a variety of forms, ranging from robbery and extortion to brutal murder and torture. In the entire eastern section of the former Polish Republic, pogroms occurred in at least 60 major towns and perhaps hundreds of villages. Acts of terror did not cover the whole territory evenly; they took a particularly mass character in the former Eastern Galicia and in the western part of the pre-war Białystok province. They occurred less often in the Vilna region and Polesie. However, it was in the Łomża region, in two small towns: Jedwabne and Radziłów, that two mass murders perpetrated by Polish neighbours tookplace. In both villages, they herded the Jews – men, women, and children –to a barn located outside the village and burnt them alive.11
No less bloody pogroms took place in several major cities, inhabited, aside from the Jews and Poles, by the Ukrainian population. In each case, thedirect cause of mass violence was the discovery of mangled corpses of Polesand Ukrainians, held by the NKVD in local prisons. Such incidents took placein as many as 22 towns in Galicia, where at least 5,300 prisoners were mur-dered. The Ukrainian public opinion blamed local Jews, considered the sup-porters of the Soviet regime. However, this does not mean that the pogromswere entirely spontaneous in nature, and that the only motive was revengefor the crimes of the NKVD. In many places, acts of aggression occurredbefore the opening of the prisons, and in others pogroms broke out despite thefact that among the found victims were also Jews. Descriptions of incidentsin the smallest towns and villages suggest that many attacks were simplyabout robbery, justified by vague arguments about the need to “take revenge”on the Jews, to “compensate” for some kind of injustice. Circumstantial evidence shows that many instances of anti-Jewish incidents were encouragedby the OUN activists (through leaflets, radio), as well as by German intelli-gence officers and the Gestapo.
In a special directive issued to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppenon 29 June 1941, Reinhard Heydrich ordered:
In reference to my command of 17 June, remember: 1. Efforts of anticommunist and anti-Jewish circles aimed at cleansing the occupied territories should not be hindered in any way. On the contrary, these efforts should be supported (leaving no trace), intensified, and properly guided to a better efficiency, but local
