Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments

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:

and farther down:

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:

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?