The latest Brockhaus Enzyklopädie's newest discovery is probably the result of its collaboration with Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon.[98] The latter contains similar information, as well as a reference to A. V. Kuznetsov's documentary novel. The Babi Yar points of the compass are given incorrectly in both encyclopedias.
24. In his book,[99] the Jew J. G. Burg (actually Joseph Ginzburg), who - along with his family - experienced the deportation in the East first-hand, reports that after the Red Army had retreated from the area of Czernovyč the local population carried out numerous pogroms against the Jews, and that it took severe intervention by German and her allied troops to put a stop to these pogroms.
• Why does Burg not mention any similar mass murders committed by the Germans?
25. On page 78 of J. Heer's and K. Naumanns's book Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 pictures 1 and 2 allegedly show "The victims on their way to Babi Yar"[100] on a bright, sunny day.
• According to the Kriegstagebuch des OKW, Raum Kiew, from Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, the weather was rainy, the roads muddy.
• The road visible on the picture is dry.
• Some people on that picture are walking in the opposite direction.
• Not masses of people (33,000!) are walking on this picture, but only a few.
• There are no guards visible, even though they certainly would have been necessary if the alleged victims could hear the machine guns firing in the background.
• The people shown do not carry any belongings, although they allegedly were told to do so.
• The road allegedly shown runs from the Southeast to the Northwest. Thus, according to the shadows, the sun is shining from the west at an angle of some 50°. This is impossible for Kyiv during the end of September!
• The Hessische Hauptstaatsarchiv, referred to by Heer and Naumann as having delivered this picture, wrote April 15, 1997:[101]
"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.
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:
"Now that the fundamental line to be taken with regard to the practical final solution of the Jewish question has been determined and the authorities involved are in complete agreement, I would ask you [...]"
and farther down:
"[...] to assign your official in charge of completing the outline requested by the Reich Marshal, in which the organizational, factual and material prerequisites for the practical implementation of the tasks involved in the solution are to be identified, to the required discussions of specific details. I intend to hold the first discussion of this kind on March 6, 1942 [...]."
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.