I read something like that when I began reading the critique in your signature. I was wondering about the interpretation. I thought it was insinuated the Nazis forged letters of thousands of people to their loved ones. Now they were standing with a gun to their head, giving them a pen. From hilariously incredible to at least somewhat credible I suppose.
Ah, I see, you manage to address that, but as to this:
To start even with something as simple to a historian as a date, crickets are chirping.
To extend your analogy, this is more like the witnesses not even agreeing on the date of the robbery with the precision of a month, the amount of money stolen varying from 305 dollars to 15,000 dollars or way over 33,000 dollars, the money having been buried by the robbers or blown away on hookers or cocain, without a trace either way, without clarity that any money is missing in the first place, and the robbers having threatened with machine guns or flame throwers. I don't care whether you're convinced or not or whether you even care whether I am convinced or not. All I know is, personally, I am not convinced. Witness evidence as to whether it happened is worth only as much as the words of the witness, in this case, not worth a nickel.
You're not convinced either because you don't have the wit to follow the evidence and can't understand it, or because you are simply refusing to be convinced, and doing everything in your power to avoid accepting common-sense conclusions. But there is no confusion here, really, except your deliberate attempt to confuse yourself and thereby wash your hands of accepting one of innumerable Nazi crimes against Jews.
Kharkov was captured by the Nazis on 24 October 1941 with a fraction of its prewar Jewish population of 130,000. On 14 December 1941, the town commandant ordered the remaining Jews of Kharkov to resettle into a ghetto based in a machine tractor factory. The collaborator administration recorded how many left each city district and the numbers total up to 10,000. In this same time frame, i.e. in the context of discussing this resettlement into the ghetto, SK4a reported (1) that preparations were underway to shoot the Jews and (2) it had shot 305 Jews 'immediately'. A German witness reported the move he dated to December 15, 1941, just as stated in the Ereignismeldung. Once inside the ghetto, the Jews were guarded by Police Battalion 314 which filed a report about doing this duty until January 7 1942.
Although some moves seem to have begun already on December 26, 1941, Jews began to be taken in larger batches over a period of days beginning on January 2, 1942 to Drobitskii Yar. There they were shot, with some apparently killed in newly acquired gas vans sent to SK4a. By January 7, 1942, it was evidently nearly all over, and Police Battalion 314 ended its tour of duty guarding the ghetto. On this day, at least one witness travelled out to the site having learned of the shootings beforehand (i.e. they were ongoing) and became caught up in the event, barely escaping with her life.
Some sources on the action can be found here.
A few Jews were shot later on after being exposed in hiding. By the end of January 1942, no Jews show up in the Kharkov city records, and the city continued to starve to death with a death toll of 2,000/month reached in April 1942, and more Russians and Ukrainians died in Kharkov of starvation in 1942 than Jews had been shot in January 1942.
After the final liberation of Kharkov, Soviet investigators opened two mass graves at Drobitskii Yar and filmed them. They estimated 15,000 bodies in the graves. The lower figure of 10-12,000 deaths is better supported by documents (especially the ghettoisation documents) and is the one used by Kharkhiv-based historian Aleksander Kruglov, the undisputed expert on the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as USHMM in their encyclopedia, plus prominent German historian Dieter Pohl. There is no reason to accept the higher figures bandied around by commemoration groups in Kharkiv today on this. There is a strong academic consensus around 10-12,000 as the death toll.
SK4a's killings at Kharkov were not properly recorded in the Ereignismeldungen because the unit commander Blobel was replaced not long after the action, and because there were evident problems transmitting full reports in the winter of 1941/2 from a number of units; the compilers in Berlin did not include it. Theydid however compile a figure of 633,000 claimed by the RSHA for the end of 1942, which clearly corresponds to the increased bodycount compared to earlier reports (Einsatzgruppe A's Stahlecker report in February 1942, more than 240,000 Jews killed; Einsatzgruppe B- total bodycount past 128,000 by November 1942; Einsatzgruppe C: 91,000 reported killed by two commandos in December 1941; Einsatzgruppe D: 90,000 killed under Ohlendorf to the spring of 1942, recorded in multiple documents, rough total: 550,000 subtracting non-Jews killed by Einsatzgruppe B). The increase of at least 83,000 compared to the previous reports would include killings in the Caucasus by Einsatzgruppe D, and a variety of killings by Einsatzgruppe C in 1942 as a whole, along with the proper accounting of its subordinate commandos. Thus, the Kharkov action shows up in the relevant time-frame of a higher-level statistic and is entirely compatible with it.
Doubting the events at Kharkov or indeed Kiev requires explaining all of the evidence for those 633,000 Einsatzgruppen murders of Jews. Since the majority of the killings left explicit documentary traces this would be futile; no conceivable scenario exists in which the reports could have been 'exaggerated' postwar, and the figure of 633,000 is as close to what the Nazis themselves could have compiled for the Einsatzgruppen, not massaged upwards by anyone, since the Korherr report was euphemised. Taking that euphemism at face value for the occupied eastern territories would be nonsensical since at least 550,000 out of 633,000 killings can be counted in other statistics as killings, executions or liquidations.
A significant proportion of the 633,000 Einsatzgruppen killings resulted in mass graves being found intact, especially in the smaller towns and in the more easterly regions of the occupied Soviet Union. Larger towns further west including Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas and Vilnius were visited by Sonderkommando 1005, whose operations in a number of spots can be
documented. Kharkov was not visited by 1005, and left one of several very large intact mass graves. It was not the only such intact mass grave or even the largest; most of the mass grave fields around Rovno were left unexhumed, and the Rovno action in November 1941 (which is documented) killed 15,000 Jews. This was however credited to HSSPF Ukraine, and doesn't show up in the figure of 633,000.
The possibility that these mass graves were the work of the NKVD can be ruled out because NKVD operations are known from post-1991 declassified documents, especially in Ukraine, and a much increased level of knowledge about NKVD killing sites.
It is certainly impossible to claim that specific sites were misattributed when those sites belong to the much bigger group of 633,000 Jews recorded as killed by the Einsatzgruppen, as there is no plausible way of reducing one site to nonexistence while accepting the others, and certainly no plausible way of nearly doubling the known executions of the Great Terror in 1937-38, which was the only previous major mass killing action in the region; much of the Terror happened of course around Leningrad, Moscow and further east, so the 700,000 executions before WWII cannot all be redistributed to the occupied territories. Soviet history is sufficiently well researched to refute any claim that there were further 'unknown' actions, as these would have left a trace of some kind, which does not exist.
