Naked and humiliated woman cries out in rage and anguish as an older woman comforts her while a mob surround them during an anti-Jewish pogrom. Lvov, July.1st, 1941

Naked and humiliated woman cries out in rage and anguish as an older woman comforts her while a mob surround them during an anti-Jewish pogrom. Lvov, July.1st, 1941

The Soviet Union occupied Lvov in September 1939, according to secret provisions of the German-Soviet Pact. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, occupying Lvov within a week.

The Germans claimed that the city's Jewish population had supported the Soviets. Ukrainian mobs went on a rampage against Jews. They stripped and beat Jewish women and men in the streets of Lvov. Ukrainian partisans supported by German authorities killed about 4,000 Jews in Lvov during this pogrom. US forces discovered this 8mm footage in SS barracks in Augsberg, Germany, after the war.

Lwów (modern: Lviv) was a multicultural city just before World War II, with a population of 312,231. It had been part of the Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1939. The city's 157,490 ethnic Poles constituted just over 50 per cent, with Jews at 32 per cent (99,595) and Ukrainians at 16 per cent (49,747).

On 28 September 1939, after the joint Soviet-German invasion, the USSR and Germany signed the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty, which assigned about 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) of Polish territory inhabited by 13.5 million people of all nationalities to the Soviet Union. Lviv was then annexed to the Soviet Union.

According to Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) records, nearly 9,000 prisoners were murdered in the Ukrainian SSR in the NKVD prisoner massacres, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941.

Due to the confusion during the rapid Soviet retreat and incomplete records, the NKVD number is most likely an undercounting. According to estimates by contemporary historians, the number of victims in Western Ukraine was probably between 10,000 and 40,000.[8] By ethnicity, Ukrainians comprised roughly 70 per cent of victims, with Poles at 20 per cent.

According to scholar Jeffrey Kopstein, the Polish population "awaited the German arrival with a mixture of fear and hope", having resented their loss of control of the city under Soviet occupation. The Ukrainian minority had been "nominal owners" of the city since 1939 but "the Ukrainian nationalst intelligentsia... found Soviet rule a huge disappointment, an insult to their hopes for a truly independent Ukraine.

They hoped for German liberation and German help in recapturing the city as the capital of their own nation-building project." Prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, some Ukrainian nationalists, specifically in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been working with the Germans.

As the historian John-Paul Himka writes, the OUN at this point was a divided organization: in Lviv, the splinter faction loyal to Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B, led locally by Yaroslav Stetsko, "a prominent lieutenant of Bandera’s as well as an extreme anti-Semite", took over the nationalist movement. In 1939, Stetsko published an article in which he claimed that Jews were "nomads and parasites", a nation of "swindlers" and "egotists" whose aim was to "corrupt the heroic culture of warrior nations". Stetsko also railed against the supposed conspiracy between Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists. The OUN-B nationally called Jews props of the Bolsheviks, but explicitly called on Ukrainians to eschew anti-Jewish pogroms (seen as a diversion from targeting the real enemy, Moscow) at its Second Great Congress, held in Kraków in April 1941.

Nonetheless, the local OUN-B's preparations for the anticipated German invasion included May 1941 instructions for ethnic cleansing to its planned militia units: “At a time of chaos and confusion it is permissible to liquidate undesirable Polish, Russian, and Jewish activists, especially supporters". "Russians, Poles, Jews" were hostile to the Ukrainian nation and were to be "destroyed in battle".

supported Communism and the Soviet Union, a perception shaped by prevalent antisemitism among Ukrainian and Polish communities, who had little meaningful interaction with Jewish neighbours and refugees. Kiebuzinski and Motyl also emphasise the role of Nazi propaganda in instigating the violence.

Jeffrey Kopstein shows that the Germans eagerly facilitated anti-Jewish violence by locals, but that such violence occurred in places where they were not present, so their presence in Lvov facilitated it and made it more brutal, but was not the sufficient or necessary cause. He notes that resentment towards Soviet occupation was clearly a factor, but that known ethnic Ukrainian Soviet collaborators were spared. The role of Ukrainian nationalists was therefore significant, but "any account [of the pogroms] as primarily an OUN operation misses something important. The OUN was a small organization spread thinly on the ground. 

They tried to recruit locals, but adherence was spotty and opportunistic... excessive focus on their role risks overlooking an essential feature...: the participation of broad segments of the Ukrainian population in the pogrom's mass, carnivalesque character." Kopstein also emphasises the role of Zionism as a powerful current among Lvov Jews (in contrast to parts of western Ukraine where Zionist support was low or Communist support was high, which tended to have fewer pogroms) that meant it was seen as a threat by both Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.