The lecture will discuss the controversial issue of violence against Jews during the first weeks after the beginning of the German-Soviet war on 22 June 1941. It will differentiate between three closely interrelated contexts from which the violence originated, i.e. acitivities of the German police and armed forces, of the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN and local militias, and spontaneous acts of violence, destruction and robbery from the local population. The lecture will start with an analysis of events in Lviv and will discuss the case of Lviv in the context of the general phenomena of anti-Jewish violence in Western Ukraine and beyond in this period.