Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments (ревізіонізм голокосту) Read online

  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%, Љitomir 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 20th 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?

  7. 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?

  8. 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!