82: Babi Yar

82 years ago today (September 29, 1941) the German Nazis and their Collaborators murdered 33,771 Men, Women and Children at Babi Yar (Бабин Яр in Ukrainian) in Kyiv, Ukraine.

(Babi Yar, Ukraine - 1941)

The name Babi Yar refers to an old woman (Baba) selling the ravine (Yar) to a Monastery in 1401.

A notice (in German, Ukrainian and Russian) was posted telling all Jews in Kyiv to meet at a certain time and place – with all their Documents and luggage -  so they could be resettled following a series of explosions throughout the city (caused by undercover Soviet NKVD Secret Police.) The notice also said that any Jews left in Kyiv afterwards would be shot on sight.

 The Germans expected around 6,000 people to show up, but instead over 33,700 came to the meeting point.

The Men, Women and Children were walked several miles to the Babi Yar Ravine (then outside the city), made to undress and run naked through a column of Ukrainian Para-Military Collaborators to an open pit where the Germans shot them – children under 3 and babies were simply thrown in alive to be buried by the other bodies.

Only 29 people are known to have survived the massacre (by being shot and wounded then falling into the pit and hiding under the thousands of dead bodies until they could climb out in the darkness.)

Babi Yar is the single largest Massacre of the Holocaust. 33,771 Men, Women and Children were murdered on September 29-30, 1941.

(Babi Yar Memorial to the Children murdered by the Germans in Kyiv, Ukraine – I took in November 2007.)

A total of 150,000 People (Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Soviet Prisoners of War, Catholic Priests, Orthodox Priests and Partisans, etc.) murdered at the same spot until Kyiv was liberated in November 1943.

Paul Blobel (the German who organized and executed the Babi Yar Massacre as well as other Massacres resulting in the deaths of 1 Million Men, Women and Children) was found guilty by a US Military Court in West Germany and hanged in 1951.