What Happened at Babi Yar? Fact vs. Myth
By Michael Nikiforuk
Aerial reconnaissance photos taken before and during World War II show mass graves of victims of the Soviet Cheka/NKVD, but an absence of Jewish mass burials.
What, if anything, happened at a place called Babi Yar (Old Woman’s Ravine) near Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine in September of 1941? According to official histories and inscriptions on monuments, 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis there. But if thousands of Kyivan Jews (those not evacuated by the Soviets) were killed in September of 1941 by the Germans, they were not murdered or buried at Babi Yar. This fact was revealed in aerial reconnaissance photos discovered in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C.
In February of this year, a Ukrainian court threw out a case brought by Ukrainian Jews against V. Kretytnychy of the St. Andrew Society and E. Musiyenko, editor of the Kyiv Evening News, who challenged the official Babi Yar story. Encouraged by the court decision, on March 19, the Kyiv Evening News published a four-page story setting the record straight for the first time since the Allies condemned the phony “atrocity” during World War II.
What is now coming to the fore is incontrovertible proof that no massacre took place at Babi Yar during the German occupation of Kyiv; that the ravine was not used as a mass grave for Jews killed by the Germans. But it was a burial field between 1922-1935 for the victims of the Cheka/NKVD.








