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 Encyclopedique, 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 Enzyklopadie 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 Enzyklopadie's newest discovery is probably the result of its collaboration with Meyers Enzyklopadisches 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 Czernovyc 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]
'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 Su?muth, 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?
