The Holocaust Historiography Project

Pronicheva, Dina

Dina Pronicheva
Dina Pronicheva

Dina Pronicheva was a Ukrainian Jew from Kiev who claimed, in at least 12 statements made between the 1940s and 1960, that she survived the mass shooting of Jews by Germans at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev on 29 September 1941.

According to her various testimonies, the Jews were driven to Babi Yar, surrounded everywhere by a dense row of Germans and auxiliaries with rifles, clubs and sticks. They had to undress at the top of the ravine, approach the edge of the ravine at one spot, and were shot there by machine-gun fire from the opposite side, falling dead or wounded into the ravine.

Machine-gun fire from the other side of the ravine, up to 100 meters away, would have been very inaccurate. Lots of ammunition would have been wasted this way, and stray bullets could have hit any of the guards. Furthermore, if 33,771 persons were all shot at one spot of the ravine’s edge, they all would have been lying on one big heap that eventually would have reached the ravine’s edge. Hence, someone had to drag away those corpses and spread them out in the ravine while all this wild machine-gun shooting was allegedly happening.

Pronicheva’s account contradicts the current orthodox narrative, according to which the victims had to walk down into the ravine, then walk on the wobbly surface of wounded and dead victims already lying on the ground to a spot pointed out to them. There, they had to lay face down on the already executed victims below them, and then got shot at close range with a bullet from a submachine gun into the nape of their neck.

The photos taken by German military photographer Johannes Hähle show that someone had deposited large amounts of clothes and personal belongings at the bottom of a ravine, not at the top outside the ravine. However, there are no executed people visible on these photos, or any other traces of a massacre. (See the entry on Johannes Hähle.)

In other words: It cannot have happened. Pronicheva lied.

(For more details, see the entry on Babi Yar, as well as Mattogno 2022c, pp. 569-579.)