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Nazis Start New Year with Broadcast Urging Ukrainians to Launch Pogroms Against Jews

January 2, 1942
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Nazi authorities in the occupied Ukraine started the New Year today with a broadcast calling upon the Ukrainian population “to take revenge for the death of Petlure,” the leader of the Ukrainians who was assassinated in Paris in 1927 by a Jewish watchmaker, Sholom Schwartzbard, in retaliation for the anti-Jewish massacres in the Ukraine during 1918-1919 for which Petlura was responsible… Schwarzbard was acquitted by a Paris jury in a trial which attracted world-wide attention.

The inciting broadcast, which was made from Cracow, quoted an article published in the Ukrainian-language Nazi organ Krekiwski Visti. “Remember Petlura!” is the call issued by this newspaper. The article urges every Ukrainian not to forget the circumstances under which Petlura lost his life and to honor his memory by “erecting special crosses which will become a national memorial symbol.” Nazi propaganda among the Ukrainians, however, seems to be having no influence both in the occupied part of Soviet Ukraine as well as in Ukrainian-populated occupied Galicia.

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