Babi Yar

For other uses, see Babi Yar (disambiguation).

Also known as	Babyn Yar

Babi Yar (Russian: Бабий Яр; Ukrainian: Бабин Яр, Babyn Yar) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by German forces and local collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union.

The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD and SS Police Battalions backed by the local police. The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date, surpassed only by the Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims, and the 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941, committed by the Romanian troops. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed at Babi Yar are between 100,000 and 150,000.

Victims of other massacres at the site included thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and civilian hostages. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were taken at Babi Yar during the German occupation.

Historical background

The Babi Yar (Babyn Yar) ravine was first mentioned in historical accounts in 1401, in connection with its sale by "baba" (an old woman), the cantiniere, to the Dominican Monastery. The word "yar" is Turkic in origin and means "cliff" or "ravine". In the course of several centuries the site had been used for various purposes including military camps and at least two cemeteries, among them an Orthodox Christian cemetery and a Jewish cemetery. The latter was officially closed in 1937.

Massacres of 29–30 September 1941

See also: Battle of Kiev (1941)

Handout dated September 28, 1941 in Russian, Ukrainian with German translation ordering all Kievan Jews to assemble for the supposed resettlement.

Paul Blobel at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, March 1948 (beard grown in prison)

Axis forces, mainly German, occupied Kiev on 19 September 1941. On September 26 Maj. Gen. Kurt Eberhard, the military governor, and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS and Police Leader at Rear Headquarters Army Group South, made the decision to exterminate the Jews of Kiev, claiming that it was in retaliation for guerrilla attacks against German troops. Einsatzgruppe C carried out the Babi Yar massacre and a number of other mass atrocities in Ukraine during the summer and autumn of 1941. Its commander SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch and the officer commanding Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel were at the September 26 meeting as well. An order was then posted in the town:

All Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, September 29, by 8 o'clock in the morning at the corner of Mel'nikova and Doktorivska streets (near the cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.

— Order posted in Kiev in Russian, on or around September 26, 1941.

On 29 and 30 September 1941, a special team of German SS troops supported by other German units and local collaborators murdered 33,771 Jewish civilians after taking them to the ravine.

The implementation of the order was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by Blobel, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. This unit consisted of SD and Sipo, the third company of the Special Duties Waffen-SS battalion, and a platoon of the 9th Police Battalion. Police Battalion 45, commanded by Major Besser, conducted the massacre, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion.

The commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later:

The difficulties resulting from such a large scale action—in particular concerning the seizure—were overcome in Kiev by requesting the Jewish population through wall posters to move. Although only a participation of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Jews had been expected at first, more than 30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution, still believed in their resettlement, thanks to an extremely clever organization.

According to the testimony of a truck driver named Hofer, victims were ordered to undress and were beaten if they resisted:

I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women, and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to give up their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians [sic] to keep them moving.

— Michael Berenbaum: "Statement of Truck-Driver Hofer describing the murder of Jews at Babi Yar"

The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late; by the time they heard the machine gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene.

Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.

File:Babi Yar 18.jpg

Babi Yar Monument in Kiev

Felix Lembersky, Execution: Babi Yar, ca. 1944–1952

Dina Pronicheva on the witness stand, January 24, 1946, at a Kiev war-crimes trial of fifteen members of the German police responsible for the occupied Kiev region.

In the evening, the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the people under the thick layers of earth. According to the Einsatzgruppe's Operational Situation Report, 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire at Babi Yar on September 29 and September 30, 1941. The money, valuables, underwear, and clothing of the murdered victims were turned over to the local ethnic Germans and to the Nazi administration of the city. Wounded victims were buried alive in the ravine along with the rest of the bodies.

Survivors

One of the most often-cited parts of Anatoly Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar is the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of the Kiev Puppet Theatre, and a survivor. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then be shot. Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies, she played dead in a pile of corpses. She held perfectly still while the Nazis continued to shoot the wounded or gasping victims. Although the SS had covered the mass grave with earth, she eventually managed to climb through the soil and escape. Since it was dark, she had to avoid the flashlights of the Nazis finishing off the remaining victims still alive, wounded and gasping in the grave. She was one of the very few survivors of the massacre and later related her horrifying story to Kuznetsov. At least 29 survivors are known.

In 2006, Yad Vashem and other Jewish organizations started a project to identify and name the Babi Yar victims, but so far only 10% have been identified. Yad Vashem has recorded the names of around 3,000 Jews killed at Babi Yar, as well as those of some 7,000 Jews from Kiev who were killed during the Holocaust.

Further executions

See also: List of victims of the Babi Yar massacre

In the months that followed, thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 residents of Kiev of all ethnic groups, mostly civilians, were murdered by the Nazis there during World War II. A concentration camp was also built in the area.

Mass executions at Babi Yar continued up until the German forces departed from Kiev. On January 10, 1942 about 100 sailors from a military flotilla were executed there. In addition, Babi Yar became a place of execution of residents of five Gypsy camps. According to various estimates, during 1941–1943 between 70,000–200,000 Romani people were rounded up and murdered at Babi Yar. Patients of the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were gassed and then dumped into the ravine. Thousands of other Ukrainians were killed at Babi Yar. Among those murdered were 621 members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha and her husband, and renowned bandurist Mykhailo Teliha, were murdered there on February 21, 1942.

Upon the Soviet liberation of Kiev in 1943, Russian officials led Western journalists to the site of the massacres and allowed them to interview survivors. Among them were Bill Lawrence of The New York Times and Bill Downs of CBS. Downs described in a report to Newsweek what he had been told by one of the survivors, Efim Vilkis:

However, even more incredible was the actions taken by the Nazis between August 19 and September 28 last. Vilkis said that in the middle of August the SS mobilized a party of 100 Russian war prisoners, who were taken to the ravines.On Aug. 19 these men were ordered to disinter all the bodies in the ravine. The Germans meanwhile took a party to a nearby Jewish cemetery whence marble headstones were brought to Babii Yar [sic] to form the foundation of a huge funeral pyre. Atop the stones were piled a layer of wood and then a layer of bodies, and so on until the pyre was as high as a two-story house. Vilkis said that approximately 1,500 bodies were burned in each operation of the furnace and each funeral pyre took two nights and one day to burn completely. The cremation went on for 40 days, and then the prisoners, who by this time included 341 men, were ordered to build another furnace. Since this was the last furnace and there were no more bodies, the prisoners decided it was for them. They made a break but only a dozen out of more than 200 survived the bullets of the Nazi Tommy guns.

Numbers murdered

Estimates of the total number killed at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation vary. In 1946, Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov at the Nuremberg Trials claimed there were approximately 100,000 corpses lying in Babi Yar, using materials of the Extraordinary State Commission set out by the Soviets to investigate Nazi crimes after the liberation of Kiev in 1943. According to testimonies of workers forced to burn the bodies, the numbers range from 70,000 to 120,000.

In a recently published letter to Israeli journalist, writer, and translator Shlomo Even-Shoshan dated May 17, 1965, Anatoly Kuznetsov commented on the Babi Yar atrocity:

In the two years that followed, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and people of all nationalities were murdered in Babi Yar. The belief that Babi Yar is an exclusively Jewish grave is wrong... It is an international grave. Nobody will ever determine how many and what nationalities are buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, their ashes scattered in ravines and fields.

For his war crimes, Paul Blobel was sentenced to death by the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged in June 1951 at the Landsberg Prison.

Syrets concentration camp

Main article: Syrets concentration camp

Syrets concentration camp. Barbwire fence

In the course of the German occupation, the Syrets concentration camp was set up in Babi Yar. Interned communists, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), and captured Soviet partisans were murdered there among others. On February 18, 1943, three Dynamo Kyiv football players (Trusevich, Klimenko, and Putistin) who took part in the Match of Death with the German Luftwaffe team were also murdered in the camp.

Concealment of the crimes

Before the Nazis retreated from Kiev ahead of the Soviet offensive of 1944, they were ordered by Wilhelm Koppe to conceal their atrocities in the East. Paul Blobel, who was in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 in eliminating its traces. The Aktion was carried out earlier in all extermination camps. The bodies were exhumed, burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity. Several hundred prisoners of war from the Syrets concentration camp were forced to build funeral pyres out of Jewish gravestones and exhume the bodies for cremation.

Remembrance

Main article: Babi Yar memorials

Ukrainian postage stamp, released to the 70th anniversary of the tragedy in Babi Yar

After the war, specifically Jewish commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the Soviet Union's policies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of memorials have been erected on the site and elsewhere. The events also formed a part of literature. Babi Yar is located in Kiev at the juncture of today's Kurenivka, Lukianivka and Syrets neighborhoods, between Frunze, Melnykov and Olena Teliha streets and St. Cyril's Monastery. After the Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine hosted a major commemoration of the 65th anniversary in 2006, attended by Presidents Moshe Katsav of Israel, Filip Vujanovic of Montenegro, Stjepan Mesić of Croatia, and Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau pointed out that if the world had reacted to the massacre of Babi Yar, perhaps the Holocaust might never have happened. Implying that Hitler was emboldened by this impunity, Lau speculated:

Maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on September 29 and September 30, 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem... Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe.

In 2006, a message was also delivered on behalf of Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, by his representative, Francis Martin O'Donnell, who added a Hebrew prayer O'seh Shalom, from the Mourners' Kaddish.

Mudslide

Main article: 1961 Kurenivka mudslide in Kiev

Babi Yar was also the site of a large mudslide in the spring of 1961. An earthen dam in the ravine had held loam pulp that had been pumped from the local brick factories for ten years without sufficient drainage. The dam collapsed after heavy rain, inundating the lower-lying Kurenivka neighborhood. The death toll was estimated to be between 500 and 2,000 people.

See also

• Babi Yar in poetry
• Babi Yar Symphony by Shostakovich
• Consequences of Nazism
• Genocides in history
• History of the Jews in Ukraine
• List of massacres in Ukraine
• Mass graves in the Soviet Union
• Operation Barbarossa
• Reichskommissariat Ukraine
• Ukrainian collaborationism with the Axis powers
• Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs

Sources

• A. Anatoli (Anatoly Kuznetsov), trans. David Floyd, (1970), Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, Jonathan Cape Ltd. ISBN 0-671-45135-9
• "Babi Yar in the mirror of science, or the map of Bermuda Triangle", an article in Zerkalo Nedeli (the Mirror Weekly), July 2005, available online in Russian and in Ukrainian
• Encyclopedia of Kiev

External links

• The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginnings of Mass Murder on the Yad Vashem website
• Marking 70 Years to Operation Barbarossa on the Yad Vashem website
• Babi Yar: Mass Murder (history1900s.about.com)
• In-depth study on Babi Yar
• The Massacre at Babi Yar Near Kiev (historyplace.com)
• Babi Yar (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Babi Yar: Killing Ravine of Kiev Jewry – WWII (zchor.org)
• Babi Yar (berdichev.org)
• Template:Ru icon History. Geography. Memory by Tatyana Yevstafyeva. August 15, 2002 (a reprint from newspaper "Jewish Observer")

The German id not carry out Babi Yar. No such massacre took place there during WW2

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.

Soviet archival records reveal that the atrocity propaganda about Katyn and Babi Yar was fabricated by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, who also invented and reported the now discredited victim counts of Nazi concentration camps: 4 million at Auschwitz; 1.5 million at Majdanek and 3.5 million at Treblinka.

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.