mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told

the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of

the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to

eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it

is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.

Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the

artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the

deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western

Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the

Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:

The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.

The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In

the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were

annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS

special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially

during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy

which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a

consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.

At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian

nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the

Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including

Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...

Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and

several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a

group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of

Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In

Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of

the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several

dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local

administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the

All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43

there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,

Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.

When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the

population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to

apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass

shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in

the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even

minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.

The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers

began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by

arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.

(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)

Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941

announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev

and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been

shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941

again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This

should serve as a warning to the population."

The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,

or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.

If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone

who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed

for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio

program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three

women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were

executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with

its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,

Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of

which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the

acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society

has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.

The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army

(UPA):

The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of

the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine

and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian

guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan

"neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p.

884)

During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and

the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major

losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned:

Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in

May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091)

Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by

guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers

were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World

War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)

Photograph of partisans

executed by the Nazis.

Photograph of young woman executed by the Nazis, and

young man about to be executed, for partisan activities.

If Morley Safer feels impelled to instruct 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were loyal Nazis,

then he should also pause to explain how it is that the Ukrainians were able to reconcile their

loyalty with German contempt:

When the time came to appoint the Nazi ruler of Ukraine, Hitler chose Erich

Koch, a notoriously brutal and bigoted administrator known for his personal

contempt for Slavs. Koch's attitude toward his assignment was evident in the

speech he delivered to his staff upon his arrival in Ukraine in September 1941:

"Gentlemen, I am known as a brutal dog. Because of this reason I was appointed

as Reichskommissar of Ukraine. Our task is to suck from Ukraine all the goods

we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of

the native population." On another occasion, Koch emphasized his loathing for

Ukrainians by remarking: "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the

same table with me, I must have him shot." (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A

History, 1994, p. 467)

Koch often said that Ukrainian people were inferior to the Germans, that

Ukrainians were half-monkeys, and that Ukrainians "must be handled with the