How Many at Babi Yar

[Hannover]

Hebden said:

Where are the mass graves of those who died in German POW camps?

Who said there were mass graves for German POWs?

However, mass graves of Communist atrocities are commonplace and well documented. You have ZERO from the 'holocaust' as alleged.

Then Hebden completely dodges the request about mass graves at Babi Yar; revealing, as there was no mass shooting as alleged there. But somehow that doesn't matter to Hebden, it's a matter of faith.

Hebden goes on to cite British 'intercepts' in which explanations have already been provided and no mass graves exist to validate them. The 'intercepts' are necessarily bogus if the physical evidence does not exist to validate them. Simple, that is logic. The British were quite astute at creating phoney documents, the alleged recorded 'conversations' are classic examples. See threads at this Forum....search 'recorded'.

Hebden lapses into a vast funk of logic with:

We don't know, but as you will appreciate, an absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence.

Well yes, it certainly is evidence of absence of evidence, otherwise we'd be seeing it. We are talking allegations of huge mass shootings at known centralized sites into mass graves which do not exist. The fraud couldn't be anymore obvious.
No doubt that since the Loch Ness monster hasn't been found it's proof that he exists. No doubt UFO/aliens abductions are true since there is no physical evidence. And undoubtedly the Devil was indeed having sex with the women of Salem since we cannot seem to find him.

The onus is upon the accuser. They cannot provide the required evidence and resort to amazingly desperate beliefs.

- Hannover

[J William]

We don't know, but as you will appreciate, an absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence.

True, but an absence of evidence should certainly make one question the stories or at least ask for confirmation. When accusations as serious as the mass graves question are made and since it would so easy to confirm or debunk the existence of the alleged mass graves one has to wonder why no proper inspections have been made. There are several reasons why investigative digs haven't been carried out. One would think when an accusation which defames an entire people for what appears is going to be all eternity is made that overwhelming evidence would be required. The overwhelming evidence should be primarily of the documentary and forensic nature backed up by eyewitness testimony. But as a sage once said, "the first casulity in wartime is the truth" or words to that effect.

[Hebden]

True, but an absence of evidence should certainly make one question the stories or at least ask for confirmation. When accusations as serious as the mass graves question are made and since it would so easy to confirm or debunk the existence of the alleged mass graves one has to wonder why no proper inspections have been made. There are several reasons why investigative digs haven't been carried out. One would think when an accusation which defames an entire people for what appears is going to be all eternity is made that overwhelming evidence would be required. The overwhelming evidence should be primarily of the documentary and forensic nature backed up by eyewitness testimony. But as a sage once said, "the first casulity in wartime is the truth" or words to that effect.

It's a nice speech, Mr. William, but we have to deal with the evidence such as it exists. The German documentary and eye-witness evidence for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Riga comes from four distinct sources: OSR report, Mr. Himmler's hand-written telephone notes, police decodes, CSDIC recording. Any conspiracy resourceful enough to coordinate fabrications of this order would, in our opinion, deserve to get away with it.

[trtsk]

However, mass graves of Communist atrocities are commonplace and well documented.

Direct question to Hannover. Name three Communist mass grave sites other than Katyn.

Tom

[Turpitz]

Here's two for a start :

'Kurapaty'

This year (1988), from July 6 through 15, the investigative agencies of the Procurator's Office of the BSSR carried out a selective exhumation of the graves at Kurapaty. The criminological investigation enquiry headed by Counsellor of Justice J.J.Broliss, a special investigator. A number of specialists (criminologists, medical experts, archaeologists, etc.) were officially invited to participate in the investigation. The archaeological excavations and the examination of the buried remains were carried out by a group of archaeologists from the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR (Z.S.Pazniak, M.M.Kryvalcevic, A.V.Iou). The scientific report on the archaeological investigations was reviewed, analysed, and approved by the Department of Archaeology (of that Institute) and submitted to the Procurator.



'Mednoe'
exhumation carried out in 1991.

On termination of the exhumation work at Mednoe, exactly as it was at Kharkov, on 31 August 1991 the exhumed remains of the Ostashkov prisoners were interred during a celebration, with participation of family members, clergy, representatives of government authorities, and merely the Representation Company of the Army was replaced by the Representation Company of the Police. A tall

DEPOSIT OF VALUABLES FROM MIEDNOJE AT THE INSTITUTE OF FORENSIC RESEARCH - RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATIONS

Andrzej CZUBAK

Institute of Forensic Research, Cracow

ABSTRACT: This article describes research carried out at the Forensic Department of the Institute of Forensic Research on valuable objects brought from Miednoje - the site of exhumation of Polish citizens murdered by the NKVD. The article presents a general description of how the relics have been conserved and how documentation has been prepared, with particular emphasis on the most interesting cases.

KEY WORDS: Ostaszków; Miednoje; Deposit of valuables.

Z Zagadnień Nauk Sądowych, z. XXXVI, 1997





The note of the Chief of NKWD 'L.Beria' (Zionist Jew) to J.Stalin
(March 1940)
USSR PEOPLE'S COMMISSARIAT OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS
" " March 1940 No. 794/B MOSCOW


CC ACP (b) to Comrade STALIN
P13N144op TOPSECRET of March 5, 1940.

Oop's, Kharkov is another as well. Also exhumed for family members I believe.

[Sailor]

It's a nice speech, Mr. William, but we have to deal with the evidence such as it exists. The German documentary and eye-witness evidence for the Bloody Sunday massacre in Riga comes from four distinct sources: OSR report, Mr. Himmler's hand-written telephone notes, police decodes, CSDIC recording. Any conspiracy resourceful enough to coordinate fabrications of this order would, in our opinion, deserve to get away with it.

Back in Riga, Mr. Hebden?

It appears that you are a follower of Shermer's "theory of converging evidences", with the help of your personal interpretations of certain events. That is fine for you, but some people have a different approach to things.

We discussed this in the thread "Riga, November 30, 1941" http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t= ... sc&start=0

As a technical person I asked then these questions:

1. To me, to say nonchalantly with a sleight of hands, that these people were all massacred without any solid proof is simply not enough. I need more information.

2. End of November, it was winter, and believe you me, it can be quite cold in that area, 30C below zero, it becomes difficult to breath. Was the ground covered with snow, ice? Or was the sun shining? Raining? Was it difficult to dig those mass graves?

3. Any other witnesses like for example the train personnel, the lokomotive drivers, the security police on the train?

4. Train traffic to and from Riga had to be halted in order to avoid collision, and who knows, thousands of witnesses to the alleged mass murder crime. Any witnesses or surviving documentations about this?

5. Were the trains “Personenzüge 3. Klasse” (trains for persons, 3rd class), we all used them many times then. Each wagon, if I remember correctly, had 6 or 8 doors on each side and two toilets, one at each wagon end. Or were they cattle cars, or freight cars?

6. The trains allegedly stopped outside a train station, with no loading platforms. The wagon floor is about 1.5 m (5 ft) above the tracks, the railroad track bed itself is usually raised above the general area, depending on the terrain, maybe at least 1.0 m (3 ft). And the tracks on ties are placed on a bed of crushed rock to prevent damage during rainfall. What all this indicates is, that it is not all that easy to get off the wagon, families with women and children, especially for older folks. Any information about this? How long did it take to disembark?

7. What with the luggage, was this left behind in the train? Or did they take it with them to the place of execution?

8. Even in “the middle of nowhere” there are people around. Where there any security measurements taken? Guards posted? Witnesses from the area around?

9. And how far did these 1000 people have to go the place of the massacre? How long would that take? I mean that they probably did no march like a troop of marines like Gomer Pile. And they had a long trip behind them. They were tired.

10. What if a little kid suddenly shouts: “Mutti, ich muß mal!” (Mom, I have to go potti!). There are 1000 people involved here, a very normal occurrence.

11. Now at the massacre site, did they all line up in one long line? Assuming 0.5 m width per person, that would give us a total length of 500 m, approximately 5 city blocks. Not to sneeze at. Or were they lined up in two rows, or three, or just one big disorganized crowd?

12. And how were they executed? Not with machine pistols? These at that time were quite inaccurate and used mostly by soldiers in “Nahkampf” (hand-to-hand combat) situations during trench warfare, where the other guys were about one or two meters away. Or by the Einsatzgruppen during partisan searches in tight quarters like housings. What were the weapons used? Rifle? Machine guns?

13. What happened to the bodies of those 5000 Jews from the trains? Were they ever discovered?

14. Any comments from Breitman, Irving, Gerlach, Browning, Ezergailis, Gilbert on these?

Nothing, Mr. Hebden, nothing?

And please, no arguments like: »The fact that there are no proofs prove that these proofs were removed without leaving a trace «. This is pseudo-scientific nonsense concocted by fellows like Arno Mayer and Michael Shermer.

But don't bother, Mr. Hebden. This thread is really about Babi Jar.

fge

[Hebden]

Back in Riga, Mr. Hebden?

It appears that you are a follower of Shermer's "theory of converging evidences", with the help of your personal interpretations of certain events. That is fine for you, but some people have a different approach to things.

Are you familiar with the notion of 'inference to the best explanation'?

If not see: http://oldweb.uwp.edu/academic/philosophy/bestexpl.htm

We discussed this in the thread "Riga, November 30, 1941" http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t= ... sc&start=0

As a technical person I asked then these questions:

1. To me, to say nonchalantly with a sleight of hands, that these people were all massacred without any solid proof is simply not enough. I need more information.

What you need, in our opinion, is a better explanation of the evidence than ours. You seem curiously unwilling to put one forward.

2. End of November, it was winter, and believe you me, it can be quite cold in that area, 30C below zero, it becomes difficult to breath. Was the ground covered with snow, ice? Or was the sun shining? Raining? Was it difficult to dig those mass graves?

Today is December 2. Here's a 5 day weather forecast for Riga:

http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/LGXX0004.html

3. Any other witnesses like for example the train personnel, the lokomotive drivers, the security police on the train?

We rejected a priori this type of evidence as being unreliable. The fear being that any witnesses would either have been coached or coerced by the Communists.

4. Train traffic to and from Riga had to be halted in order to avoid collision, and who knows, thousands of witnesses to the alleged mass murder crime. Any witnesses or surviving documentations about this?

As your position is that hundreds of thousands Jews were deported from across Europe to the Soviet Union, we could ask you the same question a thousandfold. In general, one should try and avoid such obvious double standards.

11. Now at the massacre site, did they all line up in one long line? Assuming 0.5 m width per person, that would give us a total length of 500 m, approximately 5 city blocks. Not to sneeze at. Or were they lined up in two rows, or three, or just one big disorganized crowd?

How do you think the NKVD organised the murder of thousands of Polish officers? Are you telling us that the German flair for organisation couldn't have dealt with a similar number of civilians?

12. And how were they executed? Not with machine pistols? These at that time were quite inaccurate and used mostly by soldiers in “Nahkampf” (hand-to-hand combat) situations during trench warfare, where the other guys were about one or two meters away. Or by the Einsatzgruppen during partisan searches in tight quarters like housings. What were the weapons used? Rifle? Machine guns?

See answer to question 11.

13. What happened to the bodies of those 5000 Jews from the trains? Were they ever discovered?

Not to our knowledge. We think it best to leave you with at least one straw to clutch at.

14. Any comments from Breitman, Irving, Gerlach, Browning, Ezergailis, Gilbert on these?

Nothing, Mr. Hebden, nothing?

Didn't we already warn you against such impertinence?

And please, no arguments like: »The fact that there are no proofs prove that these proofs were removed without leaving a trace «. This is pseudo-scientific nonsense concocted by fellows like Arno Mayer and Michael Shermer.

The OSR, the Himmler telephone notes, the decodes, the CSDIC recording. Your best explanation, please.

But don't bother, Mr. Hebden. This thread is really about Babi Jar.

fge

Oh, please do bother, Mr. Sailor.

[Hebden]

You are correct that the documentary record for SK 1005 appears to be scant. In a moment of weakness, one might indeed be tempted to deny that it actually existed. After all, if its organisation and field of operations could be firmly established, revisionists would be faced with the awkward task of explaining its alternative purpose.

The Treblinka book by Messrs Mattogno and Graf address this very issue:

Let us now turn to the question of what the official historiography tells us about the alleged ‘Operation 1005’ and upon what sources this is based.

In the article from the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust it says:

“Operation 1005, code name for a large-scale activity that aimed to obliterate the traces of the murder of millions of human beings by the Nazis in occupied Europe.”

The decision to allow this operation to start up is supposed to have been made in Berlin at the beginning of 1942. A letter of February 20, 1942, from the Chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, to Martin Luther of the Foreign Office, in which the subject of the unsatisfactory burial of corpses is raised and which is supposed to have been written after Müller “had received an anonymous letter complaining about the corpses flooding the WARTHEGAU area,” is cited as proof. This letter bears the file designation “IV B 4 43/42 Rs (1005),” and the alleged ‘Operation 1005’ is supposed to have gotten its name from this document!

But Alfred Streim, who cites the relevant letter based on first-hand knowledge, writes:

“On November 20, 1942, Himmler ordered SS-Gruppenführer Müller, Chief of Department IV in the RSHA, in writing (Zst. Dok. Slg. Ordner 3, Bl. 583): "…You must give me a guarantee that the bodies of these deceased Jews will either be burned or buried in every location, and that nowhere can anything else of any kind happen with these bodies…”

He does not say that this letter bore the heading “IV B 4 43/42 gRs (1005),” does not assign to it the designation ‘1005,’ and confines himself to the following comment:

“The undertaking received – in accord with a nomenclature procedure of the RSHA – the designation ‘1005.’”

Thus, the letter concerned dates from November 20, 1942, and not from February 20. This would mean that the designation ‘1005’ for the operation would have been assigned a full five months after its start! On the other hand, in the letter the Jews are referred to as “dead,” not ‘shot’ or ‘killed.’ Moreover, the disposal of the bodies could take place by cremation or burial, which means that the Himmler letter need have no connection with the excavation and cremation of corpses of Jews who had been shot, and what we are dealing with here is a primitive hoax.

According to official historiography, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel took charge of ‘Operation 1005’ and “The operation commenced in June 1942 with attempts to burn the corpses in the CHELMNO extermination camp.” In the initial phase, the bodies in the alleged eastern extermination camps are supposed to have been exhumed and cremated. We have dealt with this issue in detail in Chapter IV, in the prototypical case of Treblinka.

The second phase is supposed to have lasted from the beginning of June 1943 until the end of July 1944. During its course, the mass graves on Soviet and Polish territory are supposed to have been emptied and the traces of the massacres eradicated.

The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust shows a map with the most important locations where these activities are supposed to have transpired. This is a huge area, which extends from north to south across approximately 1,500 km (from the North Sea to the Black Sea) and from west to east across about 1,300 km (from west Poland to the German-Soviet front). Beginning with the camp Janowska at Lemberg, this area is supposed to have been assigned its own ‘Sonderkommado 1005,’ which consisted of officers of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) and from the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO, Security Police), of men from the Ordnungspolizei (regular police) and of dozens or hundreds of – mostly Jewish – prisoners, whose task was the hands-on execution of the work.‘Sonderkommando 1005-A’ and ‘Sonderkommando 1005-B’ are supposed to have been active in Kiev. Both, so it is said, were then transferred.

‘Sonderkommando 1005-Mitte’ supposedly began its work in Minsk. Other ‘Sonderkommandos 1005’ were allegedly deployed in Lithuania, in Estonia, in the Białystok district, in the General Gouvernement and in Yugoslavia.

Now, if one considers that according to the most comprehensive studies on this subject that exist, the Einsatzgruppen alone are supposed to have shot 2,200,000 people (Jews and non-Jews), that Wehrmacht, SS, and police units are also accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, and that – as already emphasized – neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass-graves with even only a few thousand bodies, the ‘Sonderkommandos 1005’ must have exhumed and burned between one-and-a-half and three million bodies. This means that within a period of 13 months they had to have emptied thousands of graves at hundreds of locations, which were scattered over an enormous area – all of this without leaving behind any material or documentary traces!

Without having thousands of maps, on which the graves were marked, it would quite obviously have been impossible to locate those thousands of mass graves in a territory of more than 1.2 million square kilometers, but neither are such maps mentioned in even a single Einsatzgruppe report or any other document, nor have such maps ever been found among the German documents captured by the victors of World War II. And if – as the witnesses report – thousands of pyres were burning during the night despite blackout regulations, no Soviet reconnaissance plane discovered and photographed them – for otherwise the photographs would have been exploited at once for propaganda purposes.

Thomas Sandkühler plays this down:

“Due to the extreme secrecy of the ‘Operation 1005,’ written sources on this are very rare.”

In other words, there are none! Sandkühler‘s statement reflects the total embarrassment, which orthodox historians feel in the face of this outrage, while simultaneously serving up the customary stale explanation: the documents do not exist “due to the strict secrecy”! This hypothesis stands in glaring contrast to a fact, which Gerald Reitlinger describes:

“The original series [of Einsatzgruppen reports] consisted of nearly two hundred reports with a circulation list of sixty to a hundred copies each. […]

It is not easy to see why the murderers left such an abundant testimony behind them, […]”

The Event Reports USSR comprise a total of “over 2,900 typewritten pages,” and each of them was distributed with a minimum circulation of 30 copies. The Germans are therefore supposed to have distributed tens of thousands of pages of documents concerning the mass shootings committed by the Einsatzgruppen, then quite suddenly have grasped the necessity of exhuming and burning the bodies, but have forgotten to destroy the incriminating documents!

The fact is, the story of ‘Operation 1005’ is based upon some few completely unreliable witness statements. The first of them were collected by Soviet commissions or journalists and printed in the Black Book edited by Ilja Ehrenburg and Wassili Grossman. This is a propagandistic collection of tales from alleged eyewitnesses. Aside from the Vladimir K. Davidov already mentioned, one finds here the (hearsay) testimony of Shimon Ariel and Zalma Edelman about Bialystok, that of a few (according to their own statements) escapees from Kaunas, and that of a Y. Farber about Ponari (Lithuania). These witnesses know nothing to report about any ‘Operation 1005’ or a ‘Sonderkommando 1005.’

The designation ‘Sonderkommando 1005’ was invented by the Soviets. At the proceedings of February 9, 1946, at the Nuremberg Trial, the Senior Counsel Smirnov read out excerpts from the protocol “of the interrogation of Gerhard Adametz (Exhibit USSR-80, Document Number USSR-80), taken by an American army lieutenant, Patrick McMahon,” in which there was talk of the activities of the “Sonderkommando 1005-A” and “1005-B.”

In 1946, the work written by Leon Weliczker Brygada Śmierci (The Death Brigade), the longest and most detailed witness report about the ‘Brigade 1005,’ appeared in Lodz, which Thomas Sandkühler, once again politely using understatement, rates as follows:

“The horrifying notes of Weliczker have only insignificant evidentiary value.”

Or, to put it another way, they have none!

The SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel was, however, unknown to this witness. He was connected to the ‘Operation 1005’ by an Erwin Schulz, who had been the leader of Einsatzkommando V of the Einsatzgruppe C of the Sicherheitspolizei from the beginning of the Russian Campaign until September 1941 and served under SS-Brigadeführer Rasch. But Schulz did not know the name of the alleged huge operation for the excavation and cremation of the bodies, since this was first settled upon in 1947. On December 20, 1945, he stated:

“About 1943 I learned during my activity as Chief of Department I of the RSHA that at this time the SS-Standartenführer Blobel had to make the mass graves unrecognizable of those who had been shot and liquidated in the territories to be evacuated by the Wehrmacht. If I recall correctly, the cover-name for these mass graves was ‘water sites.’”

Now all that remained was to put the individual parts together.

In November 1946, Rudolf Höß wrote in the Krakow prison:

“Standartenführer Blobel had been authorized to seek out and obliterate all the mass graves in the whole of the eastern districts. His department was given the code number ‘1005.’”

Finally, at the preliminary examinations of the trial against the Einsatzgruppen, which took place in Nuremberg from September 29, 1947, to February 12, 1948, Paul Blobel judged it expedient to ‘confess’ what had already become ‘facts determined by virtue of official authority’ for the prosecutors.

In a ‘statutory declaration’ made at Nuremberg on June 6, 1947, he stated for the record:

“In June 1941, I became Chief of Sonderkommando 4A. This Sonderkommando was assigned to Einsatzgruppe C, the latter was under the command of Dr. Rasch. The special region assigned to me was located in the area of the 6th Army, which was commanded by field marshal von Reichenau. In January 1942, I was relieved as Chief of Sonderkommando 4A and was transferred to Berlin for disciplinary reasons. I remained there for some time with no work. I was under the supervision of Department IV, under the former Gruppenführer Müller.

In the Fall of 1942, I was given the mission as Müller‘s deputy to drive into the occupied eastern territories and eradicate the traces of the mass graves which came about from the executions of the Einsatzgruppen. This was my mission up to the summer of 1944.”

The American inquisitors gave every appearance of being unsatisfied with this ‘confession’ and forced Blobel to give a further ‘statutory declaration.’ This time he expressed himself in more detail:

“After I had been relieved from this assignment, I had to report in Berlin to SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich and Gruppenführer Müller and in June 1942 was entrusted with the mission by Gruppenführer Müller of eradicating the traces of executions of the Einsatzgruppen in the east. My orders were to report personally to the commander of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD and to orally pass on to them Müller‘s order and to supervise its performance. This order was a secret Reich matter, and it was ordered by Müller that due to the strictest secrecy of this mission, no kind of written exchanges are to be permitted.”

This version, with the new date (“in June 1942” instead of “in the fall of 1942”) was elevated to being the pivotal point of official historiography. That Blobel in neither of his two declarations spoke of an ‘Operation 1005’ or a ‘Sonderkommando 1005’ played no role, for these little gaps were naturally closed by the historians!

It should be well understood that we do not wish to claim by what we have said here that there was no opening of mass graves and cremation of bodies, any more than we are claiming that there were no shootings of Jews. But we are very much questioning the enormous scale, which the official historiography attributes to these occurrences.

When the authors claim the designation SK 1005 was invented by the Soviets, they apparently believe this occurred only after the war; the first instance they cite is from the IMT trial in Nuremberg. They would seem to be unaware of the Soviet commission report dating from December 1944 which we have previously quoted in this thread:

On the instructions of Reichsminister of Germany Himmler and Maj.-Gen. of S. S. Police Katzmann, in June 1943 special measures were taken to exhume and burn the bodies of civilians, Soviet war prisoners and nationals of foreign States who had been tortured to death or shot. In Lvov the Germans formed a special Sonderkommando, No. 1,005, consisting of 126 men. Chief of this squad was Hauptsturmbannfuehrer Scherlak; his assistant was Hauptsturmbannfuehrer Rauch.

The previously mentioned book The Field Men gives biographical details for some 380 Einsatzkommando officers. Of these, 13 are positively identified as officers of Sonderkommando 1005:

Paul Blobel (Commander); Günther Fuchs; Karl-Arthur Harder; Walter Helfsgott; Max Krahner; Hanns-Elmar Legath; Franz Radif; Hermann Rohlfing; Walter Schallock; Dr. Friedrich Seekel; Hans-Fritz Sohns; George Winkler; Fritz Zietlow.

It's not clear what means Mr. MacLean employed to establish such an identification. In 6 of the 13 cases, (Mr. Füchs; Mr. Harder; Mr. Krahner; Mr. Rohlfing; Dr. Seekel; Mr. Winkler) the given biographies state: 'No mention of Einsatzkommando service in personnel file.' This would imply that the files of the others may contain references to service in Sonderkommando 1005.

[Sailor]

What is the difference whether the Soviets invented 'Operation 1005' in December 1944 or after the war for the Nuremberg trials?

That they had to come up with something like that is understandable, since the Soviets could not, or did not want to, find the huge mass graves of those millions of Jews who were according to their own allegations gassed/shot by the Nazis.

In the Einsatzgruppen bible by Krausnick/Wilhelm: Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges I can't find a reference to 'SK-1005' either.

fge

[Hannover]

Mr. Hebden cannot show us one mass grave which supports the story as alleged, rather it be Babi Yar or anywhere else. Why is that?

- Hannover

[TheFirstPrinciple]

I found this account by an alleged "eyewitness". Might be helpful.

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/budnik09.htm

At the end of 1968, my past knocked at my door in the person of a postman. The letter he carried was completely unexpected to me. I was asked to testify to speak in front of the jury in Stuttgart on January 7th, 1969 at 9 o'clock. The charged were Sturmbahnfuhrer SS Gans Sons, Hauptsturmfuhrer SS Fritz Zitlov, Hauptsturmfuhrer SS Walter Helsfgot and Sturmbahnfuhrer Fritz Kirstein. As it turned out it they were part of the group that designed crematoria in the concentration camps. It was they who financed and organized the cover-up of Babi Yar during the retreat.

The letter read as follows The evidence given by you earlier can not substitute for the interrogation at the hearing, as according to the rules of the German Criminal law procedure charter for sentencing only the evidence given before the jury at the hearing is acceptable.

So Davidov, Kaper and I went to Stuttgart. The process was very well organized. Everything was done very properly without any excess. I liked one of the prosecutors. He spoke Russian very well and could communicate with us without an interpreter. I was very surprised that there were many young people in the courtroom. When I asked the prosecutor about it, he explained that it was necessary to bring young people here so that they know what their parents and grandparents did. They had to learn.

Even now I still have a yellowed and aged issue of the newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung dated February 14, 1969. One of the columns contains a big headline:

PROCESS OVER SONDERKOMAND L005;

THREE RUSSIAN WITNESSES IN STUTTGART;

GENUINE AND PRECISE DESCRIPTION

OF PRISONERS' ACTIVITIES;

NOBODY KNOWS THE ACCUSED

We did not know either Sons or Helsfgot or Zitlov or Kirstein even if we had seen them in Babi Yar. Each of us were given photographs of Radomsky and Topaide for identification. I recognized Radomsky at once, but Topaide did not look like he did when he was young and had a crew cut. His appearance, for us, was always associated by the fact his head jerked. That was why we could not state if it was him.

We gave our testimony to the court and told how the corpses were burnt and how we escaped. All this was published in Stuttgarter Zeitung.

[Hannover]

- According to the ridiculous story the alleged cremations at Babi Yar took place in ovens constructed from tombstones taken from a nearby Jewish cemetery...I kid you not, that's what is alleged.

- Since when did SS officers "finance" alleged actions? Absurd.

Again, where's the mass grave?

Where's the forensic physical evidence?

I also note that Mr. Hebden continues to believe in the veracity of the silly 'recorded conversations' and laughable 'decodes' regardless of the explicit points made about their lack of credibility at this Forum; and in spite of the fact that they are not supported by evidence.

-Hannover

[TheFirstPrinciple]

Indeed, Mr. Hebden seems to be a standard Holohoaxer. He believes in mythical gas chambers, yet he is unable to provide a single proof. He believes in a laughable "massacre" at Babi Yar, yet there is no physical evidence.

[Hebden]

What is the difference whether the Soviets invented 'Operation 1005' in December 1944 or after the war for the Nuremberg trials?

fge

In a word, exactitude.

We should like to hear more about the document which apparently gave rise to the designation 1005:

The decision to allow this operation to start up is supposed to have been made in Berlin at the beginning of 1942. A letter of February 20, 1942, from the Chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, to Martin Luther of the Foreign Office, in which the subject of the unsatisfactory burial of corpses is raised and which is supposed to have been written after Müller “had received an anonymous letter complaining about the corpses flooding the WARTHEGAU area,” is cited as proof. This letter bears the file designation “IV B 4 43/42 Rs (1005),” and the alleged ‘Operation 1005’ is supposed to have gotten its name from this document!

If the authenticity of this document could be vouched for, it would seem a remarkable coincidence if the Soviets had chanced upon the same number in their own propaganda before the end of 1944.

Now do you see the difference, Mr. Sailor?

[Hebden]

Name three Communist mass grave sites other than Katyn.

From The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945:

The first mass grave of Ukrainians in Vinnitsa was discovered by the Germans shortly after they occupied the town in 1941: 96 corpses, mostly of Ukrainian political prisoners and religious dissidents, were found in the courtyard of the civilian prison, victims of the general policy of liquidating prisoners when it became impossible to evacuate them prior to the arrival of German troops. The grave was about 20 meters long and 6 meters wide. The exhumations took place in the presence of a military judge named Schwarz, who collected the relevant evidence and had photographs taken for the documentation of the War Crimes Bureau.

In another courtyard of the same prison a second mass grave was found but those bodies were not exhumed. It was not until two years later, on 25 May 1943, that as a result of the persistent rumors among the Ukrainian civilian population, digging was begun in other suspected areas of town and more graves discovered. In all, three major graveyards were found: the pear-orchard with 38 mass graves, the old cemetery with 40 mass graves, and the People's Park with 35 mass graves. Only some of the bodies were exhumed; weather conditions interrupted the digging, and it was never resumed because the Soviet Army reoccupied the area. By then, however, 9,439 corpses had already been counted.

[...]

Meanwhile, as in Katyn, the Germans had first sent in their own experts in forensic medicine, then invited foreign experts. The international medical commission that arrived in Vinnitsa in July of 1943 (some three months after the Katyn investigations) was composed of eleven doctors from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Rumania, Slovakia, and Sweden. From 13 to 15 July 1943 they carried out 11 full autopsies and 24 simple post-mortem examinations. The commission's expert opinion, signed on 15 July, reads in part: "All the corpses examined had bullet wounds in the back of the head or in the neck ... with the exception of the lower neck shots, the cause of death was the head injury. From the information obtained from relatives and eyewitnesses, and from the documents found on the corpses as well as the medical examination of the decomposition of the bodies as described in the protocol... it may be concluded that the killings took place in the year 1938."

The commission"s conclusions confirmed the results of the medico-legal investigations already carried out by a team of German and Ukrainian doctors under a Dr. Schrader - director of the German Association for Forensic Medicine and Criminology. Schrader's provisional report of 16 June 1943 described the exhumation of 509 corpses, of which 171 had been subjected to post-mortem examination.

The German Minister of Health, Dr. Leonardo Conti, thereupon appointed Dr. Schrader head of a German commission of thirteen professors of forensic medicine which from 27 to 29 July 1943 studied the work already done by Schrader and his assistants, visited the three grave sites, and carried out a number of autopsies. They arrived at the same conclusions as the international medical commission.