COMMENTARY: Syndicated columnist George Will, Holocaust revisionism and Ukrainians (09/08/96)

COMMENTARY

Syndicated columnist George Will, Holocaust revisionism and Ukrainians

by Bohdan Vitvitsky

George Will is a major media personality. He is a regular commentator every Sunday on David Brinkley's "This Week in Washington" on ABC, and he is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, from which his columns are reprinted throughout the country. George Will is, unfortunately, also a revisionist on the subject of the Nazi Holocaust.

Earlier this year Mr. Will wrote a column for the Washington Post titled "The Holocaust Mentality: Just a German Sickness?" that discussed the book authored by Daniel Goldhagen named "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." In his column, which appeared in the Star-Ledger (New Jersey's statewide newspaper) on Sunday, April 14, Mr. Will wrote that "many Croatians, Ukrainians and others collaborated with Germans in administering the Holocaust."

That remarkable statement prompted me to write to Mr. Will in order to find out whether he really intended to write what ended up in print. After all, even someone with all of the research and editorial resources of a Mr. Will can sometimes write something that, upon reflection, he did not really mean. So on April 15 I wrote to George Will at the Washington Post and asked him briefly to explain: (1) what he meant, in the context of the statement referred to above, by "many Ukrainians"; (2) what he meant by "administering the Holocaust"; and (3) I asked him to identify the source or sources for his beliefs regarding the above. He did not respond.

On May 6, I sent him a second letter, this time by registered mail, to which I attached a copy of my first letter and in which I once again requested the courtesy of a brief response. Some months have passed, and he has not responded, which makes plain that he intended to say exactly what he did. For reasons explained below, Mr. Will's statement is not merely wrong. It constitutes something much worse: it is an example of historical revisionism.

During World War II, Ukraine and Ukrainians were savaged by the Germans. Approximately 6 million Ukrainians were killed. Of this 6 million, 3 million were non-Jewish Ukrainian civilians and 900,000 were Ukrainian Jews.

Another 2.4 million Ukrainian men and women were pirated away by the Germans for slave labor in Germany. More than 2 million Ukrainians died in combat against the Germans or died in German captivity as Soviet prisoners of war.

According to Nazi German racist ideology, Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were "untermenschen," or subhumans. Ukraine was to be resettled by Germans as part of the "lebensraum" (living space) campaign: one segment of the Ukrainian population was to be killed, a second deported to Asia and a third subjugated as slaves.

Nazi officials referred to Ukrainians as helots and half-monkeys. The Nazi commissioner of occupied Ukraine, Erich Koch, referred to Ukrainians as Negroes, and the marquee at the Kyiv Ballet Theater had a sign that read "No Ukrainians or Dogs Admitted."

And yet, George Will writes that "many Ukrainians...collaborated with Germans in administering the Holocaust."

What planet does George Will come from? A tiny number of persons who happened to be Ukrainian were among those pressed into service as guards in concentration camps. What do I mean by "tiny number"? I mean perhaps as many as 10,000 Ukrainian guards, in comparison to a total pre-war estimated population of 40 million, and in comparison to 3 million Ukrainian civilians murdered by the Germans, and in comparison to another 2.4 million Ukrainians taken off to Germany for slave labor, etc.

George Will's statement becomes even more grotesque when you realize that most or all of the persons who were Ukrainian and who became guards were former Soviet prisoners of war who had been captured by the Germans and whose choice was death by starvation in a prisoner of war camp or agreement to serve as a perimeter guard at a concentration camp. To collaborate with someone means to do something voluntarily, and in order to do something voluntarily you must have an opportunity to choose freely.

What kind of choice did these Ukrainians and other Soviet POWs have when they were being starved to death by the millions?

And what does it mean to help "administer" the Nazi Holocaust? How could people whom the Nazis designated as "subhumans" help the Germans "administer" anything?

Those who deny that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews are rightfully condemned as revisionists. Happily, they constitute only a lunatic fringe, and there is no mainstream newspaper or magazine that would give them the time of day.

Those, however, who characterize the situation of Ukrainians during World War II as mainly on the side of the victimizers rather than on the side of the victims also engage in Holocaust revisionism. In contrast to the other type of revisionists, however, this kind gets to write for the Washington Post and gets to be syndicated throughout the entire country.

Bohdan Vitvitsky, an attorney, has written and lectured on the plight of the Slavs during the Nazi Holocaust.