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Babi Yar (Russian: Бабий яр, Babiy yar; Ukrainian: Бабин яр, Babyn yar) is the site near Kiev (Ukraine), where during WW II more than 100, 000 Soviet civilians (over 37, 000 of them Jews) were executed by Germans and local collaborators in 1941 - 1943. Today Babi Yar is internationally known as the site of one of the worst Jewish massacres of the Holocaust.

Historical Background

Babi Yar is a ravine in the outskirts of Kiev, capital of Ukraine. First mentioning of Babi Yar dates back to 1401 and in the course of several centuries the site had been used for different purposes including military camps and at least two cemeteries, among them a New Jewish Cemetery that had been closed by 1937.

World War II

After 45-day battle for capital of Ukraine German forces finally entered the city on September 19, 1941. Several prominent buildings within the city had been rigged with explosives by NKVD and a series of explosions between September 24-29 caused considerable casualties among German forces. The German military governor, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and several other higher officers decided at a meeting that a retaliation was to be made towards local population. First execution took place on September 27, 1941, when 700 mental patients of the local psychiatric asylum had been executed. Further it was decided by German authorities that Jewish population of the city was responsible for the explosions and orders were made to prepare for their extermination. It became later known that Germans knew all along that Jewish population of Kiev had nothing to do with the explosions, but preferred to use it as a pretext for the massacre.

Massacre of September 29-30, 1941

On September 28, notices around town read:

All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot.

The Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children did not know what was happening, and by the time they heard machine-gun fire, it was too late to escape. They were driven in small groups of ten, and led down a corridor of soldiers, as described by A. Kuznetsov:

There was no question of being able to dodge or get away. Brutal blows, immediately drawing blood, descended on their heads, backs and shoulders from left and right. The soldiers kept shouting: "Schnell, schnell!" laughing happily, as if they were watching a circus act; they even found ways of delivering harder blows in the more vulnerable places, the ribs, the stomach and the groin.

The Jews were then ordered to undress, beaten if they resisted, and then shot at the edge of the Babi Yar gorge. According to the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 101, 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were killed at Babi Yar on September 29 and September 30, 1941: systematically shot dead by machine gun fire.

A unit of Einsatzgruppe C, Police Battalion 45 commanded by a Major Besser, carried out the massacre, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln.

Further Executions

Further executions took place on October 1, 2, 8 and 11, 1941. During this time 17,000 more Jews were executed. Mass executions in the ravine continued up until Germans withdrew from the city in 1943. Among others, about 621 members of OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) have been executed, and notably a prominent Ukrainian poet Olena Teliha. According to different sources the number of executed in Babi Yar could be between 70,000 and 200,000 people. According to testimonies of Jewish workers forced to burn the bodies, the number could be as high as 70,000 - 120,000.

Later at Babi Yar the Syretsk Concentration Camp was set up, where interned communists, soviet POW and captured resistance fighters were executed as well. On February 18 1943 three Dynamo Kyiv players, who took part in the so-called Match of Death with German Luftwaffe team were executed in the camp. It is estimated that around 25,000 people died in the camp alone.

Cover-up Attempts

Retreating from Kiev Germans made an attempt to cover up the atrocities. In August -September of 1943 the Syretsk camp was partially destroyed, some bodies were exhumed and burned in open ovens. Ashes of tens of thousands of bodies were scattered in the neighbourhood. During the night of September 29, 1943 an inmate revolt broke out and as a result 18 people managed to escape, while the rest 311 were executed.

Remembrance

When the Red Army retook the city on November 6, 1943 Syretsk Concentration Camp was used as an internment camp for German POW until 1946. Subsequently the camp was demolished and in 1950-s and 60-s an apartment complex and a park were constructed adjacent to the site.

After the war the Soviet leadership was not keen to commemorate massacres of an ethnic nature and several attempts to build a memorial at Babi Yar were thus overruled. The ravine was dammed and flooded with muddy water from brick quarries in late 1950's in order to fill it with mud settling to the bottom. The dam collapsed after spring rains on March 13, 1961 sending a wall of mud and water to northern parts of Kiev. A large number of people perished with the floodwaters. Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Anatoly Kuznetsov visited the site soon after the flood.

An official memorial for Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was finally erected in 1976. A memorial for the Jewish victims was placed at Babi Yar in 1991.

The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem of the same name written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13. Babi Yar is also the title of a Ukrainian motion picture portraying the massacre and of Anatoly Kuznetsov's celebrated novel. The massacre was also shown in the TV-miniseries War and Remembrance.

References

• Kuznetsov (Anatoli A.), trans. David Floyd, (1970), Babi Yar, Jonathan Cape Ltd. ISBN 0-671-45135-9
• "Babi Yar in the mirror of science, or the map of Bermuda Triangle", an article in Zerkalo Nedeli (the Mirror Weekly), July 2005, available online in Russian and in Ukrainian
• Encyclopedia of Kyiv

External links

• All about Babi Yar
• http://sphygmoma.livejournal.com/1056.html
• Visitors to Kiev can see a Jewish Babi Yar memorial in Babi Yar park, Kiev. To reach this park, take the metro to the Dorohozhychi station http://www.metro.kiev.ua/
• Copy of the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 101
• "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in English
• Kiev organization of Jews - ghetto and concentration camp survivors: "HOLOCAUST MEMORY"
• Babi Yar: Mass Murder
• The Massacre at Babi Yar Near Kiev
• Babi Yar (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Statement of the Truck Driver Hofer Describing the Murder of Jews at Babi Yar
• Photographs of Babi Yar
• A monument is to be erected to Olena Teliha
• http://www.lib.ru/PROZA/KUZNECOW_A/babiyar.txt
• http://www.zchor.org/BABIYAR.HTM

50°28′N 30°27′E / 50.467°N 30.450°E / 50.467; 30.450

• Holocaust massacres and pogroms
• History of Kiev city
• 1941
• Massacres