• 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 Russian 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.