Babi Yar

Babi Yar

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine situated just outside the city of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. At the time that the events depicted below took place, Kiev was part of the USSR. In the early hours of June 22, 1941, the armed forces of the Third Reich streamed across its eastern border with the USSR, initiating a military conflagration codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a conflict that in terms of the numbers of fatalities, wounded, barbarities committed, human suffering, both military and civilian, and the scale and scope of its international implications, most probably has no equal in human history. Kiev fell to the German forces on September 19. Prior to evacuating the city the Soviet security services had left explosives in a number of buildings set to detonate between September 24 and 28. The buildings in which they had been placed were comandeered by the military administration and substantial casualties were sustained.

At a meeting which was attended by the military governor, the Higher SS and Police Leader, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe C, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch, and the commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, it was decided that the appropriate response to this would be the elimination of the Jews of Kiev. They, needless to say, had absolutely nothing to do with the explosions. Sonderkommando 4a, included Security Service (Sicherheistdienst), Waffen-SS, and police battalion personnel. Other police battalions and Ukrainian auxiliay police were drafted to assist in the operation. Beginning on September 29, the Jews of Kiev were assembled and marched to the vicinity of the ravine. Not far from its edge they were told to strip off their clothes and remove their valuables. In groups of ten they were marched to to the edge, whereupon they were shot and fell into the Yar. The accepted estimate is that 33,771 Jews were executed in this manner.

Babi Yar continued to be an execution spots for many months subsequently. Jews from other parts of the Ukraine were brought their for execution. So to were Roma and Sinti, and Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet authorities estimated that approximately 100,000 corpses lay strewn across the bed of Babi Yar. Beginning in July 1943 SS personnel were given the task of eliminating all evidence of the massacre. To achieve this the corpses were exhumed and burnt. The task of exhumation, moving and burning the corpses, was forced on inmates of the concentration camp Syretsk, 100 of whom were Jewish. Aided by landmoving machinery, the task was completed in six weeks. No trace, apparently, was left. With the exception of fifteen prisoners who new what their ultimate fate was likely to be, and who escaped, the concentration camp inmates who had carried out this work were executed by the SS.

Although this method of eliminating Jews in areas occupied by the Germans post-June 22, 1941, was repeated on a massive scale by personnel of the Einsatzgruppen, various auxilliary forces, and police battalions in the occupied areas of the USSR, resulting in some 1.5 million Jewish dead, as well as the dead of members of other ethnic and national groups, the destruction of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar has come to symbolise the methods and incomprehensible barbarity of this phase of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.