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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