Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments

“Courage means seeking the truth and proclaiming it!”—Jean Jaurés

1. Preamble

The subject of 'Babi Yar' is confusing in many respects. For a general overview, this brief summary shall therefore identify the major problem areas:

1. The mass murder at Babi Yar took place almost four months prior to the Wannsee Conference, where the killing was allegedly first planned.
2. Widely divergent dates are given for the murder.
3. Depending on the source, the number of victims varies by as much as two orders of magnitude.
4. Widely different methods and weapons are alleged for the murders.
5. There is also no consensus on where the killings took place.
6. The witnesses, or reports respectively, make highly contradictory claims in other respects as well.
7. The number of alleged victims by far exceeds the number of Jews remaining in Kyiv after the Soviet evacuation.
8. To date there has been no forensic investigation of the murder site and weapons. No attempts were ever made to ascertain and secure any evidence.
9. It is also odd that the Soviets would use a site as a location for a garbage dump and incineration area where countless victims were allegedly murdered by the archenemy during the 'Great Patriotic War'.
10. And finally, the allegations are disproved by wartime air photos.

We shall employ standard scientific methodology to examine the issues briefly touched on above. Following some introductory information for a better general understanding of the topic, individual sections will present the first reports, eyewitness accounts, and other sources, and will discuss specific questions that arise in context. A separate section is devoted to general questions.[1]

2. By Way of an Introduction

The taking of Kyiv by the Germans on September 19, 1941, by no means heralded the end of unrest for this city. Kyiv had hardly been occupied when “tremendous explosions occurred one after another.“[2] On September 24, the Hotel Continental was blown up, along with the Headquarters of the rear area of the 6th Army. On September 25 a conflagration of the downtown area of Kyiv, Khreshchatyk, continued to spread. Mines had destroyed almost all public buildings – after the German troops had moved in, and many died. By the end of September a Soviet map for setting of delayed action mines had been found which showed about 50 objects readied for radio detonation. In addition, an enormous quantity of mines, explosives and 'Molotov Cocktails' had also been discovered. Most of the city center had burned down and some 50,000 persons were homeless. Hundreds of German soldiers had been killed fighting the fires. Many organized saboteurs and partisans were left behind in the city abandoned by the Soviets; Kyiv was still a battlefield.

According to a document of a rather suspicious origin presented at the International Military Tribunal (IMT), all Jews were allegedly arrested and 33,771 of them were executed on September 29 and 30 in retaliation for the 'arson'.[3]

Prior to the evacuation, about 175,000[4] but possibly as few as 160,000[5] Jews lived in Kyiv. Yet Einsatzgruppen Event Report No. 106 of October 7, 1941, claims:

“The number of Jews allegedly amounts to 300,000 […].”[6]

The Jews were allegedly instructed, by means of a poster,[7] to bring their possessions and gather at a street corner on September 29, 1941. From there, it is said, they would be marched to Babi Yar at the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv.

'Babi Yar' translates roughly as 'Ravine of Old Women'. It is not, however, a ravine, but rather a branching system of erosion channels, from 30 ft. to about 3,000 ft. across and from zero to about 150 ft. depths at the wider sections of the larger western gorges.

The eastern part of this erosion feature was about 1,300 ft. in length and a maximum of 30 ft. in width and extended from the north approaching the Jewish Cemetery lying on it's eastern side to about 200 ft. This Cemetery measured roughly 1,300 ft. × 1,000 ft. The broader branch of this erosion feature is located about 1/4 mile farther to the west. To the south of the Jewish Cemetery is Melnikowa Street, and to the southeast there is a large military camp that already shows up on air photos dating from May 17, 1939.[8] Not the erosion gully next to the Jewish Cemetery, but the entire extensively fissured area was called Babi Yar. On September 29 and 30, 1941, it is said, countless victims – most of them Jews – were murdered there. But also in this case, no one ever took the trouble of confirming the various allegations and witness statements by means of detailed forensic investigations. An objective analysis is thus required.

3. Initial Reports

1. On October 21, 1941, the London office of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported that the pro-NS Ukrainian newspaper Krakiwski Wisti, published in Krakow, had written

   “[…] that soon after the occupation of the city [Kyiv], all Jews, including men, women and children of all ages, were taken from their homes and driven into barbed-wire enclosures located at the outskirts of Kyiv. From there they were driven by foot to an undisclosed destination.”[9]

   • Some 160,000 to 170,000 Jews, but according to Einsatzgruppen Event Report 106 as many as 300,000 Jews, lived in Kyiv at the start of the war. The orderly gathering and transfer of such great numbers of people would have been noticed by countless witnesses, all of whom would have attested to a 'mass migration' of people with their possessions. Why are there no such witnesses?
   • The report mentions neither a date nor a place. It is claimed that the Jews were driven on foot from barbed-wire enclosures to an unknown destination, but not that they were murdered “at the outskirts of Kyiv“.
   • During March 1996 major Ukrainian newspapers reported that Ukrainian American historians determined that the Jews were deported from Babi Yar via the nearby military railroad station to Minsk. During the stay behind barbed wired enclosures, Germans allegedly extracted from the Jews the customary war tax in valuables.[10]
2. On November 13 the secret broadcasting station of the Polish Underground in Lvov (Lemberg) issued another report,[11] which was passed on through Warsaw and was received and deciphered in London on November 17 via 819 Selim, a secret Polish receiving station in Istanbul:[12]

   “Germans and Ukrainians are slaughtering Jews by the thousands: in Kyiv 35,000 [have been] shot, about 3,000 small children were murdered with clubs by Ukrainians […]“

   • The tale of the clubbing murders was not publicized by the Polish government-in-exile.
   • How could the Jews be shot in Kyiv if, according to 1., they had been driven off to an unknown destination?
   • Why is no place or date given despite the importance of the message?
3. On November 16, 1941, the JTA then offered the following cryptic message:[13]

   “Somewhere in Europe […] from an unimpeachable source that 52,000 men, women and children […] were mercilessly and systematically executed […] in accordance with the cold-blooded Nazi policy of extermination […].”

   • This hair-raising news flash was squeezed in among rather trivial reports. And this despite the fact that it could have prompted an international outcry?
   • Why, again, are the place and date, as well as further details, not given?
   • Was the Jewish Telegraphic Agency aware of the “cold-blooded Nazi policy of extermination” even before the 'Nazi' authorities themselves, who were responsible for the Final Solution and who were not even superficially briefed on the matter until January 20, 1942, at the 'Wannsee Conference'?
4. On December 31, 1941, the JTA wrote:[14]

   “[…] the latest report from Kyiv which reached here today through secret channels gives a horrible picture of what has happened to the Jews in that city since the Nazi occupation. The report reveals that in addition to executing practically the entire Jewish male population of Kyiv on the charge that the Jews who remained in the city were 'Soviet spies and guerrillas', the Nazi military command ordered thousands of Jews confined in mined cemetery grounds. The victims, most of them women, were blown up by the exploding mines. Those who survived were machine-gunned to death by the German soldiers. (Earlier reports estimate that 52,000 Jews were murdered in Kyiv when the Nazis first occupied the city.)”

   And in the following paragraph:

   “[…] the Nazi military forces […] issued an order in the middle of December requesting all the remaining Jews in Kyiv to report to the occupation authorities on a certain date. Aware of the fact that the order meant a new Jewish massacre, many Jewish mothers killed their children and committed suicide, while elderly Jews threw themselves to death by jumping from open windows […].”

   • Did the armed forces commit the atrocities?
   • The men were shot. Where? When? The women were blown up by exploding mines, and in a cemetery. What happened to the children?
   • The latter would have required many tens of thousands of anti-personnel mines, which would then have been unavailable for more important use in the war. It takes a considerable amount of time and work to mine an area. And how were the bodies removed from the mined area afterwards?
   • How does the story of the Jews remaining in Kyiv fit in with the other reports?
   • How likely are the infanticides and suicides? Any witnesses?
5. On January 6, 1942, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced to the governments allied with the Soviet Union:[15]

   “A large number of Jews, including women and children of all ages, was gathered in the Jewish Cemetery of Kyiv. Before they were shot, all were stripped naked and beaten. The first persons selected for shooting were forced to lie face down at the bottom of a ditch and were shot with automatic rifles. Then the Germans threw a little earth on them. The next group of people selected was forced to lie on top of them, and shot, and so on.”

   • It takes many workers and a great deal of time to strip and beat up tens of thousands of people. And how long would it take to force as many people as constitute the entire population of a medium-sized city, to lie down in groups at the bottom of a ditch? How many people would it take to shovel a layer of earth over each layer of bodies?
   • To shoot people with automatic rifles, one needs at least twice as many bullets as there are people to be shot. 100,000 rifle bullets weigh about 2,820 pounds. Since especially their lead core survives for practically forever, finding them ought to be an easy matter. Why have no investigations ever been conducted? Why do none of Kyiv's inhabitants mention the noise of firing?
   • Automatic rifles?
   • About 1,060,000 cu.ft. of soil must be excavated to accommodate 50,000 bodies. When was this excavation done, and by whom? Even given a mass grave depth of about 16 ft., the graves would have taken up more than 64,500 sq.ft. of space. Excavation problems, and the resultant time required?
   • Why do the needle-sharp air photos show not even the slightest trace of any disturbances of the ground?[16]
   • Molotov's alleged location contradicts other testimony.
6. The JTA report of March 15, 1942:[17]

   “240,000 Jews executed by Gestapo in Ukraine”

   and

   “burying Jewish victims at one great tract of land, near Kyiv, by Germans even before life left them […] ground moving in waves.”

   Patek also comments on this:[18]

   “S. Bertrand Jakobsen, chief representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, […] quoted one Hungarian soldier declaring that [at] one great tract of land, near Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, he saw the ground move in waves. The Germans, he said, had just conducted mass executions of Jews and had buried their victims even before life had left them.”

   • Place?
   • Date?
   • Murder weapons?
   • How can a ground move in waves?
   • Were spectators admitted – Hungarian soldiers, for example?
7. On July 20, 1942, the Podziemna Obsluga Prasy Pozagettowej, the Warsaw ghetto's underground press agency, claimed:[19]

   “Not a single Jew is left in Kyiv because Germans have thrown the entire Jewish population in Kyiv into the river Dnjepr.”

   • Was there not one among all those tens of thousands who could swim? This killing method would have endangered the troops' own water supply, while also causing a very considerable danger of epidemic – a nightmare for any troop commander.
   • The bodies would have drifted downstream and been noticed by countless witnesses. Why are there no such witnesses?
8. On October 28, 1942, it was reported:[20]

   “[…] killing the Jewish victims by Germans on the site of the former Zaitsev's brick factory in Kyiv, followed by carting and dumping of bodies into the Dnjepr river.”

   • Another version of the murder and the murder site!
   • How were they killed? Why are there no witnesses?
9. The same issue adds yet another variant on the murder:[20]

   “[…] 32 Jewish orphans in the woods who were lined up and then the Nazis deliberately drove their tanks over these children, crushing all of them, and compelled the accompanying 118 non-Jewish orphans to bury them.”

   • Did the German armed forces have nothing more pressing to do than to engage in murderous tank maneuvers in the woods? The German tanks of that time were not very well motorized and quite slow, and poorly suited for use in the woods and for such a task. Their chains were only about 12 inches wide, while the ground clearance was large, approximately 18 inches. Close-range visibility out of tanks was very poor.
   • Where are the witnesses from among the 118 non-Jewish orphans?
   • How credible is it that the murderers would let 118 witnesses (children!) watch?
10. W. H. Lawrence reports from Kyiv:[21]

    “50,000 Kyiv Jews Reported Killed.”

    • Instead of specifics regarding the place, date, murder weapons and further evidence, the New York Times wrote:

      “The evidence remaining is sparse.”

11. On the evening of February 28, 1944, Radio Moscow reported about German atrocities in Kyiv. They come up with another method of murder:[22]

    “More than 195,000 Soviet citizens were tortured to death, shot, or poisoned in murder vans by the Germans during the occupation of Kyiv.”

    • Date? Place? The number of victims has grown to almost 200,000, which would make it even easier to secure evidence. Why was this not done?
    • 'Gas vans' are a very questionable killing method and are absent in later sources.[4],[5]

4. Eyewitness Accounts

1. In November 1943, one “Aloshin” told W. H. Lawrence, reporter for the New York Times:[21],[23]

   “[…] German troops […] ordered them into the ravine, where they were directed to give up their valuables. Part of their clothing also was removed. Then […] they were placed on a platform, machine-gunned and thrown into the ravine.”

   • So now it was the Wehrmacht who were the killers. Does this fit in with the other reports, for example the 'Event Reports'?[24]
   • How were the clothing and the valuables removed from the ravine?
   • Mass murder on a platform? Why? And if so, then it would be possible for groups at most, not all at once. When was the platform built, and by whom?
   • In a narrow, winding ravine, the line-ups of people to be executed cannot be very long. One cannot simply swing the machine gun/s in any large angle one might wish to, without endangering one's own people, without losing accuracy and penetration at oblique angles, and without facilitating the escape of some of the victims.
   • The bodies must be removed as the groups are executed, otherwise they would result in an enormous pile. If one allows ten minutes for the undressing, shooting and removal of the bodies from each group of at most 100 people, then the murder would have taken at least 83 hours.
   • How is it possible to lead the victims into the ravine and then throw them into that same ravine after shooting them?
   • In late September dusk comes relatively early in Kyiv. On September 29 it rained heavily, all the roads were soggy, on the 30th it rained and snowed and road conditions grew even worse.[25] Since it is impossible to execute groups of any appreciable size in the dark, the murder could have been carried out only during the daylight hours, i.e., it would have taken more than a week. Bright floodlights are not an option in wartime, especially near the front – and with partisans in the vicinity. And Wiehn[26] raves about beautiful September days!
2. Vilkis, a Jew born in Odessa, reports:[13],[27]

   “[…] a near-by Jewish cemetery, where marble grave markers were removed and brought to Babi Yar, where they formed crude stoves […] but (the bodies) did not burn well because of lack of draft.”

   • Vilkis goes on to claim that the Germans sent prisoners into the cemetery to get the iron rails from the graves, which were then used to construct cremation grates. During the cremation the Germans had also brought other victims in murder vans in which they had been asphyxiated. These too, he contends, were cremated.
   • People and transportation are required to move marble grave markers. Why has no one ever searched for these grave stones as evidence?
   • How many such oven gratings would one need to construct in order to cremate that many bodies in so crude a manner? Would it even work at all?
   • Where did the enormous quantities of fuel come from? Based on findings from India – the only country where bodies are cremated in the manner under discussion here – we note:
     To achieve a marginally adequate, but nevertheless still only partial cremation, 200,000 bodies would require at least 51 million pounds of firewood – a pile 3 ft. high, 3 ft. wide and 34 miles long. Who cut this firewood, and where? How was this huge quantity transported? Who carried the countless bodies to the cremation site? Who removed the remains? Where are the witnesses from among this veritable army of laborers? The claim that cremation gratings were constructed from graveside rails is even less credible; these gratings would have collapsed almost immediately due to the heat.
3. The unnamed son-in-law of one Chaim Shapiro who was taken to Babi Yar recounts:[13]

   “At the cemetery the Jews were forced to undress. Fifty six thousand (56,000) Jews were slaughtered. Those who did not die instantly were buried alive. […]
   […] on the tenth day [after the shooting] we were driven to Lukianova [Babi Yar] ravine. We stood there panic-stricken. From beneath the freshly strewn earth streamed rivers of blood, the blood of 56,000 murdered Jews. It cried to us from under the earth. My hair turned gray that morning.”

   • From where does Chaim Shapiro's son-in-law get his information? What is his name, anyhow? Why was he not among the victims? After all, wasn't everyone allegedly killed? What was the date? Where is the murder site? Why is the place where the victims undressed not the same as the other witnesses claim?
   • What would a forensic doctor say about the rivers of blood allegedly streaming from bodies killed ten days earlier?
   • The part about the blood crying from the earth is from the Bible; in Genesis 4:10 we read:

     “The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

   • Can hair spontaneously turn gray?
   • Were Jews forcibly driven to the site of the mass murder in order to produce witnesses?
4. In E. R. Wiehn's book, L. Levitas[28] tells of one Riva Kogut, who was later known as Raissa Genrichovna Dashkevich:

   “Early on September 29 the Kyiv Jews walked in a continuous line in the direction of Syretz to the train station […] First the documents were taken away and […] thrown onto a pile, at the next point the luggage was taken away, […] already on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery the people were forced with clubs to undress and were then driven to the ravine. That was the ravine of Babi Yar. Then the people were driven […] down the slope of the ravine. […] where narrow, terrace-like places had already been prepared. […] From the opposite side came the thunder of machine guns. There, […] hundreds of Jews were shot. […] Everything happened so fast, […] blows […] dog bites […]. The people lost their minds, many turned gray with horror. […] A severe chill and the pain in my head forced me to move, I began to climb up. […]“

   • Multiple graying of the hair?
   • To the train station?
   • Beaten up on the cemetery grounds?
   • Narrow terraces had been prepared? By whom? When, in the brief time since the taking of Kyiv?
   • Gunned down with machine guns from across the ravine?
   • Dog bites? Hundreds of victims – not tens or even hundreds of thousands?
5. Dimitri Orlow, one of the alleged witnesses quoted in a 1980 Black Book from the 'Holocaust Library',[29] testified:

   “An entire office operation with desks had been set up in an open area. The crowd waiting at the barriers erected by the Germans at the end of the street could not see the desks. Thirty to forty persons at a time were separated from the crowd and led under armed guard for 'registration'. Documents and valuables were taken away. The documents were immediately thrown onto the ground, and witnesses have testified that the square was covered with a thick layer of discarded papers, torn passports, and union identification cards. Then Germans forced everyone to strip naked: girls, women, children, old men. […] Their clothing was gathered up and carefully folded. Rings were ripped from the fingers of the naked men and women, and these doomed people were forced to stand at the edge of a deep ravine, where the executioners shot them at pointblank range. The bodies fell over the cliff, and small children were thrown in alive. Many went insane when they reached the place of execution.”

   • Orlow allegedly saw all of this in the space of a few minutes, from the grounds of a cable factory.[30]
   • Date? Where was the office operation set up? How much personnel and time would the various operations require? Soviet citizens did not carry passports! Corroborating witnesses???
   • Even if the people at the barriers could not see the desks, they would not have failed to hear the gunfire. Why was there no attempt at escape, especially after dark? The rugged, fissured region was ideally suited for hiding.
   • At this point, an important general note. More than half of the alleged route taken to the execution site ran through built-up urban areas. Why did Stalin's thugs fail to locate decent witnesses even in this area? Why are there also no witnesses or reports from the Wehrmacht? Vacationers, for example, would hardly have kept such horrible goings-on to themselves.
   • We learn that groups of thirty to forty persons at a time were led off under armed guard. How much time would this alone take?
   • Children and girls? According to Jewish and Soviet sources almost everyone except for the elderly had been evacuated in time (for example, cf. the sources quoted by Sanning[31]).
   • It would take a very long time to carefully remove and fold the clothing of such great numbers of people.
   • So here the victims are standing at the edge of a deep ravine, in other words not in the ravine. Do people who were exposed to such an awful situation forget in only a very few years where the victims stood?
   • The bullets that missed their targets still flew a long way! What measures were taken to ensure that German units were not accidentally shot in the process? One of the military camps, for example, was only about a fifth of a mile away from the execution site.
   • The gradient of the pile of bodies soon becomes problematic. The executed victims must be moved off. Imagine, if you will, how long it would take two persons to extract one body from the bloody pile (which does not offer a very stable surface to stand on), to move it many dozens of yards on average, to deposit it and then to return to the pile of corpses. The place had to be cleared prior to new executions, and then to be manned. Added to this is the bringing-in of the earth and the covering of the mass graves with that earth. Why are there no witnesses for any of this either? Why do the air photos not show any traces of all this?
   • Small children were thrown in alive. Were they sorted out first? Or did the executioners shoot past them? Was the shooting interrupted for this horrible activity? Where was the cable factory from where Orlow was able to observe all this in a few minutes?
6. According to Orlow,[13] other witnesses said that Germans “dashed the little ones against the rock“.

   Anyone who reads the Bible attentively will find that Holocaust tales are nothing new to the Jews (Genesis 6, Genesis 19:24, Exodus 11, Joshua 6, Matthew 2:16). Furthermore, pious people in particular draw inspiration from scripture. Psalms 137:9:

   “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

7. Tamara Mikhasev:[7],[13],[32]

   “[…] a young Russian woman whose Jewish husband was a Commander in the Red Army […] left the place of execution with an ethnic German who was married to a Jewish woman. […] This Russified German picked up the boy [his son] again, kissed his eyes and said farewell to his wife and mother-in-law.”

   • So a young Russian woman and an ethnic German were admitted as spectators at the execution site, to witness the top-secret mass execution of the Jews?
   • Mikhasev embellishes her story with the barking of many dogs, and with dance melodies blaring from loudspeakers to drown out the screams of the victims.[33]
8. The Jewess Nesya Elgort tells us:[7],[13],[34]

   “With her little son [she] miraculously escaped […] untouched by the bullets […] [from] under a heap of warm bloody bodies […] hundreds and thousands of bodies piled on top of each other.
   […] It is now difficult for me to understand how I got out of that ravine of death, but I crawled out, driven by an instinct for self-preservation.”

   • Neither Nesya Elgort nor her little son was hit by a bullet! How did she manage to crawl out – with her child! – from beneath an enormous pile of bodies? Even with optimum positioning – which is more than unlikely, given the circumstances – the bodies would ultimately have weighted down the thoraces of mother and son to the point where breathing became impossible. One must also ask whether she or the child would not have been harmed by the impact of a body falling down on them, even from as little as 6 to 10 ft. above?
   • She escaped unnoticed from the ravine. Were there no guards?
   • Why were only women able to escape, but not a single one of the men, who in this case would have been physically better qualified?
9. The Jewess Yelena Borodansky-Knysh arrived at Babi Yar[7],[13],[35]

   “[…] [when] it was already dark. […] They took our clothing […] and led us about fifty meters away, where they took our documents, money, rings, ear-rings. They wanted to remove the gold teeth of one old man, and he tried to resist.
   […] At about midnight the command was given in German for us to line up. […] A second later bodies started falling on me. […] We were sandwiched between bodies. […] A German soldier was checking with a bayonet to make sure no one was still alive. By chance he was standing on me, so the bayonet blow passed me.
   […] I freed myself, got up, and took my unconscious daughter in my arms. I walked along ravines. […] Crawling over ravines, I made my way to the village of Babi Yar.”

   She also provides this sideline story from the place of horror:[36]

   “I'll never forget one girl, Sara; she was about fifteen years old. I can't describe how beautiful she was. Her mother was […] killed with a rifle butt […]. Five or six Germans stripped [the girl] naked, but I didn't see what happened after that. I didn't see.”

   • Why did this witness not arrive at Babi Yar until after dark? On what day, anyway? Many witnesses would have noticed the great crowd of victims-to-be between the time of their morning gathering at the street corner and their much later arrival at the undressing-place. Where are all these witnesses?
   • The Jews allegedly had to report on the morning of September 29. But the murder took place not only on the 29th, but on September 30 as well. Wiehn[37] even claims that “the death march lasted three days and three nights.” Where did the tens of thousands spend the night (or nights)?
   • According to this version, the victims were first stripped naked and then, about 50 meters away, relieved of documents, money and jewelry. Was the procedure changed every few minutes?! Why has no other witness mentioned that the victims' teeth were checked? How much time would that have taken?
   • Did the Kyiv Jews understand orders given in German?
   • How can the German soldier have stood on Yelena Knysh if she was covered by bodies? How much time would it take to climb over mountains of bodies in order to kill anyone still living with a bayonet? Were victims not buried alive after all?
   • Where exactly is the village of Babi Yar??? How likely is the story of the girl Sara's forcible stripping by five or six Germans, perhaps even within the range of machine gun scatter?
10. One single eyewitness was permitted (or ordered) by the Soviets to testify abroad. In 1968 Dina Pronitscheva testified in Darmstadt in the trial of 11 members of Einsatzkommando 4a. The case files are kept under lock and key! Philip Shabecoff, reporter for the New York Times, wrote:[38]

    “When the shooting stopped, the walls of the ravine were dynamited and the rubble was shovelled over the bodies of the men, women and children who lay in it. Some were still alive when buried.”

    What A. Kuznetsov learned from Pronitscheva and incorporated into his novel Babi Yar[39] does not agree with other testimony, for example:

    “[…] machine-gunning of the Jews by German soldiers across the width of the Babi Yar Ravine throughout the night, half in darkness, illuminated by a small bonfire.”

    But the matter becomes even more confusing when one reads Dina Pronitscheva's account in Wiehn's opus[40]. Significant differences in her recorded statement at the Darmstadt Trial are added in parentheses, with the note S:

    “On September 28, 1941, an order from the German authorities was posted throughout the city […] about 8 o'clock in the morning [S: at 8 o'clock] near Djechtjarewska and Melnik Streets [S: Djachterowskaja and Melnikow] […] my parents and my sister went to the meeting place […] [S: It was very hot.] I accompanied them and then intended to return to my family […] Large groups of people. […] They were accompanied by Ukrainians, Russians, and citizens of other nationalities […]. The streets […] leading to the cemetery area were totally overcrowded with people. As we neared the gathering place we noticed the encirclement by German soldiers and officers […] policemen, too. [S: Tank riders.] [S: We went up a hill:] […] led us in groups of about 40-50 into a so-called 'Corridor' about 10 ft. wide which was formed by Germans standing close together on either side, with sticks, rubber truncheons and dogs […]. Everyone was brutally beaten by the Germans. [S: Many fell down and were trampled to a thin pulp.] [At] the place at the end of the 'Corridor' […] policemen stripped them […] down to their underwear. [S: stark naked.] The beaten and stripped people were taken in groups to the ravine of Babi Yar […]. They led us to a ledge over the ravine and began to shoot us with submachine guns. [S: machine guns.] [S: entirely different version: a German soldier offered her freedom in return for sex. She claimed to be a Russian, proved it by means of an employment book and union card, was then sent up a hill and not driven into the ravine with others until evening, on the orders of a German officer…] when it was my turn I threw myself into the ravine alive [S: jumped into the pit…]. Here, too, Germans and policemen went around and shot or beat to death anyone who was still alive […]. One of the policemen or Germans turned me over with his foot, […] stepped on my hand and my breast [S: he beat me] […]. Then they began to […] cover the bodies with soil and sand. [S: I remained lying under the soil.] I couldn't breathe anymore, freed myself of the earth with one hand [S: my right hand, on which the soldier stood, gave me trouble] and crawled to the edge of the ravine […]. On the second day I saw the Germans chase an old woman and a boy of about 5 or 6 years, who had fled from the ravine. The old woman was shot, they stabbed the boy with a knife. About 30 ft. away from this spot seven Germans came along, leading two young girls. They raped them there and then stabbed them to death.”

    • Re. Shabecoff's report in the New York Times: who drilled the blast holes, where did the equipment come from, and why are there once again no witnesses to this considerable amount of work? Why is no trace of any of this visible on the air photos?
    • Re. Kuznetsov: they shot across the ravine at night? Wouldn't that endanger even their own people?
    • Re. what Wiehn[7] saw fit to publish, and re. Pronitscheva's testimony in Darmstadt, we have the following questions:
    • About 8 o'clock or at 8 o'clock? Incorrect street names from a Kyiv resident? Why is her 'weather report' entirely wrong? How can one return to one's family when they had just been transported? How were the Ukrainians, Russians and citizens of other (which?) nationalities separated from the doomed? Where is the hill? Why did all the other witnesses forget the 'Beating Corridor'? What are Tank riders?
    • Stripped down to their underwear, or stark naked? Employment book and union card retained even though she was stark naked? Ledge over the ravine? Ravine or pit? A hill? Submachine guns or machine guns? Has anyone ever tried to turn, with his foot, a person wedged between other bodies? The soldier beat a girl he presumed was dead? What presence of mind a girl must have, not to shriek or to react in some other way when someone steps on her hand and breast, or beats her! Why did no one notice that she freed herself? Not even the soldier standing on her right hand? How daring must a girl be, to still observe events near the site of the crime two days later – and how insensitive to the cold, considering that she is either in her underwear or entirely naked. How likely is the tale of the proposition and of the girls who were first raped and then stabbed? Sexual intercourse with Jews was considered defilement of the blood, and was forbidden. Why did she understand German in Babi Yar, but not a word of that language in Darmstadt? Might her job – actress in a puppet theater – explain her facility at confabulation?
11. Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen and V. Rieß[41] have culled the testimony of three witnesses – Höfer, Kurt Werner and Anton Heidborn – from the files held at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg; these files are not, however, made available to critical researchers.

    According to Höfer, the Jews had to undress and neatly stack their clothes at a spot 500 ft. from the ravine (according to Werner it was a kilometer, about 2/3 of a mile). Then the naked victims were led into a ravine which according to Höfer was 500 ft. long, 100 ft. wide and 50 ft. deep, whereas Werner claims it was 1,300 ft. long, 260 ft. wide at the top and 33 ft. wide at the bottom, and 33 ft. deep. According to Höfer, two or three narrow passages led into the ravine; according to Werner the victims were led to the edge of the hollow and then ran down the slopes of their own accord.

    Höfer maintains that there was only one marksman at each end of the ravine; Werner tells of a total of 12. Höfer testified that a “packer” stood at each end and placed each victim onto the previous bodies. Then each was shot by a member of the police, with a submachine gun, per a bullet in the neck. The children were shot together with their mothers.

    Werner reported that the Jews had to “lie down facing the earth up against the walls of the hollow” and were then murdered via a bullet in the neck. The next victims then had to lie down on top of the bodies.

    Three days after the execution they began covering the heaps of corpses with earth. According to Heidborn a hand was seen waving from among the bodies three days later.

    • Time required, given two “packers” and marksmen, or 12 marksmen?
    • How does the position of the victims, up against the wall of the ravine, agree with the picture[42] where “exhumed bodies” are shown lying flat?
    • Why are critical researchers not allowed access to documents, and not only in Ludwigsburg? Why does not even public prosecutor Willi Dreßen take exception to the contradictions, to say nothing of the physical impossibilities alleged? Why do the authors make no mention of the 300,000 Jews postulated for Kyiv in Event Report 106, and mention only the 150,000 from Event Report 97 of September 28, 1941?[43]
    • Why does even Reitlinger,[44] the Holocaust Pope, marvel how it was possible to keep that many people together on the road for two whole days, but Klee and his co-authors do not notice this problem?
12. Now for Adalbert Rückerl. His anonymous witness would seem to be Werner, from the previous scenario. The witness reports:[45],[46]

    “[…] shot […] the entire Jewish population of Kyiv. […] Executions […] until five or six o'clock. […] All were naked.”

    In the second publication[46] we find that Rückerl draws on Event Report 106[3] unmodified. He quotes the blocking-off of the execution place, the filling-in of the pits after the execution, as well as a few individual Soviet citizens who had secretly witnessed the execution. He suggests that neutral witnesses were only rarely available and that their testimony was generally not suited to convicting the accused. As an example he quotes the statement of the witness N. T. Gorbacheva from Kyiv:[47]

    “[…] I lived in Kyiv, at 55 Tiraspols-Kaja Street, Door 2. […] near the place called Babi Yar. On September 22, 1941, I saw with my own eyes […] how, in the course of the day, about 40 lorries drove to Babi Yar, loaded with Jewish residents. […] I and some other women […] went, unnoticed by the Germans guards, to the place where […] the people were being unloaded. We saw that about 50 ft. from the beginning of the Babi Yar the Germans forced the Jews to undress and ordered them to run along the Babi Yar. Then the Germans shot at the running people with submachine guns and machine guns. […] There were not only people who had been shot, but also injured people and even living children in the ravine. Nevertheless the Germans filled the ravine in; the thin layer of soil moved visibly.”

    The only things Rückerl contests is the date, and the use of lorries for all the victims. He lets it stand for those who could not walk. Rückerl withholds the fact that Gorbacheva claimed:[48]

    “The shooting of the Jews went on for several days.”

    • According to the unnamed witness[45] 6 o'clock was 'closing time'. So all those who tell of murders at night must have lied?
    • Is Rückerl so unfamiliar with the Soviets' Babel of propaganda and lies that he considers a book printed in Moscow in 1963 to be a reliable document?
    • Was he able to find a 'Tiraspolskaja Street' (that's how it would be written correctly!) on a street map of Kyiv, and near the 'place' Babi Yar (which is not a 'place' at all)?
    • How many people – along with their possessions – can 40 lorries carry?
    • Does Rückerl really believe that some of the ladies of Kyiv were so insane, so utterly fearless, or so curious that they would sneak past the guards posted by the evil enemy, and then watch the mass murder? Is there 'a Babi Yar' that has a beginning and which one can run along? Are executions carried out by shooting at running targets with various kinds of firearms?
    • How does the “thin layer of soil” agree with the great quantities of earth needed to fill in a ravine? And would anyone who had not been hit by a bullet not suffocate directly after being buried alive?
13. In Babi Yar in March 1942[49] Adalbert Hartl, Gestapo Expert for Church Matters, observed:

    “small explosions that shot up clods of earth. It was the spring thaw that was letting the gas from the thousands of bodies escape.”

    • What is a Gestapo Expert for Church Matters doing at Babi Yar? The small explosions and rocketing clods of earth are nonsense, for even when wet ground freezes solid it is never gas-proof – especially not sandy soil.

5. Other Sources

1. A physician named Dr. Gustav Wilhelm Schübbe allegedly killed 21,000 persons single-handedly, with morphine injections. 110,000 to 140,000 victims were allegedly killed in this way at the “German Annihilation Institute” in Kyiv.[50],[51]
   • Injections of morphine, which was in very short supply and badly needed for wounded soldiers? And how long would it take one physician to give 21,000 injections?
   • According to the files of the US Document Center in Berlin, which holds more than one million records pertaining to members of the NSDAP ('Nazi' Party), Dr. Gustav Wilhelm Schübbe was never stationed in Kyiv.
   • Why did neither the USSR nor the Jews ever search for the location of this “Annihilation Institute“?
2. After the liberation of Kyiv, Moscow newspapers and the New York Times reported that 40,000 (!) inhabitants of Kyiv had written to Joseph Stalin and given the number of victims of Babi Yar as more than 100,000.[52]
   • When, where and how did these people die?
   • What happened to all these 'witnesses'?
3. In 1963 Nikita Khrushchev sharply criticized the literary champions of “Jewish martyrdom“, especially Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had drawn notice the year before with his poem Babi Yar:[53]

   “I urge Comrade Yevtushenko and other young literati to appreciate the trust of the majority [of the people], not to seek cheap sensationalism [and] not to pander to the mood and tastes of the Philistines. Do not be ashamed, Comrade Yevtushenko, to admit your mistakes. […]
   When the enemies of our Cause begin to praise you for pleasing tales, then the people will criticize you, and rightly so.”

   The cause for Khrushchev's reference to “propitious tales” was Yevtushenko's readings of his poem Babi Yar. Khrushchev's blunt words weigh very heavily, for several reasons:

   • Would Khrushchev have used the term “cheap sensationalism” if the hated enemy from the 'Great Patriotic War' had in fact murdered thousands of Soviet citizens at Babi Yar? Would he then have cautioned Yevtushenko against “pander[ing] to the mood and the tastes of the Philistines“?
   • Would Khrushchev then have admonished against “pleasing tales“?
   • In his capacity as Head of the Soviet Communist Party and General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Khrushchev on June 24, 1941, ordered the liquidation of the political prisoners in Lvov (Lemberg). The NKVD then began with the mass murders in the prisons of Lemberg and other places in the western Ukraine. The Soviets also laid the blame for these massacres at the Germans' door. Khrushchev knew exactly who had done the murdering and who it was who had suffered!
   • Furthermore, Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, knew very well that the minorities predominating in the economy and in industry, research, teaching and politics in the Ukraine – in other words, the Greater Russians and especially the Jews – had been given priority in the evacuation. He knew the evacuation rates of the Jews, for example Minsk 94%, Šitomir 88%, Novograd-Volynskij 90%, Poltava 96%, Černigov 97%, Zdanov 100%, and Taganrog 100%. For Vinnica, Kyiv and Uman it was about 80%:[54],[55],[56],[57],[58]

     “In Kyiv practically the entire Jewish youth had left the city with the Red Army. Only older people remained.”[54]

   • Wiehn, for example, ought also to have noticed that, for on his p. 146 we read:[37]

     “Sarra Evenson's advanced age had made her evacuation from Kyiv impossible.”

   • Since Wiehn must also have read the information he quoted from Reitlinger[59] regarding evacuation rates, one cannot help but suspect a deliberate attempt to falsify history and even to commit academic fraud. Incidentally, a few pages further one finds yet another and even more time-consuming and extremely dubious murder method. Reitlinger:[60]

     “[…] that the victims were shot in the neck at the precise moment when they stepped from a board into the cave.”

   • A cave???
   • At the 20^th Party Convention of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, Khrushchev succeeded Stalin and charged him with organized mass murder.
   • Yevtushenko got the inspiration for his poem Babi Yar from the American Jew Joseph Schechtman; it was not his own experiences he described with such a flaming pen.
4. In its entry “Babi Yar” the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972) devotes 92% of its entry space (21.65 inches of text) to Yevtushenko's poem, but only 8% (1.8 inches of text) for an account of the massacre.[13] The encyclopedia claims that 100,000 died in Babi Yar, 33,771 of them in the last days of September.
   • Could the Encyclopaedia Judaica not come up with any better evidence than a poem?
5. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine,[61] published in Toronto in 1988, states that only 3,000 Jews were executed in September, and gives their total number as “more than 150,000“.
6. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust[5] (New York, 1990) alleges a wide range of things, which for reasons of space we shall discuss in table form:
   

   Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:	Critical Comments:
   Not until after the war did it turn out that the blasting in Kyiv had been carried out by units of the NKVD which had remained behind.	The information regarding the blasting is false.[62]
   On September 26 the Germans decided to kill all the Kyiv Jews as retaliatory measure.	Where is some conclusive evidence for such a German decision of September 26?
   SS-Standartenführer Blobel attended this meeting.	How does this claim agree with the fact that Blobel was off duty at the time, due to his head injury of September 24?[63]
   On September 28 [1941] placards were posted, ordering that the Jews had to gather at the corner of Melnik and Dekhtyarev Streets at 8 o'clock on the morning of September 29, to be resettled.	There is no evidence whatsoever for a placard produced by the printing unit of the 6th Army.
   The text of the placards was written by Propaganda Division No. 637, and the placards had been printed by the printing unit of the 6th Army.	The Propaganda Division and the printing unit of the 6th Army could be forgiven for mistakes in the Russian and Ukrainian texts, but why are there grammatical errors in the German text as well? And why is no issuing authority mentioned on the placards?
   An area including the Jewish Cemetery and part of the ravine was fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by a special commando of police, Waffen-SS and Ukrainian police.	What/who is the source for the information that the Jewish Cemetery and part of the ravine were fenced in with barbed wire? Waffen-SS? Ukrainian policemen?
   Outside the ravine the Jews had to hand over their valuables, to undress entirely, and then to go to the upper edge of the ravine in groups of 10.	Groups of 10 would mean 3,377 groups. Even allowing only 5 minutes per group, this would still take 281 hours, or 24 days when working 12 hours a day.
   On reaching the edge they were shot with automatic weapons (German edition: with machine guns). At the end of the day the bodies were covered with a thin layer of soil.	Extra time needed for removing the piles of bodies and for covering with soil?
   In the following months, thousands more Jews were captured and shot in Babi Yar.	If some 80% of the approximately 160,000 Jews – i.e., 128,000 – had been evacuated, then how could 33,771 be murdered on September 29 and 30 and thousands more in the following months? Where did the enormous number of bullets and cartridges go?
   Some of the Kyiv inhabitants helped the Jews disappear.
   But the Ukrainians of Kyiv denounced Jews in such numbers that the short-staffed SIPO and Security Service could not process all the letters that arrived by the laundry-basketfull.[39]	Given the local support for the Jews, how can one also explain letters of denunciation by the laundry-basketfull? And how the short-staffing?
   According to Soviet researches, 100,000 people were murdered in Babi Yar, including gypsies and Soviet prisoners-of-war.	What documents are there to prove the total of 100,000? Does the claim that in Babi Yar also prisoners-of-war were murdered not make Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin even more significant?
   As of mid-August 1943 the graves were opened with bulldozers, but the bodies were transported by fettered inmates, among them 100 Jews.	Did the Germans have bulldozers? Is this sort of equipment used in a narrow ravine? Do the air photos give any indication of such activities? Why bulldozers, if the main part of the work had to be done by slaves in chains? Where did the 100 Jews come from?
   The bodies were burned on a base of railroad tracks and on pyres of tree trunks, for which purpose they were doused with gasoline.	Where did the enormous quantities of railroad tracks and firewood come from, especially in view of the advancing Russian front? Whence the gasoline, which was not even in adequate supply for tanks and the Luftwaffe?
   The bones were crushed on gravestones from the Jewish Cemetery.	Gravestones for crushing bones? Evidence?
   The cremation lasted from August 18 to September 19, 1943.
   The ashes were screened and sifted in order to retrieve all of the gold and silver.	How long would it take to screen and sift all the ashes, along with everything that had become mixed with them? To where did the gravestones and the ashes go?
   After the bodies were cremated, 15 prisoners escaped.
   Jews were not mentioned as victims in the inscription on the memorial erected in 1974. Modified in 1991, the inscription now also commemorates the Jews (German edition).	Why did the first inscription withhold the information that there were Jews among the victims?

   About two weeks after the recapture of Kyiv in late 1943, the western journalists who had been invited[21] Were told that six weeks earlier the Germans had finished the blasting, exhumation and open-air incineration of 70,000 bodies, the crushing of the unburned bones and the bulldozing of the material into the ravine.

   • What happened to the difference of 30,000 bodies, and where are all the witnesses for these blazing fires, for the clouds of smoke and the infernal stench? It ought to have been an easy matter for the Soviets to procure evidence and witnesses to prove all these claims to the journalists – or perhaps not? Why did the physical evidence fail to impress the journalists?
7. On the fiftieth anniversary (1991) of the German 'attack' on the Soviet Union, the ZDF (German Television) broadcast a film series by Guido Knopp, who had produced it in collaboration with Gostelradio, a Soviet state undertaking which even then was at times still strictly controlled by the KGB. In the course of this broadcast series, Babi Yar was also discussed (June 18, 1991).
   • A woman named Sheila Polischtschuk recounted roughly the same as set out above in Section 4 Part 9. Her mother had thrown herself and her child, Sheila, into the ravine. Mother and daughter were covered up by more and ever more bodies. The mother had pushed her fists under her daughter's neck so she would not drown in the blood. A soldier allegedly stood on her mother and thus missed her with the bayonet. The mother managed to work her way out from under this mountain of corpses, taking her unconscious daughter with her.
   • A 'ravine' was shown, which looked more like a 30-ft.-deep and 65 to 100-ft.-wide gravel pit.
   • Another picture, taken at an angle from behind, showed a row of fully dressed (!) persons at the edge of a pit, with their backs to the pit.
   • A film of an 'interrogation' from Stalin's days was shown; the interrogatee admitted having shot 120 persons. Six men had been assigned as guards and six as execution commando. He claimed to have shot about 120 people in a period of 36 hours.
     Given the killing rate admitted to by the interrogatee, it would have taken about 10,131 hours to manage the 33,771 executions claimed in the ZDF broadcast.
   • How did Sheila Polischtschuk's mother manage to turn herself and her daughter around 180 degrees and to throw herself head over heels into the ravine without either of them sustaining bruises or broken bones and without either of them crying out? If the mother had to keep the child from drowning in the blood, then the daughter must have lain practically at the bottom of the ravine, i.e., she and her mother were among the first victims. So the piles of corpses lying on both of them must have been an enormous weight.
   • If mother and daughter were underneath many bodies, how could the soldier stand on the mother?
   • If the soldier stood on the mother – in other words, if the other part of the story is not true – then why did his bayonet not strike mother or daughter after he had changed his position?
   • If the mother could work her way out from under a mountain of corpses, then in order to free her daughter she would have had to move other bodies around. After all, the bodies were not lying there neat and orderly, they were quite entangled! Why did the guards not notice her activity?
   • And for the sake of a bit of variety, other sources also tell of escaped mothers. Jean-François Steiner's book[64] is based on many instances of alleged eyewitness testimony and claims that “Ivan“, who was later promoted to “the Terrible“, was killed during the Treblinka revolt (which claim, however, was rescinded during Demjanjuk's first trial). This book tells of a very similar case which allegedly took place at about the same time, in Ponar near Vilna. Driven into a corner, Steiner admitted that his book was really just a novel (but the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie quotes it as factual source in its article on Treblinka!). Kuznetsov's book[39] and Schindler's List[65] are also works of fiction!
   • Other questions regarding Knopp's film:
   • Despite all the top secrecy, who managed to take a photo of the victims lined up to be shot? Who, furthermore, managed to do this from a clearly visible vantage point and even potentially within the scatter field of the machine gun fire? Why does the rather out-of-focus picture reveal characteristics common to many other falsified propaganda pictures? Why are the people dressed? According to the witness, six men were designated as execution commando and six as guards. Where did the 'bayonet men' come from? How many prisoners or groups can be guarded by six men?
8. Novelist Guido Knopp[66] writes in the left-hand column of page 132 of his book:

   “[…] many soldiers stood with machine guns. […] They led us to a ravine, where big boxes stood, in which they collected the documents and other things. […] Then an execution commando took up position. Mother did not wait for the commando, she threw herself and me into the pit and fell on me. The special units began to cover us over with dead bodies. After that they shot another group. […] A soldier stood on my mother and stabbed the wounded man lying beside her. When they passed on to share the spoils, mother pulled me out unconscious and carried me away.”

   In the right-hand column of the same page, however, we read:

   “When they arrived at the ravine after the beating, they had to lie down on the ground in rows, in small groups. Then the execution commando went into action. A burst of machine gun fire, a few shovels of earth that only barely covered the bodies, and then the next group was driven into the ravine.”

   • How does Knopp imagine the machine gun execution of victims that are lying down?
   • And what must one think of authors who, when writing the right column of a page, can no longer remember what they wrote in the left column?
   • For comparison, we have the sworn statement of Professor Aloshin, according to whom heavy machine guns were set up on either side of the ravine. And:

     “then Russian prisoners-of-war who were stationed on either side of the ravine with shovels […] had to throw sand over the victims.”

   • The victims had been herded into the ravine; the heavy machine guns were fired downward at a sharp angle – not an easy task.
   • At the bottom, he said, the bodies piled up every which way – not, as Knopp describes, “in rows on the ground.” From experience with the mass graves in Hamburg, for the 40,000 victims of the British terrorist attacks, we know that the prisoners-of-war would have had to shovel about 742,000 cu.ft. of sand in order to cover the victims. Given a more careful layering of the bodies, as in Katyn, there would still have been about 503,200 cu.ft. to shovel. Since the bodies were in the pit, they would either have had to dig into the embankments or to bring the sand in from outside. More work, and lots of it! Do the air photos reveal any of this? How much sand can one worker shovel per day, under such conditions?
   • Where does Knopp glean his knowledge of large empty halls in which those still living spent night?[66] There were no halls at Babi Yar. And why is there not so much as one single witness for these treks – from the 'halls' back to the murder sites?
9. Professor Dr. Wolfgang Benz:[67] In the ravine

   “[…] there were 3 groups of marksmen, a total of about 12 marksmen. […] They stood behind the Jews and killed them with shots to the neck.”

   • Shooting in the neck was the well-known murder method of choice for the GPU, NKVD, KGB, and Stasi!
10. On February 18, 1946, the Soviet prosecutor Smirnov declared at the IMT:[68]

    “In Kyiv, over 195,000 Soviet citizens were tortured to death, shot, and poisoned in the gas vans, as follows:
    (1) In Baybe-yar, over 100,000 men, women, children, and old people.”

    • How does this version agree with the various eyewitness testimony?
    • Did the Communist regime concoct these claims in order to blame its own mass murders on the Germans?
    • The approximately 10,000 Ukrainians who were murdered in Vinnica by the Soviets via bullets to the neck and then thrown into mass graves[69] come to mind, as do other massacres.
11. N. F. Petrenko and N. T. Gorbacheva testified:[70]

    “[…] the Germans threw babies at the breast into graves and buried them alive with their dead or wounded parents.”[71]

    • Evidence? Specifics re. place, date, etc.?
12. In C. Clarke's book we read:[72]

    “German tanks roared through the large Jewish quarter, after the occupation, blasting every living object in sight, and then burning Jews alive in flaming buildings and killing them in woods over the mass graves excavated by the victims while some Jews were tied to trees and shot or bayoneted.”

    • Evidence? Witnesses?
    • Time required for the victims-to-be to excavate the mass graves?
    • Place? Date?
    • Why the time-consuming procedure of tying to trees?
    • If there was a large Jewish quarter, why were the Jews not simply ordered to gather there and led off, instead of marching them in many columns into northwestern Kyiv and producing many witnesses in the process – witnesses who, however, mysteriously were not to be found later?
13. In her book, published in 1987 in Israel, Leni Yahil wrote:[73]

    “The 30,000 Jews who assembled [in Kyiv] were taken to the forest and slaughtered over the course of two days.”

    • Leni Yahil does not name witnesses, nor does she give an explanation and/or evidence for how it was possible to assemble and lead off more than 30,000 people within a few hours, without thousands of people noticing and potentially appearing as witnesses later.
    • Yahil transfers the murder site to a forest. So it wasn't a ravine? Evidence? Air photos?
14. As noted in sections 4 and 6, the Jews of Kyiv and its environs were informed via placards that they had to assemble with all their belongings at a specific place. This placard was not ready until the day before.

    This organizational point is of utmost importance and should be examined a little more closely, for the relevant considerations apply mutatis mutandis for all the various versions of the massacre.

    The placard was printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German and allegedly read [translation of German text]:[7]

    “All the Jews of Kyiv are to gather until 8 o'clock on Monday, September 29, 1941, at the corner of Melnik and Dokteriwski Streets (at the cemeteries). Bring your papers, money and valuables, also warm clothing etc.
    Anyone failing to comply with this order, and found elsewhere, will be shot.
    Anyone breaking into vacant Jewish homes or appropriating items from the same will be shot.”

    Fundamental questions:

    • Why is no issuing authority given?
    • Name and rank of the issuing commander?
    • Date of issue?

    Regarding the German text:

    • 8 o'clock in the morning or 8 o'clock in the evening? “Until” 8 o'clock?
    • The original German text was printed using 'oe', 'ae' and 'ss' instead of 'ö', 'ä' and 'ß'. Did the printer for the 6th Army not have any umlauts in his fonts?
    • “Dokteriwski Street” is incorrect. The street was called 'Djegtjariwskoi', i.e., Tarburner Street.
    • “Melnik Street” is incorrect. It is correctly called 'Melnikowa Street'. It is named for a Mr. Melnikow.
    • “An den Friedhöfen” (the original German wording for “at the cemeteries“) is incorrect German. It should read 'Bei den Friedhöfen'. Aside from that, the Russian text has only one cemetery.
    • The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust[5] claims that the purpose of the order was 'resettlement'. What is the source of this insight? The placard makes no mention of this.[7]
    • What is meant by “found elsewhere“? When people converge on a location from everywhere else, everywhere is “elsewhere“.
    • How likely is it that a military propaganda division and an army printer would do such sloppy work?

    Regarding the Russian text:

    • The term used for Jews (“schidy“) is contemptuous Russian gutter jargon. What sort of results can one expect when even the order to assemble bodes ill? Did the Germans actually want to run the risk of having a large part of the Jews not show up at all, and go into hiding? Perhaps they even intended that in such a case they would put all armed conflict on hold, and employ their forces in locating the Jews instead…?
    • Here, too, the street names are incorrect. Moreover, the declension of street and that of cemetery are both wrong.
    • The Russian text specifies 8:00 a.m. No mention is made of resettlement!
    • In the list of things to bring, what does “etc.” mean? Did that not risk having the great Jewish population come to the gathering place loaded down with masses of baggage and horses and wagons, hand carts and baby buggies crammed full of belongings, blocking all the streets of Kyiv in the process?

    Regarding the Ukrainian text:

    • Again, incorrect street names, and no hint as to the purpose of the assembly.

    Whoever may have been responsible for this 'order' – what were they thinking of:

    • after the occupation of Kyiv, and with an anonymous placard, with name-calling and threats of execution, to order perhaps 100,000 or even more Jews to assemble literally over night and with potentially all their belongings, at a single street corner at 8 o'clock the next morning?
    • How was this 'message' supposed to reach the Jews in Kyiv and its environs, shortly after the extremely destructive armed conflict?
    • How did they intend to handle this enormous and unorganized crowd (no staggered times for the summoned, in alphabetical order, for example)? Did they deliberately risk chaos in the streets – something which the occupiers of a large, partisan-riddled city precisely did not need?
    • How are these great masses of people and goods to fit at one street corner?
    • How does one print approximately 2,000 placards in a city with no electrical power?
    • Where and how does one post the placards, while potentially risking one's life to snipers?
    • Why did none of the many German Army privates notice the huge crowds, the miles-long exodus, or the placards (which, after all, they could read!) and mention all of this at an appropriate time, if only to their families?
    • Why did none of the foreign correspondents, whom the 'German gangs of killers' allowed to view the captured and burning city of Kyiv, see or at least hear about even a single one of the alleged 2,000 placards?
    • In a just recently captured and still very dangerous city, is there nothing more pressing for the occupiers to do than to create additional problems on an enormous scale, especially in contexts which, after all, were not terribly urgent?
    • Wiehn[7] and others seem not to have noticed that there were several rather different versions of the placard. According to Reitlinger,[74] the placard specified “within three days“, and “for resettlement“. According to L. Ozerow,[75] the placard was in Ukrainian and Russian and stated “7 o'clock“. Arch-Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg claims 7 o'clock,[76] and his street names are also wrong. A. Kuznetsov[77] (placard source[78]) also has no idea of the correct street names, and gives neither the Ukrainian nor the German text. Event Report No. 128 of November 3, 1941, allegedly announced the resettlement via “brick-wall posting“.[79] The term “brick-wall posting“, which is quite unusual in the German language, appears to be in common usage by Russians speaking German.[80]
15. On October 6, 1991, on the occasion of a night-time commemoration at Babi Yar, a middle-aged orthodox Jew told Ukrainian Television in Kyiv:[81]

    “150,000 Jews were massacred by the Germans in two days, with the active participation of a minority of Ukrainians from Kyiv and the passive cooperation of the majority.”

    • Where does he get his figure of 150,000 murdered?
16. Vladimir Posner, an American-born Jewish NKVD collaborator, claimed that 200,000 were murdered.[82]
    • Evidence?
17. On April 23, 1990, Vitaly Korotych, a Ukrainian NKVD and KGB collaborator, claimed that there had been 300,000 victims at Babi Yar.[83]
    • How did Korotych come up with this figure?
18. On September 5, 1991, The Washington Times published the claim of Genadi Udowenko, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, who alleged that 50,000 Jews, most of them children, had been butchered during the first week of the dreadful massacre of Babi Yar.[84]
    • Did he perhaps get this information from I. M. Levitas, the Head of the Society for Jewish Culture in Kyiv, who had made the same claim in an interview with a Kyiv newspaper?[85] That would mean that despicable Jewish parents had abandoned more than 25,000 children when they were evacuated by the Soviets. This, however, is disproved by Jewish and Soviet publications,[31],[54]–[58] which stressed the evacuation of families in order to sustain morale.
19. In her book[86] the Kyiv author and poet Dokia Humenna, who had witnessed the entire time of occupation in Kyiv, devotes fully half a sentence to the alleged massacre of Babi Yar. She describes it as a rumor, and states that the alleged killing methods were machine gun executions, electric shock, hand grenades, and burying injured Jews alive.
    • Why does this contemporaneous witness deem Babi Yar worth only half a sentence?
    • Why does she consider it a rumor?
    • What is the source for the new murder methods of electric shock and hand grenades?
20. Readers of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1950 will search in vain for an entry for Babi Yar.[87] The 1970 edition claims 50,000 to 70,000 victims.[88]
    • Isn't it surprising that the mighty encyclopedia of 1950 forgot about Babi Yar even though 'Smirnov & Co.' had testified to the most gruesome things about it only a few years earlier, in Nuremberg?
21. The 1955 and 1971 editions of the Ukrainian encyclopedias are unaware of Babi Yar.[89],[90]
22. The following important encyclopedias do not mention (are not aware of) Babi Yar:
    • Grand Larousse Encyclopédique, Paris, 1960;[91]
    • Brockhaus, 1967;[92]
    • Enciclopedia Europea, Rome, 1976;[93]
    • Enciclopedia Universal Nautea, Madrid, 1977;[94]
    • Encyclopedia Britannica, 1945 to 1984 editions;[95]
    • Academic American Encyclopedia, 1991;[96]

    The 1987 (most recent) edition of the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie has already heard of Babi Yar.[97] According to this work, more than 30,000 Jews were murdered by members of a German police battalion in a ravine in northern Kyiv. Yevtushenko's poem and Shostakovich's 13th symphony are cited, but a reader will search in vain for better data.

    The latest Brockhaus Enzyklopädie's newest discovery is probably the result of its collaboration with Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon.[98] The latter contains similar information, as well as a reference to A. V. Kuznetsov's documentary novel. The Babi Yar points of the compass are given incorrectly in both encyclopedias.

23. In his book,[99] the Jew J. G. Burg (actually Joseph Ginzburg), who – along with his family – experienced the deportation in the East first-hand, reports that after the Red Army had retreated from the area of Czernovyč the local population carried out numerous pogroms against the Jews, and that it took severe intervention by German and her allied troops to put a stop to these pogroms.
    • Why does Burg not mention any similar mass murders committed by the Germans?
24. On page 78 of J. Heer's and K. Naumanns's book Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 pictures 1 and 2 allegedly show “The victims on their way to Babi Yar“[100] on a bright, sunny day.
    • According to the Kriegstagebuch des OKW, Raum Kiew, from Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, the weather was rainy, the roads muddy.
    • The road visible on the picture is dry.
    • Some people on that picture are walking in the opposite direction.
    • Not masses of people (33,000!) are walking on this picture, but only a few.
    • There are no guards visible, even though they certainly would have been necessary if the alleged victims could hear the machine guns firing in the background.
    • The people shown do not carry any belongings, although they allegedly were told to do so.
    • The road allegedly shown runs from the Southeast to the Northwest. Thus, according to the shadows, the sun is shining from the west at an angle of some 50°. This is impossible for Kyiv during the end of September!
    • The Hessische Hauptstaatsarchiv, referred to by Heer and Naumann as having delivered this picture, wrote April 15, 1997:[101]

      “It is not known here, where the assignation to Babi Yar stems from.”

25. And last but not least: at the memorial ceremony in Babi Yar in October 1991, the President of the Bundestag (German Parliament), Professor Dr. Rita Süßmuth, accused the Germans of the murder as follows:

    “Fifty years ago, 33,771 Jews were murdered here in the course of two days, and at least as many again in the following two years; countless other persons shared the same fate later. By the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine, the ravine had become a mass grave.”

    • From where does she get her figures?
    • Does this academic feel that she is above the scientific maxim of de omnibus dubitandum est (everything is to be doubted)?
    • How many persons does the good professor consider “countless“?
    • Did this President of the Bundestag not swear an oath of office?

6. Fundamental Questions

6.1. Regarding the Number of Victims

The 'precise' figure of 33,771 murdered Jews stems from Event Report 106 of October 7, 1941.[3] In the following, we shall just briefly show why even the very few figures given in Event Report 106 prove that what we have here are clumsy fabrications. Other evidence for the fabrication has been provided by Walendy,[24] among others.

One must assume that the destruction of the Jews was led by German experts. Wiehn[7] emphasizes that the Einsatzkommandos were headed by intellectuals (p. 17). But it is an unforgivable mistake for experts to claim that there were about 300,000 Jews in Kyiv, especially two-and-a-half weeks after that city had been occupied, by which time there would have been a relatively reliable overview of the situation.

140,256 Jews lived in Kyiv in 1928-1931.[102] It was a known fact that prior to the Second World War the Jewish population of the Ukraine had dropped by about one-third due to emigration to the less anti-Semitic northern and eastern regions of the Soviet Union;[103] this rate was a little lower for Kyiv due to the urbanization of the Jews. And it was also a known fact that the population of Kyiv had shrunk from some 850,000 – 930,000 persons to about 305,000 due to evacuations.[104],[105] So if there had still been 300,000 Jews in Kyiv on about October 7, then these 'experts' would have found practically no one in Kyiv who was not Jewish – and it would not have taken experts to notice that.

Thus the “non-Jewish population of Kyiv” which Event Report 106 mentions and which expected the German authorities to take retaliatory measures due to the arson perpetrated by the Jews, would have consisted almost entirely of ghosts. And the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,[5] too, would have been conjuring up ghosts in speaking of non-Jewish sectors of the Kyiv population that helped the Jews to hide, or that wrote denunciatory letters by the laundry-basketfull.

The literature[31],[54]–[58] shows that fewer than 40,000 Jews, most primarily the elderly, remained in Kyiv by the time the German troops arrived.

Reitlinger[106] states that in early 1946, at a time when the great remigration of deportees and evacuees from Siberia had only just begun, there were already 100,000 Jews in Kyiv again. In 1959 there were 154,000.[107] Wiehn states that in 1959 15% of the inhabitants of Kyiv, i.e., about 166,500, reported Yiddish as their mother tongue.[108] Added to this there is a significant unreported number, for the Russian census did not check the information regarding religion or ethnic origin and many Russian Jews preferred, and continue to prefer, to conceal their ethnicity. Furthermore, many were left out of the group at issue due to mixed marriages. One can thus safely assume that at least as many Jews lived in Kyiv in 1959 as had lived there in 1939. And finally, it is beyond dispute that a great many Jews died in the camps in Siberia, and that the birth rate was also noticeably below normal.

What would an unbiased court do when the numbers of alleged victims in a crime under investigation diverge this dramatically?

6.2. Regarding the Time of the Murder

According to the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie[109] the “order for the final solution of the Jewish question” was issued on July 31, 1941 (Nuremberg Trial Document NG 2586e), and was announced on the occasion of the 'Wannsee Conference' (January 20, 1942).[110]

Quite aside from the fact that historians and other interested persons are still searching in vain for this order for mass extermination, it is more than odd that many tens of thousands would have been slaughtered in Babi Yar before the order was even made known. Therefore, let us take a closer look at the relevant documentation.

In the January 26, 1942, letter from the Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service (Heydrich) to Under Secretary of State Luther in the Foreign Office, we read:

“Now that the fundamental line to be taken with regard to the practical final solution of the Jewish question has been determined and the authorities involved are in complete agreement, I would ask you […]“

and farther down:

“[…] to assign your official in charge of completing the outline requested by the Reich Marshal, in which the organizational, factual and material prerequisites for the practical implementation of the tasks involved in the solution are to be identified, to the required discussions of specific details. I intend to hold the first discussion of this kind on March 6, 1942 […].”

In other words, considerations of all the organizational, factual and material prerequisites for a practical implementation of the tasks involved in the solution were not even begun until about mid-March 1942. Heydrich announced his appointment as delegate for the preparations for the Final Solution. This further confirms our earlier arguments.

Fundamental questions were to be settled. It is a big step from settling fundamental questions to planning details, and another step to implementing detailed plans. Heydrich mentioned retrospectively: “forcing [the Jews] back, speeding up [their] emigration“, and:

“The goal was to cleanse the German sphere of Jews in a lawful manner. After prior approval by the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews eastward has replaced emigration as a further possible solution.” (Emphasis added.)

How likely are mass murders months before the prior approval of the victims' evacuation? Part of the purpose of the evacuation was also to gain experience “relating to the coming final solution of the Jewish question.” So, there was not even an overall concept at that time.

To deal with the final solution (which the document shows to be, at this point, evacuation and the use of Jews as labor force), consultations between experts from the Foreign Office, the Security Police and the Security Service are suggested. Again there is nothing definite.

This gives rise to a pressing question: On whose orders were the “33,771 murders” committed on September 29 and 30, 1941, four months before the Wannsee Conference was convened and easily five months before the disputed Wannsee Conference Protocol copies finally reached the participants? Surely mass murder without backing from higher-up is anything but likely. All the more so, considering that even later on, i.e., after the Wannsee Conference, a good number of concentration camp commandants were convicted by Hitler's justice system, some of them even executed, for cruelty and other irregularities.[111]

So when did the murders really take place?

6.3. Regarding the Site of the Crime

Where was the crime committed?

• In the cemetery, beside the cemetery, in a forest and if so, in which one?
• At the edge of the ravine, in the ravine, and in which ravine anyhow?
• In a brickworks, in Kyiv, in gas vans, or perhaps even in the Dnjepr River?

6.4. Regarding the Murder Weapons

What do the sources discussed allege the murder weapons to have been?

• machine guns
• submachine guns
• automatic rifles
• rifle butts
• clubs
• rocks
• tanks
• mines
• hand grenades
• gas vans
• bayonets and knives
• burial alive
• drowning
• injections
• electric shock
• Did the Germans avail themselves of the Soviet method of shooting victims in the neck?

What would an unbiased court do if it had to pass judgment on an alleged mass murderer, if the witnesses were in such thorough disagreement?

6.5. Logistic and Organizational Questions

Shooting 33,771 or even far more people within two days and then removing all traces of the deed (which is impossible anyhow, with the investigative means available today!) would require superb organization and logistics. Some aspects thereof were discussed in the context of specific issues, and for reasons of space constraints we shall have to leave it at that.

We would stress, however, that these problems would have been unmanageable under extreme conditions such as prevailed right after the taking of Kyiv, with fires, blasting and partisan activity on the one hand and the continuing battles at the front, with their concomitant demand for human and material resources, and in autumn of 1943 in the face of the advancing deadly front of the Soviet army.

6.6. Securing Evidence

Why did no one ever try to secure any evidence in order to prove the murders?

By way of contrast, some time ago, following a double murder of policemen, the German police vowed to dig up the entire military training area of Sennelager if necessary to find the bodies.

When the German Federal Criminal Police Office got into trouble in the context of the cause of death of a terrorist following the 1993 incident in Bad Kleinen (one terrorist was shot by the police, another one arrested), a Minister resigned, a very high-ranking official got his walking papers, the entire track was gone over virtually with a fine-tooth comb, domestic and foreign institutes were commissioned with investigations, the Special Unit involved was interrogated, physical evidence was compared with testimony – practically everything that could be done to remove any and all doubts was done.

But in the case of Babi Yar, witnesses and allegations (and from Stalin's glorious days, no less!) are blindly given full credence even though they contradict each other and claim the silliest impossibilities.

Why does no one bother to lift a finger in this instance, to secure bodies and remains, residue, murder weapons etc., even though countless victims are at issue? Is such conduct by the authorities responsible in keeping with the binding international legal guidelines?

It is clearly not necessary to specify which questions a high-ranking, disinterested, international and incorruptible committee of experts would have to examine in order to arrive at a relevant forensic assessment!

But the incriminating documents must also be examined very critically, not least of all because they too are rendered questionable by the evidence contained in the air photos.[16] The so-called Gerstein Report,[112] and the Jerusalem Trial of John Demjanjuk[113] no less, show that the champions of one particular school of thought do not hesitate to commit grotesque falsifications even many decades after the end of the war. Some few examples:

Despite a clear and unequivocal international report issued after the discovery of the mass graves of Katyn, the atrocity propaganda churned out by Ilya Ehrenburg and Wassily Grossmann continued – not only throughout the Nuremberg Trials, but right up until a few years ago – to impute the Stalinist mass murders to the Germans.[114] In this vein, Katyn and Babi Yar are not the only examples that come to mind; there are also the massacres of Lvov, Char'kov, Bykivnia, Bielhorodka, Darnitza and Vinnica. They represent many hundreds of thousands of victims, including some from the liquidation era of Lazar Moisejevich Kaganovich.[115] Katyn is the only case so far where the Soviets have admitted as late as 1991 that they were the perpetrators!

6.7. Babi Yar: From Mass Murder Site to Garbage Dump

After the end of the war the Soviets turned the ravine of Babi Yar into a municipal garbage dump, and later into a garbage incineration site.[116]

That the Soviets intended to build a sports facility over the site of indescribable crimes is no less incomprehensible…[117],[118]

To the best of this author's knowledge, Khrushchev's reprimand to Yevtushenko was never made public in the western world. Did this terse rebuke perhaps reflect the plain and simple truth?

Just what is self-evident about Babi Yar?

Notes

Back to Dissecting Index