Herbert Tiedemann - Babi Yar - Critical Questions and Comments

• Re. Shabecoff's report in the New York Times: who drilled the blast holes, where did the equipment come from, and why are there once again no witnesses to this considerable amount of work? Why is no trace of any of this visible on the air photos?

• Re. Kuznetsov: they shot across the ravine at night? Wouldn't that endanger even their own people?

• Re. what Wiehn[7] saw fit to publish, and re. Pronitscheva's testimony in Darmstadt, we have the following questions:

• About 8 o'clock or at 8 o'clock? Incorrect street names from a Kyiv resident? Why is her 'weather report' entirely wrong? How can one return to one's family when they had just been transported? How were the Ukrainians, Russians and citizens of other (which?) nationalities separated from the doomed? Where is the hill? Why did all the other witnesses forget the 'Beating Corridor'? What are Tank riders?

• Stripped down to their underwear, or stark naked? Employment book and union card retained even though she was stark naked? Ledge over the ravine? Ravine or pit? A hill? Submachine guns or machine guns? Has anyone ever tried to turn, with his foot, a person wedged between other bodies? The soldier beat a girl he presumed was dead? What presence of mind a girl must have, not to shriek or to react in some other way when someone steps on her hand and breast, or beats her! Why did no one notice that she freed herself? Not even the soldier standing on her right hand? How daring must a girl be, to still observe events near the site of the crime two days later - and how insensitive to the cold, considering that she is either in her underwear or entirely naked. How likely is the tale of the proposition and of the girls who were first raped and then stabbed? Sexual intercourse with Jews was considered defilement of the blood, and was forbidden. Why did she understand German in Babi Yar, but not a word of that language in Darmstadt? Might her job - actress in a puppet theater - explain her facility at confabulation?

11. Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen and V. Rieß[41] have culled the testimony of three witnesses - Höfer, Kurt Werner and Anton Heidborn - from the files held at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg; these files are not, however, made available to critical researchers.

According to Höfer, the Jews had to undress and neatly stack their clothes at a spot 500 ft. from the ravine (according to Werner it was a kilometer, about  of a mile). Then the naked victims were led into a ravine which according to Höfer was 500 ft. long, 100 ft. wide and 50 ft. deep, whereas Werner claims it was 1,300 ft. long, 260 ft. wide at the top and 33 ft. wide at the bottom, and 33 ft. deep. According to Höfer, two or three narrow passages led into the ravine; according to Werner the victims were led to the edge of the hollow and then ran down the slopes of their own accord.

Höfer maintains that there was only one marksman at each end of the ravine; Werner tells of a total of 12. Höfer testified that a "packer" stood at each end and placed each victim onto the previous bodies. Then each was shot by a member of the police, with a submachine gun, per a bullet in the neck. The children were shot together with their mothers.

Werner reported that the Jews had to "lie down facing the earth up against the walls of the hollow" and were then murdered via a bullet in the neck. The next victims then had to lie down on top of the bodies.

Three days after the execution they began covering the heaps of corpses with earth. According to Heidborn a hand was seen waving from among the bodies three days later.

• Time required, given two "packers" and marksmen, or 12 marksmen?

• How does the position of the victims, up against the wall of the ravine, agree with the picture[42] where "exhumed bodies" are shown lying flat?

• Why are critical researchers not allowed access to documents, and not only in Ludwigsburg? Why does not even public prosecutor Willi Dreßen take exception to the contradictions, to say nothing of the physical impossibilities alleged? Why do the authors make no mention of the 300,000 Jews postulated for Kyiv in Event Report 106, and mention only the 150,000 from Event Report 97 of September 28, 1941?[43]

• Why does even Reitlinger,[44] the Holocaust Pope, marvel how it was possible to keep that many people together on the road for two whole days, but Klee and his co-authors do not notice this problem?

12. Now for Adalbert Rückerl. His anonymous witness would seem to be Werner, from the previous scenario. The witness reports:[45],[46]

"[...] shot [...] the entire Jewish population of Kyiv. [...] Executions [...] until five or six o'clock. [...] All were naked."

In the second publication[46] we find that Rückerl draws on Event Report 106[3] unmodified. He quotes the blocking-off of the execution place, the filling-in of the pits after the execution, as well as a few individual Soviet citizens who had secretly witnessed the execution. He suggests that neutral witnesses were only rarely available and that their testimony was generally not suited to convicting the accused. As an example he quotes the statement of the witness N. T. Gorbacheva from Kyiv:[47]

"[...] I lived in Kyiv, at 55 Tiraspols-Kaja Street, Door 2. [...] near the place called Babi Yar. On September 22, 1941, I saw with my own eyes [...] how, in the course of the day, about 40 lorries drove to Babi Yar, loaded with Jewish residents. [...] I and some other women [...] went, unnoticed by the Germans guards, to the place where [...] the people were being unloaded. We saw that about 50 ft. from the beginning of the Babi Yar the Germans forced the Jews to undress and ordered them to run along the Babi Yar. Then the Germans shot at the running people with submachine guns and machine guns. [...] There were not only people who had been shot, but also injured people and even living children in the ravine. Nevertheless the Germans filled the ravine in; the thin layer of soil moved visibly."

The only things Rückerl contests is the date, and the use of lorries for all the victims. He lets it stand for those who could not walk. Rückerl withholds the fact that Gorbacheva claimed:[48]

"The shooting of the Jews went on for several days."

• According to the unnamed witness[45] 6 o'clock was 'closing time'. So all those who tell of murders at night must have lied?

• Is Rückerl so unfamiliar with the Soviets' Babel of propaganda and lies that he considers a book printed in Moscow in 1963 to be a reliable document?

• Was he able to find a 'Tiraspolskaja Street' (that's how it would be written correctly!) on a street map of Kyiv, and near the 'place' Babi Yar (which is not a 'place' at all)?

• How many people - along with their possessions - can 40 lorries carry?

• Does Rückerl really believe that some of the ladies of Kyiv were so insane, so utterly fearless, or so curious that they would sneak past the guards posted by the evil enemy, and then watch the mass murder? Is there 'a Babi Yar' that has a beginning and which one can run along? Are executions carried out by shooting at running targets with various kinds of firearms?

• How does the "thin layer of soil" agree with the great quantities of earth needed to fill in a ravine? And would anyone who had not been hit by a bullet not suffocate directly after being buried alive?

13. In Babi Yar in March 1942[49] Adalbert Hartl, Gestapo Expert for Church Matters, observed:

"small explosions that shot up clods of earth. It was the spring thaw that was letting the gas from the thousands of bodies escape."

• What is a Gestapo Expert for Church Matters doing at Babi Yar? The small explosions and rocketing clods of earth are nonsense, for even when wet ground freezes solid it is never gas-proof - especially not sandy soil.