Was there really only one witness to the process?

Mattogno’s assertion that there is only one witness to the exhumations and cremations is incorrect. The members of the exhumation work group (‘Sonderaktion 1005’) reasoned that when their work was finished the Nazis would in turn execute them. Thus, they escaped en masse on September 29, 1943. Of the 300 plus men who worked in the Sonderkommando, several survived. Of the survivors, a number have given or published their detailed testimony over the years. This list includes: Vladimir Davydov, Jakov Steyuk, Vadislav Kuklia, Jakov Kaper, David Budnik, Ziama Trubakov, Seymen Berlyant, Leonid Ostrowsky, Yosif Doliner, and Isaac Brodsky.[2] Their stories are important and corroborate one another.

David Budnik recalled being selected for the Sonderkommando in the Syrets labor camp and how the feet of the selected prisoners were chained together so they could work but could not run away. Budnik recalled how screens were installed to camouflage the area and the whole region was declared restricted. At night they were pushed into a bunker dug into the ravine wall and locked in. 18 SS officers, in addition to the regular guards around the entire area, guarded them. Every morning they went to work. He states: “We had to dig out the pits with the corpses, search them for jewelry, remove any gold fillings and then burn them in the furnaces that we had built. We were divided into brigades each specializing in specific types of work. I worked with the hooks, pulling out the corpses . . . The compressed soil and corpses had stiffened after two years and made the work nearly impossible. . . . Besides digging, we also helped the team that built the furnaces. For this, tombstones and iron fences brought over from the neighboring Jewish cemetery were used. These tombstones were laid on the site 10 meters across by 10 meters in width [33 feet by 33 feet], like a chessboard. Rails and fences were laid on top of them. Then two rows of logs were put down and then a layer of corpses, then more logs and then more corpses. After this everything was doused with oil and burnt. These furnaces were of differing sizes, but not less than three meters high. The corpses were laid with their heads on the outside. Any remaining bones were crushed with iron hammers and then sifted with special sieves to remove gold and jewels. The ashes were then mixed into the ground. . . . We worked 12 to 15 hours every day. The Germans made us hurry. The black smoke was rising above Babi Yar from the 60 furnaces that were built and in each one over two thousand people were burnt.”[3]

Yakov Kaper, another survivor, added this insight: “As soon as I found myself behind the camouflaging rampart I saw the panorama that I would remember till the last day of my life.” He was shackled and led down into the ravine. He recounts the oven structures and the cremation process. He too was assigned to remove the bodies from the graves with a special tool: a rod “50-60 centimeters [20 inches to 24 inches] long with the hooked sharpened end. We were shown how to insert this hook under the chin and pull the corpse out.” Everything that was done was top secret. “When they brought food or something required for burning, like logs or oil, it was brought up to a certain point and nobody was permitted to go beyond it.” Even so those who lived by the ravine must have guessed what was going on because “from morning till night the sky over Babi Yar was covered with thick black smoke and the smell of burned flesh.” Kaper recalls: “Every day we worked like robots. We were urged on, beaten, covered with sweat and blood.” Prisoners were shot for the smallest infraction and their bodies added to those on the cremation pyre. As the front neared, they could hear the sounds of explosions: “We kept on trying to survive for another day.”[4]

Other testimonies, such as those appearing in the Report of the Extraordinary State Commission on Destructions and Atrocities Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders in the City of Kiev (1941-1944) [published in 1987], recount the same events and conditions: the shackles, bringing granite tombstones and iron grates from the Jewish cemetery, the construction of the ovens, the use of logs and oil, the layering of the bodies and logs, the capacity of each pyre (2,500 to 3,000 bodies), the teams which removed jewelry, rings and pulled out gold teeth, the crushing of the bones, the scattering of the ashes into the sand of the ravine, and the use of an excavator to exhume the bodies as time started to run out.[8]

In addition, there is eyewitness testimony from a notable participant in the destruction of the evidence: the aforementioned Paul Blöbel. On July 18, 1947, Blöbel testified in an affidavit for the International Nuremberg Trials: “I was entrusted with the task of obliterating the traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East . . . This order was top secret . . . During my visit in August I myself observed the burning of bodies in a mass grave near Kiev during my visit in August 1943. This grave was about 44 m. long, 3 m. wide and 2-1/2. m. deep [145 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet deep] . . . Owing to the moving up of the front-line it was not possible to destroy the mass graves further south and east . . . I could not carry out my orders completely . . .”[9]