The Babi Yar Bamboozle

by Eric Martinson

I was recently reading a Zionist controlled newspaper when I noticed an article written by Susan B. Glasser. It described Pope John Paul's visit to Babi Yar in the Ukraine. Babi Yar is the site where, according to the Communist, Talmudic Jews, Zionists and Stalinists, (what's the difference?) that an elite German SS unit allegedly slaughtered between 33,000 and 200,000 (depending on with account you read) Jews and associates. There the pope was pictured, intently listening to some rabbi named Yaakov Dov Bleich. Bleich was apparently showing JP a Jewish "memorial".

The article caused me to recall seeing aerial photographic evidence in my reading on the so-called Jewish Holocaust. Those photographs clearly demonstrate that what the Talmudic Jews claim happened at Babi Yar was false and could not possibly have occurred, especially given the time frame that it supposedly happened.

Basically, the claim is that when the Germans took the city of Kiev, they rounded up the Jews by telling them to report to a specific location. They then supposedly transported or escorted them to Babi Yar, which was located in the countryside northwest of the city. Once at Babi Yar, the Germans purportedly shot every one of them, then blasted the area and buried them under the debris.

The claim does not end there. The Jews also contend that while in full retreat from Stalin's Red Army, the Germans dug all those bodies up and cremated them in open pits. The cremations allegedly ended on September 28, 1943, when the actual battle line crossed the area.

So I decided to do some research. I opened a reference volume concerning the subject [1], and sure enough, there was an aerial photo of Babi Yar taken September 26, 1943. The photo is accompanied by a needle-sharp blowup of the spot where the massacre, burial, exhumation, and cremation had purportedly taken place.

The topography of the land is undisturbed in any way. There are certainly no blasting sites, pits, transport roads, smoke or other evidence of burning fuel of any kind, and there is no excavation material to be found. The vegetation is absolutely serene.

Although aerial photography conclusively exposes the untruthfulness of the Babi Yar claim, the accounts of the so-called eyewitnesses also unveil it as a farce. Besides having a section dedicated to aerial photography, this particular volume contained a separate section exclusively devoted to critical questions concerning Babi Yar. That section, written by Herbert Tiedemann, contained a plethora of information.

Briefly, the background here is that Kiev was a city of just under one million until the German offensive arrived in Russia. Babi Yar translated means "Ravine of the Old Women". Authentically, it was a fissured area made up of branching erosion channels, which at that time were from 0 -150 feet in depth and 30 - 3000 feet across, which means that, in reality, it was not a ravine at all. The killings supposedly occurred on September 29 and 30, 1941, but the cremations of the bodies did not take place until 1943.

The Germans took Kiev on September 19, 1941, but that was not the end of chaos in the city. There remained heavy partisan activity. This is demonstrated by the fact that even the 6th Army's headquarters, located downtown, were blown up on the 24th. There were also enormous quantities of mines readied for detonation, left behind by the Soviets.

Much of the downtown area was in flames as of the 25th, leaving approximately fifty thousand homeless, and hundreds of German firefighters dead. It is against this backdrop that SS troops supposedly took time to wipe out 100,000 or so civilians. The Zionist spindoctors don't tell us why the Germans would be sacrificing the lives of their own men fighting fires to save people they were going to execute in a few days.

First and foremost, the alleged order for mass exterminations, according to the Nuremberg show trial Doc. NG2586e, was supposedly issued at the "Wannsee Conference" on January 20, 1942. Despite the fact that no one has ever produced this "order", or the plans for the implementation of the details for the supposed extermination program, according to these Nuremberg records, no extermination had even begun until March of 1942.

Why there would be a mass murder of the purported Babi Yar dimensions several months before the alleged announcement that there was to be exterminations of Jews has never been explained. There hasn't even been any evidence or indication as to whose orders precipitated these tens of thousands of pretended murders at Babi Yar.

One must remember that the Waffen SS has been acknowledged verily by many of their enemies to be the finest fighting force ever. Even in defeat, their kill ratio on the Eastern Front against a better equipped and numerically superior Red Army has never been matched.

The superior military discipline of the SS is beyond question in virtually any circle. Such discipline was followed in a system of orders, and the SS troops were renowned for meticulously adhering to their orders. Knowing this, it is absolutely bewildering how anyone could believe that they could have carried out a random massacre at what would have had to have been on the regimental or divisional level, and without an order.

Carrying out such an act is all the more puzzling since the SS justice system was also renowned for swiftly disciplining its members for cruel acts toward civilians or even inmates. The execution of Buchenwald Camp Commandant Koch was a prime example of this.

Moreover, considering the investigative techniques available today, shooting between 33,000 and 200,000 people within two days and removing all traces is clearly impossible. Such a deed would, of course, have been completely out of the question in the chaotic conditions existing immediately after such a battle as the one at Kiev. The exhumation of the same amount of corpses for open cremation two years later in the face of the menacing advance of the Soviet forces is even more preposterous. Undoubtedly, the cremation story was created to explain away the lack of any physical evidence, including bodies. What they fail to mention, however, is that there should still be evidence of such a mass exhumation and cremation.

It should also be noted that not a soul ever attempted to procure any physical evidence of this supposed slaughter. On the contrary, the post-war Soviets placed a garbage dump on the area of Babi Yar, and then turned this location of "unspeakable atrocities" into a trash incineration site. The "evidence" of Babi Yar consists of nothing more than contradictory allegations by "witnesses" who were living under Joe Stalin's regime when they made the "accusations". The absolute absurdity of these statements can be demonstrated with a few brief examples.

According to holohoaxers, the Jews of Kiev were informed by two thousand placards posted throughout the city the day before on September 28, 1941. These placards were supposedly printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German. The translation of the German text allegedly read:

"All Jews of Kiev are to gather until 8 o'clock Monday, September 29, 1941, at the corner of Melnik and Dokteriwski streets (at the cemeteries). Bring your papers, money, and valuables, also warm clothing etc.

"Anyone failing to comply with this order, and found elsewhere, will be shot.

"Anyone breaking into vacant Jewish homes or appropriating items found from the same will be shot." (The Russian text specifies 8 A.M.) [2]

One question that jumps right off the page is, How were 33,000 to 200,000 Jews assembled by 8 o'clock the next morning at a single street corner with all of their belongings? Some must have had access to automobiles, or they had carts, wagons, and possibly animals. These things would constitute a part of their valuables, and would be needed for the transport.

The hoaxers don't inform us how such a phenomenal gathering and possible traffic jam was scheduled. When a mass of people converge on a location from everywhere, they are all "elsewhere", once the word gets around that there is no room on the corner.

When the Germans captured Kiev, they invited a number of foreign correspondents to inspect the city. The holohoaxers fail to explain just how not a single one of these correspondents saw or ever even heard about any of these two thousand placards supposedly plastered throughout the town. Moreover, they refuse to relate how the Germans posted these placards in a sniper infested urban area, nor do they clarify to anyone how the two thousand placards were printed in a city with no electrical power.

The word used to refer to Jews in the Russian text is "schidy". This is pejorative Russian gutter jargon, analogous to a poster in English referring to German Americans as "Krauts", or Italian Americans as "Dagos". The Jew hoaxers want prospective hoaxees to believe that the Germans attempted to lure the Jews to a certain location by insulting them.

Then they also insist that the Jews were so vacuous that they still showed up regardless. In addition to the name calling in the purported placard, there is of course the remaining defect that the placards cited no issuing authority.

Although the accounts of these "witnesses" blatantly contradict one another, they are all consistent in one department - their incredibility. One of these so-called witnesses named Dimitri Orlow claims:

The execution

"An entire operation with desks had been set up in an open area. The crowd waiting at the barriers erected by the Germans at the end of the street could not see the desks. Thirty to forty persons at a time were separated from the crowd and led under armed guard for 'registration'. Documents and valuables were taken away. The documents were immediately thrown to the ground, and witnesses have testified that the square was covered with a thick layer of discarded papers, torn passports, union identification cards. Then Germans forced everyone to strip naked: girls, women, children, old men … Their clothing was gathered up and carefully folded. Rings were ripped from the fingers of naked men and women, and these doomed people were forced to stand at the edge of a deep ravine, where the executioners shot them at point blank range. The bodies fell over the cliff, and small children were thrown in alive. Many went insane when they reached the place of execution." [3]

This hoaxer wants us to believe the Germans set up such an operation "in an open area" in the fire ravaged, mine laden, sniper infested city of Kiev. He conveniently fails to provide any location or landmarks. Soviet citizens at the time did not even carry passports and it is inscrutable why people waiting at the "barriers" didn't hear all this gunfire and attempt to skedaddle. It is likewise bewildering, how these 'barriers" prevented folks from seeing desks "set up in an open area".

There should have been thousands of witnesses to an incident of such an alleged magnitude, particularly since the route from this "corner" to Babi Yar wound through a heavily populated urban area.

By the way, the Talmudic Jews' own sources state that practically all Jews except the elderly had been evacuated from Kiev on time. [4] Moreover, this is stating that these crack SS troops busied themselves with forcing women, children and old men, to strip while brutally ripping rings from victims fingers, only to sit around daintily folding and pat-creasing the clothing.

I hope Orlow was passing out wrenches with that statement, because this "witness" obviously thinks everyone's head screws on and off. And then there is the question, How did he see all this himself? He claims to have seen it all from a cable factory, but gives no details concerning the location of such a factory near Babi Yar. Certainly, none of the aerial photos show anything of that nature anywhere near Babi Yar.

Clamp down on your neck bolts, because here is a trophy tale from Yelena Borodansky-Knysh:

"It was already dark … They took our clothing … and led us about fifty meters away, where they took our documents, money, rings, earrings. They wanted to remove the gold teeth of one old man, and he tried to resist … At about midnight the command was given in German for us to line up … A second later bodies started falling on me … We were sandwiched between bodies … A German soldier was checking with a bayonet to make sure no one was still alive. By chance he was standing on me, so the bayonet blow passed me … I freed myself, got up, and took my unconscious daughter in my arms. I walked along ravines … Crawling over ravines I made my way to the village of Babi Yar." [5]

I've often heard it said that a Zionist Jew will say anything for money. They have certainly been able to fleece the German people for billions of dollars with ludicrous fairy tales such as this. Nevertheless, this Jewess doesn't explain how, if she was covered with bodies, the German could have stood on her. There is no explanation how he also missed her daughter. She provides no details as to how she could free herself from under all those bodies, get up, and then with her daughter in her arms, just waltz away from a secured area crawling with ferocious executioners.

As a reminder, Babi Yar is a system of erosion channels. It is not exactly a ravine and there certainly was no village of Babi Yar. Notice that the procedure described by this hoaxer is completely contradictory, even the opposite, when compared to the previous hoaxer's statement. Hoaxer Orlow said that the documents, etc. were taken away immediately and then they were stripped, while hoaxer Knysh claims the reverse.

Maybe the Germans changed the process every half hour because they were in a contest to see how much time they could waste on the front? Maybe they changed their operating procedure several times because they had become so bored with plain old bland forms of mass murder? Or is it that lies are being fabricated?

Furthermore, Yelena Borodansky-Knysh says that her experiences at Babi Yar were after dark. I thought it was 8 A.M.? I must admit that Talmudists are crazy, often stupid, but I believe they know the difference in 'first thing in the morning' and midnight.

Once again, if they were at the street corner at 8 A.M., thousands of Ukrainians would have been witnesses. They would have seen the gigantic parade of Jews passing by on the way to the "strip site" in the countryside. No such witnesses ever came forward, and remember, not one of those foreign correspondents saw or had heard of such a caravan of marching Jews.

In case you are wondering just exactly how conspicuous this formation would have been, let's think for a moment - If, for example, 100,000 people were marched in a reasonably tight single file formation, and a stride is approximately three feet, in order to keep them from falling all over the top of each other, let's say there was one person walking in a four foot space; that's four feet times 100,000, which equals 400,000 feet. Divide that by a mile, or 5,280 feet, and we can derive that the line would go on for 75.8 miles!

Now don't you think that somebody would notice something like that?

Here is a quickie account from yet another Babi Yar bamboozler named "Aloshin":

"German troops … ordered them into the ravine, where they were directed to give up their valuables. Part of their clothing also was removed. Then … they were placed on a platform, machine gunned and thrown into the ravine." [6]

Well, blow me down, and set me back up again! These elite SS troops sure come up with some creative ways of wasting precious time in the combat zone. Here, they supposedly order all of the Jews into "the ravine", to take their valuables, and then for some unknown senseless reason, partially strip them. Then they hike all of these half naked Jews back out of the ravine, and they themselves have to go back down into the ravine to retrieve these "valuables" and haul them back out. Then they place them on a platform constructed solely for this purpose - to shoot them down so they can throw them in the ravine. They have to clean the platform off so that they can do it again with the next group. Consider this, in order to complete this task in a two day period, working around the clock, the Germans would only have five minutes to complete the entire procedure using groups of one hundred. 8 A.M. on the 29th to 12 midnight on the 30th is forty hours. If there were twelve hundred shot per hour times forty hours, that would equal only 48,000. That would be a group of one hundred every five minutes nonstop. If the shootings went on a full 48 hours, that would equal 57,600 deaths. Come on, people, it would take at least five minutes to assemble one hundred people in the ravine, and that is assuming that everyone was cooperating.

Back to the platform, Who built this platform? Where is it located? A rather large platform is needed to hold 100 people standing upright, and still a larger one to hold them horizontally, but there is no clue as to when, how, or by whom, this platform was built.

There is also one undeniable fact which all of these witnesses seem to conveniently forget: Winter came early in 1941. The weather in Kiev on September 29,1941, was heavy rain, turning the roads into mush and making this whole affair all the more impossible. On the 30th, it rained and snowed, making conditions even worse.

The following quote is from the "son-in-law" of Chaim Shapiro:

"At the cemetery the Jews were forced to undress. Fifty six thousand Jews were slaughtered. Those who did not die instantly were buried alive…on the tenth day [after the alleged shooting] we were driven to Lukianova [Babi Yar] ravine. We stood there panic stricken. From beneath the freshly strewn earth streamed rivers of blood, the blood of 56,000 murdered Jews. It cried to us from under the earth. My hair turned gray that morning." [7]

For a week and a half, rivers I tell you! There are several more quotes, each is as contradictory and ridiculous as blood that would not dry or clot, but the above is typical and will suffice to demonstrate the tale of Babi Yar to be nothing more than a monumental mendacity.

In returning to the topic of the aerial photos, some basic facts need to be related in order to establish just how obvious a mass grave accommodating the number of victims claimed for Babi Yar would be from the air.

The mass graves created for the Soviet massacre and burial of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn (a crime that for fifty years was blamed on the Germans), as well as the graves used to accommodate the bodies of some 100,000 innocent residents, including children, of Hamburg, Germany, that were slaughtered by Allied bombing, have proven that it takes about a one acre area of excavation material to bury roughly 10,000 bodies.

Babi Yar would have needed a minimum of three and one half acres for 33,000 bodies, and as much as twenty acres for 200,000 bodies. There is, therefore, no possibility that the precision aerial photos available from the period in question would not show such a disturbance in the soil.

Even if the mass grave's depth is increased to sixteen feet, 50,000 bodies would take up about one and a half acres. Approximately 1,600,000 cubic feet of soil would need to be excavated. This would be a major excavation project even for today's modern heavy equipment. Any claim that it was done in 1941, and once again in 1943 under battle conditions, is pure fantasy. This does not even address the question, Where was this equipment obtained on a battle-weary front?

The insanity of the Babi Yar fable is evidenced by additional realities. For instance, in order to "machine gun" people, at least, and I emphasize at least, twice as many bullets as the given number of people would be needed. If we round the number of the supposed victims to the low end of the spectrum and say 50,000, then the Germans would have needed a minimum of 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and probably a good deal more.

This ammunition would weigh about 2,800 pounds. Lead is essentially an inert substance which survives practically forever in the soil. So those bullets would still be easy enough to locate for anyone interested. This is to say nothing of the Germans sacrificing a ton and a half of precious ammo directly behind a deadly front line.

Next there is the matter of the fuel needed for cremation of the bodies, which the bizarre and bamboozling yarn says took place while the Germans were in full retreat two years after these "murders". For only partial cremation, 100,000 bodies would require approximately twenty-five million pounds of firewood. Now folks, that is a 3' by 3' pile which would be seventeen miles long.

For anyone to cut and haul that amount of firewood in the face of an advancing Soviet Army notorious for torturing prisoners would be sheer stupidity, to say the least, and that is even if all these trees could be located.

And another thing, anyone who has ever built a fire since the beginning of time knows that freshly cut wood doesn't burn well. It needs to be dried, or "cured" in order to burn efficiently. Attempting to transport that much usable wood under the conditions surrounding a military retreat is utter insanity.

Moreover, a full regiment would be necessary for carrying corpses to the cremation site and then disposing of the remains. Yet not one single German soldier or German veteran, aside from those who were interrogated, provided any confessions, and these "confessions" came only after being brutally tortured by Uncle Joe's cutthroats; no one has ever mentioned or validated this "operation".

Yet another point that should raise serious suspicions concerning this Zionistic Jewish myth is in relation to the Jewish population figures for Kiev at the time. The Jewish population of Kiev in 1931 was 140,256.

Because of heavy emigration in the 1930's to other areas of the Soviet Union, the Jewish population of the Ukraine dropped considerably prior to 1941. There must have been much less than that 140,000 in Kiev during the time frame in question.

If these were all massacred as the bamboozlers urge, Why were there, according to G. Reitlinger [8], (who is incidentally an ultimate hoaxer), 100,000 Jews back in Kiev again by 1946, at a time when immigration of the evacuees and deportees from Siberia had only begun? Additionally, by 1959, there were more Jews in Kiev than there had been in the 1930's. This is one more magical mystery that the holohoaxers expect everyone to just overlook in swallowing the Babi Yar Bamboozle.

After reviewing the material concerning this aspect of the fabled, so-called Holocaust, I began to reflect on the reality of the papal visit. After all, if a man in my position is able to lay his hands on material that not only casts doubt on, but conclusively shows the falsehood of Babi Yar, then how can somebody like John Paul, at the helm of an enterprise worth hundreds of billions of dollars, who has access to some of the greatest religious and historical documents in the world, not be able to figure out the lies and come to the same logical conclusion about not only Babi Yar, but the whole phony Holocaust scheme in general?

The only answer is the obvious answer. John Paul is not a buffoon; he knows exactly what he is doing. This "pope" is a Talmudic Jewish fellow-traveler, or he would not give such aggressive support to worldwide Jewry; the Catholic religion is run by Talmudists, because the leadership supports this sell-out Pope; they support the entire Zionist Jew-assisting structure, even if only discursively, by giving assent to the support of the lying, blasphemous, God-hating, Talmudic, Zionist, Communist Jews.

Pope Pius XII, who was the pope during World War II, had an intelligence network with literally thousands of sources scattered in every corner of Europe during the entire war. [9] He was well aware that the Zionist claim of the Germans having an extermination policy against the Jews was a complete farce. For this simple reason he refused to endorse the Jewish lies and be a part of or take part in their planned phony Holohoax.

As someone who was born and raised Catholic, and who attended Catholic grade school, as well as Catholic high school, I can honestly say that, luckily, I never paid the pope much attention.

It does not matter whether he is a pawn in a Zionist game, or if he is using the Jews, or if they are all exploiting each other. The end result is all the same. This "pontiff" is expediently pacifying the world Zionist community because he is caught up in their globalistic ambitions. He understands their monopoly of the press and media. He understands the Jewish monetary and commercial influence on his organization's financial holdings.

This is a pope who, in addition to publicly celebrating Hanukkah, openly praises the Talmudic Jews and gives repeated melodramatic apologies to them that they do not deserve. He has stood idly by while no one from his collected hierarchy protested the blasphemous depiction of Jesus Christ as an effeminate mongrel on the cover of the "millennium issue" of the National Catholic Reporter.

How can millions of white Catholics agree with the corrupt actions that go along with all this repulsive globalistic Zionist Jew pandering? I am afraid that the universal and international interests have rendered this pope "Pope Pawn".

In order to understand the installation of the "New World Order", it is necessary to understand the Babi Yar Bamboozle and its part in the colossal flimflam known as the "Holocaust". This fictitious Holocaust is, after all, more than just an enormous guilt trip laid on the Germans to strip them of their national pride and billions of dollars. The Zionist Jews have utilized this monstrous sham to persuade nations from all around the world to allow them to steal territory from the Palestinians and call it "Israel".

The upper echelon of the Zionists know that the "Holocaust" is a comprehensive forgery, but the Holocaust myth is not only used to attack Caucasian people, it is used to create, while even though fictitious, a rallying point of common ground, a binding component if you will, among "lower" Zionist Jews.

Most importantly, the Holocaust racket is a tool for the suppression of any nationalistic movement, other than their own, which may arise, not only now, but any time in the future. The Communist Jews and their fellow globalists need their deception at the ready, to be trotted out and thrown in the face of any who demonstrate nationalistic tendencies or racial pride. In essence, it is a ready made attack on anyone that the Jews want to destroy.

Bibliography

(1) "Babyn Yar" is the Ukrainian rendering of the Russian "Babi Yar," which is the spelling most typically used in English up until recent times.  "Yar" means "ravine" and "Babyn Yar" means "the old woman's ravine."  The story commonly connected with Babyn Yar and which is challenged in Pysachenko's account is that in three days starting on September 29, 1941, the occupying Germans executed and buried 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar.  Other estimates of the number of Jews killed at Babyn Yar vary widely, sometimes venturing as high as 300,000 for the total number of Jews killed at Babyn Yar over the course of the war.  source

David Irving, historian

According to official histories and inscriptions on monuments, 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis there

Source

"...Babi Yar, a ravine in Kyiv where up to 200,000 Jews and others were shot and killed by the Nazis.."

USHMM

It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar.

Source

Einsatzgruppen Event Report No. 106 of October 7, 1941, claims:

"The number of Jews allegedly amounts to 300,000 [...]."[6]
 

Jewish Journal of LA

The 81-year-old pope bowed his head and prayed in silence for five minutes Monday beside the ravine at Babi Yar, where the Nazis gunned down nearly 34,000 Jews during three days in September 1941. As many as 150,000 Jews and 50,000 others were killed there over the course of two years

Source

Paul Blobels's

Blobel ordered me to have the children executed. I asked him, "By whom should the shooting be carried out?" He answered, "By the Waffen-SS." I raised an objection and said, "They are all young men. How are we going to answer them if we make them shoot small children?" To this he said, "Then use your men." I then said, "How can they do that? They have small children as we" This tug-of-war lasted about ten minutes....I suggested that the Ukrainian militia of the Feldkommandant
should shoot the children. There were no objections from either side to the suggestion....

I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with the technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later....The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle range. The execution must have taken place in the afternoon at about 3:30 - 4:00. It took place the day after the discussions at the Feldkommandanten....Many children were hit four or five times before they died.

[Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, editors. The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators
and Bystanders. New York: The Free Press. 1988. pp. 153 - 154. ]

Dina's testimony

All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing. . . . The whole mass of bodies were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living.

Some soldiers came out on to the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone not far from Dina went on groaning as loud as before.

Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing at those which showed signs of life. . . .

One SS-man caught his foot against Dina and her appearance aroused his suspicions. . . . But she hung limp and gave no signs of life. He kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trod on the right hand so that the bones cracked, but he didn't use his gun and went off. . . .

A few minutes later she heard a voice calling from above: "Demidenko! Come on, start shoveling!" . . .

Her whole body was buried under the sand but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth. She was lying face upwards, breathed in some sand and started to choke, and then, scarcely realizing what she was doing, she started to struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic. . . .

With her left hand, the good one, she started scraping the sand off herself, scarcely daring to breathe lest she should start coughing; she used what strength she had left to hold the cough back. She began to feel a little easier. . . .

"Don't be scared, lady! I'm alive too."

It was a small boy in vest and pants who had crawled out as she had done. He was trembling and shivering all over.

"Quiet!" she hissed at him. "Crawl along behind me."

Dina was raped by bayonet
These questions can be answered, if at all, not so much by recognizing the similarities between Lisa's fate and Dina's, as by noting the one or two major differences in their stories, differences that distinguish history from myth. Dina Pronicheva is said by Anatoll to be the only eyewitness survivor of Babi Yar; Lisa is made to be one of its innumerable victims. But apart from this crucial fact, what really distinguishes the actual survivor from the fictive victim is that, in the moment before her death in the ravine, Thomas forces Lisa to undergo a horribly cruel rape by a sadistic Ukrainian guard, who uses his bayonet to penetrate her, whereas there is no mention in Anatoli's account that Dina Pronicheva ever was violated in such a brutal and obscene way.

Atrocities

Since I am not a historian, rather than discuss history I tell stories. And here is one, just one: it takes place in September 1941 in Babi-Yar, in Kiev, as reported by an eyewitness, a certain B.A. Liebmann.

He tells of a Jewish family which has spent several days hiding in a cave. The mother decides to seek help in a nearby village with her two small children. They are intercepted by a group of drunken Germans who, in front of the mother, behead one child, then the second. As the distraught mother clutches the bodies of her dead children, the Germans, obviously delighted with the spectacle, kill the mother as well. And when the father appears on the scene, they murder him too. I don't understand.

Dynamited

One single eyewitness was permitted (or ordered) by the Soviets to testify abroad. In 1968 Dina Pronitscheva testified in Darmstadt in the trial of 11 members of Einsatzkommando 4a. The case files are kept under lock and key!

What Happened at Babi Yar?
Fact vs. Myth



BY Michael Nikiforuk



THE MEMORY of the "massacre" of Jews at Babi Yar is painful to all politicians. But evidence shows it never happened. Aerial reconnaissance photos taken before and during World War II show mass graves of victims of the Soviet Cheka/NKVD, but an absence of Jewish mass burials.

What if anything, happened at a place called Babi Yar (Old Woman's Ravine) near Kiev, Ukraine - September 29, 1941? According to official histories and inscriptions on monuments, 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis there. But if thousands of Kievan Jews (those not evacuated by the Soviets) were killed in September of 1941 by the Germans, they were not murdered or buried at Babi Yar. This fact was revealed in aerial reconnaissance photos discovered in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, DC.


[Posting of this article on this Website must not be regarded as an endorsement of its contents. Comments are invited.]

In February 1997 a Ukrainian court threw out a case brought by Ukrainian Jews against V. Kretytnychy of the St. Andrew Society and E. Musiyenko, editor of the Kiev Evening News (Vechirnyi Kyiv), who challenged the official Babi Yar story. Encouraged by the court decision, on March 19, 1997 the Kiev Evening News published a four-page story setting the record straight for the first time since the Allies condemned the phony "atrocity" during World War II.

What is now coming to the fore is incontrovertible proof that no massacre took place at Babi Yar during the German occupation of Kiev; that the ravine was not used as a mass grave for Jews killed by the Germans. But it was a burial field between 1922-1935 for the victims of the Cheka/NKVD.
For decades, aerial photography has been recognized as an indispensable archaeological tool. With sophisticated equipment, ruins of ancient cities and cemeteries that lie under cultivated fields, forgotten for decades or centuries, have been discovered. Even submerged Hellenic ports have been discovered by aerial photography.

In 1991, wartime aerial photographs from the National Archives in Washington, DC were used as the ultimate guidance in exhumations of hundreds of Polish officers and intellectuals massacred in 1939-40 by the Soviet NKVD in the vicinity of Kharkiv. Aerial photos of Kiev's distant suburbs, including Bykivnia, Bilhorodka and Darnista, revealed mass graves of victims of the 1930's Stalinist terror-famine. It is therefore logical to assume that aerial photos of a ravine would reveal evidence of recent mass graves or of a major topographic disturbance.

The US National Archives in Washington contain about 1,100,000 wartime aerial photos, among them some 600 of Kiev, including Babi Yar. They were taken during 20 or more flights over the area. The first photos, taken at 12:23 pm on May 17, 1939, reveal such details as cars and even the shadows of the lamp posts on the streets of Kiev. Every large bush and small tree is visible on the slopes and at the bottom of the Babi Yar ravine. The last aerial photo coverage of Kiev (and Babi Yar) took place on June 18, 1944, about nine months after the city's "liberation" by the Red Army.

This series of reconnaissance photos demonstrates that the flora and the ground cover of the ravine remained undisturbed throughout the two years of German occupation. When the early and late photos are compared, it is obvious that the scattered trees grew and became slightly larger. No evidence of human or large animal activity in the ravine can be discerned on the many aerial photos of Babi Yar taken repeatedly in different seasons of the years 1939-1944.

In November of 1943, a group of Western journalists, including New York Times correspondent William "Bill" Lawrence, himself Jewish, were invited to Kiev by the Soviets. This occurred two weeks after the city's fall to the Red Army. The reporters were told that this was only six weeks after the Germans had completed the dynamiting, disinterment and open-air cremation of 70,000 corpses, followed by the crushing and bulldozing of the unburned bones into the soil of the ravine.

But the Western journalists were hard pressed to find any convincing physical evidence at the site of the alleged massacre.

The lack of reliable physical evidence of this "greatest massacre of World War II" - and the inability to find a single inhabitant of Kiev willing to corroborate the story - impelled the NKVD to provide the Westerners with three "eyewitnesses." Even though a Times editor censored out the most egregious exaggerations (about Soviet partisans and German "gassing vans"), the disjointed story by these three liberated Soviet POW's became the template for imitation for all subsequent Babi Yar testimonies.

When one realizes that all liberated Soviet POW's were facing either a firing squad or a short-lived future in the Gulags (it was a capital crime in the USSR for a soldier to be captured alive by the enemy), one realizes why it was easy for the NKVD to coerce any expedient statement from them.

Two weeks later, Soviet authorities were able to orchestrate massive "grass roots" support for their three Babi Yar witnesses. According to the "front pages of Moscow newspapers," (as reported in the United States), "40,000 Kiev residents [sent a letter] to Premier Josef Stalin, raising the estimate of the number killed and burned in the [Babi Yar] ravine to more than 10,000 (New York Times, Dec. 4, 1943).

Since - in later years - only 11 of these supposedly well-informed citizens offered any testimony, the wartime statistical reports in the NYT regarding Babi Yar (as well as the subsequent testimonies of belated witnesses) may be considered baseless. By 1943, the NKVD had a well-earned reputation for its ability to obtain any testimony from almost any witness.

For instance, in August of 1941, the Soviet press agency TASS and the Associated Press reported as fact the testimonies of NKVD-provided witnesses to the effect that the massacre of about 4,000 Ukrainians in NKVD prisons in the city of Lviv in late June of that year "was committed by the Nazi Storm troopers." This in spite of the fact that Lviv had not been taken by the Germans until July 1, 1941. Long famous testimony extorted by the NKVD from a large number of witnesses told of the mass murder of 4,500 Polish military officers and intellectuals by the Nazis in the Katyn Forest. These fraudulent testimonies, taken under oath in the fall of 1943, were finally refuted by the Russians in the spring of 1990.

However, this admission was not forthcoming until the German pre-invasion aerial reconnaissance photo of Katyn (showing the mass graves of the Polish officers, teachers, etc.) had been transmitted in the fall of 1989 to the Soviet authorities.

Chronology suggests that the NKVD provided Western correspondents with three Soviet ex-POW, as witnesses of the Babi Yar massacre to test their credibility under scrutiny of non-Soviets. In 1943, the Babi Yar massacre, being almost unknown in the West and thus unimportant, was apparently selected by the NKVD for such a "dress rehearsal" prior to the contemplated exposure to Western journalists of fraudulent Katyn massacre witnesses in this far more publicized and more politically important affair.

As a result of the failed Babi Yar credibility test for their ex-POWs, the Soviets for 25 years did not provide access to live "eyewitnesses" of massacres to Western correspondents in Katyn or elsewhere.

Furthermore, the Soviets postponed the inspection of Katyn by Westerners for four months, from Sept. 29, 1943 to January 24, 1944, until the site and the physical evidence were covered by snow and literally frozen, as was the reporters' investigative zeal in the unheated tents provided them.

Among the observers of the work of the Soviet investigative commission was 25-year-old Kathleen Harriman (daughter of then-US Ambassador to Moscow W. Averell Harriman) who, in her naivete', later became (along with her father) a champion of Soviet credibility. On the other hand, the more experienced Lawrence from the NYT, who was also present, was even more skeptical in his Katyn report about presented evidence than in his earlier Babi Yar story. As a result, his Katyn report was spiked and never published.

Thus, the false testimony of the NKVD-provided eyewitnesses of the alleged Babi Yar massacre became the cornerstone of a decades-long Soviet judicial policy of not allowing their fraudulent atrocity witnesses to testify independently; that is, beyond the reach of the supervising Soviet prosecutor, or outside the borders of the USSR.
Fabricated by russian jews

Even at the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviets did not provide to Western authorities or correspondents live eyewitnesses to any German massacres, including Babi Yar and Katyn. Instead, Soviet Prosecutor Col. Smirnoff peddled--but without much success--fabrications in the form of affidavits about the two alleged German massacres. Also Ilya Ehrenburg, in his 1947 novel, The Storm, tried unsuccessfully to revitalize the Babi Yar story.

The Old Woman's Ravine story did not gain "credibility" until 12 years later. Then, a visiting Jewish-Ukrainian-American journalist, Joseph Schechtman, persuaded young Soviet dissident Evgeny Yevtushenko to write an emotional and widely read poem "Babi Yar".

But poetic fancy cannot stand against physical evidence. Indeed, the aerial photos of the Ahovtnevyi borough of Kiev and the general area of Babi Yar reveal the presence of a row of about 10 mass graves, some 165 yards behind the western fence of Kiev's labor camp, Syretz. These could contain up to 1,000 victims of the camp buried over the two years of the German occupation of Kiev. Furthermore, at the nearby small Orthodox Lukianivsky cemetery, another, larger mass grave can be seen. This could contain up to 2,000 bodies of the frequent public or surreptitious German executions of resistance fighters of Kiev.

On this subject, according to the Hague Convention (1905) and the Geneva Convention (1920) on the conduct of civilians during wartime, taking part in hostilities without easily visible, external symbols of belonging to the military units is subject to immediate execution.

A number of additional, overlooked historical facts undermine the credibility of the standard tale propagated about Babi Yar today.

For one thing, the Babi Yar massacre was not mentioned in the Ukrainian Resistance press, although the killing of its members by the Germans in Kiev is described.
Secondly, the occurrence of the Babi Yar massacre is excluded, until the late 1970s, from the writings of Ukrainian emigres (former wartime inhabitants of Kiev) as well as from Ukrainian encyclopedias; some published by Western universities.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, for decades the Babi Yar massacre did not catch the literary attention of Kiev's Jewish population.
The expatriates of about 440 Jewish communities of the USSR were able to produce commemorative books (Yizkerbikhers) about their districts, cities, towns and even villages. But not until 1981 was the first scarce, commemorative book published in a small edition about the Ukrainian capital, Kiev; in Israel in Hebrew. An expanded Yiddish version came out again in a limited edition in the US in 1983. If the massacre at Babyn Yar were true, how could 150,000 surviving, educated Kievan Jews have been so tardy in recording the destruction of their kinsmen?

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the alleged "Babi Yar massacre," the world's media were replete with reports of the exact number (33,771) of Jews machine-gunned there. They variously reported its timing as taking 48, 36 or 24 hours. However, they rarely mentioned that the suspiciously exact number of victims were derived from captured German documents (so-called "Einsatzgruppen Reports") and were completely silent about the fact that these purported "exact" reports failed to indicate Babi Yar as the site of the massacre.

The media also failed to mention that almost every major historian, including "Holocaust expert" Prof. Raul Hilberg, considers the atrocities mentioned in these reports as exaggerated.

The wartime aerial photos of Kiev provide incontrovertible proof that the so-called historic documentation of the Babi Yar massacre represents fabricated wartime propaganda and post-war martyr mythology. Perhaps the Nazis had, as promised, deported the missing Kievans away from Kiev. If so, their remains and burial sites should be sought elsewhere.
On the other hand, what may have happened in Kiev can be glimpsed from the dispatch of the United States 12th Army Headquarters in Europe, published in (among others) the May 1, 1945 issue of the New York Herald Tribune. It mentions that a captured German doctor, Gustav Schuebbe, who "confessed" to directing an annihilation institute, where "110,000 Were Murdered by Nazi Physicians in Kiev." In addition, Schuebbe "admitted he had [himself] murdered about 21,000 persons" with injections, thus apparently outdoing Dr. Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz physician.

So, far, no one in the former USSR, or from Jewish organizations, has attempted to pinpoint the location of the "German Annihilation Institute" (where the remaining "Jews and Gypsies" of Kiev were killed, according to the May 1, 1945 issue of the NYHT). Had such a place existed, it would seem that the site of the "Annihilation Institute" would be the proper Kiev location for the commemorative menorah, erected in 1991 following a visit by then-US President George Bush.

Not until 1966 were Ukrainians implicated in the alleged Babi Yar massacre of Jews. The only witness was an alleged Babi Yar survivor, a Kiev Puppet Theater actress named Dina Pronicheva. The testimony of this Jewish witness is nullified by the absence of any photographic trace of massacre or mass burial. Furthermore, no witness has ever implied the complicity of Ukrainians in acts perpetrated at the never-located German Annihilation Institute of Kiev.

Following the Soviet Union's demise, the leaders of the then-newly-proclaimed independent Ukraine - instant converts from communism - were fast to jump on the Babi Yar bandwagon.

One of them, Ukraine's Ambassador to the United Nations, Genadi Udovenko, went so far as to state (Washington Times, Sept. 5, 1991) that "in the first week of the horrible Babi Yar massacre, 50,000 Jews, mostly children, had been slaughtered."

During the summer of 1941, the Soviets had been able to evacuate about 150,000 Jews from Kiev, while the Germans were advancing through Western Ukraine. Therefore, the Ukrainian Ambassador's statement was preposterous and inadvertently defamatory.

It suggested that Jewish parents, who had been safely evacuated from Kiev, had abandoned their children.

Perhaps Ukraine's current leaders might better serve their people, as well as their post-Communist consciences, by exhibiting tangible contrition relative to Communism's early 1930's famine-slaughter of unquestionably immense proportions.

Bone crushers

In August of that year Sonderkommando 1005 units burned the bodies of Jews massacred at Babi Yar and subsequently, those killed in Kamenets-Podolski. Later, units were sent to Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. As the Soviet army advanced in mid 1944, the activity of the Sonderkommandos 1005 focused on the General Government. Each Sonderkommando 1005 unit consisted of several SD (Security Service) and SIPO (Security police) officers, who supervised the work, and several dozen Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), who served as guards. The labor was carried out by prisoners, mainly Jews, who were organized in three groupings: one to open the graves and exhume the bodies, a second to erect the pyres, transport the bodies and arrange them on the pyres, and the third to sift through the human remains for valuables, crush the bones and scatter the ashes.

Certain prisoners were assigned the task of keeping the fire going and counting the corpses burned, while others were responsible for leveling the terrain, plowing and replanting the site after the graves were destroyed. Most of the prisoners were killed on the completion of their assignment.

KIEV AND BABI YAR

Kiev was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some 160,000 Jews resided in Kiev, comprising about 20 percent of the city's population.
 

Explosions
Approximately 100,000 Jews fled Kiev in advance of the German occupation. German forces entered Kiev on September 19, 1941. Along with the rest of the Ukraine, the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, headed by East Prussian Nazi district leader Erich Koch. During the first days of the German occupation, two major explosions, apparently set off by Soviet military engineers, destroyed the German headquarters and part of the city center. The Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder the remaining Jews of Kiev. At that time, there were about 60,000 Jews in the city. Most of those who remained were women, children, the elderly, and the sick who had been unable to flee.


Eastern Europe 1933, Kiev indicated
See maps
 

Shot 33000 jews in two days

On September 28, 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) C, supported by other SS and German police units and Ukrainian auxiliaries, murdered more than half of the Jewish population of Kiev at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the city. This was one of the largest mass murders at an individual location during World War II. As the victims moved into the ravine, Einsatzgruppe detachments shot them in small groups. According to reports by the Einsatzgruppe to headquarters, 33,771 Jews were massacred in two days. In the months following the massacre, German authorities stationed at Kiev killed thousands more Jews at Babi Yar, as well as non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies), Communists, and Soviet prisoners of war. It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar.

The Soviet army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943.

 

 

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

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

   • Some 160,000 to 170,000 Jews, but according to Einsatzgruppen Event Report 106 as many as 300,000 Jews, lived in Kyiv at the start of the war. The orderly gathering and transfer of such great numbers of people would have been noticed by countless witnesses, all of whom would have attested to a 'mass migration' of people with their possessions. Why are there no such witnesses?
   • The report mentions neither a date nor a place. It is claimed that the Jews were driven on foot from barbed-wire enclosures to an unknown destination, but not that they were murdered "at the outskirts of Kyiv".
   • During March 1996 major Ukrainian newspapers reported that Ukrainian American historians determined that the Jews were deported from Babi Yar via the nearby military railroad station to Minsk. During the stay behind barbed wired enclosures, Germans allegedly extracted from the Jews the customary war tax in valuables.[10]

    

More people than expected were brought to the site. According to a report from Einsatzgruppe C:
"...originally we estimated the arrival of only 5,000-6,000 Jews, but actually about 30,000 Jews presented themselves, believing until the moment of liquidation that they would be resettled, because of the great work of the propaganda section."
As a result the Germans could not kill all of the Jews immediately.

shoot two at once

The historian Felix Levitas wrote: "The executioners did not have enough time to finish their job. Therefore they began to put two people together, head by head, so that one bullet would kill two people. The wounded people were killed with shovels. The children were thrown into the Yar alive and buried with them." Sergey Ivanovich Lutsenko, former guard of the Lukianovska cemetery, testified: "They shot people from morning to night. At night the Germans went to sleep. The rest of the victims were locked in empty garages. This continued for five days. The Nazis brought more and more people, and from there only trucks with people's clothes returned."

geysers

Using air photos and wartime newspapers, Ukrainian writer MICHAEL NIKIFORUK attacks a few myths about a wartime atrocity.3.) Smith writes. "EW claims that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, 'geysers of blood' spurted from their grave for 'months' afterward." Wiesel's words are these: "Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses."  Elie Wiesel claim that eyewitnesses saw geysers of blood, and the ground moved for months

The Prisoners

Not knowing why they had been chosen, 100 prisoners from the Syretsk concentration camp (near Babi Yar) walked toward Babi Yar thinking they were to be shot. They were surprised when Nazis attached shackles onto them. Then surprised again when the Nazis gave them dinner.

At night, the prisoners were housed in a cave-like hole cut into the side of the ravine. Blocking the entrance/exit was an enormous gate, locked with a large padlock. A wooden tower faced the entrance, with a machine-gun aimed at the entrance to keep watch over the prisoners.

327 prisoners, 100 of whom were Jews, were chosen for this horrific work.

The Ghastly Work

On August 18, 1943, the work began. The prisoners were divided into brigades, each with its own part of the cremation process. Prisoners didn't necessarily work for one brigade the whole time, they could be switched to do other duties.

• Digging: Some prisoners had to dig into the mass graves. Since there were numerous mass graves at Babi Yar, most had been covered with dirt. These prisoners removed the top layer of dirt in order to expose the corpses.

   

• Hooking: Having fallen into the pit after having been shot and having been underground for up to two years, many of the bodies had twisted together and were difficult to remove from the mass. The Nazis had constructed a special tool to disentangle and pull/drag the corpses. This tool was metal with one end shaped into a handle and the other shaped into a hook.

  The prisoners who had to pull the corpses out of the grave would place the hook under the corpse's chin and pull - the body would follow the head.

  axes

  Sometimes the bodies were so firmly stuck together that two or three of them came out with one hook. It was often necessary to hack them apart with axes, and the lower layers had to be dynamited several times.¹¹

  The Nazis drank vodka to drown out the smell and the scenes; the prisoners weren't even allowed to wash their hands.¹²

   

• Removing Valuables: After the bodies were pulled out of the mass grave, a few prisoners with pliers would search the victim's mouths for gold. Other prisoners would remove clothing, boots, etc. from the bodies. (Though the Jews had been forced to undress before they were killed, later groups were often shot fully clothed.)

   

• Cremating the Bodies: After the bodies had been checked for valuables, they were to be cremated. The pyres were carefully constructed for efficiency.

  Granite tombstones were brought from the nearby Jewish cemetery and laid flat on the ground. Wood was then stacked on top of it. Then the first layer of bodies was carefully laid on top of the wood so that their heads were on the outside. The second layer of bodies was then carefully placed on the first, but with the heads on the other side. Then, the prisoners placed more wood. And again, another layer of bodies was placed on top - adding layer after layer. Approximately 2,000 bodies would be burned at the same time.¹³

  To start the fire, gasoline was doused over the pile of bodies.

  The [stokers] got the fire going underneath and also carried burning torches along the rows of projecting heads. The hair, soaked in oil [gasoline], immediately burst into bright flame - that was why they had arranged the heads that way.¹⁴

   

• Crushing the Bones: The ashes from the pyre were scooped up and brought to another group of prisoners. Since there were usually large pieces of bone that had not burned in the fire, they needed to be crushed to fully destroy the evidence of Nazi atrocities. Jewish tombstones were taken from the nearby cemetery to crush the bones. Prisoners then passed the ashes through a sieve, looking for large bone pieces that needed to be further crushed as well as searching for gold and other valuables.

Eyewitness