• 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:
"[...] many soldiers stood with machine guns. [...] They led us to a ravine, where big boxes stood, in which they collected the documents and other things. [...] Then an execution commando took up position. Mother did not wait for the commando, she threw herself and me into the pit and fell on me. The special units began to cover us over with dead bodies. After that they shot another group. [...] A soldier stood on my mother and stabbed the wounded man lying beside her. When they passed on to share the spoils, mother pulled me out unconscious and carried me away."
In the right-hand column of the same page, however, we read:
"When they arrived at the ravine after the beating, they had to lie down on the ground in rows, in small groups. Then the execution commando went into action. A burst of machine gun fire, a few shovels of earth that only barely covered the bodies, and then the next group was driven into the ravine."
• 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
"[...] there were 3 groups of marksmen, a total of about 12 marksmen. [...] They stood behind the Jews and killed them with shots to the neck."
• 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]
"[...] the Germans threw babies at the breast into graves and buried them alive with their dead or wounded parents."[71]
• Evidence? Specifics re. place, date, etc.?
13. In C. Clarke's book we read:[72]
"German tanks roared through the large Jewish quarter, after the occupation, blasting every living object in sight, and then burning Jews alive in flaming buildings and killing them in woods over the mass graves excavated by the victims while some Jews were tied to trees and shot or bayoneted."
• 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]
"The 30,000 Jews who assembled [in Kyiv] were taken to the forest and slaughtered over the course of two days."
• 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]
"All the Jews of Kyiv are to gather until 8 o'clock on 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 from the same will be shot."
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 Russia
n 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]
"150,000 Jews were massacred by the Germans in two days, with the active participation of a minority of Ukrainians from Kyiv and the passive cooperation of the majority."
• 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 backgrou
nd.
• 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]
"It is not known here, where the assignation to Babi Yar stems from."
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:
"Fifty years ago, 33,771 Jews were murdered here in the course of two days, and at least as many again in the following two years; countless other persons shared the same fate later. By the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine, the ravine had become a mass grave."
• 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?
6. Fundamental Questions
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.
Babi Yar: Critical Questions and Comments (ревізіонізм голокосту) Page 4