Critique of the Matt Cockerill vs. Thomas Dalton Debate, Part 7

Matt Cockerill writes on page two:

“The first main stage of systematic extermination, which claimed the lives of nearly two million Jews from Yugoslavia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, was carried out by mass shootings, beginning in 1941; the most prolific killers were the Einsatzgruppen, but mass shootings were also carried out by the SS und Polizeiführer (SSPF), the Ordnungspolizei, the Wehrmacht, the Romanian military, local collaborators, and (in Yugoslavia) the Ustaše, among other bodies.”

My Response

Jewish Princeton University historian Arno Mayer summarizes his view of the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union:[1]

“Even so, and notwithstanding the unparalleled magnitude of the Jewish suffering, the extermination of eastern Jewry never became the chief objective of Barbarossa. The fight for Lebensraum and against bolshevism was neither a pretext nor an expedient for the killing of Jews. Nor was it a mere smoke screen to disguise the Jewish massacres as reprisals against partisans. The assault on the Jews was unquestionably intertwined with the assault on bolshevism from the very outset. But this is not to say that it was the dominant strand in the hybrid ‘Judeobolshevism’ that Barbarossa targeted for destruction. In fact, the war against the Jews was a graft onto or a parasite upon the eastern campaign, which always remained its host, even or especially once it became mired deep in Russia.

When they set forth on their mission, the Einsatzgruppen and the RSHA were not given the extermination of Jews as their principal, let alone their only, assignment.”

In Mayer’s analysis, the massacres of the eastern Jews were not part of a comprehensive plan of extermination. Rather, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union occurred as the result of the inexorable radicalization of the war in the east, and because many Soviet Jews were classified by the SS as carriers of Bolshevism.[2]

In the eyes of the SS and the civilian population of the Soviet Union, many Soviet Jews were regarded as being responsible for or accomplices to the Communist acts of violence. For example, the massacres of Jews committed by Ukrainians and SS men in July 1941 in Lemberg and other Galician towns were primarily retaliations for the mass murders of Ukrainians committed by the Soviets between June 22 and July 2, 1941. The reports of the Einsatzgruppen furnish evidence of this:[3]

“In Tarnopol 5,000 Ukrainians kidnapped, 2,000 murdered. As counter measures arrest operation initiated against Jewish intellectuals, who shared responsibility for the murder and besides were informers for the NKVD. Number estimated at about 1,000. On July 5, approximately 70 Jews rounded up by Ukrainias and shot. Another 20 Jews killed on the road by military and Ukrainians, as response to the murder of three soldiers who were found chained in jail, with tongues cut out and eyes gouged out.”

Other Jews were shot in retaliatory measures after the discovery of Soviet torture chambers. For example, after the discovery of a torture chamber in the Tarnopol courthouse, the Germans reacted as follows:[4]

“The troops marching through who had the opportunity to see these atrocities, above all the bodies of the murdered German soldiers, killed all of the approximately 600 Jews and set their houses on fire.”

The combat of Soviet partisans in forests and swamps was regarded by the Einsatzgruppen and German troops as the most dangerous of all types of warfare—favoring the hunted rather than the hunter. The partisans almost always killed captured German soldiers, frequently after inflicting brutal torture. The German anti-partisan forces operated in an extremely unpleasant environment that made the German units resent the partisans whose activities had caused them to be there. In summer huge swarms of flies and mosquitos made life miserable; in winter frostbite and trench foot were rampant.[5]

Joseph Goebbels’s diary entries reinforce what numerous historians have said about the dangers of the Soviet partisan activities. Goebbels wrote on March 6, 1942:[6]

“An SD report informs me about the situation in occupied Russia. It’s more precarious than one generally assumes. The partisan danger is increasing from week to week.”

On March 16, 1942, Goebbels wrote:[7]

“I read an SD report about the situation in the occupied East. Partisan activity has increased noticeably in recent weeks. They are conducting a well-organized guerilla war. It’s very difficult to get at them because they are using terrorist methods in the area we occupy, so that the population is afraid of loyally working with us anymore.”

Soviet partisan warfare against Germany became increasingly barbaric and murderous. In February 1943, 596 German prisoners were killed and many of them mutilated by Soviet partisans at Grischino. A German judge who interrogated witnesses and survivors of this atrocity remembered:[8]

“You have no idea how much trouble the commanders and company chiefs had […] to restrain the German soldiers from killing every Russian prisoner of war of the Popov Army. The troop was very bitter and angry. You cannot imagine the vehemence of the soldiers after they had seen what had happened.”

Matt references on page three of this debate the Kube-Lohse document as proof of a German extermination plan against Jews. This letter, written from the General commissioner for Byelorussia Wilhelm Kube to Reich Commissioner for the Ostland Hinrich Lohse, explicitly states that Jews were the principal supporters of the partisan movement:[9]

“In all clashes with partisans in Byelorussia, it has been found that Jewry is the principal supporter of the partisan movement, both in former Poland and in the former Soviet part of the General District, together with the Polish resistance movement in the East and the Red Army in Moscow. As a result, the handling of Jewry in Byelorussia, in view of the threat to the entire economy, represents a prominently political issue which must consequently be tackled based, not on economic considerations, but on political ones. In detailed meetings with SS Brigadeführer Zenner and the magnificently hard-working leader of the SD, SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. jur. Strauch, we have liquidated approximately 55,000 Jews in Byelorussia during the last 10 weeks.”

Thus, the Einsatzgruppen and other German units killed Jews as part of their anti-partisan operations in the Soviet Union and Poland, and not because Germany had a policy of genocide against Jews.

Matt Cockerill writes on page two:

“All documentary evidence shows that the Einsatzgruppen and other killing squads in the USSR targeted Jewish civilians and killed the overwhelming majority of them in the regions they occupied.

Consider for example the nation of Lithuania (which had been annexed into the USSR under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). On 15 October 1941, just a few months after the Germans had conquered the country, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported that 71,105 Lithuanian Jews (out of a pre-war population of 160,000) had been liquidated. In November 1941, most of the surviving Lithuanian Jews—whom the Germans had concentrated in Vilna, Kovno, Siaulai, and Svencionys ghettos—were also murdered.”

My Response

I do not agree that all documentary evidence shows that the Einsatzgruppen and other German killing squads targeted Jewish civilians. In fact, there is considerable evidence than many of the Einsatzgruppen reports are not valid.

The unreliability of the Einsatzgruppen reports was acknowledged in the British trial of German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein in 1949. Von Manstein’s British lawyer demonstrated that whole areas claimed by the reports to be “cleared of Jews” contained many flourishing Jewish communities that were untouched throughout the entire war. The trial court accepted the argument that the Einsatzgruppen reports were unreliable. The court acquitted von Manstein regarding the Einsatzgruppen activities in his command sector.[10]

The originals of the Einsatzgruppen reports have never been produced, and many of the copies that have been produced show clear signs of postwar additions. For example, Einsatzgruppen Report No. 111 contains garbled wording and a clear addition of the words “Jews in general” at the end of a paragraph (highlighted below):[11]

“These were the motives for the executions carried out by the Kommandos: Political officials, looters and saboteurs, active Communists and political representatives, Jews who gained their release from prison camps by false statements, agents and informers of the NKVD, persons who, by false depositions and influencing witnesses, were instrumental in the deportation of ethnic Germans, Jewish sadism and revengefulness, undesirable elements, partisans, Politruks, dangers of plague and epidemics, members of Russian bands, armed insurgents—provisioning of Russian bands, rebels and agitators, drifting juveniles, Jews in general.”

Dr. Arthur Robert Butz writes about the Einsatzgruppen documents:[12]

“They are mimeographed and signatures are most rare and, when they occur, appear on nonincriminating pages. Document NO-3159, for example, has a signature, R.R. Strauch, but only on a covering page giving the locations of various units of the Einsatzgruppen. There is also NO-1128, allegedly from Himmler to Hitler reporting, among other things, the execution of 363,211 Russian Jews in August-November 1942. This claim occurs on page four of NO-1128, while initials said to be Himmler’s occur on the irrelevant page one. Moreover, Himmler’s initials were easy to forge: three vertical lines with a horizontal line drawn through them”

Dr. Butz explains why many of the Einsatzgruppen documents were forged:[13]

“It is not difficult to see why these documents exist; without them the authors of the lie would have no evidence for their claims except testimony. We have seen that with Auschwitz there was an abundance of material facts to work with and whose meanings could be distorted: shipments of Jews to Auschwitz, many of whom did not return to their original homes, large shipments of a source of hydrogen cyanide gas, elaborate cremation facilities, selections, the stench. The situation with the Einsatzgruppen was different; there was only one fact, the executions. Standing alone, this fact does not appear impressive as evidence, and this consideration was no doubt the motivation for manufacturing these documents on such a large scale.”

Even Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger had trouble with the existence of the Einsatzgruppen reports. Reitlinger wrote:[14]

“It is not easy to see why the murderers left such an abundant testimony behind them, for in spite of their wide circulation list, Knobloch’s (the Gestapo official who edited the reports) reports seemed to have been designed primarily to appeal to Himmler and Heydrich. Thus, in addition to much juggling with the daily death bills in order to produce an impressive total, there are some rather amateur essays in political intelligence work.”

In addition to fighting partisans, the Einsatzgruppen had numerous tasks involving the reorganization of civilian life in the Soviet territories occupied by the Germans. In their reports, the Einsatzgruppen addressed such issues as morale, politics and administration, propaganda, cultural life, public health, church, economy, the food situation, agriculture, industry and trade, the resistance movements, as well as the Jews. The Einsatzgruppen were involved in a truly staggering number of tasks.[15]

The first Stahlecker Report, the “Overall report up to October 15, 1941,” explicitly states that “the total number of liquidated Jews amounts to 71,105.”[16] However, pro-Holocaust historian Ronald Headland confirms that figures in the Einsatzgruppen reports were often exaggerated:[17]

“The claim that the numbers were exaggerated would also seem to have some basis in fact. Sources other than those used at the trial suggest that numbers were altered to produce a more favorable picture. Some historians have quite readily accepted that exaggerations took place in order to prevent [sic: read: present] an impressive picture of the Kommandos’ activities.”

German mainstream historian Dr. Peter Longerich comments on the possible exaggeration of Jews killed in the Einsatzgruppen reports:[18]

“Regarding the number of victims, it cannot be excluded that the accounting-style accuracy with which the Event Reports were written convey a false impression; it is possible that the exact number of people killed during the massacres was not recorded, and it seems conceivable that the figures given are exaggerated in order to polish the ‘success record.’”

Franz Walter Stahlecker, in a communication dated August 6, 1941, indicated that Soviet Jews were targeted not because they were Jews, but because they were collectively suspected of supporting Bolshevism. Stahlecker, who was the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, did not follow a policy of killing Jews simply because they were Jews.[19] Also, as we will see in the section on Aktion 1005, most dead Jewish bodies mentioned in the Einsatzgruppen reports have never been found.

Matt Cockerill writes on page two:

“By 1 December 1941, the SD Einsatzkommando III Karl Jäger reported that Einsatzgruppe A had killed all Jews in Lithuania, except working Jews and their families:

I confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania: There are no more Jewish in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families. I wanted to eliminate the working Jews and their families as well, but the Civil Administration and the Wehrmacht attacked me most sharply and issued a prohibition against having these Jews and their families shot.

Lithuania was no anomaly. The Einsatzgruppen reports show a consistent pattern of the Germans massacring the vast majority of Jews—men, women, and children—in the German-occupied USSR.”

My Response

The Jäger Report was not presented as evidence at the IMT even though a copy of this report fell into the hands of the Soviet Union during their reconquest of Lithuania in 1944. The Soviets maintained silence about the Jäger Report until 1963, when they delivered this unique document to an authority of the Federal Republic of Germany. The document was then thoroughly examined and declared genuine.[20]

Unlike many SS officers, Jäger after the war did not flee abroad, nor did he conceal himself under a false name. Jäger lived undisturbed in Heidelberg, Germany until his arrest on April 10, 1959. He was interrogated for approximately 23 hours after his arrest, signing typewritten statements consisting of 29 sheets. Jäger was found hanged in his cell during the night of June 21-22, 1959.[21]

Since the Soviets only made the Jäger Report available to the German authorities four years after Jäger’s death, the Germans were not able to interrogate Jäger about his report. During his interrogations, Jäger stated that 8-14 days before the start of the war against the Soviet Union, he attended the Pretzsch meeting. Jäger recalled with certainty:[22]

“that nothing was said about shootings of Jews. Heydrich’s address in Berlin, in which he declared that the Jews were to be shot in the event of a war with Russia, was not repeated. Nor was it said that a strict order had been given to shoot the Jews in the East. I consider it completely out of the question that a written order would have arrived from any agency to shoot Jews. I myself have certainly never seen such an order, not even later in Kaunas.”

The authenticity of the Jäger Report is highly questionable. This document is a fourth carbon copy of an original that has never been found. According to German standard bureaucratic practice, the author of the document should appear on page one, at the upper left, and the addressee should appear underneath, which is clearly missing in this document.[23]

It is also inconceivable that the Soviets would have refrained from presenting the Jäger Report at the IMT if they thought it was genuine. As early as December 1942, the Soviets had issued a report stating that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews. Even at Nuremberg, in the hearings of February 18, 1946, the Soviet prosecutors explicitly stated that the Germans had committed terrible massacres and pogroms against the Jews. However, the Soviets at the IMT did not think the Jäger Report was credible enough to support their claims.[24]

The most important test of the reliability of the Jäger Report is whether there is any documentary or physical proof of the burial of more than 137,000 bodies in the locations mentioned in the report. Such proof does not exist. As we will discuss later, the invented Aktion 1005 does not explain why the 137,000 Jewish bodies do not exist in the locations mentioned in the Jäger Report.[25]

Matt Cockerill writes on pages 39-41:

“In his rebuttal, Thomas challenged me to corroborate in specific detail my estimate of nearly 2,000,000 Jewish victims of mass shootings, as well as my overall estimate of over 5,000,000 Jewish Holocaust victims. This appendix addresses his challenge. The starting point for data on mass shooting victims is Richard Korherr’s famous report, which indicates that 633,000 Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union between June 1941 and summer 1942. To get the full figure of Jews shot by the Germans between June 1941 and autumn 1942, we have to not only take into account Korherr’s figure, but also numerous other shootings not claimed by the Einsatzgruppen (nor listed in the headlines of the Einsatzgruppen Reports). I have designed the following table, which lists and adds up the victims of such mass shootings…

The mass shootings enumerated in my chart add up to 447,000. By adding this figure Korherr’s 633,000 figure to the mass shootings mentioned above, we increase our total to about 1,080,000. And this is just through summer 1942. To our figure of 1,080,000 must be added about 325,000 Jews listed as shot by the SSPF16 between September and December 1942, in a report sent by Himmler to Hitler. (Himmler describes 363,211 executed Jews in the report, but tens of thousands of these—notably the Jews of Bialystok—were killed by gassing in Treblinka II, not by bullets.) Now we are at about 1.405 million. The next step is to add Jewish fatalities listed on 30 July 1943 Katzmann Report. This report describes the murder of 434,000 Jews in Galicia (Poland), between July 1941 and July 1943; about 180,000 of these Jews were shot by the SSPF, while about 250,000 were deported to Belzec and gassed. At the time Katzmann wrote his report, 21,000 Jews were still alive in Galicia. These Jews were shot by the end of November 1943. So, we add 21,000 to the 180,000 shooting victims mentioned in the Katzmann report, to confirm a figure of about 201,000 Galician Jews shot to death. This should be added to our previous figure of 1.405 million. Our total figure of Jewish deaths from mass shooting has risen to about 1.606 million. To this we now add the victims of mass shootings at the camps. The most notorious of these was Operation Harvest Festival (3-4 November 1943), in which about 43,000 Jews were shot by the SS and the Ordnungspolizei. Another major camp in which shootings took place was Maly Trostenets. According to Yad Vashem, most of the camp’s 65,000 Jewish victims were shot.

After taking into account these and other mass shootings at camps, our total figure of shooting deaths approximates 1.7 million. Now, we can account for the Jews who were shot in or near ghettos. I do not have the space here to conduct a chapter-and-verse calculation for all these victims. Suffice it to say that many tens of thousands of Jews were shot during the liquidation of ghettos—such as in Głogów Małopolski (5,000 in 1942), Majdan Tatarski (3,800 in April 1942), Krakow (2,000 on March 13-16 1943), and Warsaw (7,000 on 16 May 1943). Many tens of thousands more were also shot before the ghetto liquidations, in the course of police actions, reprisals (especially after ghetto uprisings), deportations to death camps, and other killing operations. Our final count can be topped off by adding the tens of thousands of Jews shot in Yugoslavia by the Ustaše and the Germans between 1941 and 1944; many tens of thousands more shot by the Romanians after summer 1942;20 as well as the victims of scattered German shooting actions in 1943 and 1944. Having accounted for all of the various types of mass shootings, and scrupulously avoided double-counting, we have arrived at a final mass-shooting death toll of almost two million.”

My Response

Since the bodies of the alleged almost 2 million murdered Jews have not been found, the official Holocaust historiography claims that they were cremated in what is called Aktion 1005. An article in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust defines this operation:[26]

“Operation 1005, code name for a large-scale activity that aimed to obliterate the traces of the murder of millions of human beings by the Nazis in occupied Europe.”

It is unrealistic to assume that Aktion 1005 succeeded and the Germans exhumed and burned almost 2 million bodies. This would mean that within a period of about 13 months, the Germans had to have emptied thousands of graves in a territory of more than 1.2 million square kilometers–all without leaving behind any material or documentary traces. The mass exhumation of such a large number of bodies in such a short period of time is quite impossible.[27]

Furthermore, we know that no Soviet planes discovered and photographed the burning bodies, because otherwise the Soviets would have exploited the photographs for propaganda purposes. The thousands of pyres burning through the night would have been photographed by the Soviets if such mass exhumations had taken place.[28]

Holocaust historian Yitzak Arad attempts to explain away these problems by stating that Aktion 1005 was a failure:[29]

“Aktion 1005 was a highly classified operation. Orders and reports were given and received verbally, and no German documents were saved to provide evidence. The SS, which was responsible for the operation, did everything in its power to prevent a leak of information on the site…

There is no way of knowing how many corpses were cremated in the course of the operation—hundreds of thousands, certainly, possibly even millions. But millions of corpses remained in the pits in which they had been buried. This tangible evidence—the corpses of millions of Jews and non-Jews, murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the occupied Soviet territories—remained for posterity. In its main objective—destroying the evidence of mass murder—Aktion 1005 failed.”

The problem with Arad’s explanation is that neither the Soviets nor anyone else have found the mass graves in which large numbers of Jews were supposedly buried in the Soviet Union. Germar Rudolf writes:[30]

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, numerous mass graves, containing altogether hundreds of thousands of bodies of victims of the Soviets, were discovered, excavated, and investigated. Not only was the number of victims determined, but in many cases the specific cause of death as well. In the same regions where many of these mass graves were found, one million Jews are said to have been shot by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet no such grave has ever been reported found, let alone dug and investigated, in the more than half a century during which these areas have been controlled by the USSR and its successor states.”

Thus, the undocumented and imaginary Aktion 1005 provides no evidence of a German program of genocide against Europe’s Jews. Matt’s estimate of “a final mass-shooting death toll of almost two million” Jews is certainly an exaggeration. If almost 2 million Jews had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and other German units, the mass graves of these dead Jews would have long ago been found.

Babi Yar

The unreliability of the Einsatzgruppen reports is well-illustrated by the Babi Yar massacre, which is probably the best known of the alleged Einsatzgruppen atrocities. I will discuss this alleged massacre at length to illustrate the unreliability of the Einsatzgruppen reports and the alleged Holocaust by bullets.

The Babi Yar massacre supposedly occurred in a large ravine outside of Kiev in the Ukraine. The allegation is that Einsatzgruppen C rounded up 33,771 Jews in Kiev and shot all of them over the period of September 29-30, 1941.[31] German Reserve Police Battalion 45 and Police Battalion 303 are also said to have assisted in this operation.[32] We will examine in this section the truth of these allegations.

The figure of 33,771 Jews murdered at Babi Yar comes from Einsatzgruppen Event Report 106 of October 7, 1941.[33] As previously stated, it is strikingly odd that the Germans let copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports fall into the hands of the Allies. They could have easily burned these few stacks of incriminating papers before the Allies conquered Germany.[34] The authenticity of the Einsatzgruppen reports has also been questioned because, like so much other “evidence” of Nazi atrocities, the documents emerged from the Soviet occupation zone.[35]

The Einsatzgruppen reports that have been produced are copies which often show clear signs of postwar additions, inaccurate and inflated figures, and rare signatures which appear on non-incriminating pages. Such reports would not constitute valid proof to historians or a legitimate court of law.[36] It is also surprising that the alleged mass murder at Babi Yar took place almost four months prior to the Wannsee Conference, where the mass killing of Jews was allegedly first planned.[37]

The very few figures given in Event Report 106 are provable fabrications. This report claims that there were about 300,000 Jews in Kiev at the time the report was made. The population of Kiev at the time of the report, however, had shrunk from 850,000 or more persons to about 305,000 due to evacuations. So, if there had still been 300,000 Jews in Kiev on October 7, 1941, there would have been practically no one in Kiev who was not Jewish. The German experts who made the Einsatzgruppen reports almost certainly would not have made such a major mistake in their report.[38]

Today there are no remains of the tens of thousands of Jews allegedly murdered by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar. The official Holocaust story claims that the Nazis sent a special team back to the site in 1943 to exhume and burn the bodies.[39]

Jewish eyewitness Vladimir K. Davidov is apparently the only survivor who claimed to have participated in the cremation of bodies at Babi Yar. Davidov stated that on August 18, 1943, he and 99 other prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. He claimed that 70,000 bodies had been buried in the mass graves of Babi Yar. Davidov said that he and about 35 to 40 other prisoners escaped their own murder during the night of September 29, 1943. About 10 of his comrades were killed during this escape.[40]

According to Davidov, the prisoners exhumed the dead bodies and later burned them on ovens, which consisted of granite blocks with train rails laid upon them. A layer of wood was piled on top of these ovens with the dead bodies piled on top of the wood. This resulted in an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 meters high. According to Davidov, there was only a single oven in the beginning, but later 75 ovens were built.[41]

Davidov said that the cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar was finished on September 25 or 26, 1943. The German Luftwaffe took an aerial photograph of the area around Babi Yar on September 26, 1943.[42] John C. Ball, a Canadian mineral exploration geologist with experience interpreting air photos, has published a photograph of the Babi Yar ravine with the following commentary:[43]

“Photo 2—September 26^th, 1943:

This photo was taken one week after the end of the supposed mass cremations in the ravine. If 33,000 people were exhumed and burned evidence of vehicle and foot traffic to supply fuel should be evident in the area where the Jewish cemetery meets Babi Yar ravine, however there is no evidence of traffic either on the end of the narrow road that proceeds to the ravine from the end of Melnik Street, or on the grass and shrubbery or on the sides of the cemetery.”

Ball writes regarding an enlarged section of the same photograph:[44]

“An enlargement reveals no evidence that 325 people were working in the ravine finishing the cremation of 33,000 bodies just one week earlier, for many truckloads of fuel would have had to be brought in, and there are no scars from vehicle traffic either on the grass and shrubs at the side of the Jewish cemetery or in the ravine where the bodies were supposedly burned.

1943 air photos of Babi Yar ravine and the adjoining Jewish cemetery in Kiev reveal that neither the soil nor the vegetation is disturbed as would be expected if materials and fuel had been transported one week earlier to hundreds of workers who had dug up and burned tens of thousands of bodies in one month.”

Ball’s findings are extremely valuable since, according to Davidov, the cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar was completed on the same day or the day before the photo of September 26, 1943 was taken. This would have left behind clear evidence from the cremation of the bodies that would have shown on the photo. Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf write:[45]

“[T]he cremation of 33,771 bodies would have required approximately 4,500 tons of firewood and approximately 430 tons of wood ashes and about 190 tons of human ashes would have been generated by the process. Moreover, several dozen tons of granite (gravestones and monuments) would have had to have been transported from the Jewish cemetery to Babi Yar and back again in order to construct the support for the 75 ‘ovens.’ If the claims put forward about Babi Yar were true, all of this would have had to leave behind unmistakable traces on the air photo of September 26, 1943.”

If 33,771 Jews had been shot at Babi Yar, large numbers of rifle bullets would also have remained at the site. To shoot people with rifles, one needs at least twice as many bullets as there are people to be shot. Since the lead core of bullets survive practically forever, finding the remains of these bullets would have been an easy matter. However, these bullets have not been found.[46]

No one ever conducted a detailed forensic investigation to confirm the witness statements and allegations at Babi Yar. Why was no detailed forensic investigation ever conducted at Babi Yar? The only reasonable answer is that the mass shootings of Jews at Babi Yar never took place. Since there is no material evidence for the mass shootings and cremation of the bodies at Babi Yar, and since the photograph of September 26, 1943 disproves these allegations, Davidov’s eyewitness testimony is clearly inaccurate.[47]

Some Jewish survivors and authors have described the massacre at Babi Yar. Elie Wiesel wrote in one of his books that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar:[48]

“Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses.”

Wiesel later repeated this claim with some embellishment:[49]

“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”

This story lacks all credibility.

A. Anatoli Kuznetsov wrote a novel titled Babi Yar to document the alleged Babi Yar massacre. The author was born in Kiev on August 18, 1929.[50] Thus, he was only 12 years old when the alleged massacre of Jews at Babi Yar took place. This is a relatively young age and tends to lessen his credibility.
Kuznetsov wrote:[51]

“On September 29^th, 1941, for example, every single eye-witness of what happened in Babi Yar was executed, but the people of Kurenyovka knew all about it an hour after the first shots had been fired.”

So, Kuznetsov says that he knows of no living eyewitnesses to the massacre of some 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar. Kuznetsov thus documents the alleged atrocity at Babi Yar with almost exclusively hearsay evidence.

Dina Mironovna Pronicheva was a Jewess who says she survived the alleged massacre at Babi Yar. She is the only person believed to have fallen into the ravine unwounded and feigned death. Assuming various non-Jewish identities, she survived the German occupation of the Soviet Union during World War II. While nobody seems to have interviewed Pronicheva with a tape recorder, there are 12 written records of her testimony dating back to the 1940s. These records differ in substance, and most of the texts fail to meet the standards of contemporary oral history interviews.[52]

Despite the inconsistencies in her testimony, historian Karel C. Berkhoff writes that historians of the alleged Babi Yar massacre should use Pronicheva’s and other testimonies much more extensively. Berkhoff writes:[53]

“The fact remains that only very few sources come as close as Pronicheva’s testimonies do to the horrendous details of Kiev’s Jewish Holocaust.”

Berkhoff and other historians fail to acknowledge the extreme disparity in the eyewitness testimonies regarding the events at Babi Yar. For example, Pronicheva’s accounts emphasize guns and rifles as the murder weapons. Other eyewitness accounts have included clubs, rocks, rifle butts, tanks, mines, hand grenades, gas vans, bayonets, knives, burial alive, drowning, injections, and electric shock as the murder weapons at Babi Yar. Herbet Tiedemann asked:[54]

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

Jürgen Graf writes concerning the contradictory testimony of witnesses at Babi Yar:[55]

“According to the established version of the facts, these 33,711 Jews were shot and their bodies thrown into the ravine of Babi Yar on 29 September 1941. But the first witnesses told completely different stories: The massacre was perpetuated in a graveyard, or near a graveyard, or in a forest, or in the very city of Kiev, or on the shores of the Dnieper. As to the murder weapons, the early witnesses spoke of rifles, or machine guns, or submachine guns, or hand grenades, or bayonets, or knives; some witnesses claimed that the victims had been put to death via lethal injections whereas others asserted that they had been drowned in the Dnieper, or buried alive, or killed by means of electric current, or squashed by tanks, or driven into minefields, or that their skulls had been crushed with rocks, or that they had been murdered in gas vans.”

Conclusion

Witness testimonies of the alleged Babi Yar massacre have been given full credence by historians even though these testimonies contradict each other and claim the most ridiculous impossibilities. No one ever tried to secure any physical evidence in order to prove the murders. The Soviets after the end of the war turned the ravine of Babi Yar into a municipal garbage dump, and later into a garbage incineration site. It is also incomprehensible that the Soviets intended to build a sports facility over this site of the alleged mass murder of 33,771 Jews.[56]

The air photo taken of the ravine of Babi Yar on September 26, 1943 shows a placid and peaceful valley. Neither the vegetation nor the topography has been disturbed by human intervention. There are no burning sites, no smoke, no excavations, no fuel depots, and no access roads for the transport of humans or fuel. We can conclude with certainty from this photo that no part of Babi Yar was subjected to topographical changes of any magnitude right up to the Soviet reoccupation of the area. Hence, the mass graves and mass cremations attested to by witnesses at Babi Yar did not take place.[57]

Endnotes