In a chapter headed “Questioning the confirmed death toll” in our book Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories, we take the deniers to task for asserting it would have been impossible to six millions Jews at Auschwitz and other death camps over the course of the Holocaust. (See our blog of February 3).
The deniers of course mischievously overlook the fact that many of the Jewish deaths occurred in what historians refer to as “open-air killings” throughout Europe outside of the death camps.
A member of the Einsatzgruppen shooting naked Jews.
A further excerpt from the book follows:
One of many such examples is Babi Yar, a ravine in Ukraine’s capital city Kiev, where over just two September days (29th to 30th) in 1941, approximately 34,000 Jews were killed by death squads.
The History.com website details this event beneath the headline “Babi Yar massacre begins.” An excerpt from the article follows:
“The German army took Kiev on September 19, and special SS squads prepared to carry out Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found there. Beginning on September 29, more than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine to the north of the city, ordered to strip naked, and then machine-gunned into the ravine. The massacre ended on September 30, and the dead and wounded alike were covered over with dirt and rock.
“Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Soviet officials, and Russian prisoners of war were executed at the Babi Yar ravine in a similar manner. As the German armies retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in large pyres. Numerous eyewitnesses and other evidence, however, attest to the atrocities at Babi Yar, which became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.”
We have spoken to local Ukrainians of non-Jewish descent who confirm that in the western Ukraine entire towns that were almost exclusively Jewish before WW2 now have no Jews as all were executed by the Nazis.
Most tellingly, eyewitnesses to some of these massacres include high ranking German officers – one of those being convicted war criminal German SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, head of the intelligence and security division Inland-SD and commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe D task force, which perpetrated mass murder in Moldova, Ukraine and the Crimea.
In Herr Ohlendorf’s own words, “The Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, Gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security.”
The Einsatzgruppe’s victims were in reality almost entirely Jewish civilians. And directly contradicting Ohlendorf’s assertion that the mission was to “protect the rear of the troops,” not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations – essentially proof that the true mission was to slaughter innocent people.
In its first year alone (1941), the Einsatzgruppen killed 300,000 civilians, mainly by shootings at mass-killing sites outside major towns.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has recorded the eyewitness account of one survivor of an Einsatzgruppen massacre in Piryatin, Ukraine, where on April 6, 1942, the Germans killed 1600 Jews. It reads as follows:
“I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 pm they gave the command, “Fill in the pits.” Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: “Finish me off!” … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. “Mommy!” That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.”
You have been reading an excerpt from Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories – by James & Lance Morcan.
The book is exclusive to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/DEBUNKING-HOLOCAUST-DENIAL-THEORIES-Historicity-ebook/dp/B01EYY7T7Y/
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Morcan Books & Films 