The memorial to the murdered children in Babi Yar, and William H. Lawrence


Thanks to the excellent website fultonhistory.com, I've found another appearance of William Lawrence's famous doubting Thomas article about Babi Yar, which appeared in November 29, 1943 edition of The New York Times, supposedly under the headline:


50,000 KIEV JEWS REPORTED KILLED
Soviet Atrocity Group Hears Nazis Machine-Gunned Victims in Sept., 1941
BODIES LATER BURNED
Prisoners of War Forced to Build Pyres Were Shot to Destroy All Evidence


It appears that the article also featured in the same day's edition of The Chicago Tribune. And also on the same day, it appeared on the front page of the Courier Express of Buffalo, New York, with the following time-honoured headline:





Much worth noting is Lawrence's assertion that: "No witness to the shooting appeared before the (Kiev Atrocity) commission or talked with the (Anglo-American-Soviet) correspondence." Because 24 years later at the West German trial of SS men who partook in the September 1941 massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, it was reported that the majority of 175 witnesses who appeared in court to testify, were there to recount what they claimed to have witnessed at Babi Yar!


(Incidentally, this news report purports to quote Himmler on the Babi Yar)






"Little Evidence Supports Story of Nazi Atrocity," by W. H. Lawrence,
Buffalo Courier Express (Buffalo, NY), November 29, 1945, p.1.


As Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt pointed out, Lawrence blamed his doubts at Babi Yar on being part of the "generation which had a natural scepticism and inherent disbelief of all wartime atrocity stories," due to the the glut of them they'd endured during WWI. Prof. Deborah Lipstadt states that Lawrence only got beyond disbelief in August 1944 after the Soviets led him round the Majdanek 'factory of death,' with it's six (later seven, now just two) gas chambers, where 1,500,000 (since reduced to 78,000) people were murdered. Had Lawrence lived (he died in 1972) to learn how vastly the Soviets and western historians—especially Lipstadt—have exaggerated what happened at Majdanek, he may have concluded that his gut instinct about Babi Yar was very likely the correct one after all.