Blyazer, A.

A propaganda report by the Soviet terror organization NKGB dated 14 August 1944 about alleged German atrocities in the Ponary District of Lithuania contains an account by a certain A. Blyazer. The same witness was interrogated by a Soviet commission, whose report is undated, but probably from 1946.

According to these two documents, Blyazer claimed that he was to be executed with many other Jews in 1941 at a large pit near Ponary. However, when the shooting began, he let himself fall into the pit without getting hit. He subsequently was covered by many layers of other dead victims and a thin layer of sand. After lying there for four hours, he dug himself out and escaped into the woods. He was later captured, and in 1943 forced to assist exhuming and burning corpses from the mass graves he had escaped from two years earlier. He escaped from there as well at an unknown date and unknown circumstances.

Blyazer asserted that his team exhumed and burned altogether 68,000 corpses. He gives a breakdown of the number of inmates working on certain tasks, among them 15 persons felling and sawing trees or firewood. Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 68,000 bodies thus requires some 17,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 38 hectares of land, or some 85 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood with just 15 persons would have lasted some 1,800 days, or almost five years.

According to Blyazer, only 2 (two!) inmates built the pyres, hence hauled 68,000 bodies and 17,000 tons of wood. Furthermore, only “[o]ne person with a two-meter poker constantly maintained the fire, adjusting the fire and clearing channels of the fire from ashes” – which would have burned him to a crisp.

If this tale has a real background, it can have been about at most a few thousand bodies, but certainly not 68,000.

This testimony relates to one of many events claimed to have been part of the alleged German clean-up operation which the orthodoxy calls Aktion 1005. The above exposition demonstrates that Blyazer’s entire scenario is completely detached from reality. Its claimed dimension cannot be based on experience, but on mere propaganda, imagination and delusion.

(See also the similar accounts by Yuri Farber, Matvey Zaydel and Szloma Gol; for more details, see the entries on Ponary, on lumberjacks, as well as Mattogno 2022c, pp. 677-679.)