In September 1941, German forces invading the Soviet Union took the city of kyiv, in what is now the nation of Ukraine, and soon after carried out one of the most gruesome acts of genocide in history. On September 29, they forced much of kyiv’s Jewish population into Babi Yar, also known as Babyn Yar, a ravine just outside the city.
After being ordered to strip, the victims were forced into the ravine, where they were shot by SS and German police units and their auxiliaries. As the SS later reported to headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were executed in two days, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum..
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Mass shootings become ‘Holocaust by bullets’
The Babi Yar massacre was the climax of the “Holocaust by bullets”, a term used by historians to describe the shooting executions carried out by the Nazis during World War II, which continued even after they began killing European Jews on a large scale with poison gas. death camps like the Auschwitz complex in Poland.
“What distinguishes Babyn Yar from kyiv within the Holocaust as a whole is that a metropolitan city in Europe lost almost all of its remaining Jewish residents to premeditated murder, for the first time in history, and that more Jews died there than in any other single German massacre,” says Karel Berkhoff, historian and co-director of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.
“Babyn Yar is also the best-known example of a specific type of murder in the Holocaust: mass murder near where the victims lived, usually by shooting them.”
According to Edward B. Westermann, professor of history at Texas A&M University and author of the 2021 book Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany.
As German forces created an occupation zone, Hitler’s Nazi regime was able to carve out Lebensraumor “living space,” to accommodate future German settlers, and at the same time eliminate a huge portion of Eastern Europe’s Jewish population, according to Berkoff.
Jewish residents of kyiv forced into Babi Yar
By the time the Germans reached kyiv in mid-September 1941, about 100,000 of the city’s 160,000 pre-war Jews had already fled or joined the Soviet army to fight the invasion, according to the Memorial Museum of the ‘Holocaust. This left 60,000 Jews who had been unwilling or unable to flee – many of them women, children, the elderly and the sick.
A few days after the Germans took kyiv, bombs left behind by Soviet forces exploded in several buildings the Germans were using, according to Berkhoff. About 200 of the occupants lost their lives and the Germans quickly retaliated by arresting and executing several hundred people. But it wasn’t enough.
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On September 26, the German army and SS concluded that kyiv’s Jewish population would not be confined to a ghetto, but rather wiped out at Babi Yar, a site the Germans had previously used to execute and bury Soviet officials. Two days later, on September 28, police posted 2,000 copies of a notice throughout the city and its suburbs, ordering all Jewish residents to report the following morning at an intersection in the Lukianivka neighborhood, with all their personal documents, their money and their valuables and their Clothing.
The thousands of people who showed up that morning were perhaps expecting to be sent to labor camps. Instead, they were organized into groups by the Germans and ordered to march to Babi Yar.
“The fact that the victims were ordered to assemble and report to the German authorities, and the fact that they had to pass through Ukraine’s largest city to get to the scene of the massacre, demonstrated the true scope of Nazi objectives involving the destruction of the European Jews,” says Westermann.
How many were killed at Babi Yar?
A woman stands in front of the “Crystal Wall of Weeping” at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial on the northern edge of kyiv, Ukraine, October 6, 2021.
Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images
When the Jews arrived at Babi Yar, the Germans seized their identity papers and burned them, making it clear that no one would come out alive. Most of the victims were then driven through a gauntlet of Germans armed with clubs and rubber batons, who beat them as they made their way down the ravine. They were ordered to undress, then line up and fire machine guns standing or lying down. Infants were taken from their parents’ arms and thrown into the ravine.
The massacre lasted the first day until about 5 or 6 p.m., but the Germans could not kill everyone. Those who remained were imprisoned in garages that night, until the executioners resumed their work the next day, according to Berkhoff. Bulldozers then covered the bodies with layers of earth.
It was not until nearly two months later that news of the massacre was published by the Jewish Telegraph Agency Daily Bulletin, which reported that the victims “were systematically and methodically put to death”.
The gunfire at Babi Yar was not over, however. “The ravine was used during the German occupation as a killing site until 1943 for Jews and non-Jews with an estimated 100,000 casualties,” Westermann says. In total, no less than two million people were killed in mass shootings by Nazi forces.
Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Ukraine
After the war, the memory of the terrible events of Babi Yar did not disappear. But attempts to commemorate the Jewish victims of kyiv were suppressed by Joseph Stalin’s regime. When the Soviet government finally gave the go-ahead for a monument to be erected in the 1970s, it dedicated the site to “residents and prisoners of war of kyiv” and made no mention of Jewish identity.
Finally, in independent Ukraine, a commission was created in 2016 to plan a large-scale memorial center. This site, still under construction, narrowly escaped damage from a Russian missile strike on a television tower in kyiv in March 2022.
