Although The Present Tensions Are Much Larger & More Complex Than Ukraine Itself - The Ukranians Were Complicit In The Murder of 1.5 Million Jews! Not Much Sympathy From This Jew!

 Ukraine’s part in the Holocaust

 

In this July 16, 2007, photograph, French priest Patrick Desbois, front, and members of his team walk to what used to be a well where many Jews were thrown dead or still alive, in Bogdanivka, Ukraine, during World War II.

 

 

 

Carl Gershman’s May 28 op-ed, “Ukraine must confront its Holocaust history,” drew attention to the fact that, of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1.5 million were murdered on Ukrainian soil.

It was not only the involvement of large numbers of Ukrainian nationals in the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads that was responsible for this result but also the official comprehensive involvement of the Ukrainian Police in assisting the Nazis’ roundup of Jews for the more mechanized efficient killing fields of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec.

Mr. Gershman referenced the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska as an example of what happened. But it would be useful to note what a U.S. federal court found in 1981 in the case of U.S. v. Osidach, in which it upheld the Justice Department’s stripping of the defendant’s U.S. citizenship. He had been charged with having served as police chief in Rava-Ruska, where he was responsible for rounding up the town’s 18,000 Jews.

The court had concluded that a careful review of the record shows “that what occurred in that town was not an isolated instance of conduct but totally consistent with the general pattern of persecutorial conduct by the Ukrainian police throughout the Galacia region.”

During the Germans' census of December 1941, local officials in Kharkiv played a crucial role in identifying Jews, evicting them from their apartments, and forcing them into a temporary ghetto in the barracks of the Kharkiv Machine-Tool Factory and the Kharkiv Tractor Factory. The tenth district council was particularly closely involved in ghettoization, and formed a security team to help German soldiers prevent escapes. Employees of that council, along with former ghetto guards, looted the possessions of the Jews after the Germans and, with other indigenous accomplices, helped murder them and dispose of the bodies. The behavior of these local actors sheds new light on the “Ordinary Men” debate.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ukraines-part-in-the-holocaust/2019/05/31/9922ad8e-8259-11e9-b585-e36b16a531aa_story.html