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25 Tremors in the Shatterzone of Empires EASTERN GALICIA IN SUMMER 1941 Kai Struve During the first days and weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 a wave of violence against Jews swept those territories that had been occupied by the Soviet Union since September 1939 or summer 1940 and now were invaded by the German armed forces and its Romanian and Hungarian allies. The violence consisted mostly of mass executions by the German Security Police’s infamous Einsatzgruppen and pogrom-like excesses by the local Christian population. Often both forms of violence were closely connected.1 The anti-Jewish violence in the region sprung from both external and internal sources. Both sources of violence characterized the region as a borderland in the sense of a contested space where competing claims of states, nations, religions, and ideologies clashed with one another. Thus, the violent events of summer 1941 epitomize greater conflicts that arose from the relations of the powers in the region and from the fundamental political and socioeconomic changes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local anti-Jewish violence was one expression of larger structural tensions that characterized the region. This chapter will focus on Eastern Galicia. It does not aspire to a comprehensive presentation of all anti-Jewish violence or all pogroms, but is intended as an analysis of certain motifs and contexts and, therefore, refers to specific cases as exemplary.2 As a starting point, we look at the central violent event in the region, i.e., in Lwów (L'viv). It was central not so much because of the scale of violence in Eastern Galicia’s capital—although it was probably the place that saw the most victims of mass executions during the first weeks of the war in June and July—but more so because the aspirations, perceptions, expectations, and strategies of the different collective actors here became more clearly visible than in other places.3 464 Kai Struve Lwów During the weeks before the German invasion a new wave of deportation and arrests had started in the territories that the Soviet Union had occupied since 1939 and 1940. In Eastern Galicia and Volhynia the arrests focused on people who were suspected of Ukrainian nationalism and of having links to the Ukrainian nationalist underground.4 Many more were arrested after the German attack. Just one or two days after the German attack the Soviet People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentii Beriia, seems to have given the order to execute all inmates of the prisons in Western Ukraine who had been imprisoned for “counterrevolutionary crimes as well as persons who caused damage on a large scale.”5 The advance of the German armies in Western Ukraine—the Seventeenth Army, the First Tank Group, and the Sixth Army—after 22 June was comparatively slow because of the strong Soviet forces that were concentrated here. This gave the NKVD more time to complete this order than in other parts of the border regions. The number of murdered prison inmates in Lwów alone was more than 3,000.6 Altogether, probably 20,000-24,000 prison inmates were murdered in the territories of eastern Poland, two-thirds to three-quarters of them in Eastern Galicia.7 In contrast to earlier periods of the Soviet occupation of the region, the majority of prison inmates at the time of the German invasion were Ukrainian. Nevertheless, there were also many Poles and Jews among them. The first units of the German army entered Lwów in the early morning of 30 June, without fighting except for some short exchanges of gunfire with departing Soviet units. Among them was the Ukrainian battalion with the codename Nachtigall (Nightingale) as part of the I. Battalion of the special command regiment Brandenburg 800. This unit had to occupy and secure important objects within the city. Among them were the prisons.8 Nachtigall had been staffed in cooperation with the radical Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN’s (Orhanizatsiia Ukraïns'kykh Natsionalistiv) self-styled “revolutionary” faction under the leadership of Stepan Bandera (usually referred to as OUN-B).9 It soon became evident that there were some German soldiers among the dead in the NKVD remand prison at Łąckiego Street.10 Many corpses showed signs of torture and some apparently were also mutilated.11 The information about the mass killings of prison inmates spread rapidly through the city (see also chapter 20). The prisons were in...

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