bad has ever happened: a tale of two genocides, the Holocaust and the Holodomor by Victoria Amelina (May 19 2022 - 06:03) The Irish Times.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Blacker, Uilleam (2014). "Urban commemoration and literature in post-Soviet L'viv: a comparative analysis with the Polish experience". Nationalities Papers. 42 (4): 637–654. doi:10.1080/00905992.2014.880830. ISSN 0008-5006. S2CID 191468364. Routledge.
  17. ↑ Goncharenko, Roman (May 22, 2022). "Stepan Bandera: Ukrainian hero or Nazi collaborator?". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved October 11, 2022.
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