The Great Game, the Vril-ya and Theosophy

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan: ghastly. It could also be a post-war torture scene, with an SS ritual as good enough cover. Or it could be what the Ukrainians reported, but it does sound a wee bit sensational. I'd like to see more physical evidence, medallions and so on. If it's a single SS belt buckle, that could've fallen off while Jews were being butchered in sadistic ways by Nazis.

Helen - I have a great uncle who was most probably executed by the NKVD at Katyn, along with around 22,000 other Poles. Of course, for decades, the USSR blamed this on the Nazis, and British governments from Churchill's to Thatcher's, played along with this Soviet propaganda.

So, I examine all Soviet reports about the provenance of mass graves in the Steppes with deep scepticism.

However, this was Ukrainian reporting through Pravda in 2002, so the control mechanisms of the NKVD and KGB and the Soviet Communist Party are less of a factor than previously.

If the bodies are from the WW2 era, they are almost certain to be slavs or Germans, not Jews. They could be partisans butchered - by either side, with evidence left to blame the other.

If this was genuinely an SS medical experiment, and the Russians have long claimed that the Nazis saved much of their most brutal and unethical behaviour for the eastern front, then it is entirely plausible that it would be conducted on "aryan-looking" slavs, such as blond-haired Poles or Ukrainians. Or, alternately, on fallen SS soldiers.

There's not enough evidence to come to a definitive conclusion. However, speculatively, an Ahnenerbe medical unit could have been tasked with the grisly business of investigating the anatomical details of the "purest of the pure", SS corpses, for - shall we say - physical curiosities.