Controversy surrounding the Lviv pogroms of 1941

The Lviv pogroms of June and July 1941 took the lives of an estimated number of between 4,000–9,000 people, many of whom were Polish Jews murdered in Lviv. Some confusion has arisen from the conflation of separate, but closely related atrocities carried out in just one-month span during the German offensive. The first one was the massacre by the Soviet Security forces (NKVD) of an estimated 4,000 political prisoners (and class enemies) inside the NKVD prisons in Lviv (some of them Jewish) immediately prior to the Soviet evacuation. The second one was the anti-Jewish pogrom by the civilian population encouraged by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in which 4,000 Jews were killed in the streets immediately before and after the takeover of Lviv by the German forces. The third massacre (thus the second one against the Polish Jews within days) was committed by the newly arrived Einsatzgruppe C under the guise of retaliation for the NKVD killings, whereby some 2,500 to 3,000 Jews were herded into a stadium and than taken by lorries to a remote execution site at Janowska. The antisemitic killing spree culminated before the end of July in the so-called ""Petlura Days"" massacre of more than 2,000 more Jews by the Ukrainian nationalists under the watchful eye of the Nazi administration.Controversy exists regarding the exact dates in which these atrocities took place, the numbers affected, and the sources of information. The confusion is amplified by the political agenda of parties involved including national viewpoints in a variety of sources as to the alleged involvement of prominent political and historic figures and groups in the massacre, notably Theodor Oberländer, Roman Shukhevych and the Nachtigall Battalion in the Lviv civilian massacres.