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At the end of February 2024, Russian-language resources disseminated information about a scandalous trend allegedly noticed by visitors to the most famous museum in Israel. We have checked whether this message is true.
According to the news, Israeli blogger Margarita Levin found outthat over the past two years, photographs showing Ukrainian nationalists together with the Nazis exterminating Jews on Ukrainian territory, in particular at Babi Yar, have mysteriously disappeared from the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial complex in Jerusalem. Also, most references and documents about the direct participation of Ukrainians in the mass murder of almost 1.5 million Jews living in Ukraine seemed to have disappeared from the exhibition. Commentators see this as a connection with the support of Western and pro-Western countries for Ukraine in the war with Russia.
Famous Russian journalists wrote about this Oleg Lurie And Vladimir Solovyov, publicist Mikhail Khazin, Director of the Department of Press and Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Maria Zakharova, State Duma deputy from the United Russia party Oleg Matveychev, portals "Russia and compatriots", "Russian world", Aftershock, as well as a number of popular Telegram channels.
During World War II, the territory of modern Ukraine occupied by the troops of the Third Reich became one of the main regions where the Holocaust took place - the persecution and mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as part of the policy of the final solution to the Jewish question. According to some estimates, about 1.5 million Jews became victims of the Holocaust here. About 150,000 of them were shot in the tract in 1941–1943 Babi Yar near Kyiv. The extermination of Ukrainian Jews was carried out mainly by Einsatzgruppen (special operational groups of German security forces) with the participation of other Wehrmacht units and the Ukrainian police, including those formed from local residents. Ukrainian nationalist organizations played an important role in the persecution of Jews.
The basis for the plot video Margarita Levin was the story of Israeli citizen Vitaly Freeman. According to him, at the end of September 2023, he and guests from Germany visited the Holocaust memorial complex located in Jerusalem “Yad Vashem" Walking to the part of the exhibition dedicated to the Holocaust in Ukraine, Freeman noticed that the exhibition he was already familiar with was half empty - only the least shocking photographs remained. In particular, a black-and-white photograph allegedly disappeared (Freeman sent a copy of it to Margarita Levin), in which a Ukrainian policeman can be seen standing near the bodies of executed people with a bandage on his arm - in real life it is blue and yellow, as the blogger’s interlocutor is convinced. All this, according to Freeman, testifies to Israel’s lobbying for the interests of Ukraine to the detriment of its own, to the rewriting of history to please the Kyiv regime.
Holocaust Memorial ComplexYad Vashem"is located on an area of 18 hectares and contains a colossal amount of documents on the history of the persecution of Jews in 1933-1945. On the official website of the institution, separate pages are dedicated Ukraine, activities Organizations of Ukrainian nationalists (OUN), tragedies in Babi Yar, Stepan Bandera, some evidence of activity is also provided Banderaites. IN online collections As of 2024, the site contains almost 500 documents related to the activities of Ukrainian collaborators. This alone casts doubt on theories about some new biased museum policy. As for the above photo, Verified found no trace of it on the site.
When the news reached the Israeli segment of social networks, the Yad Vashem memorial complex itself reacted to it. “We saw this strange publication, and I tell you with complete confidence: there were no changes in the exhibition of the Holocaust History Museum, allegedly aimed at “removing” photographs or documents indicating the murder of Jews by Ukrainians during the Holocaust,” - stated in response to a request from Newsru.co.il, press secretary of the complex Simi Allen.
More detailed commentary in Facebook given by Israeli historian, author of books and publications about World War II, Yad Vashem employee with 30 years of experience, Aron Schneer. According to him, the photograph cited by Vitaly Freeman was never exhibited in the museum. At the same time, not a single photograph from the exhibition of the complex, telling about the Holocaust on the territory of the former USSR, has disappeared. Photographs about executions and pogroms of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia are exhibited; a large number of photographic materials are devoted to tragedies in different parts of Ukraine - in particular, a giant frame depicts German soldiers rummaging through the clothes of those killed after execution. Under the photographs, as Schneer assures, you can see text documents on the same topic, and in another room hang photographs of Ukrainian collaborators. Schneer provided his evidence with his own photographs from the museum.
Schneer called the photograph presented by Vitaly Freeman fake, but in a personal conversation with “Verified” he clarified that he did not mean its authenticity - only the fact that it was in the Yad Vashem exhibition. In fact, this photo is posted on many online resources - in particular, in Ukrainian website Institute for Civil Society Development named after Golda Meir. Pictures taken from the same point with a difference of a few moments from the desired photograph are also widespread.
Most often it is specified that the place where these shots were filmed was Babi Yar, and as source photos indicated Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAKFD). However, apparently, one mistake gave rise to a chain of others. On website RGAKFD cannot find these photographs, but the footage can be seen at the very end of the Belarusian-German feature film “Babi Yar", filmed in 2003.
“Verified” contacted the author of the sensational interview, Vitaly Freeman, and asked to provide evidence that the said photo had previously been exhibited at Yad Vashem, if any. Freeman responded that the only evidence was his own memory, as well as the memory of his relatives from Germany who visited the memorial with him in 2018. Freeman has not been to the museum since then, so he cannot be sure when exactly the photograph disappeared from the museum - after the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022 or in the previous four years.
“Verified” also decided to check the statement that “the Ukrainian flag is clearly visible on the armband.” To do this, two frames from a black and white film were processed in four network services offering colorization using neural networks (ImageColorizer, img2go, Palette, Hotpot). Even though the final colors were quite realistic, in none of the pictures did the headband turn blue and yellow.
“Verified” also carried out the reverse operation - it transformed the color image of the Ukrainian flag into black and white. The result does not at all resemble what we see on the bandage.
In other words, even in theory there was no reason to delete the above-mentioned fake photo because of the bandage allegedly in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. At the same time, in a conversation with Verified, Aron Schneer did not rule out that in Babi Yar, Ukrainian police could theoretically wear similar armbands (regardless of the content of the photo), just like collaborators in the Baltic countries.
Thus, there is no reason to talk about removing from the Yad Vashem exhibition photographs and other documents indicating the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the execution of the civilian Jewish population. The invariability of Yad Vashem’s position on this issue is evidenced by the fact that in May 2022, already in the midst of a full-scale war in Ukraine, representatives of the complex criticized Ukrainian authorities for their intention, as part of the de-Russification of geographical names, to assign a number of streets the names of figures of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the OUN. The photograph, which was used as the main argument in favor of the conspiracy, is a still from a feature film.
It is possible that the reason for the emergence of such a version was a false memory. It is worth noting that Vitaly Freeman is not an ordinary citizen of Israel; he actively participates in anti-Ukrainian propaganda, for which he was once listed on the unofficial website “Peacemaker"
Update from 02.29.24: Information about the origin of the sensational photo has been added to the text.
Cover photo: Flickr
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