The 1919 Massacre of Ukrainian Jews

The Origin of the Holocaust

It is commonly believed that the mass murder of 6 million European Jews began with the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of Germany in 1933.  The facts are otherwise.

It was on February 15 in 1919 that Ukrainians murdered over 1000 Jews in the town of Proskurov. These murders continued until 1921 in both the Ukraine and Poland, so that it is not surprising that the Christian population in both countries were most eager to continue this slaughter when German armies invaded these countries and demanded that the population participate in the killing of the Jewish minorities in both countries. As German armies entered Ukraine and Poland in 1941, the mass murder of the local Jewish population was merely a continuation of the slaughter of Jews which began in 1919 and ended in 1921.

In a number of Polish and Ukrainian towns, Jews were locked into synagogues (Greek for assembly), which were then set on fire, burning the Jews to death. Guns were aimed at the doors, so that any Jew attempting to escape could be shot. In both Poland and the Ukraine, 300,000 Jews were starved to death. In the Ukraine, the population showed the German invaders the homes of Jews. This led Germans and Ukrainians to enter these homes and kill all who lived there, including sick patients in their beds and little children. In a ravine called Babi Yar the Ukrainians murdered thousands of Jews. Then the populations of both countries, like the Germans, stole all the possessions of the slaughtered Jews.

In Poland, German troopers entered Jewish hospitals and tossed newborn babies out of the windows of maternity wards. The tiny children died on the concrete below as their little heads burst on impact; their brains flowed out of their tiny skulls. 

In Germany, Austria, and other European countries, the population tore Torah scrolls to pieces, despite the fact that Christians were reading the same Bible in translation.

Even in France, the country which prided itself on having been the first to make freedom of religion a cornerstone of French democracy, the population was happy to send French Jews to the German gas chambers so that Christians could steal all Jewish property.

The truth is that the Holocaust was a European enterprise fueled by religious hate and greed . It is significant that the killers of Jews in Europe knew the Jewish victims for years as neighbors and even relatives but murdered the Jews whom they had known, not only because of religious bigotry, but also because the murder of Jews was allowed and encouraged by church and state, and because sadistic cruelty was allowed.

Today, in the 21^st century, Americans distinguish themselves by condemning religious hate and persecution despite the existence, even in the USA, of anti-Jewish propaganda fueled by Arab immigrants.

Eastern Europe, once the home of ten million Jews, is today devoid of any sizable Jewish communities. The mass murder of Jews is hardly possible now, as there are not enough Jews in eastern Europe to kill, and because Israel exists despite Arab efforts to repeat another holocaust.

It is evident that the murder of Jews in eastern Europe made the Nazi killings less horrible, since all murders make the next murders less important and part of normal life. Killing Jews was normal behavior in eastern Europe when the Germans came there in 1939 and carried out what eastern Europeans had done for years.

Furthermore, the Nazi mass murders led to the disregard and forgetting of the atrocities already common to Poles and Ukrainians before the Germans came.

Shalom u'vracha.

[ Home ] [ Up ]