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The Week In News
B A LT I M O R E J E W I S H H O M E . C O M
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
OCTOBER 15, 2020
The Week In News
Babi Yar Mystery Solved
The two-day German “aktion” at Babi Yar, where the Germans and Ukrainians slaughtered 33,771 people decades ago, was one of the largest open-air massacres but its precise location had remained a mystery for nearly 80 years. Recently, however, a former Scotland Yard investigator solved the 1941 mystery together with the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, creating a 3D simulation of the site where at least 70,000 others were killed during the months following the original massacre. Speaking with the Times of Israel, investigator Martin Dean said, “I believe my work goes considerably beyond the previous understanding of historians that have worked on this topic. “The Germans feared the Soviets
would use any such evidence for propaganda purposes. Ironically some of what we know about the locations of the shootings comes from about a dozen former prisoners who burned the corpses but then managed to escape just before the Nazis planned to kill them.” He added, “In the end, I conducted around nine months of careful research and wrote more than 30 detailed reports, each analyzing a specific location or aspect of the mass shooting, trying to highlight any new information discovered or significant conclusions that we had reached.” After Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, the Soviet Union committed itself to erasing the memory of the Nazi genocides, among other things by filling the ravine itself with brickpulp and other landfill materials. “The whole area of the ravine was literally flattened and turned into a park that is unrecognizable compared to the wartime terrain,” said Dean, who has mapped the route taken by the Babi Yar victims during the Yom Kippur massacre. “I discovered that a key feature [of the massacre], the ‘sand quarry,’ which can be seen in some key wartime images, did not come into existence until the late 1930s, such that even people familiar with Kyiv, were not aware of this feature and could not find it on maps.” The sand quarry was where Jews were forced to leave their clothes and belongings before being brought to the ravine’s edge, where they were shot in groups of ten. According to Dean, the mass grave was 500 feet long, and corpses were stacked in layers. Dean said that he took testimo-
nies from German and Ukrainian perpetrators, as well as the handful of wounded Jews who managed to escape death, and put them together, along with photographs and maps. “My methodology has been to combine ground photographs with aerial photography, maps, and especially witness testimony. In the postwar German legal investigations, there are hundreds of testimonies by men who acted as guards or even shooters at Babi Yar. I looked especially for any references to geographical features or descriptions of the process of how the shootings were organized,” he said. “Fortunately, there were several photographs that had overlapping views, so we could piece together a panorama of the photos by finding distinctive vegetation or terrain features that overlapped. These were then also compared to aerial photographs and maps to visualize the entire topography. By enlarging ground and aerial photographs, it was possible to identify features not obvious to the naked eye.” He also used evidence discarded by other investigators. “In particular, there were two quite primitive sketch maps drawn by Germans, which do not look very useful at first sight,” said Dean. “However, together with the testimonies of these witnesses, the sketch maps strongly corroborate the overall picture I have built from comparing the various sources.”
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is to get the virus under control,” Dowden told Sky. “The point of moving to this tiered system is so that in those most highly affected areas, we have got measures in place to control the virus.” Adding that he hoped the pandemic would be under control by the December holidays, he acknowledged: “Of course, it is very challenging for people. The measures we are taking are having a bad impact on health, they are having a bad impact on the economy but ultimately it is better to do that than to allow the virus to get out of control.” Coronavirus cases have spiked in the UK since mid-August, reaching 617,688 cases and 42,875 deaths as of Monday. The rising infection rate has already led the government to implement wide-ranging restrictions, including closing pubs after 10 p.m. and shuttering cafes and restaurants in Wales and Scotland. While Prime Minister Boris Johnson has attempted to reduce the spread of the disease while mitigating the damage to the already-battered economy in the UK, critics say that he isn’t going far enough. Britain already has the highest death rate in Europe from the pandemic and may well impose a second lockdown.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government should impose additional restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said on Monday. He noted that the risk to contracting the virus is greater in pubs, restaurants, and night clubs. “The purpose of these measures
The 2020 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger and its “contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-afflicted areas.” The Norwegian Nobel Committee presented the award on Friday, praising the organization for being “a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” A United Nations entity, WFP was
