Largest Single Massacre of the Second World War in Europe (deutsch)
To this day, most people in Central Europe primarily associate the National Socialist mass murder of Jews with the death camps in occupied Poland, which the Germans deliberately set up away from the major centers. However, the largest single massacre of the Second World War on European soil was carried out by German police officers, SS men, members of the Wehrmacht and local militia members right on the outskirts of a large city – on the outskirts of Kyiv. The site of Babyn Yar, translated as “Indian Gorge”, is located just four kilometers as the crow flies west of the Ukrainian capital’s main train station. Here they shot more than 33,000 Jews within two days in September 1941 and murdered thousands more people in the following two years.
Towards the city center, Babyn Yar still borders on an extensive complex of six cemeteries. Beyond the gorge there has been an extensive military summer training area since the beginning of the 19th century. To the south of it there is an industrial area with a heterogeneous development of factory halls and wooden barracks as well as one Freight depot. At the beginning of the 1940s, Babyn Yar itself appeared to be largely bare, sandy terrain, into which an erosion channel up to ten meters deep had been dug over the centuries, from which numerous smaller side valleys with steep slopes radiated, some of which were used as garbage dumps .[1] It was this ground relief that persuaded the organizers of the massacre of Kyiv’s Jews to carry out the shootings so close to the city center and not further outside – mass graves could not have been dug so quickly for the large number of victims.
The capture of Kyiv by the Wehrmacht and the first shootings
Kyiv, the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic since 1934, was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the Soviet Union before the German attack on June 22, 1941. At this point, Kyiv had around 930,000 inhabitants and was a distinctly multi-ethnic city. Ukrainians formed a relative majority, the largest minorities were Russians and Jews, each accounting for around a quarter of the population. A large proportion of the residents had fled or been evacuated when the Wehrmacht advanced on Kyiv in August 1941, including around two thirds of the Jewish residents. The young Jewish men had been drafted into military service. The Jews who remained behind were mostly women, children and old people.
The German occupiers’ approach to the population of Kyiv followed the pattern of “cleansing” occupied cities that had been established since the beginning of the German-Soviet War: First, all Red Army soldiers who had evaded capture were to be identified, with particular attention being paid to individuals who had “Asian characteristics” and who, according to the National Socialist racial ideology, outwardly corresponded to the “subhuman” type. Two days after the occupation of Kyiv, the commander of the 6th Army, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, ordered that all men fit for military service be brought to a remand camp; Wehrmacht intelligence officers were supposed to interrogate them there. The soldiers, “partisans” and Jews identified were to be deported to transit camp 201, which Army Group South set up in the cities near the front. The “Jewish intelligentsia”, along with political commissars of the Red Army and communist officials, were the focus of persecution from the beginning of the campaign; The longer the war lasted, the larger the Germans’ group of Jewish victims became. This is also the case in Kyiv: from September 22nd, several orders were issued to the Wehrmacht patrols specifically to arrest all male Jews. The 99th Light Division also arrested “suspicious” Jewish women and handed them over to the German security police (Sipo). On the day of the invasion of Kyiv, the leadership of the 75th Infantry Division had already decided to use Jews for clean-up work and demining.[2]
In this way, members of the Wehrmacht were involved in the persecution of the Kyiv Jews from the very beginning. However, the officers of the Sipo’s task forces and the Security Service (SD) of the Reichsführer SS were supposed to carry out their murder. Together with the units of the 6th Army, a 50-man advance detachment from Sonderkommandos (Sk) 4a entered Kyiv on September 19, 1941, which was commanded by SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner and Adolf Jansen. Two days later, the head of the Sk 4a, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, arrived in the Ukrainian capital, followed by the rest of the command on September 25th. It comprised a total of around 120 men – mostly former Gestapo and criminal police officers. The staff of Einsatzgruppe C under SS brigade leader Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, to which the Sk 4a belonged, as well as the staff of the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) Russia-South, Friedrich Jeckeln, and the South Police Regiment subordinate to him with police battalions 45, 303 and 314. In their wake moved two units of Ukrainian militias. A total of around 2,000 police officers, SS men and militia members had now arrived in Kyiv.
The Sk 4a advance command had already taken part in the search for Jews. After the Wehrmacht opened Kyiv for the Sipo on September 20th and all members of the Sk 4a had arrived, seven interrogation groups searched the city and the two camps set up by the Wehrmacht. They were located on Kerosinna Street (now Žoludenka Street), northwest of the Central Station. To the north of a large camp for around 8,000 prisoners of war on the site of a barracks, there was another camp for separated Red Army political commissars and civilians in the Zenit football stadium. Here the Germans also held the approximately 1,600 Kyiv Jews who were arrested from Sk 4a until September 28th.
On September 27th at the latest – two days before the big massacre – the German occupiers began shooting in Babyn Yar: On this day, police battalions 45 and 303 were deployed for the first time for a “cleaning operation” and for “barrier services”. The exact number of victims of these first two massacres can no longer be determined. The groups were shot in various side valleys in the Babyn Yar compound. Witnesses and survivors of the Zenit camp unanimously say that a dozen trucks were used to transport the Jewish prisoners alone, which drove back and forth several times and were only loaded with outer clothing on the return trips. It is possible that all 1,600 Jews arrested up to that point were murdered in those days. There is no information about the number of Red Army soldiers shot at that time; they walked to their deaths. In 1943, the Germans had concentration camp inmates exhume and burn the remains of the prisoners of war they had murdered as they sought to remove traces of their crimes. Surviving prisoners and German guards later estimated the number of corpses that could be identified as Red Army soldiers based on remains of their uniforms at up to 20,000. Sinti and Roma were among the first victims of the German occupiers in Kyiv: a few dozen of them were already dead in Babyn on September 23rd Jar shot.[3]
The decision on the great massacre and preparations
On September 20th – the day after the Red Army withdrew from Kyiv – the first time-detonating mine laid by the Soviet secret service exploded in the citadel southeast of the city center. In the days from September 24th, further such bombings took place on buildings along the central Chreščatyk Boulevard that housed German occupation offices. The headquarters of the High Command of the 6th Army (AOK 6) was also hit. In addition to many locals, numerous German soldiers also died in the explosions and fires. While the fire was being extinguished, a meeting was held on September 26th at the headquarters of the Kyiv city commander, Major General Kurt Eberhard, to decide on “retaliatory measures”. In addition to Eberhard, Jeckeln, Blobel, a representative of Einsatzgruppe C and the counterintelligence officer of the 29th Army Corps, Major Gerhard Schirner, took part in this meeting. Those present decided to murder a large proportion of Kyiv’s Jews – at least 50,000 of the estimated community of up to 150,000 people.[4]
Contemporary German documents consistently portrayed the massacre as a military response to the bombings. But it was a pretext to legitimize the mass murder that was already planned: it was striking that only Jews were to be shot. There was great agreement between Blobel and von Reichenau regarding the murder of the Jews. A month earlier, von Reichenau had personally ordered the killing of 90 Jewish children in the town of Bila Cerkva, south of Kyiv, whose parents had previously been shot by the men of Sk 4a.[5]
In order to bring the victims to the place of execution, the Germans resorted to a trick that had already been used several times: on September 28th, a trilingual poster called on the Jewish population to gather at a fork in the road near the cemeteries on the western side at eight o’clock the following morning Find the outskirts of Kyiv. Sk 4a had worded the text, which was not signed, in such a way that those affected would believe that they were being resettled. People were asked to bring warm clothing, ID cards and valuables; There was a freight yard near the assembly point. After the massacre was over, the Sipo proudly reported that, thanks to the good organization, the Jews still believed in their resettlement until immediately before the execution. This may have been the case for those who actually showed up at the specified meeting point. However, so many Jews committed suicide in Kyiv during these days that there was a shortage of coffins. Numerous other people hid or took refuge with acquaintances.
The massacre of September 29th and 30th, 1941
On the morning of September 29th, a neighbor excitedly knocked on teacher L. Nartova’s door. She should look at what is happening on the street.
“I run out onto the balcony and see people passing by in an almost endless line; they fill the entire street and sidewalks. There are women, men, young girls, children, old people, entire families. Many people carry their belongings on wheelbarrows, but most carry their belongings on their shoulders. They walk in silence, quietly. It’s scary.”
Some of the thousands upon thousands who walked along Mel’nykov Street, which leads the four kilometers from Kyiv’s city center to the cemeteries, even had their pets with them. Meanwhile, members of Police Battalion 45 carried out house searches throughout the city using registration registers and drove any Jews they found into the crowd towards the assembly point. Only a few police officers were present along the route to the assembly point; it was only behind the intersection of Mel’nykov and Pugačev Streets, about a kilometer from the shooting site, that German gunmen had converted an anti-tank ditch with barbed wire into a barrier. Anyone who passed them was within the cordoned off area around the execution site and was no longer left behind. The non-Jewish companions had to turn back at this point. The arrivals were probably counted at this barrier, so that the Sipo was later able to transmit to Berlin the irritatingly exact number of 33,771 men, women and children shot, given the extent of the massacre.[6]
From the assembly point immediately behind the barrier, those arriving were driven along Mel’nykov Street in groups of 200 to 500 people each. After walking around two street corners between the cemeteries, the groups finally arrived at the upper, southern reaches of Babyn Yar.
The entire route was cordoned off on both sides by German and Ukrainian police guards. The execution site was also completely surrounded by German armed men, including numerous Wehrmacht members. Already at the assembly point, people had to leave their suitcases and bags on the wall of the Jewish cemetery. Behind the next intersection, on Simʼï-Khochlovych Street, there were police officers who took the warm outerwear, ID cards and valuables from those passing by. They threw their IDs into the fire, their valuables into baskets waiting for them, and their outer clothing into large piles that were taken away by truck during the day. When it became clear that it was taking too long to search so many people individually and to transport away their clothing, the people were driven without stopping to the edge of the execution site, where they either sat on a plateau above the gorge or at the bottom of it Had to remove underwear. The piles of clothes were then searched by members of Sk 4a after the massacre was completed.
Of the Jews who gathered at the assembly point, only a very few escaped the massacre. After the liberation of Kyiv by the Red Army, some reported that they managed to turn around in front of the barrier at the Pugačev Street intersection without being noticed because they noticed shots in the distance. Others were able to slip through the guard lines on the way from the assembly point to Babyn Yar and hide in the cemeteries on either side of the route. Only one person is known to have survived the shootings: Dina Proničeva threw herself on the dead in front of her before the shots and fled the ravine under the cover of darkness.[7] The non-Jewish residents of the area adjacent to Babyn Yar also became aware of the continuous volleys of gunfire: from the Luk’janivsʼke cemetery, witnesses were able to get within two hundred meters of the gorge and so did not observe the shootings themselves, but they did see the columns of them Jews up to the area where they had to take off their clothes.
Down in the gorge the various murder squads were ready. Kurt Werner, a member of the Sk 4a, reported in court after the war about the executions:
“It didn’t take long before the first Jews were brought to us over the slopes of the gorge. The Jews had to lie down on the walls of the hollow with their faces to the ground. There were three groups of riflemen in the hollow, with a total of about twelve riflemen. At the same time, Jews were constantly being added to these shooting groups from above. The following Jews had to lie on the corpses of the previously shot Jews. The shooters stood behind the Jews and killed them with shots in the neck. I can still remember the horror in which the Jews were when they were up at the edge of the pit and were able to look down on the corpses in the pit for the first time.”[8]
The members of the murder squads rotated regularly as they carried out their bloody activities. After Werner spent the morning in the gorge, shooting there himself and reloading the magazines, he was deployed at the upper edge of the gorge after the lunch break. There he was responsible until the evening for “feeding” the Jews to his comrades.[9] The twelve men of the Sk 4a were not the only shooters who murdered that day. Each of the commandos had been assigned their own side valley in the extensive area in which they carried out their atrocities.
Since it was foreseeable that the execution would last many hours, the organizers had kitchen carts prepared that provided hot meals and drinks, including liquor, for 400 men (the 120 men of Sk 4a as well as the members of the other commandos who took part in this mass murder contributed). When darkness fell, Blobel stopped the shooting; by this point his men had murdered approximately 22,000 people. The remaining Jews were locked up overnight in the tank battalion’s large garages at the assembly point east of the cemeteries and killed the following day, September 30th.
After the massacre was over, Wehrmacht pioneers blasted the steep edges of the gorge’s side valleys to cover the bodies with sand. In the days that followed, Soviet prisoners of war had to level these areas. Johannes Hähle, a photographer from Propaganda Company 637, recorded their activities in color slides when he visited the execution site in the first week of October.[10] He also took pictures of the numerous piles of clothing that lay immediately next to the individual execution sites. After the massacre in Kyiv and the mass murder of more than 3,000 Jews committed ten days earlier in Žytomyr, about 140 kilometers further west, a total of 137 truckloads of clothing were produced, which were distributed primarily to so-called ethnic Germans. In Kyiv, an evacuated school was converted into an interim storage facility: According to witnesses, food was stored on the ground floor, laundry on the first floor, outer clothing on the second floor, and valuables that were given to the Jews on their way to the third floor were stored on the third floor The place of execution had been removed.
Of course, a crime of this magnitude, committed so close to a major city, did not go unnoticed. Initially, many may have thought that the Kyiv Jews were actually being “resettled” in the literal sense – the experiences with the Russian and then the Soviet authorities, who had deported large groups of the population several times, probably played a role here, which is why the German approach did not initially seem completely unusual. But the news quickly spread throughout the city that the people being taken away had not boarded railway carriages at the Luk’janovka freight station west of Kyiv. Irina A. Chorošunova wrote in her diary on October 2nd:
“Everyone is already saying that the Jews are being murdered. No, not to be murdered, but to have already been murdered. Everyone, without exception – old people, women and children. Those who returned home on Monday have already been shot. This is still talk, but there can be no doubt that it corresponds to the facts. […] A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery and sneaked through the fence [into the Russian cemetery] from the other side. She saw undressed people being led in the direction of Babi Yar and heard gunshots. There are more and more of these rumors and reports.”[11]
Knowledge of the massacre was not limited to Kyiv. A few days later, a group of twenty-eight foreign correspondents arrived in Kyiv, who undertook a tour of occupied Ukraine at the invitation of the Foreign Office and supervised by Wehrmacht officers. Although their visit to the Ukrainian capital was carefully planned and monitored, journalists learned about the shootings. As early as November 1941, the New York Herald Tribune reported that ten thousand Kyiv Jews had been murdered.[12]
Not all non-Jewish locals looked in horror at the stream of their Jewish fellow citizens moving toward Babyn Yar. Many took the opportunity to denounce their neighbors or the people staying in their house. The nurse Ol’ga R. Muchortova-Pekker, doubly at risk as a Jew and a party member, reported after the liberation how she had to change residence half a dozen times in the first weeks of the occupation alone because she had been denounced.[13 ] The former head of the security police in Kyiv, Dr. Hans Schumacher reported after the end of the war that his office had received so many denunciations that his officials could not process them all. In the case of Kyiv, only a few of these reports have survived because the relevant files were probably destroyed. All the more revealing is a document that has been preserved in the files of the Kyiv housing administration. It is a petition from a caretaker with whom he fought for his apartment in November 1941, which he had only been given a month earlier by the German local command – as a reward for holding 19 Jews in his house with eight other Ukrainians and dropped it off on September 29th “at the specified collection point”. If all caretakers were as dutiful as he was, he concluded his petition, then there would be no more Jews in Kyiv.[14] Retribution for repression suffered under the Bolshevik regime, for which Jews were often held responsible, and greed merged seamlessly. Many people in Kyiv took advantage of the collapse of the old order to appropriate the apartments of their Jewish neighbors who had fled or were murdered, or at least their household goods.
Other citizens did not limit themselves to denouncing Jews, but rather killed them themselves. Presumably on October 1, 1941 (the exact date could not be determined), for example, residents of the Kyiv district murdered several Jewish people, including a teenager. On that day, Ukrainian militiamen picked up denounced Jews in an open truck to hand them over to the German security police. When the already partially occupied truck stopped on Nyžnij Val Boulevard, bystanders attacked the Jews who were being dragged out of nearby houses. Children threw stones at them, and during the course of the day, residents killed a total of seven Jews and buried them on the spot in splinter protection ditches that had been dug in the green area on the median strip of the boulevard. The bodies lay there until they were exhumed after the Germans withdrew in December 1943 and the three main perpetrators were arrested. In total, several dozen people took part in these murders. It is unclear how many similar cases there were in other places in Kyiv, but what is certain is that, unlike in eastern Galicia, direct violence by non-Jewish people against their Jewish neighbors was much rarer.[15]
The continuation of the shootings in Babyn Yar
Even after the conclusion of the great massacre of 29/30. In September 1941, the German occupiers shot Jews in Kyiv. They continued to use Babyn Yar as an execution site. The police battalions of Jeckeln’s South Police Regiment remained in Kyiv until mid-October and during this period carried out four “wartime operations”, as the usual cover term for mass shootings was. On September 30th, the Einsatzkommando (Ek) 5 under August Meyer arrived in Kyiv and was now murdering police officers in parallel with Sk 4a and Jeckelns. Witnesses observed daily columns of Jews being led out of the city in early October, while others noticed trucks leaving the civilian prison camp at Zenit Stadium and heading for Babyn Yar. The members of Ek 5 alone shot around 3,000 Jews in Kyiv in the weeks after the great massacre, mostly people who had fled to the countryside at the end of September and were now returning to the city. Meanwhile, the members of the Sk 4a primarily murdered Jewish prisoners of war who were handed over to them by the Wehrmacht.
From the end of November 1941, Ek 5 was solely responsible for searching for Jews and executing them. Because of the small number of personnel – the command only had around 20 men – Ek 5 was unable to carry out any raids, but primarily processed the denunciations mentioned. In addition, members of the Wehrmacht, the German police and the German civil administration independently arrested Jews and delivered them to the headquarters of Ek 5. This had moved into the former headquarters of the Soviet secret service NKVD, which was located in the middle of Kyiv on Korolenka Street diagonally opposite the medieval St. Sophia Cathedral – the building is now used by the Ukrainian secret service SBU. All of the people imprisoned there were interviewed by the command’s clerks, who then decided whether those arrested were Jews. In this case they were marked for execution. The security police also murdered communists, Red Army soldiers and suspected partisans, agents and saboteurs. From the beginning of 1942, they also murdered Ukrainian nationalists who did not give up their goal of an independent state.
From autumn 1941 onwards, the operational groups in the occupied eastern territories were gradually converted into stationary offices of the Sipo: Ek 5 became the office of the commander of the security police (KdS) in Kyiv. In February 1942, Erich Ehrlinger arrived in Kyiv. Up to this point he had led Ek 1a, now he took over the expansion of the KdS office, which was fully operational three months later. The investigation and execution of “enemy persons” was the responsibility of the head of Department IV (Gestapo). Until June 1942 this was the aforementioned Dr. Schumacher, then Erich Wagner.[16]
Under Ehrlinger a kind of routine became established in the murder trial. If there were enough prisoners for an execution, the head of the department set a date for the murder operation. That was usually Saturday morning. Initially, the executions were carried out in a gas van in the office yard. The box attachment held around 30 people. When the occupants had suffocated, the driver would take the car to Babyn Yar, where the bodies would be buried above the ravine in one of the old anti-tank ditches or in the ravine. Because Schumacher, as the head of the execution, wanted to spare his subordinates the gruesome sight of the painfully suffocated, he advocated carrying out shootings in Babyn Yar again. All members of the department were assigned to these operations in turn, and the names of the eight to 15 men in question were then posted on the bulletin board. The victims were driven to Babyn Yar in trucks, the firing squad followed in cars. However, on the orders of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), murders continued to be carried out using gas vans until the KdS office withdrew in November 1943.[17]
The Syrec concentration camp
In the spring of 1942, Ehrlinger had the so-called Syrec’ labor education camp set up at the southern end of Babyn Yar, and at the same time the camps set up by the Wehrmacht not far from the Kyiv main train station were dissolved. In addition to the Janovska camp in Lemberg, the Syrec camp was the only concentration camp in the strict sense in what is now Ukraine.[18] Officially it was one of the 56 subcamps of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but was subordinate to Department I/II of the KdS Kyiv. SS Sturmbannführer Paul Otto Radomski, an early companion of Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, took over management in June 1942. The guard was the responsibility of the 23rd Schutzstaffel Battalion, a Ukrainian unit of around 120 men, which was subordinate to the KdS and commanded by German SS men. The number of camp inmates fluctuated; at times up to 3,000 men and women were held captive in Syrec. Some of the inmates were Jews, but most of the prisoners were communists, alleged NKVD agents and Ukrainian nationalists. The most prominent prisoners were nine football players from the Kyiv league club Dynamo; Radomski personally shot three of them in February 1943. The legend spread by the CPSU that the football players were imprisoned because they had defeated a team of Wehrmacht soldiers in a friendly match persisted for a long time. In fact, they were denounced, among other things, as supposed NKVD agents.[19]
The camp, of which no remains have survived, was built on the territory of a summer camp of the Kyiv garrison and covered an area of approximately 500 by 300 meters. It was surrounded by a triple barbed wire fence, the middle row of which was electrified. On the eastern side was the main gate, which led into a kind of kennel where the guard room was also located. Another gate led into the inner area of the camp.
The camp, of which no remains have survived, was built on the territory of a summer camp of the Kyiv garrison and covered an area of approximately 500 by 300 meters. It was surrounded by a triple barbed wire fence, the middle row of which was electrified. On the eastern side was the main gate, which led into a kind of kennel where the guard room was also located. Another gate led into the inner area of the camp. To the left and right of a corridor of barbed wire fences that led to the work zone at the western end of the camp were the women’s and men’s departments and warehouses. The women were housed in barracks, the men in initially 16, later 32 long earthen huts in which up to 80 people lived. On the southern edge of the camp there was an earthen hut for the sick, officially called a “hospital”. In fact, the sick were shot at irregular intervals by camp director Radomski and his subordinates.
The prisoners were divided into brigades of 15 to 20 people, which in turn were grouped into “hundreds”. The brigade leaders, like the hundred leaders, were recruited from among the prisoners; The hundred leaders had the right to impose corporal punishment. A number of these brigade leaders were former Ukrainian auxiliary police officers who had been sent to the concentration camp for official misconduct, such as accepting bribes. In the men’s and women’s camps there were camp elders who had to report to Radomski on the number of people working and the number of sick people or the progress of the work. The inmates had to saw wood and build or repair barracks, made charcoal, did saddlery or were used to carry out earthworks in the area and to demolish houses. Working hours lasted from five in the morning to nine in the evening with an hour lunch break during which the prisoners were given soup. Some prisoners received additional food from relatives. To do this, they bribed the Ukrainian guards who accompanied the work crews on operations outside the camp. Other family members tried to throw bread or potatoes over the camp fence to the prisoners.
Only a few inmates managed to escape from the camp, such as two doctors during a Soviet air raid on Kyiv on May 11, 1943, in which the camp area was also hit by bombs. Two further escape attempts were made in July and August 1943, one of which was also the result of a bomb hitting the camp fence. In retaliation, Ehrlinger had between ten and 25 prisoners shot each time. After the war, several pits with corpses were found on the former camp site and in the immediate vicinity and around 650 dead were exhumed. The exact number of those who died in the camp is unknown. In 1947, a Soviet investigative commission put the number at more than 30,000, although this appears to be significantly inflated.
The evacuation of the camp began on September 23, 1943, several hundred women were deported to Germany, and around 500 other prisoners had to load railway wagons at the Kyiv train station. At the end of October 1943, the camp was finally closed and the remaining prisoners were taken west.
The burning of the corpses
Since the summer of 1943, members of “Sonderkommando 1005,” led by Paul Blobel, oversaw the burning of the bodies of people murdered by the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories. After Blobel had carried out extensive experiments in the Lemberg-Janovska forced labor camp from June 1943 on how a large number of corpses could be burned, he arrived in Kyiv in August 1943 with sub-command 1005a, followed soon after by command 1005b. They initially housed 100 men, most of them Jews, and 13 Jewish women, and after two weeks a total of 300 prisoners from the Syrec’ camp in earthen huts on the site of the Babyn Yar gorge and put them in chains. The area was surrounded with privacy screens and the surrounding area was declared a restricted area that no one was allowed to approach. While the Syrec camp was guarded by members of a Ukrainian security battalion, in Babyn Yar only German SS men took on this task. Outsiders could not see what work the prisoners were doing there, but they could soon smell it. After the liberation of Kyiv in November 1943, survivors and guards of the Syrec’ camp reported that clouds of smoke rose from the gorge and the stench of burnt flesh wafted through the concentration camp and the surrounding districts.
The prisoners in Babyn Yar uncovered the bodies of the Jews who had been shot in the southeastern part of the gorge as well as those of the murdered Red Army soldiers who had been buried a little further north. As soon as around 2,000 bodies had been exhumed, the so-called “corpse burners” built a huge pyre several meters high. Railroad tracks were placed over a rectangle of tombstones from the nearby Jewish cemetery, and then the bodies and oil-soaked wood were laid in layers. However, since the bones did not burn completely, the prisoners had to grind the human remains with a special grinder and then pour them back into the pits.
On September 26, 1943, almost exactly two years after the great massacre in Babyn Yar, the prisoners built a final pyre. Since all the bodies had already been burned, they realized that now they themselves should be killed. About 30 of them fled at dawn the next day, 18 of them were able to escape thanks to thick fog, and 15 were liberated by the Red Army. Most were called up immediately, four of them were killed by the end of the war.[20]
The total number of people shot in Babyn Yar and in the anti-tank trenches of the adjacent former military area can no longer be determined due to the activities of the “Sonderkommando 1005”. While the Sk 4a an exact number of the 29th/30th. In September 1941, the perpetrators reported the number of Jews shot to Berlin, but the perpetrators did not provide any information about the number of victims for the following executions. After 1943, the Soviet “Extraordinary State Investigative Commission for the Detection of German-Fascist Crimes” spoke of 100,000 deaths. Even this number is probably significantly too high, but some studies published before and after 1991 even estimate that up to 200,000 people were murdered and buried in Babyn Yar and the surrounding area. While the numbers in Soviet investigation reports have usually been inflated for political reasons, after 1991 researchers have sometimes linked all victims of the German commandos stationed in Kyiv to Babyn Yar. Only in rare cases did the members of the Sk 4a, the Ek 5 or the KdS Kyiv bring their victims from the surrounding cities to Kyiv in order to kill them there. Rather, the murder squads shot or gassed people in the immediate vicinity of their respective places of residence. In addition, witnesses and survivors saw dozens of transports and numerous columns of victims arriving in Babyn Yar in the days before and after the weeks after the great massacre of September 1941, but from the spring of 1942 onwards the number of transports was limited to one or two per week: From February 1942 to the end of 1942, at least 350 Jews were brought into the KdS, executed and buried in Babyn Yar, and around 15 in 1943. Especially in the fall of 1943 – in the weeks before the liberation of Kyiv and when the pyres in the ravine were still there burned – the security police increasingly brought other groups of victims to Babyn Yar, but the statements of witnesses suggest that hundreds, but not thousands, of people were murdered in this final phase.
Taking into account the statements from survivors, perpetrators and witnesses recorded after the war, the documents from several trials in federal German courts as well as the documents of the German occupiers, some of which only became accessible after 1991, the following casualty balance emerges: In addition to the approximately 1,600 civilian victims of the first days of the German Occupation of Kyiv and the almost 34,000 on the 29th/30th. After the Jews shot in September 1942, up to 8,000 more Jews and a total of up to 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered and buried in Babyn Yar by the end of January 1942. In addition, by September 1943 there were around 1,000 victims from the KdS prison and at least 700 murdered prisoners from the Syrec camp, who were buried in and around Babyn Yar. Overall, the number of victims murdered and buried in Babyn Yar is probably around 65,000.
[1] On topography: Tat’jana Evstaf’eva, Vitalij Nachmanovič: Syrets, Luk’janovka i Babij Jar v pervoj polovine XX v. (do načala nemeckoj okkupacii 1941–1943 gg.). Istorija zastrojki i problemy topografii, in: Dies.: Babij Jar. Čelovek, vlast’, istorija. Documenty i materialy, Vol. 1. Kyiv 2004, pp. 66–83.
[2] On the orders after the capture of the city: Klaus Jochen Arnold: The conquest and treatment of the city of Kyiv by the Wehrmacht in September 1941. On the radicalization of the occupation policy, in: Military History Notices, 1/1999, pp. 23-63, here pp. 49–53.
[3] On these first shootings: Vitalij Nachmanovič: Rasstrely i zachoronenija v rajone Bab’ego Jara vo vremja nemeckoj okkupacii g. Kyiva 1941–1943 gg, in: Evstaf’eva, Babij Jar [fn. 1], pp. 84–163, here pp. 94–102.
[4] On the decision-making for the great massacre and the Wehrmacht’s shared responsibility: Hartmut Rüß: Who was responsible for the Babij Yar massacre? In: Military History Notices, 2/1998, pp. 483–508.
[5] Report of the 1st general staff officer of the 295th Inf. Div., signed Groscurth, from August 21, 1941, reprinted in: Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, Wolf Gruner (ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by the National Socialist Germany, Vol. 7. Munich 2011, Doc. 62 [= VEJ, 7/62], pp. 253–257.
[6] On the exact course of the massacre Nachmanovyč, Rasstrely [fn. 3], here pp. 102–116.
[7] She testified, among other things, in 1946 before the Commission for Research into the Great Patriotic War. Reprint of this protocol in: Feliks Levitas, Mark Šimanovskij (ed.): Babij Jar. Stranicy tragedii. Kyiv 1991, pp. 23–32. See also her testimony in the Callsen trial in Darmstadt, in this volume pp. 47–57.
[8] Quoted from: Adalbert Rückerl: Nazi crimes in court. Attempt to come to terms with the past. Heidelberg 1984, p. 43f.
[9] Ibid.
[10] The photos are printed and analyzed in: Dmitro Malakov: Kyiv i Babij Jar na nemeckoj fotoplenke oseni 1941 goda, in: Evstaf’eva, Babij Jar [fn. 1], pp. 164–170.
[11] Diary of Irina A. Chorošunova, entry for October 2, 1941, reprinted in: VEJ, 7/94, pp. 311–314, here p. 312.
[12] Nazis Deport 20,000 Jews to Pinsk Marshesl. New York Herald Tribune, November 20, 1941, reprinted in: VEJ, 7/119, p. 377f.
[13] Report by Olga Muchortova-Pekker from January 15, 1944, reprinted in: VEJ, 8/4, pp. 91–95.
[14] Submission by Stepan Šodnjuk to the Kyiv city administration dated November 26, 1941. Deržavnyj archiv Kyivs’koj oblasti 2356/1/64, pp. 178–181.
[15] Oleksandr Melnyk: Stalinist Justice as a Site of Memory. Anti-Jewish Violence in Kyiv’s Podil District in September 1941 through the Prism of Soviet Investigative Documents, in: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe, 2/2013, pp. 223–248.
[16] On the structure and activities of the KdS office: Alexander Prusin: A Community of Violence. The SiPo/SD and its Role in the Nazi Terror System in the Kyiv General District, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1/2007, pp. 1–30.
[17] About the murders by members of the KdS office: Judgment of the Karlsruhe Regional Court against Schumacher and others from December 13, 1963, reprinted in: Christiaan F. Rüter (ed.): Justice and Nazi Crimes. Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicides 1945-1999, Vol. 19, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande and others, Amsterdam 1978, Doc. 560, pp. 559-593.
[18] Stanislav Aristov: Next to Babi Yar. The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kyiv, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3/2015, pp. 431–459.
[19] Tat’jana Evstaf’eva: Futbol’nye matči 1942 goda komandy “Start” v okkupirovannom nemcami Kyive i sud’by ee igrokov, in: Vitalij Nachmanovyč, Anatolij Podol’s’kyj (ed.): Babyn Jar: Masove ubyvstvo i pam’jat’ pro n’oho. Materialy mižnarodnoï naukovoï conference. Kyiv 2017, pp. 32–82.
[20] One of the surviving “corpse burners” was Vladimir J. Davydov, who was questioned about the destruction of the corpses by the department head of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR in the Kyiv region on November 9, 1943, Davrenko. Reprint of the protocol in: Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, Wolf Gruner (eds.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany, edited by Bert Hoppe, Vol. 8. Munich 2016, [= VEJ, 8/275] , Doc. 275, pp. 653–659.
Translated from German by J. Gather – Original article in “Osteuropa 2021 1/2”