Babi Yar
(Kiev and Babi Yar – maps)
Babi Yar (Ukrainian: Бабин Яр,
Babyn Yar or Babin Yar; Russian: Бабий Яр, Babiy Yar) is a ravine in the
Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's
forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first
and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing
approximately 33,771 Jews. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kyiv was made
by the military governor Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for
Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe
C Commander Otto Rasch. Sonderkommando 4a troops, along with the aid of the SD
and SS Police Battalions with the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police backed by the
Wehrmacht, carried out the orders.
The massacre was the largest mass
killing under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its collaborators during its
campaign against the Soviet Union and has been called "the largest single
massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date and
surpassed overall only by the later 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000
Jews in October 1941 (committed by German and Romanian troops) and by Aktion
Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims.
Victims of other massacres at the
site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and
Roma. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed 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) who was also the
cantiniere, to the Dominican Monastery. The word "yar" is Turkic in
origin and means "gully" 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.
Massacres of 29–30 September
1941
Battle of Kiev (1941) Axis
forces, mainly German, occupied Kyiv on 19 September 1941. Between 20 and 28
September, explosives planted by the Soviet secret police caused extensive
damage in the city; and on 24 September an explosion rocked Rear Headquarters
Army Group South. Two days later, on 26 September, Maj. Gen. Kurt Eberhard, the
military governor, and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS and
Police Leader, met at Rear Headquarters Army Group South. There, they made the
decision to exterminate the Jews of Kyiv, claiming that it was in retaliation
for the explosions. Also present were
SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, commander of Sonderkommando 4a, and his
superior, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C. The
mass-killing was to be carried out by units under the command of Rasch and
Blobel, who were ultimately responsible for a number of atrocities in Soviet
Ukraine during the summer and autumn of 1941.
(Paul Blobel at the subsequent
Nuremberg trials, March 1948)
The implementation of the order
was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by Blobel, under the general
command of Friedrich Jeckeln. This unit consisted of Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and
Sicherheitspolizei (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. Contrary to the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht",
the Sixth Army under the command of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau worked
together with the SS and SD to plan and execute the mass-murder of the Jews of
Kyiv
On 26 September 1941 the
following order was posted:
(Notice dated September 28, 1941
in Russian, Ukrainian with German translation ordering all Kyivan Jews to
assemble for supposed resettlement)
All Yids[a] 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 Dokterivskaya streets (near the
Viis'kove cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm
clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids[a] who do not follow this order and are found
elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids[a]
and appropriate the things in them will be shot. — Order posted in Kyiv
in Russian, Ukrainian, and German on or around 26 September 1941.
On 29 and 30 September 1941, the
Nazis and their collaborators murdered approximately 33,771 Jewish civilians at
Babi Yar. The order to kill the Jews of Kyiv was given to Sonderkommando 4a, of
Einsatzgruppe C, consisting of SD and SiPo men, the third company of the
Special Duties Waffen-SS battalion, and a platoon of the No. 9 police
battalion. These units were reinforced by police battalions Nos. 45 and 305, by
units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, and supported by local collaborators.
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[b] 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 to keep them moving. The crowd was large enough
that most of the victims 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 metres long and 30 metres wide and a good
15 metres 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.
(Soviet PoWs made to cover the
Babi Yar Ravine – October 1, 1941)
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 Kyiv and its suburbs were systematically shot dead by machine-gun
fire at Babi Yar on 29 September and 30 September 1941. The money, valuables,
underwear, and clothing of the murdered 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.
Further massacres 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 Kyiv 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 until the Nazis evacuated the city of Kyiv. On 10 January
1942 about 100 captured Soviet sailors were executed there after being forced
to disinter and cremate the bodies of previous victims. In addition, Babi Yar
became a place of execution of residents of five Gypsy camps. 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).[8]
Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha and her husband, and renowned bandurist
Mykhailo Teliha, were murdered there on 21 February 1942. Also killed in 1941 was Ukrainian activist
writer Ivan Rohach, his sister, and his staff.
Upon the Soviet liberation of
Kyiv in 1943, Soviet 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 August 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 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 machine guns.
Numbers murdered
(Portrait of five-year-old Mania
Halef, a Jewish child, who was later killed during the mass execution at Babi
Yar.)
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 Kyiv 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 17
May 1965, Anatoly Kuznetsov commented on the Babi Yar atrocity: In the two
years that followed, Ukrainians, Russians, 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 on 7 June 1951 at Landsberg Prison.
Survivors
(Dina Pronicheva on the witness
stand, 24 January 1946, at a Kyiv war-crimes trial of fifteen members of the
German police responsible for the occupied Kyiv region)
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 Kyiv 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 torches 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 story to Kuznetsov. At
least 29 survivors are known.
In 2006, Yad Vashem and other
Jewish organisations 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 Kyiv who were killed during the Holocaust.
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
resistance members were murdered there, among others. On 18 February 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 Kyiv ahead of the Soviet offensive of 1944, they were
ordered by Wilhelm Koppe to conceal their atrocities in the East. Paul Blobel,
who had been 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.
Remembrance
(Current appearance of ravine)
After the war, specifically
Jewish commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the
Soviet Union's policies. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins
"Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("There are no monuments over
Babi Yar"); it is also the first line of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.
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 Kyiv at the
juncture of today's Kurenivka, Lukianivka and Syrets districts, between
Kyrylivska, 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 29
September and 30 September 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, Resident Coordinator Francis Martin O'Donnell, who added a
Hebrew prayer O'seh Shalom, from the Mourners' Kaddish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
