Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments

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]

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]

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

• 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!

• 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?

9. Novelist Guido Knopp[66] writes in the left-hand column of page 132 of his book:

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

• 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?

10. Professor Dr. Wolfgang Benz:[67] In the ravine

• Shooting in the neck was the well-known murder method of choice for the GPU, NKVD, KGB, and Stasi!

11. 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.

12. N. F. Petrenko and N. T. Gorbacheva testified:[70]

• Evidence? Specifics re. place, date, etc.?

13. In C. Clarke's book we read:[72]

• 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?

14. In her book, published in 1987 in Israel, Leni Yahil wrote:[73]

• 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?

15. 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]

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]

16. 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]

• Where does he get his figure of 150,000 murdered?

17. Vladimir Posner, an American-born Jewish NKVD collaborator, claimed that 200,000 were murdered.[82]

• Evidence?

18. 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?

19. 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.

20. 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?

21. 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?

22. The 1955 and 1971 editions of the Ukrainian encyclopedias are unaware of Babi Yar.[89],[90]

23. 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.

24. 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?

25. 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]

26. 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:

• 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?