THE HORRIBLE MASSACRE OF THE JEWS (THE LVIV POGROMS ) JUNE AND JULY 1941 IN THE CITY OF LWOW GERMAN.

THE HORRIBLE MASSACRE OF THE JEWS (THE LVIV POGROMS ) JUNE AND JULY 1941 IN THE CITY OF LWOW GERMAN.

Ukrainian militia as well as Ukrainian residents and to a lower degree Poles targeted Jews in the first pogrom, which was triggered by the discovery of thousands of bodies in three Lviv prisons of victims of the Soviet NKVD prisoner massacre, which were widely blamed on "Jewish Bolsheviks". 

The subsequent massacres were directed by the Germans in the context of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. The pogroms have been widely debated in the historiography, including the extent to which Ukrainian nationalists played a central or complicit role.

occupation), fuelling a widespread perception from Polish and Ukrainian residents that Jews 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.