TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VII: The Role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories 211
These 300 were probably not exclusively Jews but a miscellaneous collection
of people who were being held on suspicion of resistance activity. The
Simferopol incident received a good deal of publicity because it was spoken
of by the prosecution’s only witness, an Austrian corporal called Gaffa
who said that he heard anti-Jewish activities mentioned on an engineers’
mess when he was oderly and had passed the scene of the Simferopol execution.
As a result we received a large number of letters, and where able to
call several witnesses who had been billeted with Jewish families and also
spoke of the functioning of the local synagogue and of a Jewish market
where they bought icons and similar bric-a-brac right up to the time that
Manstein left the Crimea and after.
It was indeed clear that the Jewish community had continued to function
quite openly in Simferopol and although several of our witnesses had
heard rumours about an S.D. excess committed against Jews in Simferopol,
it certainly appeared that this Jewish community was unaware of any special
danger.
Ohlendorf had reported that not only Simferopol but the whole Crimea
was cleared of Jews. He was clearly a man who was prepared to say anything
that would please his employers. The Americans found him a perfect
witness.”
e. Babi Yar
In “Activity and Situation Report no. 6 of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security
Police and the SD in the USSR,” we read this concerning the time period
from October 1 to 31, 1941: 596
“In Kiev all the Jews were arrested and on September 29 and 30, a total
of 33,771 Jews were executed.”
This pertains to the (in)famous ‘Massacre of Babi Yar.’ However, as Udo
Walendy and Herbert Tiedemann have proved, the massacre never happened,
at least not remotely in the scope claimed. 597 Presumably several hundred
people were shot near Kiev, as at Simferopol. We will come back to the case
of Babi Yar.
f. Jews in Lithuanian Ghettos and Camps Who Were Unfit for
Work
The reports of the Einsatzgruppen are not only questionable as to the number
of Jews shot, but also with respect to their classification.
596 102-R. IMT, vol. XXXVIII, pp. 292f.
597 Udo Walendy, “Babi Jar – Die Schlucht ‘mit 33,771 murdered Jews’?”, in: Historische Tatsachen
no. 51, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1992. Herbert
Tiedemann, “Babi Jar: Critical Questions and Comments”, in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), op. cit.
(note 81), pp. 501-528.