Babi Yar - information about the massacre, and the coverup

[White Rose]

IOW: The erasing of ”the cause of death, the forensic remains, and the scale of the crime” in this "sucessful" manner, has made murder trials against the Nazis impossible?

No, but circumstantial evidence isn't as strong. I assume that the key players were persued in the IMT and NMT trials, but I'm just speculating.

I would figure this would be one of the larger mass killings in Russia

- one of larger mass killings in Ukraine, not Russia. Time to get the geography straight.

Aside the point - why would Soviets try to cover up the crime after the Germans? If am not mistaken, plans were to build a stadium on top of the grave site.

Sorry, I meant "USSR". I didn't mean to abuse geography, and I hope you got my meaning.

I'm not sure I follow your question. Do you think the Soviets were "covering up", or simply that they had poor taste for selecting the area for a stadium?

The Soviets weren't known for their sympathic treatment at any time. I think a monument erected in the area mentioned "Soviet victims", neglecting to mention that a significant percentage of these were Jews.

I have a question for you, Askold. Is Babi Yar a well known event from during the war years in the Ukraine?

[Sergey Romanov]

Aside the point - why would Soviets try to cover up the crime after the Germans? If am not mistaken, plans were to build a stadium on top of the grave site.

Soviets' Holocaust cover-up is a well-known phenomenon. They didn't even tell in their report that Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz.

[THECLASH]

I've been interviewing a Soviet Veteran of WWII. He's a Jew and at the outbreak of the war, lived in Kiev. Sadly, his aunt decided to stay because she thought the Germans would be like they were in 1918. She was later killed at Babi Yar.

I've been to a web site (the Serpent's Wall - forgot the address) that shows photos of World War II battlefields and places in Ukraine. They showed a photo of Babi Yar with a huge statue and memorial overlooking a flat field that seems to be much lower than the ground around it - I take it that this is where the Soviet victims' remains are. There are also two 10-year old boys playing soccer on the field - the caption says something like they do not understand or know what the place is or what the memorial represents. They must be idiots not to know.

[White Rose]

I've been interviewing a Soviet Veteran of WWII. He's a Jew and at the outbreak of the war, lived in Kiev. Sadly, his aunt decided to stay because she thought the Germans would be like they were in 1918. She was later killed at Babi Yar.

I've been to a web site (the Serpent's Wall - forgot the address) that shows photos of World War II battlefields and places in Ukraine. They showed a photo of Babi Yar with a huge statue and memorial overlooking a flat field that seems to be much lower than the ground around it - I take it that this is where the Soviet victims' remains are. There are also two 10-year old boys playing soccer on the field - the caption says something like they do not understand or know what the place is or what the memorial represents. They must be idiots not to know.

Theclash, I don't think they are idiots, just uninformed. From what I've been able to find, information about Babi Yar and the killings that took place there are quite hard to find. The Nazi's didn't want to publicize it, and the Soviets wanted to exploit the "Soviet hero", not racial or ethnic types of attrocities, and so neutralized what occured.

If the monument is the one I am familiar with, it is a monument to "Heroes of the great revolutionary war" ... with refrence to people who were killed from Kiev in Babi Yar. No mention that the bulk of those murdered were Jews, or even that Jews were paticular targets of this crime.

[THECLASH]

Well the Soviets did point out the genocide against the Soviet people (this was ethnic and some say 30 million were killed due to war and genocide) - did Stalin's anti-semitism cause some to forget that Jews, specificly, were targeted too?

[David Thompson]

I've been to a web site (the Serpent's Wall - forgot the address) that shows photos of World War II battlefields and places in Ukraine.

Serpent's Wall home page
http://www.serpentswall.com/index.html

[michael mills]

Sergey Romanov wrote:

Soviets' Holocaust cover-up is a well-known phenomenon. They didn't even tell in their report that Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz.

White Rose wrote:

If the monument is the one I am familiar with, it is a monument to "Heroes of the great revolutionary war" ... with refrence to people who were killed from Kiev in Babi Yar. No mention that the bulk of those murdered were Jews, or even that Jews were paticular targets of this crime.

There is a very good reason why the Communist ruling class in the post-war Soviet Union concealed the fact that the victims in that country of the German occupation 1941-44 were of Jewish ethnicity.

The Soviet victory over Germany, and the attendant claim that that victory had saved the Soviet peoples, in particular the Russian people, from slavery or even extermination, was the main basis for the legitimacy of the Communist ruling class. Accordingly, the threat posed by Germany, from which the Communist Party claimed to have saved the Soviet people, had to be presented as one directed against the Soviet people as a whole.

That basis of legitimacy would have been undermined if the Soviet Government had revealed to the people it ruled that the German threat of extermination had been directed primarily against the Soviet Jewish minority, and that other nationalities had been far less targeted.

In fact, if it had become known to the Soviet people that it was the Jews whom the Germans had seen as their main enemy, it could well have reinforced the widespread (but not openly expressed) feeling that the Communist regime represented a Jewish tyranny over Russians and other Christian peoples, and led to the idea that the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union to destroy that Jewish tyranny, not to brutalise the Russians and other Soviet peoples.

I well remember a possiby apocryphal story that cropped up in the media during the 1970s, according to which a senior United States official on a mission to the Soviet Union questioned a senior Soviet official about the Soviet historiographical treatment of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War.

The United States official asked his Soviet counterpart why Soviet historiography did not explicitly reveal that the victims of German occupation were disproportionately Jewish.

The Soviet official answered that it was feared that such a revelation could arouse "dangerous sympathies" among the Soviet people.

The United States official was outraged, and demanded to know what was wrong with arousing sympathy for the poor persecuted Jews.

The Soviet official answered: "Not sympathy for the Jews, sympathy for the Fascists".

[Kunikov]

Theclash, I don't think they are idiots, just uninformed. From what I've been able to find, information about Babi Yar and the killings that took place there are quite hard to find. The Nazi's didn't want to publicize it, and the Soviets wanted to exploit the "Soviet hero", not racial or ethnic types of attrocities, and so neutralized what occured.

I doubt that's correct, everyone in my family and anyone else who is former Soviet that I know knows about the place, there are also songs about it. For (at least) the past 20 years information about it has been quite easy to access.

[David Thompson]

Michael -- You wrote:

The Soviet victory over Germany, and the attendant claim that that victory had saved the Soviet peoples, in particular the Russian people, from slavery or even extermination, was the main basis for the legitimacy of the Communist ruling class. Accordingly, the threat posed by Germany, from which the Communist Party claimed to have saved the Soviet people, had to be presented as one directed against the Soviet people as a whole.

This didn't take much of a presentation, since, with the exception of the former Baltic republics, Nazi slavery was directed against the Soviet people as a whole.

Nazi slaving in the occupied USSR

Document: *3040-PS; Description: Secret order of Reichsfuehrer SS, 2/20/1942, concerning commitment of manpower from the East. (USA 207)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 320#553320
Document: *016-PS; Description: Sauckel's Labor Mobilization Program, 4/20/1942. (USA 168)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 335#553335
Document: *EC-347; Description: Directives for operation of the Economy in Occupied Eastern Territories. (USA 320)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 395#553395
Document: *084-PS; Description: Interdepartmental report of Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, 9/30/1942, concerning status of Eastern laborers. (USA 199)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 403#553403
Document: *017-PS; Description: Letter from Sauckel to Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 10/5/1942, concerning mobilization of foreign labor forces. (USA 180)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 407#553407
Document: *054-PS; Description: Report to Reich Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, 10/7/1942, concerning treatment of Ukrainian Specialists. (USA 198)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 424#553424
Document: *294-PS; Description: Top secret memorandum signed by Brautigam, 10/26/1942, concerning conditions in Russia. (USA 185)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 428#553428
Document: 1381-PS; Description: Secret report of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on Political and Economic Situation in these Territories, December 1942
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 223#554223
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 225#554225
Document: *018-PS; Description: Letter from Rosenberg to Sauckel, 12/21/1942, concerning labor in the East. (USA 186).
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 230#554230
Document: *407-II-PS; Description: Letter from Sauckel to Hitler, 10 March 1943, concerning difficulty in recruiting of workers in former Soviet territories. (USA 226)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 237#554237
Document: *019-Page; Description: Letter from Sauckel to Rosenberg, 3/17/1943, concerning draft of workers from the East. (USA 181)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 242#554242
Document: *3012-PS; Description: Order signed Christiansen, 3/19/1943, to all group leaders of Security Service, and record of telephone conversation signed by Stapf, 3/11/1943. (USA 190)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 246#554246
Document; *2280-PS; Description: Letter from Reichs Commissar for Ostland, 3 May 1943, concerning recruiting of manpower in Baltic Countries for Reich territories. (USA 183)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 250#554250
Document: *3000-PS; Description: Report, from Chief of Main Office III with the High Command in Minsk to Reicke, 28 June 1943, on experiences in political and economic problems in the East, particularly White Ruthenia. (USA 192)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 256#554256
Document: *265-PS; Description: Memorandum of oral report by Lyser to Rosenberg, 30 June 1943, on situation in district Shitomir. (USA 191)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 260#554260
Document: *290-PS; Description: Letter from Rosenberg Ministry, 12 November 1943, concerning burning of houses in Mueller's district. (USA 189)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 773#554773
Document: *254-PS; Description: Letter from Raab to Reichsminister for Occupied Eastern Territories, 6/7/1944, concerning burning of houses in Wassilkow district. (USA 188)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 778#554778
Document: *031-PS; Description: Memorandum, 12 June 1944, concerning evaluation of youths from the territory of Army Group "Center", and interoffice memorandum, Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories. (USA 171)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 785#554785
Document: 200-PS; Description: Confidential telegram from Berger to Reich Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, 7/8/1944 concerning forced labor of children
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 798#554798
Document: *199-PS; Description: Letter from Alfred Meyer to Sauckel, 11 July 1944, concerning forced labor of children. (USA 606)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 801#554801
How the Nazi occupation failed in Galicia/ Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 283#431283

That basis of legitimacy would have been undermined if the Soviet Government had revealed to the people it ruled that the German threat of extermination had been directed primarily against the Soviet Jewish minority, and that other nationalities had been far less targeted.

In fact, if it had become known to the Soviet people that it was the Jews whom the Germans had seen as their main enemy, it could well have reinforced the widespread (but not openly expressed) feeling that the Communist regime represented a Jewish tyranny over Russians and other Christian peoples, and led to the idea that the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union to destroy that Jewish tyranny, not to brutalise the Russians and other Soviet peoples.

Who would believe that, given how the Nazi occupation authorities behaved?

Soviet POWs

Annihilation of Soviet prisoners of war in Belorussia
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=8034
Documents on German treatment of Soviet POWs
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=62262
Sumy POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41839
Khorol POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41853
Kremenchuk POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41857
Rovno POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41861
Starokonstantinov POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41899
Tyvrov POW Camp, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41905
Lvov POW Camps, Ukraine
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=41915

The civilian population in partisan-infested regions

Fuehrer Order of 23 Jul 1941 - security measures in the East
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=60806
The Soviet Partisan Movement 1941-1944
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=65387
The German Army & anti-partisan warfare in USSR
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=62191
Major Anti-Partisan Operations in Belorussia
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=2006

and

the Soviet civilian population generally, particularly the Great Russians

Nazi occupation policies for the USSR
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61454
Hitler's plans for Ostland -- Fuehrer Conference 16 Jul 1941
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=60772
Generalplan Ost
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=20050
Starvation plan for the USSR, beginning at:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 416#604416
German plans to seize food from the Soviet Union
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=11976

[bratello]

I may have not read carefully enough all of the posts, but it appears that there is no mention of a book called "Babi Yar" by Anatoly Kuznetsov.

This is what Encyclopedia Britannica Online has to say about it: "...Anatoly Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, born Aug. 18, 1929, Kiev, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. died June 13, 1979, London, Eng. pseudonym A. Anatoli. Soviet writer noted for the autobiographical novel "Babi Yar", one of the most important literary works to come out of World War II...". First published in a Soviet literary magazine "Yunost'" in 1966, it was published in the USA by Dial Press in 1967 as "Babi Yar" by Anatoly Kuznetsov.

Indeed it is a very good book (at least in the original) and I can recommend it to White Rose or anybody who appreciate quality literature.

[Rauli]

Mr. Mills

I have to applaude to you, you are very good.

There is a well known radio record in Finland where a punch of notable finnish academians talked about jewish question in Finland. Their talk might sound racist todays standars but that was common talk at the time.

They were talking about jewish refugees worlwide.

Best regards,

rauli

[White Rose]

Well the Soviets did point out the genocide against the Soviet people (this was ethnic and some say 30 million were killed due to war and genocide) - did Stalin's anti-semitism cause some to forget that Jews, specificly, were targeted too?

Specific targets in the Soviet Union included political officials, commisars in the Red Army, and Jews early in the war. Nazi ideology held all "slavs" as inferior, and many innocent civilians were also targeted. The bulk of those murdered at Babi Yar, though, were Jews, while the memorial mentions nothing of the sort.

I'm not sure it's simply Stalin's anti-semitism that caused this; I think that the Soviet Union felt threatened by things that were potentially divisive to the "state", and pointing out attrocities against any ethnic or regional group might serve to promote "anti-soviet" feelings in that group, and in general. Long after Stalin's death there was still an official policy of "minimizing" the Holocaust as it related to the Soviet Union.