Borges on Beowulf

 BEOWULF. DESCRIPTION OF THE GERMANS. ANCIENT FUNERAL RITES

UNDATED, PROBABLY OCTOBER 15, 19661

In our last class, I said that today we would discuss the epic poem, Beowulf. As we shall see, the protagonist is a knight who embodies all the virtues held in high regard during the Middle Ages: loyalty, bravery—this is all in the book by the Venerable Bede. But let’s dig into Beowulf. The name in itself is a metaphor that means “bee-wolf,” in other words “bear.” It is truly a long poem: it contains a little fewer than 3,200 lines, all of which follow the law of Germanic versification: alliteration. Its language is intricate; it makes constant use of what is called “hyper-baton,” that is, the alteration of the logical sequence of words in a sentence. We know this was not the usual form of the Germanic language, and much less so of its poetry, because another fragment that has been preserved, the Finnsburh Fragment, employs very direct language.

It was previously believed that the style of Beowulf belonged to a primitive, barbaric stage of poetic creation. Subsequently, however, a Germanist discovered that lines from the  Aeneid were woven into the poem, and that elsewhere, passages from that epic poem were brought in, then interspersed in the text. Hence, we have realized that we are not dealing with a barbaric poem, but rather with the erudite, baroque experiment of a priest, that is, someone who had access to Latin texts, and who studied them. 

The author took an ancient Germanic legend and turned it into an epic poem that follows the syntactic rules of Latin. Thanks to those few interpolated lines, we can see that the author set out to compose a German Aeneid. One clear indicator of this is the aforementioned contrast with the direct language used in the heroic Finnsburh Fragment and the other texts we have from that era (such as incantations, etcetera). But the author faced a problem in attempting to carry out his intention: according to the decorum of the time, he could not praise the pagan gods. In the eighth century, the pagan era was quite recent, and still very much alive among the populace. It was not until the seventeenth century, almost ten centuries later, that we see Góngora speak calmly, without qualms, about the pagan gods.2 However, [the author of Beowulf] could not speak about Christ and the Virgin, either. The fact is, he never names them anywhere. But two concepts make their appearance, and we do not know if the author understood that they contradicted each other. The word “god” appears, as does wyrd or “fate.” Fate, in Germanic mythology, was a power greater than even the gods themselves. We know this from Norse mythology. Wyrd has survived in modern English: Shakespeare uses it in Macbeth to speak of the witches, though it probably did not have the same meaning. In any case, the word [in  Beowulf] is not “witch,” but “emissary of fate,” “weird sister,” “sister of fate.”3 Throughout Beowulf, the concepts of God—the new God, and the old one, the one of wyrd—are woven into the text and used indiscriminately.

 The Germanist Ker has criticized Beowulf, for he considers the plot to be childish.4a>The idea of the hero who kills an ogre, that ogre’s mother, and then a dragon, belongs to a children’s tale. But these elements are, in fact, inevitable; they are there because they must be. Once he chose that legend, the author could not possibly omit the ogre, the witch, or the dragon. The public expected them, because it knew the legend. Moreover, these monsters were symbols of the powers of evil; they were taken very seriously by that audience.

 One of the poem’s most curious aspects is that it takes place first in Denmark and then in southern Sweden. This indicates that after three hundred years of living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick for their old homelands on the Baltic Sea; this further suggests that there is a strong affinity between the Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons. The characters in the poem are Scandinavian. The hero himself is a Swedish prince. This might tempt some scholars to claim that the lore of the Goths contains the legend of their origins, which says they come from Northern Europe. But there is no proof of this. (We actually know that the first news of these people has them hailing from south of the Danube.) However, Charles XII of Sweden believed this. So much so that during a conflict with the pope, he wrote to him [the pope], warning him not to feel too secure; he said his ancestors had already entered Rome once, and their descendants were no less brave. He was hinting at a possible invasion that would repeat the Gothic invasions of Italy. (Now, if we look closely at the word “Geats,” we see that it can easily be associated with “Goths.”5a> Hence, if we identify the Geats with the Goths, the Spaniards would be relatives of the Norsemen. Hence, all descendents of the Spaniards would be relatives of Beowulf!)

In the  Odyssey and the  Iliad, we see that the bloody and bellicose events are the most paramount. The poet of Beowulf was interested in hospitality, manners, gift-giving, and minstrels more than in military feats; in other words, he was interested in what we would now call “social life.” All of these things were valued at that time and must have been quite appealing to the Saxons, who lived in a violent era and in inhospitable lands. Europe was colder then. We know this because research has shown that the animals who lived at that time in the south of Europe now live in the north. For example, reindeer used to live in Germany and are now found only in Scandinavia. England was a marshy land. The Germans considered it to be a terrible, noxious place. They populated all those swamps with evil beings, devils. Moreover, the psychology of these people is revealed by the fact that they counted the years by the winters, and the days by the nights. The cold that prevailed in that land is what constantly shows up in these texts; always mentioned are the terrors of the snow, the hardships of winter. The arrival of spring was welcomed as a great event.

 Returning to the poem, the first episode deals extensively with the mythic king of Denmark, Scyld Scefing, which means “shield with the sheaf.” This name is derived from the legend of his origins. One day, a baby arrives on the coast of Denmark in a mysterious ship. There was nobody manning the ship, and the child is lying on the bottom, on a bed of weapons, sheaves of wheat, and jewels. This prodigious child becomes king and was so strong that he made his people great. This is, in the concept of the era, a “good king”: one who terrifies his neighbors, is strong, and is a warrior, and whose men fear and respect him. Time passes and the king grows old; he feels that the hour of his death is upon him. So he plans his  funeral and gives orders for it to be carried out according to his instructions. These include building a ship exactly like the one he came in and placing him next to the mast surrounded by weapons and jewels, then pushing him out to sea.

All peoples have believed that the territory of death lies beyond the sea. Life was associated with the course of the sun; since the sun is born in the east and dies in the west, a parallel was drawn to human life. It was believed that when it was over, one went to the land where the sun dies, to the west, beyond the sea. Hence, in the Celtic legends, paradise was thought to be in the west. In Greek mythology, the kingdom of death was beyond the water, and one had to cross the water to reach it. So, this ship they push out to sea has that meaning. Next comes a description of the ship and the king lying next to the mast, and then of the subjects crying, pushing the ship out to sea. This is one of the most powerful scenes in the poem.6 We cannot know if in the mind of the poet—who genuinely felt this scene—if this king being pushed out to sea (in the ship he arrived in) is a symbol of man mysteriously returning to the place from which he mysteriously came. In any case, this ritual of launching the ship is not an invention of this poet but rather a Germanic custom. Ships containing the skeletons of men and animals have been found at the bottom of the sea. We can deduce from this that they not only pushed the dead out to sea, but on their last trip, they were accompanied by their servants and their favorite animals. It was a Germanic custom to bury the dead with their dogs at their feet. In the book Beau Geste, the hero says that he “had his Viking’s funeral with a dog at his feet.”7 He was talking about a sergeant who had been buried. There is an ancient text that also says that after the ship was launched, it would be set on fire.

The author [of Beowulf] intentionally described different burial rites of the Germanic people. This can be seen at the end of the poem, with Beowulf’s funeral next to the sea, on a pyre so high it can be seen by sailors out at sea, and that is heaped with weapons, shields, and helmets. This detail also appears in the  Odyssey, where there is also a funeral rite.

In the next class we will continue our study of Beowulf and probably examine the Finnsburh Fragment.

CLASS 3

BEOWULF. BRAVERY AND BOASTFULNESS:BEOWULF AS COMPARED TO THE COMPADRITOS.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1966

In the previous class, we discussed the epic poem Beowulf. Today, we will pick up where we left off. I recounted one of the most poetic episodes of the poem: the one about the child who arrives mysteriously on the coast of Denmark, who becomes king and instills fear in his enemies. The poet notes that he is a good king because what is expected of a king is that he be strong and warlike and that his neighbors fear his people. Then the years pass and when death approaches, he gives instructions for his  funeral. So they prepare the funeral ship.

The poet says that this ship was “isig ond utfus.” The first word means “frozen,” and is related to the English word “iced” and the German word eisig. But we don’t know if the ship is covered with ice (it is strange that the poet hadn’t spoken of ice earlier), or if he meant “resplendent,” “shimmering,” “as clear as ice.” The third word is difficult to translate because fusmeans “eager” and ut means “out.”1 In other words, the ship was eager to leave, as if it were a living being. Then the ship is described; the poet says that it flew a flag made of gold fabric, and that the king was placed in a seated position, leaning against the mast: “The powerful one against the mast.” Then his vassals, crying, push the ship out to sea, and then we have these lines that I know by heart: “Nobody, neither the counselors in their assemblies nor the heroes under the heavens, knows who received that cargo.” And it is said that the ship was pushed far away by the power of the sea: “Under the power of the sea, it traveled far.” Now, an ancestor is also mentioned, who is also called Beowulf, like the eponymous hero of the poem, but he is a different Beowulf. And this lets us imagine that there is a connection between the royal house of Denmark and the royal house of the Geats—that tribe that is a bit mysterious—which some have identified with the Jutes who invaded England, and others, with the Goths, in other words, the ancestors of the Spaniards, who were the Visigoths. But there is a lot of disagreement about this.

One peculiar feature of Beowulf is that the story we are looking at is a primitive one—even puerile, according to some. Yet the atmosphere in which this barbarous and primitive fable takes place is not the fantastical atmosphere of a fairy tale even if the events that take place are. The story abounds in realistic details, especially regarding the genealogy of the characters. It has, as the English Germanist Ker has said, the solid atmosphere of a realist novel.2The events are fantastical, but we feel the characters as real, as garrulous as if they were right there, and given to oratory; they are characters who like good manners, conviviality, ceremony. It is true that all of this was highly valued during that dangerous era, a violent era when people perhaps did not much like violence; it was a barbarous era that nonetheless was drawn to culture, that enjoyed culture.

 The poet lists the names of the kings of the royal house of Denmark, until he gets to a king named Hrothgar. These consonant clusters are common in Anglo-Saxon, but have since been lost: hr, and the runic letter following it, can be transcribed as th.3 We have another example in the Anglo-Saxon word for “ring.” In German and, I think, in Scandinavian languages, it is ring, whereas the Anglo-Saxons said hring, and there are other analogous sounds. For example, “neigh” in English is the verb hnægan in Anglo-Saxon.4 There are other consonant clusters we cannot pronounce, because we don’t know how they were pronounced. For example, for “haughty” they said wlanc. I don’t know how the wl should be pronounced. It’s possible the W was pronounced as a U. But let’s return to the poem.

The poet names several kings until he finally gets to Hrothgar, the king of Denmark, who builds a palace called Heorot. And this palace, the poet tells us, is the most splendid of palaces, though we should imagine it built of wood. I have seen beautiful houses in the United States, luxurious houses—the house of Longfellow, the house of Emerson—houses that are three hundred years old, and these houses are built of wood. Currently, in Buenos Aires, to say “a wood house” is to mean a shack. This is not the case in New England: a wood house can be very beautiful, with many floors, a salon, a library, and they are well built so there are no drafts.

The king builds the palace, and the poet tells us that this is the palace that shines over all the neighboring kingdoms; in other words, it is famous. We can imagine a large central hall where the king meets with his vassals and where he dines. I assume they ate pork and deer and drank beer from drinking horns; wine was quite rare, as it had to be brought from the south. In the poem, there is a minstrel who livens up the banquets singing and accompanying himself on the harp. The harp was the national instrument of all the Germanic peoples. The music would be, undoubtedly, very simple.

The king has his court. And there he hands out gold rings and bracelets to his vassals. This is why one of the king’s titles is “ring-giver” or beahgifa. We find this word, beag, in French as bague, meaning “ring.” The king is very powerful, but the din of the court, or the music, frightens or disturbs a monster who lives nearby in an area full of swamps, marshes, and moors. Some believe that certain regions of England are recognizable in the description of where the monster, named Grendel, lived. Lincolnshire, for example. But this is pure conjecture. The monster is described as looking like a human being, but gigantic. He is an ogre and apparently belongs to ancient German mythology, but as the poet is Christian, he wanted to tie him to the Christian tradition, rather than the pagan tradition, so he tells us that he is a descendent of Cain. And this monster wanders around the moors and lives with his mother under a lake, so deep down that the hero swims for an entire day to reach the underground cavern where he lives with his mother, who is a witch. The poet calls her “the she-wolf of the sea,” “the sorceress of the sea.” There are also storms, which make this lake seem like the sea, and there is a description of the forests surrounding the lake. It says that crows are afraid to fly near the lake, for it is a zone of tempests, fog, solitude, and because of what could be called sacred horror. The description of the lake and its surroundings lasts about twenty lines. Now, this does not surprise us, but remember that the poem was written at the end of the seventh century or, according to the scholars, the beginning of the eighth, and it is full of sentiment for the natural world. This sentiment does not appear in other literatures until much later. One often says, too hastily—because in addition to  Beowulf, there is also Shakespeare—that this sentiment for nature is the same as the romantic sentiment. In other words, the same as in the eighteenth century, about ten centuries after Beowulf. The truth is that there are books, notable books, in which the natural world as we feel it now makes no appearance. And to turn to the most famous example, I believe—I don’t know if I am certain—I suspect that in Don  Quixote, it does not rain a single time. The landscapes described in Quixote have nothing in common with the landscapes of Castile: they are conventional landscapes, full of meadows, streams, and copses that belong in an Italian novel. On the other hand, in Beowulf, we sense nature as something fearsome, something that is hostile to man; the sense of night and darkness as fearsome, as it surely was for the Saxons, who had settled in an unknown country whose geography they discovered only as they were conquering it. Undoubtedly, the first Germanic invaders had no precise idea of England’s geography. It is absurd to imagine Horsa or Hengest arriving with a map. Completely unbelievable. We don’t even know if they would have understood  Beowulf, which is written in a very contorted language and is full of metaphors that, undoubtedly, were not used by the Anglo-Saxons in their spoken language. In any case, these metaphors never appear in their prose. And in the Scandinavian Norse regions, those most closely connected to the Saxons, we find a very marked and deliberate division between prose, which can be very eloquent and full of pathos, but is very simple, and the language of poetry, which is filled with kennings, the name for those metaphors that, as we have seen, reached an extraordinary level of complexity. 

So, King Hrothgar rules over Denmark. Naturally, nobody thought of empires at that time; the idea of empire is totally foreign to the Germanic mind. But he was a prosperous king, a victorious, opulent king, and his court’s jubilant celebrations—one of the metaphors for the harp is “wood of joy” or “party-wood”—upsets Grendel, who attacks the castle. The fable is poorly wrought, for at the beginning we have a very powerful king, and then this same king and his vassals and his troops, the only measure they take is to pray to the gods, to ask for help from their ancient gods, Odin, Thor, and the others. The poet tells us that all their prayers were in vain. The gods have no power at all against the monster. And thus, improbably, twelve years pass, and every few nights the ogre breaks down the castle’s double doors—there were no other doors—enters, and devours one of the men. And the king does nothing. Then news of the ogre’s attacks spreads. The ogre is gigantic and invulnerable to all weapons. The news reaches the neighboring country of Sweden. And in Sweden there is a youth, a prince, Beowulf, and throughout his childhood this prince has shown himself to be clumsy, slow, but he wants to gain fame with a great feat. He has already fought in a war against the Franks, but this isn’t enough for him, so he departs in a boat with fourteen companions.

 Naturally, the poet makes the sea stormy, so that the trip won’t be easy, so it will be difficult, and Beowulf lands in Denmark. The king’s sentinel comes out to greet him, an aristocrat like Beowulf, a prince. Beowulf says that he has come to save the country and is received courteously by the court. There is one character, however, who questions Beowulf’s personal courage, so Beowulf proposes a kind of contest, a swimming race, which improbably lasts ten days, a competition against another famous swimmer named Breca. The two swim for ten days and ten nights. They fight against sea monsters, who drag Beowulf to the bottom of the sea, where he kills them with his sword or chases them away. Then he surfaces, keeps swimming, and wins the race.

Now, we find ourselves up against a modern custom, a modern prejudice that distances us from the poem. Today we say, or better, we have the idea, that a brave man should not be a braggart. We think that all bragging is like that of the Miles Gloriosus, of the Latin comedy, who is a coward.5 But, generally speaking, this idea did not exist in antiquity. Heroes boasted of their deeds, and were permitted to do so. In fact, doing this gave them courage. I’d like to recite here some couplets of the compadritos[toughs, braggarts] from the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires. I don’t think anybody would think a man was a coward because he said:

Soy del barrio ’e Monserrá

donde relumbra el acero,

lo que digo con el pico,

lo sostengo con el cuero. 

[I am from the Monserrat neighborhood, / where blades abound, / what I say with my lips, / I back up with my hide.]

or:

Yo soy del barrio del norte,

soy del barrio del Retiro,

yo soy aquel que no miro

con quién tengo que pelear,

y aquí en el milonguear

 ninguno se puso a tiro. 

[I’m from the northern neighborhood, / I’m from Retiro, / I never stop to look / at who I have to fight, / and here in the fray / nobody was up to the dare.]

or:

Hágase a un lao, se lo ruego,

que soy de la Tierre ‘el Fuego.

[Step aside, if you please, / for I am from Tierra del Fuego.]

That is, from the neighborhood around the penitentiary. 

In any case, Beowulf had a lot in common with our compadritosfrom Monserrat or Retiro. Beowulf wanted to boast about how brave he was. And no one thought he was a coward. To find a more famous example, we can turn to the  Iliad, in which the warriors state who they are, and their reputations do not suffer. On the contrary, they are enhanced. It is a necessary prelude to combat, their way to warm up. They could even insult each other, too, and could accuse each other of cowardice.

In Beowulf, after the swimming race and the battle against the sea monsters, everyone goes to bed and falls asleep. This is another poorly wrought episode: they are expecting the ogre’s attack, yet they sleep peacefully. The only one who stays awake is Beowulf, and Beowulf is unarmed, because he knows that no weapon can harm the monster. Moreover, he has confidence in his physical strength, which is extraordinary. The poet tells us that he has in his fist the strength of thirty men.

Then the monster arrives, circles the castle, and although the door is locked with strong iron bars, he breaks it down, surprises the first sleeping warrior he comes upon, and devours him whole, raw. Also, he devours the warrior’s hands and feet, then rashly approaches Beowulf. And then Beowulf, who has not yet risen, grabs the ogre’s hand and breaks it. And the two begin to fight—a fight others do not participate in—which allows the hero to show off even more. And Beowulf, with only the strength of his hands—imagine we have before us a northern Hercules—pulls off the ogre’s arm and shoulder. As they fight, they shout. This is realistic. For example, when infantrymen charge, they shout. There is a poem by  Kipling that describes this. So, they are both shouting. The entire palace of Heorot trembles, it is about to collapse, but finally the ogre receives a mortal wound and runs off to die in his swamp. The next day, they celebrate the death of the ogre and hang his arm in the hall as a trophy. There is another banquet, but that night the ogre’s mother, who is a witch and also very strong, comes to recover her dead son’s arm, and she takes it and kills a warrior. Then Beowulf decides to look for the swamp where the ogre lives, and that’s where we get the description of the swamp, one of the classic passages in the poem. Some men want to accompany Beowulf, but he is the hero: it is better for him to perform his feats alone, as Hercules did centuries before. And he sees pieces of flesh, human flesh, possibly the ogre’s, in the swamp. And there is also foam, which seems to be bloody. The hero dives in and swims for a whole day before he reaches the cavern. The cavern is dry; it is illuminated by a supernatural, magical light. And there is the ogre’s mother, horrible, as strong as the ogre himself. Beowulf fights her and is on the verge of being defeated: she is actually stronger than her son. But [Beowulf] manages to grab a sword hanging on the wall. The ogre’s mother is not invulnerable to iron; he kills her with the sword, but the sword melts because the witch’s blood contains some kind of poison. Then, Beowulf takes the ogre’s head and also the hilt of the sword, though not the blade, which has melted. On shore, they are waiting for him anxiously. He rises to the surface with this trophy, and here the poet invents an incidental detail: the giant’s head is so heavy that two men are needed to carry it. Then Beowulf, covered in blood, wounded and triumphant, returns to Hrothgar’s palace, where Hrothgar thanks him for what he has done and showers him with gifts—accepting these gifts is not dishonorable—and Beowulf returns to his own kingdom, in the south of Sweden.

Now, Beowulf was not actually Swedish. The Swedes belonged to a different tribe. The Geats were enemies of the Swedes. . . . Well, in this way, five years passed . . . excuse me, fifty years, “fifty winters,” the poet says. The Saxons counted time by winters because of the harshness of the climate. In the meantime, Beowulf performs many military feats, but the poet mentions them only in passing because he is interested only in Beowulf’s first and last feat. It has been said that one of the aims of the poem was to portray an exemplary prince, according to the concept of the time. That is, one who is strong—supernaturally strong, for he has the strength of thirty men—as well as a slayer of monsters who are a danger to everyone—again this coincides with Hercules—and also just. Because when he dies at the end of the poem, he invokes God and says that he never dealt out death to a single relative in the great banquet hall. And this is considered to be a rather extraordinary fact, and it probably was at the time. 

Fifty years pass, fifty years of victories, and, finally, a triumphant peace, and then another character appears, a dragon who has lived for time immemorial in a cave guarding treasures. The idea of the dragon as a guardian of treasures is common in ancient Germanic myth. We remember the case of Sigurd, or Siegfried, and the dragon; and there was also the griffin in Pliny’s Natural History, who guards mountains of gold and fights against the one-eyed Arimaspians.6The idea of the dragon as the guardian of treasures is so common that in Norse poetry one of the most common metaphors for gold—immediately understood by everybody—was “the dragon’s bed.” That is, people imagined the gold, and the dragon lying on top of it, sleeping on it in order to guard it better. The poet tells us about an escaped slave who enters the cave when the dragon is asleep and steals a golden pitcher. Then the slave disappears from the fable. The following day, the dragon awakes, notices that the golden pitcher is gone, and leaves his cave, thinking he must take revenge for the theft. Then we see a human trait: before destroying the Geats’ land, he goes back into the cave and carefully looks through everything, just to make sure the pitcher isn’t there somewhere. But he doesn’t find it, so he terrorizes the kingdom of the Geats, just as the ogre, half a century before, had done in Denmark. Then the news of what is happening reaches old Beowulf, and again he decides to fight a monster. And if we want to use our imaginations a little, we can see this as a story about a man pursued by a fate: to fight a monster and die. The dragon is, in some way—and whether or not it is understood this way by the poet, it really shouldn’t matter to us because an author’s intentions are less important than the success of his execution—the dragon is yet another encounter with his fate. That is, the dragon is again the ogre of Denmark. And the king goes there with his men, who want to help him, but he says no, he’ll manage on his own as he did fifty years before with the ogre and the ogre’s mother. He reaches the mouth of the cave of the dragon, who has been described with many metaphors—he has been called “spotted horror of dusk” and “guardian of gold”—and Beowulf  challenges him. The dragon emerges, and they engage in battle. There is a rather bloody description of the battle; Beowulf slays the dragon, but the dragon breathes fire, and Beowulf knows that this fire will poison him. And there is a servant named Wiglaf, the only one who has accompanied him there; and the king says that he is going to offer his soul to the Lord—this paragraph is Christian—and he knows he will be going to heaven because his life has been righteous, and he gives instructions for his funeral. The funeral is not like the one we saw earlier: there will be no funeral ship. He tells them to erect a pyre and pile it high with helmets, shields, and shining armor—“Helmum behongen, hildebordum, beorhtum byrnum, swa he bena wæs.” Helmum behongen means “adorned with helmets”—the Germanic word helm is the same. And hildebordum is “battle board”: that’s what the shield was called, which was round, made of wood, and wrapped in leather. And then beorhtum byrnum means “bright armor,” and swa he bena wæs means “just as he ordered.” Then they lie him out on top of the pyre and set it on fire, and he has instructed them to build a burial mound that can be seen from the sea, so that people will remember it. He is then buried in the burial mound, and twelve warriors on horseback ride circles around the king’s tomb and sing his praises and celebrate his brave deeds.

Now, in a medieval text about the history of the Goths, by  Jordanes, Attila’s burial and the same ritual is described: the pyre, the burial mound, and the warriors who ride circles around it singing praises of the king.7 It is clear that the poet was an erudite poet: in his poem he wanted to describe the various funeral rites of the Germanic peoples. (They considered Attila to be one of their own, even though he was a Hun, because many Germanic kings were his vassals.) The poem ends with praise of Beowulf, and this praise is quite odd. Though I don’t agree, some have believed it to be an interpolation, for one might expect there to be mention of the ogre, as well as of the dragon, and of the other Swedes against whom he fought, and his victories, but none of this is mentioned. The penultimate line says that he was manna mildust, the mildest of men, the kindest of men, and one most eager for praise. This also contradicts our current sensibility, because we live in an era of propaganda: a man’s desire to be famous is not seen as an admirable characteristic. But we have to remember that this poem was written in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that all praise was just: that men wished to be praised, deserved to be praised. The poem ends with these words: “the mildest of men and the most eager for praise.” Nothing is said about his courage. However, we have seen that courage exemplified throughout the entire poem.

There’s another curious aspect of this poem, and this is the appearance of a minstrel, and this minstrel sings—but doesn’t finish—a Germanic legend predating Beowulf: the story of a princess from Denmark named Hildeburh. Her name means “castle of war” or “castle of the battle.” Now, this fragment as sung by the minstrel might not be the same as the song—the old ballad—because the language is like the rest of Beowulf. That is, it is in rhetorical language with an abundance of metaphors, and undoubtedly Germanic primitive poetry was much simpler. We can see this, for example, in The Lay of Hildebrand; although composed more or less at the same time as Beowulf, it corresponds to a much more primitive era, for there are few alliterations, and I believe there is only one metaphor, and even that is a dubious one: armor is called “battle vestments,” or “war vestments,” which may or may not be a metaphor. It is far from the complexity of “weave of men” for “battle,” as we find among the Norsemen, or “swan-road” for “sea.” 

Now, this story is told only in part, and it is the subject of the other ancient Anglo-Saxon epic fragment,  Finnsburh Fragment, which contains about sixty lines and must be, I suspect, prior to Beowulfbecause of the directness of the language.8

The fable chosen by the author of Beowulf does not lend itself to pathos. In it we have two feats performed by the same hero. The two are separated by an interval of fifty years, and there is no conflict in the poem. In other words, Beowulf always fulfills his duty as a brave man, and that’s all. He dies bravely. The poem is full of pious pronouncements. Some are obviously pagan, for example, when it says that it is “better to avenge than mourn a dead friend.” This is clearly pagan. It belongs to an era when revenge was not only a right but a duty—a man was obliged to avenge the death of his friend. So there is no conflict. The story of Hildeburh, on the other hand, which is interpolated into Beowulf, contains conflict. This is the story. There is a princess in Denmark named Hildeburh, and there is discord between the Danes and the Frisians, the people from the Low Countries. And so it is decided that a princess, the princess of Denmark, will marry the king of the Frisians, so that through this alliance between the two royal houses, the conflict will be resolved. This practice was so common that one of the metaphors for the princess used in the Saxon poem is “peace-weaver,” not because she was particularly peaceful but because she served to weave peace between neighboring, rival nations. Hildeburh marries the king of the Frisians and then her brother comes to visit her, arriving at court with sixty warriors. They are received hospitably and given lodgings in rooms that surround a central hall with two doors. Identical, let’s say, to Hrothgar’s palace. But at night, the Frisians attack. The Danes defend themselves and fight for several days, during which the princess of Denmark’s brother kills his nephew. Finally, the Frisians realize that they are no match for the Danes. Both Anglo-Saxon poems express true sympathy for the Danes and for the Geats, that is, for the Norsemen. After a few days, when [the Frisians] realize that they can no longer fight, that they are unable to defeat them [the Danes], they propose a truce, which the princess’s brother accepts. He waits for the winter to be over to set sail—because during the winter, the sea was obstructed by ice—then he returns to his country. There he assembles a force larger than the one with sixty warriors that previously accompanied him. He returns, attacks the Frisians, kills the king, and carries his sister, the princess, back with him to his country.

Now, if this poem existed in its entirety—and we have to assume that it once did—we would have the possibility of a tragic conflict, because we would have the story of the princess whose son dies by the hand of his uncle. In other words, the poet would have more opportunity for pathos than in Beowulf, which simply recounts two brave feats, neither credible to us, against an ogre and a dragon. In the next class we are going to examine—and we can examine it in great detail—the Finnsburh Fragment. We’ll leave out the beginning of the fragment, because I’ve already told it. We will start from the moment the Danes realize that the Frisians have forcibly entered their rooms and are going to attack them, and we will continue until the Frisians realize they are no match for the Danes and that they have been defeated by them. We are going to analyze it almost line by line. There are about sixty lines. You will see how direct the language is, so different from the pompous language of Beowulf. Maybe its author was a man of action. In the case of Beowulf, on the other hand, we can imagine the author as a monk, from Northumbria, in the north of England, a reader of Virgil, who set himself the task, quite audacious at that time, to write a Germanic epic poem. And this brings us to a small problem, which is this: why is it that in the Germanic nations—and here I am thinking of Ulfilas, I am thinking of the Saxons, I am thinking later of Wycliff, and of England in the sixteenth century, of Luther—why were there translations of the  Bible in the Germanic nations before the Latin nations?9There is a Germanist of Jewish origin,  Palgrave, who had an answer, and the answer is this: the Bible that was read in the Middle Ages was the Latin Vulgate Bible, that is, it was a Latin text.10 Now, if anyone would have thought of translating the Bible into Provençal or Italian or Spanish—these languages are too similar to Latin for the translation not to run the risk of seeming like a parody of the original. On the other hand, the Germanic languages are so totally different from Latin that the translation could be undertaken without running that risk. What I mean is, in the Middle Ages, those who spoke Provençal or Spanish or Italian knew that they were speaking a language that was a variant or a corruption of Latin. So it would have seemed irreverent to go from Latin to Provençal. On the other hand, the Germanic languages were totally different. [Translations of the Bible] that were undertaken for people who knew no Latin did not run any risks. Now, maybe we can apply this to Beowulf. Why was Beowulf the first epic poem written in a  vernacular language? Because that vernacular language was profoundly different from Latin, so that nobody reading Beowulfcould think that they were reading a parody of the  Aeneid. On the other hand, quite a lot of time had to pass for the Romance-language minstrels to have the courage to try epic poetry in their own language.

In the next class, then, we will look at the Finnsburh Fragment, and at a much later Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and with that we’ll bring the first unit to an end.

PROFESSOR BORGES

A COURSE ONENGLISH LITERATURE

The Mafia

It is impossible to summarize the power of this Mafia in a few words, under pain of not being believed. We published a 400-page book on the subject in 2008, containing all the information the reader will ever need to prove that the Jewish Mafia is, by far the most powerful Mafia in the world. Here we present a small glimpse of this octopus-like international power, engaged in all illegal activities: Ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, prostitution, gambling, porn, arms dealing, plus money laundering, through the agency, in particular, of the diamond industry.

The production and distribution of Ecstasy all over the world is entirely in the hands of the Jewish Mafia. In fact, all the dealers who have ever been indicted anywhere in the world – without a single exception – (see The Jewish Mafia, 2008) – have been Jewish criminals. And all of them were in possession of Israeli passports, for the simple reason that the State of Israel almost never extradites Israeli citizens.
Liberation, the daily newspaper, of 23 July 2001, in fact, informs us that the Israeli Mafia has “hijacked the market in synthetic drugs”. The 11 August 2001 issue of Le Figaro confirms this: “Ecstasy is theprivate hunting ground of the Israeli criminal underground”.The synthetic drug called “Ecstasy”, which provides a sensation of power and well-being for a few hours, is a veritable chemical garbage can. Its effects, long term, are irreversible: memory loss, behavioural disturbances, sleep disturbances, loss of concentration, and brain damage in the children of drug-addicted mothers. But these complications are of no matter in the eyes of the dealers.

Holland is the most important producer in the world. The drug is produced there in dozens of clandestine laboratories. At the head of the traffic, we find Israelis linked to various “Russian” mafias, which organize the networks supplying Europe, the United States, Japan and Australia. Sometimes the dealers use young Orthodox Jews to smuggle the drug past border check points. For a long time, customs agents never even thought of suspecting these religious Jews in their black caftans, black hats and ringlets. Each of these “mules” transported 35,000 to 50,000 tablets per trip. These smugglers, who criss-crossed between Europe and the United States, were paid 1500 dollars per trip.

The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz of 6 April 2003, confirms the role of these “Israeli” criminals: “Israel is the hub of the internationalEcstasy traffic, according to a document published by the United StatesDepartment of State. These past few years, organized crime in Israel,linked to criminal organizations in Russia, has taken control ofdistribution of the drug in Europe, according to an official document. This document notes that the Israeli criminal groups have taken controlof the Ecstasy traffic in North America. Over the course of the year2000, 80% of all the Ecstasy sold in the United States originated fromHolland, which is the largest centre ofproduction.”

The Arc, known as “the monthly of French Judaism”, published this information in May 2007:” Zeev Rosenstein, the most famous godfatherof the Israeli milieu, has returned from the United States to complete a12-year prison sentence for drug dealing”. Rosenstein was sentenced for importing 850,000 Ecstasy pills into the United States. The weekly newspaper Marianne, on 18 August 2007, informs us that Rosenstein’s organization was active on four continents, and used “small Latin-American gangs of smugglers for the distribution of his synthetic drug.”At a cost of production of 20 or 25 cents, one single Ecstasy pill, sold to a distributor for 2 dollars, who himself resells it in a discotheque for 10 or 15 dollars, or even 30-40 dollars, can feed quite a large family. What is more, if the discotheque belongs to you, this makes you “King of the Night”.

The reality of “accusatory inversion” is easily verified, for example, by the 1987 film by Gerard Oury , Levy et Goliath: Moise Levy, a Hassidic Jew and diamond dealer at Antwerp, has fallen out with brother Albert, a Parisian cafe owner, ever since the latter married a goy. Moise takes the train for France, where he is supposed to deliver diamond powder to the Renault factory, but he finds himself involved, despite himself, in a coke trafficking deal. The coke dealers and pimps here are tall, blond-haired “Aryans” with blue eyes, very wicked and very anti-Semitic, while the Jews are always very likeable and innocent.

The film Lethal Weapon (USA, 1987), shows the methods of these horrible drug traffickers.

Two cops – one white and one Negro – are assigned to arrest the evil-doers. The two cops are atrociously tortured in the basement of a night club owned by one of the dealers. But you shouldn’t be surprised: the bad guys here are Viet Nam vets, white men, as usual, with blond hair and blue eyes. The poor Jews are completely innocent. The film is signed Richard Donner.

The sequel to Lethal Weapon2 (1989) is even more of a caricature: The two cops, who symbolize the triumphant multicultural society, are, this time, fighting a dangerous gang of South African drug dealers. The villains are all white – always Nordic, blond-haired and blue-eyed, and terribly, terribly racist. Richard Donner’s real name, let us note, is Richard Schwarzenberg. This information may be useful in understanding the messages disseminated through his films.
The film Blood Diamonds (USA, 2007) is a good example of media furtiveness whenever a Jewish criminal type is involved. The film only shows the role of the Jews in the diamond industry in one single image: an Orthodox Jew appears on the screen… for one-half second! The viewers are completely hood-winked. In his genre, the director, Edward Zwick, is a magician. You must realize, in fact, that the international diamond business, legal or illegal, is 100% in the hands of Jewish firms or dealers.

In the French film Taxi (1998), the dangerous criminals are Germans of the Nordic type, as stupid as they are wicked: a film by Gerard Pires.

In The Firm (USA, 1993), a young diplomat has just been recruited by a powerful law firm in Memphis. He gradually comes to the realisation that the company managers are in fact working for a terrible mafia gang in Chicago. All the lawyers present – about thirty of them – are white, Catholic and Nordic. They symbolize the American elite at its hypocritical best. The film is by Sydney Pollack, who also practises the technique of accusatory inversion. Thus it is that the Jews are always portrayed as innocent victims.

The Great Swindles

Not all swindlers are Jews, and not all Jews are swindlers. But, as Jacques Attali said, in 2002, “among Jews, as always, one never doesanything by halves: if you’re going to be a criminal, you might as wellas well be the best”. And the fact is that the really great swindles are exclusively the work of the Jews. We will only present a succinct summary of a few: we advise you to read The Jewish Mafia (2008), to become aware of the details and juicy anecdotes linked to these scandals.

We know that since the signature of the Kyoto agreements, by virtue of the principle that “the polluter pays”, all industrialists must acquire “rights” to compensate for the environmental damage caused by their activity. In 2007, the opening of the financial markets to “carbon credits” attracted international swindlers.

In Paris, it was sufficient to supply a photocopy of your identity card to obtain the status of a “broker”. Between the fall of 2008 and 2009, a colossal embezzlement of VAT on the “carbon tax” permitted the crooks to steal 1.4 billion euros from the French taxpayer. Sitting in Parisian internet cafes, the swindlers, over the BlueNet CO2 exchange system, acquired tons of “CO2 equivalents” for non-existent clients, without paying tax, in foreign countries, with a click of the computer. They then diverted these quotas to different countries to cover their tracks, then resold their cargoes in France to polluting industries, such as cement plants and electricity producers, invoicing them for VAT at 19.6%, which they never paid over to the state. The money evaporated instantly into accounts in Lithuania, Montenegro, or Hong Kong or Cyprus. The brains of the operation, Gregory Zaoui, had begun his criminal career by fraudulently reselling jeans and portable phones. Justice sent dozens of letters rogatory to Israel. As a result, the Ministry of Finance was compelled to reduce VAT on CO2 to zero per cent to restrict the fraud. Europol estimated the extent of the fraud at 5 billion euros. Have you ever heard of this gigantic swindle? No, of course not. Which is quite normal, because these same people control our TV channels.

Here’s another recent scandal: In December 2008, it was revealed that approximately 400 complaints had been filed by tradesmen, merchants and associations in a single year. The swindlers solicited electronic listings by fax or telephone. The inquiries led to the indictment of four persons in France in the month of April, followed by about thirty people in Israel by early December, in which 700,000 euros worth of jewellery and luxury vehicles were also seized. You haven’t heard about this scandal? Perfectly normal.
In March 2008, another gigantic VAT fraud was revealed, the brain of which was a certain Avi Rebibo, “a Franco-Israeli”.
We also recall the Claude Lipsky affair, the “swindler of thecentury”, who was sentenced in 2007 for embezzling the savings of 450 French soldiers.

In 2006, the swindler Gilbert Chickli, who swindled the banks by telephone, fled to Israel with 23 million euros.
In 2001-2004, the scope of the “Sentier” money laundering scandal was estimated at one billion euros. The media, curiously, did not insist on these matters.

There was also the recent case of Jacques Crozmarie, president of the Cancer Research Association, who embezzled money from TV viewers. He was sentenced in 2000. The swindler only repaid 26% of the money entrusted to him by French citizens. He also manifested a classic example of phenomenal chutzpah, declaring before French TV cameras: “I had pocketed even a single penny I would be a criminal. But look at my representation expenses, they are nothing! I don’t evenget my meals reimbursed when I eat at restaurants!”

In the USA, swindles occur in mammoth proportions. In April 2010, for example, a business man was prosecuted for a pyramid scheme. On Wednesday 21 April, the regulatory agency for the American stock market, the SEC, announced that it was bringing proceedings against the President of a Florida investment fund, Nevin K. Shapiro, for a 900 million dollars “Ponzi-type” pyramid scheme.

The year before, in November 2009, another Ponzi-type pyramid scheme, mounted by the lawyer Scott W. Rothstein, amounted to a billion dollars, according to The Wall Street Journal. The star lawyer of Florida was accused of selling shares in extra-judicial agreements to investors, promising 2-digit returns.

In February 2009, a stock market fraud exploded before the London Stock Exchange, for the sum of 600 million dollars. The principal protagonist was a certain Abraham Hochman.
On 18 January 2009, we learn that a Florida business man, Arthur Nadel, disappeared with 350 million dollars he was managing. In 2006, there was the “Abramoff swindle” as well.
All these swindlers were small fry compared to Bernard Madoff. This New York financier was nicknamed “the Jewish Treasury Bond” by members of the Jewish-American community. But the returns which he distributed to his clients were not the result of financial investments: he simply collected funds from new investors and distributed them to old ones. In December 2008, his company went bankrupt, ruining thousands of savers, and, at the same time, numerous influential Jews. He stole the investments of the Stephen Spielberg Foundation and the Elie Wiesel Foundation. Fifty billion dollars disappeared! It was the biggest swindle in the history of the world.

But the Jewish mafia was even more powerful in Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Regime. In the 1990s, a handful of “oligarchs” got their clutches on the near-totality of Russian wealth, creating a reign of terror in the streets of the big cities, while the little people suffered in silence (see the summary in The Jewish Mafia, 2008). It requires an understanding of the actions of these people – Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich and other, Boris Berezovsky – to understand the anti-Semitism of many Russians. Starting in 2000, the new Russian President, Vladimir Putin began to clean house. Since then, Khodorkovsky is in prison, and his fellow Jews fled to Israel, London or the Cote d’Azur.

The Pavel Lungin film, Tycoon (2003), of course, shows none of this. This is the scenario: at the end of the 80s, Platon Makovsky and his friends, young brilliant university students, abandon their scientific studies to launch themselves in business. Platon became the richest man in his country. Alas, he is soon killed in an assassination. The people responsible for this cowardly murder – stock “bad guys” – are all Russian patriots, tall, strong, with blue eyes, who are swindling the people and will stop at nothing to eliminate Platon, the likeable billionaire. There is obviously no need to study “Pavel Lungin”’s family tree to guess which “Mafia” he belongs to…

International Pimping

This topic was the object of a long very well documented chapter in our book entitled The Jewish Mafia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, tens of thousands of young women from Eastern Europe have been caught up by prostitution networks and sent to distant destinations.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to a considerable impoverishment of the population. To attempt to escape from the misery and meet the needs of their young families, many young Russian, Ukrainian or Moldovan women answered attractive ads in newspapers. Unfortunately for them, these offers to work abroad proved to be traps laid by international pimps. The media remain extremely discreet on this subject. In the month of May 2000, however, a report by Amnesty International revealed the scope of the phenomenon and pointed the finger at the State of Israel, as the turntable of this traffic.

Here again, we shall only present a few recent incidents: on 20 September 2009, we learned that an international luxury prostitution network had been dismantled in Paris. Three people were charged with “aggravated pimping” and membership in a “criminal organization”. Young women from Eastern Europe had been coerced into relations with business men. The Nouvel Observateur spoke of a “couple from Narbonne”. The head of the network was said to be a 38-year old woman, manager of a clothing store, and “of Moroccan origin”. In the French press, usually, they explain that the persons responsible are “Lebanese”, “Russian”, “Chechen”, or “Armenian”. If the press never gives their names, it is because there is a good reason not to: in fact, one had to read the Egyptian newspaper Al Yom Saabeh to learn that this was the work of the Jewish Mafia.

In December 2008, at Limoges, information was received from an Israeli pimp, Moshe Suissa, adding: “Several thousand women were ‘sold’ to prostitution networks in Israel over the last four years, according to the inquiry of a Parliamentary committee. From 3,000 to 5,000 women were the victims of this traffic, which earned thousands of billions per year. According to a police inquiry, 120 persons were arrested for pimping in the past 15 years and sentenced to from 2 to 15 years in prison”. Let us note that this is a question of 3 to 5 thousand women per year, most of them literally kidnapped in Russia, the Ukraine or Moldova, through deceptive newspaper ads.

Sergio Leone’s beautiful film One Upon a Time in America (1984), tells the story of Jewish gangsters arriving in New York from their native Poland at the beginning of the century. We see them dedicating themselves to smuggling alcohol and all sorts of other sordid rackets. They burglarize a jewellery store, liquidate their competitors, become nightclub owners, and do not hesitate to prostitute women of their own tribe. Later, their leader changes his identity in order to become a Senator.

In L.A. Confidential (USA, 1997), a film by Curtis Hanford, after the novel by James Ellroy, Jewishness is shown with great discretion. The beginning of the film presents the godfather of the local mafia, in the Los Angeles of the 1950s: Meyer Cohen – “Mickey C., to his fan club”. He is, we learn, “the king of junk, racketeering and prostitution. He kills a dozen people per year” and makes big headlines.

At the cinema, some cosmopolitan directors have also very classically projected the guilt of their fellow Jews upon others. In Roger Hanin’s film (real name: “Levy”), The Protector (1974), Nathalie, an 18-year old girl, disappears in the middle of Paris. To find her, her father, Samuel Malakian – a poor Jew – enters the White Slave trade directed by an aristocrat, Baron Metzger.

Take another look at the film Vice Squad, by “Jean Rougeron” (1987); Severine, 18 years old, falls into the hands of a pimp. Alarmed by her disappearance, her loved ones alert the vice squad. The inquiry orients the police to a White Slave network, the “Horsch” network. These villains kidnap girls to resell them to very rich foreigners.

These are all Nazis, Germans, tall, blond, with blue eyes. In the same register, Steven Spielberg’s film on the slave trade, Amistad (USA, 1997), does not show the dominant role played by Jewish merchants in this tragedy (see the chapter in The Jewish Mafia) and throws all the weight of the ignominy onto Christians.

The Organ Traffic

The organ traffic was the topic of a scandal during the summer of 2009. On 24 July, in the United States, about forty local representatives and five rabbis were arrested in New Jersey, and several synagogues were searched. The authorities suspected the suspects of corruption, extortion, money laundering, and… organ trafficking. Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum was accused of persuading Moldovan donors to sell their kidneys for 10,000 dollars, so as to resell them for 16 times as much in the USA and Israel. “He targeted vulnerable people”, stated Mark MacCarron, substitute Federal prosecutor. Rosenbaum took care of all the formalities required to cover the donor’s trip to New York, where the operation took place. It turned out that Rosenbaum was the principal intermediary of Illen Peri, who remained in Israel, and who was the brains of the operation.
In January 2004, already, a retired Israeli army officer named Geldaya Tauber Gady was arrested in Brazil for his participation in an international organ trafficking network. He then explained to the court that the operation was financed by the Israeli government. The fact is that the Israelis do not donate their organs for religious reasons. Israel is thus the only country in which the medical profession does not condemn the illegal traffic in organs, and where no action is taken against physicians who engage in the practice.
In 2003, Ilan Peri, 52 years old, was indicted in a network discovered in South Africa. It had performed at least one hundred kidney transplants. The operations, which benefited the Israelis, had taken place at the Saint Augustine clinic in Durban. The donors, in turn, were poor Brazilians from the region of Recife, who were paid up to 100,000 dollars per kidney. But the rates dropped quickly: to 3000 dollars.
Mike Levinski, an Israeli citizen, was the pioneer of the Moldovan network. The 15 February 2002 issue of Le Point, a weekly newspaper, provides some information on this traffic. We learn that the Moldovans, citizens of a small country located between Rumania and the Ukraine, were quite poor, and some of them were reduced to selling a kidney to survive. Israeli racketeers prospected on the spot, offering donors 3000 dollars for their “pound of flesh”. The commission received by the racketeers amounted to 30,000 dollars per kidney, while the surgeon’s fees amounted to 100,000 to 200,000 dollars per operation. Donors and patients found themselves in Turkey in the clinic of Dr. Sonmez, who admitted practicing more than 500 transplants over the past 5 years, without ever being bothered by the Turkish police. The traffic was obviously extremely profitable, judging by the number of small ads of intermediaries published in the Israeli press.

The “donors” were not always aware of what was happening to them. After benign operations, for appendicitis or something similar, performed on young Moldovans, they woke up with scars in the wrong places. They were then informed that it had been necessary to remove a kidney which was not functioning properly, or that, as was the case with Serghei, an X-ray later revealed that their surgeon had simply stolen their kidney.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, of the University of California, the specialist in this field, visited villages in Moldova where, she wrote, “20% of the adult men had been recruited to be kidney vendors”.

In December 2001, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Rumanian ambassador in Israel had demanded to be received by the Minister of Social Affairs to discuss the topic of what was beginning to be a scandal in his country. On this occasion, we learn, he demanded explanations and had given the Ministry a list of children born in Rumania who had been brought to Israel to be adopted, “with all theirorgans inside their bodies”. It therefore seems that the adoption of Rumanian infants in Israel is perhaps not just a work of charity.

The “Rabbi Rosenbaum Affair” reopened the case. At the end of 2009, the Swedish journalist Donald Bolström, after an on-the-spot investigation, accused the Israeli army of taking organs from Palestinian prisoners. On the Internet, tongues loosened. Israeli doctors from the medico-legal legal institute of Abou Kabir were accused of having extracted the vital organs (heart, kidneys, liver) from young Palestinians killed by the Israeli army in Gaza or the West Bank. The bodies were sometimes returned to the families, stuffed with cotton and stitched up from top to bottom, but usually guarded in numbered tombs.

During an interview on the Al-Jazira TV channel, the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat accused the Israelis of murdering infants and young Palestinians so as to collect their vital organs for transplant purposes. “They murdered our children and used theirorgans like the recycling of spare parts. Why did the world remainsilent? Israel benefits from this silence to intensify its oppression andterror against our people”, Arafat charged. Over the course of this interview, which was held on 14 January 2002, Arafat showed photographs of mutilated children.

In early October 2009, it was revealed that the network of rabbi Rosenbaum was also operating in Morocco. Pr. Mustapha Khiarti, president of the National Foundation for the promotion of health and research and development, revealed that the network specialized in kidnapping children in Algeria. The operations were performed in Moroccan clinics located in Oujda. Rabbi Rosenbaum concerned himself with the financing to acquire the necessary equipment for the surgical operations, and the transport of the organs to New York.

In July 2009, we learned that at Bucharest, in Rumania, three persons had been arrested on charge of trafficking in human ova, this time. The two persons responsible for the Sabyc clinic, a father and son, were Israelis. Two other Israelis who worked in this clinic were also booked. The clinic paid the donors sums between 800 to 1,000 lei (approximately 190 to 238 euro), while Rumanian law strictly prohibited the payment for the donation of organs or cells. According to the Rumanian media, most of the recipients were Israelis. They paid between twelve and fifteen thousand euro for the performance of fertilization in vitro. The ovules originated from young Rumanian women in situations of social difficulty.

Accusatory inversion is seen here in a film called Dirty PrettyThings (Britain, 2002): Okwe is a poor black of Nigerian origin who lives in London, England. He is an illegal immigrant, and life is not easy. But he works hard to survive. He works as a taxi driver by day and receptionist at night, in a London hotel. But strange things start happening in the hotel, and Okwe discovers that the hotel where he works is just a front for an organ dealing operation, orchestrated by the person responsible for that floor, who exploits poverty-stricken immigrants. In exchange for a kidney, poor Third World immigrants are promised a passport or a visa: a kidney for a passport. The operation is performed in one of the suites in the hotel by inexperienced physicians. Persecuted by the immigration services (two white Englishmen – very evil people), Okwe does not dare report what he knows. So he attempts to dismantle the traffic by other means, assisted by a Turkish cleaning lady, a black prostitute and a Chinaman working in a morgue. The poor clandestine immigrants (“undocumented aliens”) are the victims of blackmail, pressure, rape and crimes, while the bad guys, once again, are whites. The film was produced by the director Stephen Frears, who is a “white man”, as you may have guessed…

See The Believers (USA, 1987). In this film (do doubt you were expecting this): at New York, young children are kidnapped and serve as victims of ritual sacrifice. The psychologist Jamison discovered the existence of a sect, Santeria, practicing a Cuban variant of voodoo. The film is by John Schlesinger, who is not a member of any voodoo sect…
In the film by Peter Webber, Hannibal Lector, the Origins of Evil (2007), which unveils the childhood of the cannibal psychopathic killer of The Silence of the Lambs we see, in one scene, that a child killer can also be a good Christian, who is anxious for his own children to go to church.
It may be a bit easier to understand now why Jewish intellectuals, as a whole, are fiercely opposed to the death penalty. It is not just the fruit of philosophical reflection, but, rather, of a well-understood self-interest…

Understanding the Jews, Understanding Anti-Semitism

Hervé Ryssen 

Babi Yar

 

Documented History

After German troops had occupied Ukraine’s capital Kiev on 19 September 1941, Soviet partisans blew up several large buildings in the city center on 24 September, killing hundreds of German soldiers, mostly officers. The explosions caused a fire that eventually destroyed a square mile of Kiev’s center, making some 50,000 persons homeless. Efforts to extinguish the fires were also sabotaged by partisans. The Germans found a Soviet mining map showing about 50 objects readied for remote-controlled detonation. Large quantities of mines, explosives and “Molotov Cocktails” were also discovered.

Several reports by the Einsatzgruppen and by other units mention the fatalities and destruction caused by the partisan activities. Since the Germans suspected Jews to have been the main participants in this disaster, the city’s Jews were singled out for reprisal measures, officially by resettling them elsewhere to make room for the homeless. Posters in the city proclaimed that all of Kiev’s Jews had to show up on 29 September at a certain street intersection near the city’s cemeteries close to a ravine called Babi Yar.

The Einsatzgruppen’s Event Report No. 101 of 2 October 1941 states:

“In collaboration with Group Headquarters and two squads from the Police Regiment South, Sonderkommando 4a executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev on 29 and 30 Sept. 41.”

Later German documents repeated this number or a similar, rounded number as the death toll of this alleged blood bath, which allegedly found no opposition among the local non-Jewish populace, or was even supported by them. None of the documents indicate where exactly these executions took place.

Several photos taken by German military photographer Johannes Hähle in Kiev during those days show groups of several dozen people walking along streets; on other photos, numerous people are working with shovels in a ravine; several other photos show the bottom of a ravine littered with clothes and luggage, but with no people anywhere, dead or alive.

Although the radio messages sent by German SS units in Ukraine to Berlin were intercepted and deciphered by the British at that time, not a single reference to this event can be found.

Later Einsatzgruppen reports mention minor events in Kiev, such as the public hanging of three saboteurs or the shooting of a robber, but no large-scale execution.

Propaganda History

On 21 October 1941, the pro-National-Socialist Ukrainian newspaper Krakiwski Wisti wrote that the Jews of Kiev had been driven into barbed-wire enclosures, and from there by foot to an undisclosed destination.

On 4 November 1941, a certain Andrei I. Maremukha, a junior lieutenant in the militia, authored a report claiming that, on 23 September 1941, the Germans had killed a hundred Jews outside the city of Kiev by taken them to a pit that was mined.

On 13 November, a Polish underground radio station reported that Germans and Ukrainians had shot 35,000 Jews in Kiev.

On 16 November 1941, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published an article claiming that 52,000 Jews had been executed by the Germans in Kiev. On 31 December 1941, the JTA specified that “practically the entire Jewish male population of Kiev” had been executed as spies and partisans, and that the remaining Jews were killed by exploding mines, with any survivors getting machine-gunned. The report repeated the death-toll of 52,000 murdered Jews.

On 19 November 1941, the two Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia reported that “the Germans in Kiev killed 52,000 Jews.”

On 10 December 1941, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published the report of a regiment commissar about a massacre of Kiev’s Jews, mentioning for the first time the name Babi Yar.

On 6 January 1942, the Soviet Union’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, reported the murder of a “large number of Jews” at the Jewish Cemetery of Kiev.

The JTA reported on 15 March 1942 that 240,000 Jews had been executed by the Germans in Ukraine, claiming that people were even buried alive, and that therefore the ground was “moving in waves.”

On 20 July 1942, the Warsaw Ghetto’s underground press agency claimed that all of Kiev’s Jews had been drowned in the Dnjepr River.

On 28 October 1942, the JTA reported that Jews in Kiev were getting murdered, and their bodies dumped into the Dnjepr River.

On 29 November 1943, The New York Times reported that 50,000 Kiev Jews had been ordered to a ravine, where they had been machine-gunned, although the evidence for it was “sparse.”

Late on 28 February 1944, Radio Moscow reported that the Germans had murdered “more than 195,000 Soviet citizens” in Kiev by torture, shooting and poisoning in gas vans. This was a preview of an expert report issued by a Soviet Extraordinary State Commission charged with investigating the claimed mass murder, burial, exhumation and cremation at Babi Yar, which was officially dated and issued the next day, 29 February 1944. (See the section on Forensic Findings below.)

To come to this conclusion, the NKGB interrogated several witnesses who either had witnessed the shootings in late September 1941, or who claimed to have worked on exhuming and burning the bodies of the murder victims.

Witness testimonies about the executions agree that the victims had to undress at the top of the ravine, meaning outside of it. Some stated that the victims had to walk naked to the edge of the ravine, where they were shot at point-blank range, thus falling into the ravine. Others claimed that the victims were shot with (sub)machine guns from the opposite side or from both side of the ravine (e.g., see the entry on Dina Pronicheva). Another witness claimed that the victims had to run through the ravine while getting shot at from the edges (Nadezhda T. Gorbacheva). Children were tossed alive into the ravine.

However, machine-gun fire from the other side of the ravine, up to 100 meters away, would have been very inaccurate, particularly when the targets were moving. Lots of ammunition would have been wasted this way. If shooting at victims standing at the ravine’s edge from the opposite side, stray bullets could have hit any of the guards. Furthermore, if 33,771 Jews were all shot in one spot of the ravine’s edge, they all would have been lying on one big heap that eventually would have reached the ravine’s edge. Hence, someone had to drag away those corpses and spread them out in the ravine while all this wild submachine-gun shooting was allegedly happening. In other words, this most certainly did not happen.

German “perpetrator” witnesses who testified in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Fritz Höfer, Kurt Werner) insisted instead that the victims had to walk down into the ravine, then walk on the wobbly surface of wounded and dead victims already lying on the ground to a spot pointed out to them. There, they had to lay face down on the already executed victims below them, and then got shot at close range with a bullet from a submachine gun into the nape of their neck.

Of course, this would have required that all victims went like sheep to the slaughter. Furthermore, the photos taken by German military photographer Johannes Hähle show that people had deposited large amounts of clothes and personal belongings at the bottom of a ravine, hence inside, not at the top (outside). However, there are neither executed people visible on these photos, nor any other traces of a massacre. (See the entry on him.)

Within the so-called Aktion 1005, the mass graves are supposed to have been exhumed and the bodies cremated between mid-August and late September 1943 in order to erase all traces of this crime. Several witnesses, who all claimed to have been forced to do this work but managed to escape, testified about these alleged events. They all told a more-or-less consistent story:

Initially, some 100 inmates from the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev, were taken on or around 18 August 1943 to the ravine and put in shackles. There, they had to exhume bodies from mass graves, then pile them up on pyres in layers, alternating with layers of wood. These pyres contained some 2,000 to 3,000 bodies, rarely more. After they had burned down, bones in the cremation remains had to be crushed with pestles, and the ashes searched for valuables. After a while, this team of slave laborers was increased to some 320-330 men.

All in all, some 50,000 to 125,000 bodies were allegedly cremated, depending on the witness. On or around September 29, a revolt among the inmates broke out, and some of them managed to flee, among them the witnesses who testified. (See the entries on Semen Berlyant, Isaak Brodsky, David Budnik, Vladimir Davydov, Iosif Doliner, Yakov Kaper, Vladislav Kuklia, Leonid Ostrovsky, Yakov Steyuk, Ziama Trubakov.)

While these witnesses differ in several minor points, by and large they agree on what happened. This is a classic case of the convergence of evidence. However, all these witness statements describe events that cannot have happened the way they are described (see the witnesses’ entries for details):

Almost all witnesses give approximate sizes of the pyres they built, and how many bodies they contained. Yet if we add to the bodies the wood that would have been required to burn these bodies, the resulting pyres would have reached absurd heights. Such pyres could never have been built, neither would they have been stable, toppling over already while getting built or at the latest when burning down.

Sifting ashes with manual sieves and crushing unburned bones would have required that all the remains of a pyre had to be sifted. Wood-fired pyres burn unevenly and leave behind lots of unburned wood pieces, charcoal, and incompletely burned body parts, not just ashes and bones (80% of leftovers would have been from wood, not corpses). Incompletely burned wood and human remains could not have been crushed. If 100,000 bodies were burned, then several thousand metric tons of cremation leftovers had to be processed. Just this task would have required hundreds of men to complete in time. Any manual sieve – allegedly like flour sieves, hence with very small mesh sizes – would have clogged with the first load. Moreover, occasional inevitable rainfalls would have turned any burned-out pyre into a moist heap of highly alkaline, corrosive slush that could not have been processed this way at all. Any reasonable person facing this challenge would have employed industrial-sized strainers, loaded large quantities of cremation remains on them, flushed out all small parts with water, picked out any valuables, then dumped the rest onto a burning pyre for further cremation. The claim that a few inmates were sifting through thousands of tons of cremation remains with manual sieves is preposterous.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 100,000 bodies thus requires some 25,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 56 hectares of land, or some 125 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within the five weeks (35 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 1,134 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. None of the witnesses mentioned any kind of wood-cutting team. They all stated that everyone was busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, sifting through ashes, crushing bones, and finally scattering the ashes and refilling the graves with soil. There was just no way to obtain that much firewood at such short notice for such a huge operation – especially not when the fighting front was getting dangerously close.

Hence, this is a classic case of the convergence of evidence on a lie. After all, these witnesses were interviewed not by some mild-mannered, serious prosecutor or judge, but by members of the Soviet state’s terrorist organization NKGB.

Having several mutually consistent witness accounts in hand “confirming” the huge exhumation and cremation activities, the Soviet authorities neglected the other end of the equation: testimonies by locals. 25,000 metric tons of wood transported to the cremation sites with a typical 5-ton truck amounts to 5,000 truckloads. While there are a few witness statements of the local populace about the shootings claimed for the 29th and 30th of September 1941, there is not a single testimony or diary entry about the alleged cremation activities lasting five weeks, involving thousands of trucks driving in and out of Kiev, and smoke blanketing parts of the city.

Add to this the fact that a German report from early 1943 stated that it was impossible to provide Kiev’s civilian population with sufficient firewood due to a lack of means to transport it. By August and September of the year, with the front near Kiev, the transportation situation was far worse. There simply was no wood and no huge truck fleet to haul them.

To bolster the case of mass murder at Babi Yar for presentation at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal., U.S. and Soviet propagandists collaborated by extracting a coerced affidavit from an unknown (and maybe invented) German in U.S. captivity named Gerhard Adametz. His story has too many similarities with the NKGB-extracted testimonies to be independent, too many absurdities to be real, and too many anglicisms to have been written by a German. (See the entry on Gerhard Adametz.)

Soviet photo of Babi Yar taken in 1943, with no spectacular discoveries at all.

Once the Americans were on their own without any NKGB help to straighten out their stories, they faltered. In 1947, they extracted an affidavit, evidently by means of torture, from their captive Paul Blobel. Blobel is said to have been involved in both the murders and the clean-up action at Babi Yar. What he wrote about the clean-up operation, though, was physically impossible nonsense: bodies lying in mass graves burned right there and all by themselves, right to the bottom of the grave. (See the entry on Paul Blobel.)

When a show trial about Babi Yar was staged in Stuttgart, West Germany, in 1968/69, Soviet propaganda had long since been cast in stone. Gerhard Adametz’s fake testimony played a central role even during that trial, which accepted the Soviet propaganda story. The four defendants played along with this charade, with one of them getting 4 years, another 2 and a half years in prison, while the other two were acquitted: 6.5 years for 50,000 murders, as the court claimed. That’s 41 minutes for every Jewish life taken.

Forensic Findings

If 195,000 persons had been killed in and near Kiev, but only some 50,000 to 125,000 were exhumed and burned, as the witnesses claimed, where are the remaining 70,000 to 145,000 bodies? The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigating Kiev forced a few German PoWs to dig for them in several places, among them Babi Yar. But all they allegedly found were the remains of 150 Soviet citizens, and a few traces of burned remains. Even if that is true, who can reassure us that these weren’t NKVD victims from before the war?

No tombstones, rails, iron racks or fences, presumably used to build pyres, were discovered in Babi Yar, although two witnesses insisted that they had been buried there. Lacking any hard evidence, the ravine was later used as a garbage dump by the city of Kiev.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. released German wartime air photos they had captured in Germany and brought to the U.S. after the war. Among them are photos of Kiev dated 26 September 1943, showing the Babi Yar ravine in high resolution. This is supposed to have been at the very end of the claimed daily burning of thousands of bodies. We should see the floor of the ravine and its surroundings mauled by hundreds of trucks delivering firewood for weeks; the ravine’s walls massively damaged by people and vehicles going in and out; ramps allowing vehicles to drive in, unload fuel, and drive back out; large scorched areas of burned-down pyres, blackened by ashes and charcoal leftovers; the smoldering, smoking remnants of the last pyres.

Nothing of that sort can be seen on it, because nothing happened.

(For more details on Babi Yar, see Rudolf 2019, pp. 509-538; 2020a, pp. 153-156; 2023, pp. 317-324; Mattogno 2022c, pp. 523-579, 770-792.)

Repercussions

As mentioned at the beginning of this entry, several German wartime documents exist which mention the murder of 33,771 Jews in Kiev. The exactitude of this number itself is suspicious, because it is highly unlikely that any executioner would have kept such exact details.

If the huge exhumation and cremation in August and September never happened, the corpses should still be in the ground. But if so, why did the Soviets not find them after the war? However, none of these German documents mention Babi Yar. Could those Jews have been murdered and buried elsewhere? But if so, why were those mass graves never found or at least mentioned by anyone?

Maybe the death toll was vastly exaggerated, perhaps by accidentally (or deliberately) adding an extra “3” or “7” – perhaps 3,371 were executed, or maybe even just 371.

Or worse, it is conceivable that the documents reporting this massacre are profoundly wrong simply because nothing ever happened. Or perhaps they were tampered with, or even forged. Anything is possible.

For more information on these issues, see the entry on Johannes Hähle, the Einsatzgruppen and on Aktion 1005.

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Adametz, Gerhard

Gerhard Adametz was in U.S. captivity after the war at Dachau, where he was interrogated, most likely using the customary torture applied by the Americans to many, if not most of their captives. (See the entry on torture.) He signed a 36-pages-long handwritten statement on 17 October 1945. However, that original has disappeared. All that survived is an alleged transcript of 12 pages. A Russian translation of it was given the document ID USSR-80 at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.

According to this transcript, Adametz claimed to have reached Kiev around 10 September 1943 with a group of 40 policemen called “Detachment 1005 b.” There he was led “to an old cemetery about 5 km from Kiev,” where he was led “into the adjacent field.” There he saw about 100 inmates whose legs were shackled with a chain.

One hundred, later some 330 inmates, he claimed, were extracting corpses from mass graves and piling them up on stacks containing about 700 or even about 2,000 bodies each – with no wood in between. These bodies, merely placed “on a wooden base,” were then surrounded by wood leaning against the finished pile, after which the whole pile was set ablaze. This work ended around 1 October 1943. All in all, about 100,000 bodies were exhumed and burned this way.

Rather than placing the mass graves and the resulting pyres in the ravine named Babi Yar, Adametz has this event take place in a field. He never mentions Babi Yar. This indicates that he was describing an event at a location he had never seen.

His description of the incineration technique allegedly used is technically impossible. His piles of corpses, allegedly two to three meters high, were merely sitting on a wooden base and then surrounded by wood leaning against the pile. The wooden base, covered by these large piles of corpses, would never have caught fire, and the wood leaning against the pile would have burned down without transferring any noticeable amount of heat to the bodies in the center.

The survivor witnesses who were interrogated by the NKGB after the war at least had their pyres built by alternating layers of wood and corpses, so in theory those could have worked. However, their calculated sizes would have made them technically impossible, too. (See the entries on Semen Berlyant, Isaak Brodsky, David Budnik, Vladimir Davydov, Iosif Doliner, Yakov Kaper, Vladislav Kuklia, Leonid Ostrovsky, Yakov Steyuk, Ziama Trubakov.)

The total number of 100,000 bodies allegedly cremated accidentally happens to coincide with the number of bodies allegedly buried at Babi Yar, according to the Extraordinary Soviet Commission.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 100,000 bodies thus requires some 25,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 56 hectares of land, or some 125 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within the five weeks (35 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 1,134 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Adametz says nothing about huge piles of firewood, and where it came from.

In his affidavit, Adametz made statements about other locations where his unit supposedly guarded other inmate groups exhuming and burning corpses from mass graves. However, his claims as to where his unit went, and how long they stayed at which location, how many corpses were exhumed and burned are highly erratic and inconsistent. Moreover, his unit took extended breaks, recovery periods and furloughs. After having wrapped up Babi Yar, his unit was involved, from 16 October 1943 to 20 January 1944, in the exhumation and cremation of… 6,000 bodies! This is less than 62 bodies per day – a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of bodies that he allegedly just processed. It is also noteworthy that 40 to 50 inmate slave laborers were deployed at each location he mentions, no matter the number of corpses to be processed or the time available for it. In other words, his narrative was invented from scratch with no connection to reality. (See also the entry on Rumbula.)

The German text of Adametz’s statement is riddled with anglicisms both by choice of words and by sentence structure. Hence, the original text of Adametz’s statement was not written by a German in German, but in English, after which it was incorrectly translated into German by an inexperienced translator. Hence, even if Adametz handwrote this text, he did not write down his own words, but copied a poorly translated, originally English-language text. He would never have done this voluntarily. It therefore stands to reason that the American investigators cobbled together a text in English, translated it to German, softened up Adametz to make him cooperative, and had him sign it. This was probably done with assistance from the Soviets to make sure Adametz’s story about Babi Yar aligned with the Soviet version, as the Soviets evidently planned to use it, and then indeed introduced it, as evidence. Hence, they may even have requested this affidavit from the Americans.

Finally, no person by the name of Gerhard Adametz is known to historiography in any other historical context. The whole thing may just have been made up from beginning to end by the Americans and Soviets.

(For more details, see the entry on Babi Yar, as well as Mattogno 2022c, pp. 542-546, 550-563, 598-600.)

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Berlyant, Semen

Semen Berlyant was a Ukrainian Jew working on a German-run farm near Kiev during the war. In early September 1943, he was taken from there to Babi Yar, a place where tens of thousands of Jews are said to have been shot and buried by the Germans in mass graves in late September 1941 (see the entry on Babi Yar). He was interrogated by the NKGB on 16 November 1943 about his alleged experiences at Babi Yar.

Among other things, Berlyant stated that he and some 320 other slave-labor inmates were put in chains and had to exhume mass graves and burn the extracted bodies on pyres. Those pyres had 300 corpses in one layer, alternating with layers of wood, with a total of 3,000 bodies per pyre. This results in ten layers.

Let’s assume that a running meter of a pyre two meters wide can accommodate four corpses. Each corpse requires 250 kg of freshly cut wood (see open-air incinerations). The density of green wood is roughly 0.9 tons per m³, and its stacking density on a pyre is 1.4 (40% for air and flames to go through). This means that the wood required to burn just one layer of corpses is some 0.75 meters high. Adding the body layer gets us to roughly a meter. Ten such layers result in a pyre ten meters high. It would have been impossible to build such a pyre, and also impossible to burn it down without it collapsing and spilling burning wood and corpses all over the place.

Berlyant claimed that in total 70,000 corpses were burned at Babi Yar. Cremating 70,000 bodies thus requires some 17,500 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 39 hectares of land, or some 87 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within the five weeks this operation is said to have lasted (35 days) would have required a work force of some 800 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Berlyant claims his unit consisted only of 320 inmates, all busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, and according to other testimonies, also sifting through ashes, scattering the ashes and refilling the graves with soil. Berlyant said nothing about where the firewood came from.

Berlyant also asserted that people murdered in gas vans were brought to Babi Yar for cremation. However, considering that the front was getting very close to Kiev during September 1943, it is unlikely that anyone would have operated gas vans in Kiev’s vicinity. All this apart from the fact that gas vans are a figment of Soviet atrocity propaganda (see the entry on gas vans).

(For more details, see the entry on Babi Yar, as well as Mattogno 2022c, pp. 533f., and 550-563.)

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Brodsky, Isaak

Isaak Brodsky was a Ukrainian Jew who claimed to have been taken by German units in June 1943 to Babi Yar, a place where tens of thousands of Jews are said to have been shot and buried by the Germans in mass graves in late September 1941 (see the entry on Babi Yar). In an undated interview with the NKGB sometime in November or December 1943, he claimed that he was forced to exhume corpses from mass graves at Babi Yar and burn them on pyres. After that, the ashes were presumably sifted in search of valuables. He asserted that 70,000 bodies were burned at Babi Yar.

Brodsky’s statement is very brief and devoid of any specifics, making it difficult to assess his claims. His dating is noticeably off, though, because other witnesses claim that exhumations and cremation started only in mid-August 1943, not in June.

His claim that the ashes were sifted for valuables is naïve and betrays a lie, that all the remains of a pyre had to be sifted for unburned remains. Wood-fired pyres burn unevenly and leave behind lots of unburned wood pieces, charcoal and incompletely burned body parts, not just ashes (80% of leftovers would have been from wood, not corpses). Any sieve would have clogged with the first load. Moreover, any occasional rainfall would have rendered any burned-out pyre into a moist heap of highly alkaline, corrosive slush that could not have been processed at all. If 70,000 bodies were burned, then several thousand metric tons of cremation leftovers had to be processed. Just this job would have required hundreds of men to complete in time.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 70,000 bodies thus requires some 17,500 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 39 hectares of land, or some 87 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within five weeks (35 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 800 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Brodsky claimed his unit consisted only of 320 inmates, all busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, and also sifting through ashes, scattering the ashes and refilling the graves with soil. Brodsky said nothing about where the firewood came from.

(For more details, see the entry on Babi Yar, as well as Mattogno 2022c, p. 534, and 550-563.)

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Budnik, David

David Budnik was a Ukrainian Jew interned in the Syretsky Camp, 5 km from Kiev. On 18 August 1943, he was taken from there to Babi Yar, a place where tens of thousands of Jews are said to have been shot and buried by the Germans in mass graves in late September 1941 (see the entry on Babi Yar). He evidently was interviewed about his alleged experiences for the first time more than 20 years after the event on 14 February 1967. In 1980, during another interrogation in the Soviet Union – although not by court officials, yet by the KGB – Budnik repeated his terse description from 13 years earlier.

Among other things, Budnik stated that he and other slave-labor inmates were put in chains and had to exhume mass graves, and burn the extracted bodies on pyres. During his interrogations, he did not give any specifics about the pyres, other than that up to 2,000 bodies were placed on each of them. He asserted, however, that a total of 120,000 to 125,000 bodies were burned this way.

In a 1993 book containing an essay by Budnik, he describes the pyres used. They were built on an area of 10 m × 10 m, and were at least three meters high. However, this description was at least partially plagiarized from another witness, Ziama Trubakov, who testified in 1967:

“Tombstones and iron fences were brought from the Jewish cemetery, and then an area 10 x 10 m was planned, where they were laid in checker board pattern so that they formed an ash pan;”

In Budnik’s 1993 essay, we read:

“These tombstones were laid on the site 10 meters across by 10 meters in width, like a chessboard. Rails and fences were laid on top of them.”

On the pyre described by Budnik, some 20 bodies would have been placed per square meter. With some 250 kg of freshly cut word needed to burn one body, this would have amounted to 5 metric tons of wood. Fresh wood has a density of roughly 0.9 tons per m³, and when stacked on a pyre, the gaps make up some 40% of the space (for air and flames to go through). Therefore, 5 metric tons of wood on a surface of one square meter stack up to a height of some 8 meters. Add to this the 20 to 25 bodies. This means that the pyres described by Budnik would have been at least ten meters high, not just “at least three meters.” Such a huge pyre could have been built only with cranes. Once lit, it inevitably would have burned unevenly, hence would have toppled over and spilled burning wood and corpses all over the place.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 120,000 bodies thus requires some 30,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 67 hectares of land, or some 149 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within five weeks (35 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 1,360 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Budnik didn’t specify how many men were in his unit. The maximum number claimed by other witnesses was just over 300 men, all busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, crushing bones, sifting through ashes, scattering the ashes and refilling the graves with soil. Budnik said nothing about where the firewood came from.

Budnik claimed that, after the pyres had burned down, unburned bones were ground down, the cremation remains sifted through sieves, and the remaining powder scattered. However, wood-fired pyres burn unevenly and leave behind lots of unburned wood pieces, charcoal, and incompletely burned body parts, not just ashes and bones (80% of leftovers would have been from wood, not corpses). Incompletely burned wood and human remains could not have been ground. Any sieve would have clogged with the first load. Moreover, any occasional rainfall would have rendered any burned-out pyre into a moist heap of highly alkaline, corrosive slush that could not have been processed at all. If 120,000 bodies were burned, then several thousand metric tons of cremation leftovers had to be processed. Just this job would have required hundreds of men to complete in time.

Budnik also insisted that they had to throw bodies of people into the pyres who had been killed in gas vans. However, considering that the front was getting very close to Kiev during September 1943, it is unlikely that anyone would have operated gas vans in Kiev’s vicinity. All this apart from the fact that gas vans are a figment of Soviet atrocity propaganda (see the entry on gas vans).

(For more details, see the entry on Babi Yar, as well as Mattogno 2022c, pp. 539f., and 550-563.)

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