On
this date, September 29, 1941, the German Einsatzgruppe C begins the Babi Yar
massacre, according to the Einsatzgruppen operational situation report. I will
post information about this massacre from Wikipedia and other links.
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Babi Yar ravine in Kiev.
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Also known as
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Babyn Yar
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Location
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Babyn Yar, a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine
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Date
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29 and 30 September 1941 and on later dates
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Incident type
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Genocide
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Perpetrators
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Friedrich Jeckeln, Otto Rasch, Paul Blobel, Kurt Eberhard and others
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Organizations
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Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, Sonderkommando 4a
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Camp
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Victims
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33,771 Jews in initial two-day massacre
100,000–150,000 Ukrainians, Jews, Romanis, and Soviet prisoners of war on later dates |
Memorials
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On site and elsewhere
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Notes
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Possibly the largest two-day massacre during the Holocaust. Syrets
concentration camp was also located in the area.
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Babi Yar
(Russian: Бабий Яр;
Ukrainian: Бабин Яр,
Babyn Yar) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site
of a series of massacres carried out by German forces and local collaborators
during their campaign against the Soviet Union.
The
most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on
September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation.
The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor,
Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South,
SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C
Commander Otto
Rasch. It was carried out by Sonderkommando
4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD
and SS Police Battalions backed by the local police. The
massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its
collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and
is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the
Holocaust" to that particular date, surpassed only by the Aktion
Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied
Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims, and the 1941 Odessa massacre of more
than 50,000 Jews in October 1941, committed by the Romanian troops. Estimates
of the total number of Jews killed at Babi Yar are between 100,000 and 150,000.
Victims
of other massacres at the site included thousands of Soviet prisoners of war,
communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and civilian hostages. It is
estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 lives were taken at Babi Yar during
the German occupation.
Historical
background
The
Babi Yar (Babyn Yar) ravine was first mentioned in historical accounts in 1401,
in connection with its sale by "baba" (an old woman), the cantiniere,
to the Dominican Monastery. The word "yar" is Turkic in origin and
means "cliff" or "ravine". In the course of several
centuries the site had been used for various purposes including military camps
and at least two cemeteries, among them an Orthodox Christian cemetery and a
Jewish cemetery. The latter was officially closed in 1937.
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Handout dated September 28, 1941 in Russian,
Ukrainian with German translation ordering all Kievan Jews to assemble for the
supposed resettlement.
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Massacres
of 29–30 September 1941
See
also: Battle of Kiev (1941)
Axis
forces, mainly German, occupied Kiev on 19 September 1941. On September 26 Maj.
Gen. Kurt Eberhard, the military governor, and
SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS and Police Leader at Rear
Headquarters Army Group South, made the decision to exterminate the Jews of
Kiev, claiming that it was in retaliation for guerrilla attacks against German
troops. Einsatzgruppe C carried out the Babi Yar massacre and a number of other
mass atrocities in Ukraine during the summer and autumn of 1941. Its commander
SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch and the
officer commanding Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel
were at the September 26 meeting as well. An order was then posted in the town:
All Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, September 29, by 8 o'clock in the morning at the corner of Mel'nikova and Doktorivska streets (near the cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.—Order posted in Kiev in Russian, on or around September 26, 1941.
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Paul Blobel (beard
grown in prison)
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On
29 and 30 September 1941, a special team of German SS troops supported
by other German units and local collaborators murdered 33,771 Jewish civilians
after taking them to the ravine.
The
implementation of the order was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by
Blobel, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. This unit consisted of SD
and Sipo, the third company of the Special Duties Waffen-SS
battalion, and a platoon of the 9th Police Battalion. Police Battalion 45,
commanded by Major Besser, conducted the massacre, supported by members of a
Waffen-SS battalion.
The
commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later:
The difficulties resulting from such a large scale action—in particular concerning the seizure—were overcome in Kiev by requesting the Jewish population through wall posters to move. Although only a participation of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Jews had been expected at first, more than 30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution, still believed in their resettlement, thanks to an extremely clever organization.
According
to the testimony of a truck driver named Hofer, victims were ordered to undress
and were beaten if they resisted:
I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women, and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to give up their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians [sic] to keep them moving.—Michael Berenbaum: "Statement of Truck-Driver Hofer describing the murder of Jews at Babi Yar"
The
crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have
known what was happening until it was too late; by the time they heard the machine
gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of
soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene.
Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.
In
the evening, the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the
people under the thick layers of earth. According to the Einsatzgruppe's
Operational Situation Report, 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were
systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire at Babi Yar on September 29 and
September 30, 1941. The money, valuables, underwear, and clothing of the
murdered victims were turned over to the local ethnic Germans and to the Nazi
administration of the city. Wounded victims were buried alive in the ravine
along with the rest of the bodies.
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Monument to the murdered ones in Babi Yar, Kiev
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Survivors
One
of the most often-cited parts of Anatoly
Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar is the
testimony of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of the Kiev Puppet
Theatre, and a survivor. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine,
to be forced to undress and then be shot. Jumping before being shot and falling
on other bodies, she played dead in a pile of corpses. She held perfectly still
while the Nazis continued to shoot the wounded or gasping victims. Although the
SS had covered the mass grave with earth, she eventually managed to climb
through the soil and escape. Since it was dark, she had to avoid the
flashlights of the Nazis finishing off the remaining victims still alive,
wounded and gasping in the grave. She was one of the very few survivors of the
massacre and later related her horrifying story to Kuznetsov. At least 29
survivors are known.
In
2006, Yad Vashem and other Jewish organizations started a project to identify
and name the Babi Yar victims, but so far only 10% have been identified. Yad
Vashem has recorded the names of around 3,000 Jews killed at Babi Yar, as well
as those of some 7,000 Jews from Kiev who were killed during the Holocaust.
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Dina
Pronicheva on the witness stand, January 24, 1946, at a Kiev war-crimes
trial of fifteen members of the German police responsible for the occupied Kiev
region.
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Felix
Lembersky, Execution: Babi Yar, ca. 1944–1952
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Further
executions
See
also: List of victims of the Babi
Yar massacre
In
the months that followed, thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar
where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 residents of Kiev
of all ethnic groups, mostly civilians, were murdered by the Nazis there during
World War II. A concentration camp was also built in the area.
Mass
executions at Babi Yar continued up until the German forces departed from Kiev.
On January 10, 1942 about 100 sailors from a military flotilla were executed
there. In addition, Babi Yar became a place of execution of residents of five
Gypsy camps. According to various estimates, during 1941–1943 between
70,000–200,000 Romani people were rounded up and murdered at Babi Yar. Patients
of the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were gassed and then dumped into the
ravine. Thousands of other Ukrainians were killed at Babi Yar. Among those
murdered were 621 members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha and her husband, and renowned bandurist Mykhailo
Teliha, were murdered there on February 21, 1942.
Upon
the Soviet liberation of Kiev in 1943, Russian officials led Western
journalists to the site of the massacres and allowed them to interview
survivors. Among them were Bill Lawrence of The New York Times and Bill
Downs of CBS. Downs described in a report to Newsweek what he had been told by
one of the survivors, Efim Vilkis:
However, even more incredible was the actions taken by the Nazis between August 19 and September 28 last. Vilkis said that in the middle of August the SS mobilized a party of 100 Russian war prisoners, who were taken to the ravines.On Aug. 19 these men were ordered to disinter all the bodies in the ravine. The Germans meanwhile took a party to a nearby Jewish cemetery whence marble headstones were brought to Babii Yar [sic] to form the foundation of a huge funeral pyre. Atop the stones were piled a layer of wood and then a layer of bodies, and so on until the pyre was as high as a two-story house. Vilkis said that approximately 1,500 bodies were burned in each operation of the furnace and each funeral pyre took two nights and one day to burn completely. The cremation went on for 40 days, and then the prisoners, who by this time included 341 men, were ordered to build another furnace. Since this was the last furnace and there were no more bodies, the prisoners decided it was for them. They made a break but only a dozen out of more than 200 survived the bullets of the Nazi Tommy guns.
Numbers
murdered
Estimates
of the total number killed at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation vary. In
1946, Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov at the Nuremberg
Trials claimed there were approximately 100,000 corpses lying in Babi Yar,
using materials of the Extraordinary State Commission set
out by the Soviets to investigate Nazi crimes after the liberation of Kiev in
1943. According to testimonies of workers forced to burn the bodies, the
numbers range from 70,000 to 120,000.
In
a recently published letter to Israeli journalist, writer, and translator
Shlomo Even-Shoshan dated May 17, 1965, Anatoly
Kuznetsov commented on the Babi Yar atrocity:
In the two years that followed, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and people of all nationalities were murdered in Babi Yar. The belief that Babi Yar is an exclusively Jewish grave is wrong... It is an international grave. Nobody will ever determine how many and what nationalities are buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, their ashes scattered in ravines and fields.
For
his war crimes, Paul Blobel was sentenced to death by the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged in June 1951 at the Landsberg
Prison.
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Syrets concentration camp. Barbwire fence
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Syrets
concentration camp
In
the course of the German occupation, the Syrets
concentration camp was set up in Babi Yar. Interned communists,
Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), and captured Soviet partisans were murdered there among
others. On February 18, 1943, three Dynamo Kyiv football players (Trusevich,
Klimenko, and Putistin) who took part in the Match of Death with the German Luftwaffe
team were also murdered in the camp.
Concealment
of the crimes
Before
the Nazis retreated from Kiev ahead of the Soviet offensive of 1944, they were
ordered by Wilhelm Koppe to conceal their atrocities in the
East. Paul Blobel, who was in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years
earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 in eliminating its traces. The Aktion
was carried out earlier in all extermination camps. The bodies were exhumed,
burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity. Several hundred
prisoners of war from the Syrets concentration camp were forced to build funeral
pyres out of Jewish gravestones and exhume the bodies for cremation.
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Ukrainian postage stamp, released to the 70th
anniversary of the tragedy in Babi Yar
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| Monument to children killed in Babi Yar |
Remembrance
Main
article: Babi Yar memorials
After
the war, specifically Jewish commemoration efforts encountered serious
difficulty because of the Soviet Union's policies. After the collapse of the
Soviet Union, a number of memorials have been erected on the site and
elsewhere. The events also formed a part of literature. Babi Yar is located in Kiev
at the juncture of today's Kurenivka, Lukianivka and Syrets
neighborhoods,
between Frunze, Melnykov and Olena Teliha streets and St. Cyril's
Monastery. After the Orange Revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine hosted a major
commemoration of the 65th anniversary in 2006, attended by Presidents Moshe Katsav of Israel, Filip Vujanovic of Montenegro, Stjepan Mesić of Croatia, and Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau pointed out
that if the world had reacted to the massacre of Babi Yar, perhaps the
Holocaust might never have happened. Implying that Hitler was emboldened by
this impunity, Lau speculated:
Maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on September 29 and September 30, 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem... Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe.
In
2006, a message was also delivered on behalf of Kofi Annan, Secretary-General
of the United Nations, by his representative, Francis Martin O'Donnell, who
added a Hebrew prayer O'seh Shalom, from the Mourners' Kaddish.
Mudslide
Main
article: 1961 Kurenivka mudslide in Kiev
Babi
Yar was also the site of a large mudslide in the spring of 1961. An earthen dam
in the ravine had held loam pulp that had been pumped from the local brick
factories for ten years without sufficient drainage. The dam collapsed after
heavy rain, inundating the lower-lying Kurenivka neighborhood. The death toll
was estimated to be between 500 and 2,000 people.
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