Babi Yar

This article is about a ravine in Kiev and the mass murders took place there during World War II. For the book by Anatoly Kuznetsov, see Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. For the symphony based on Yevtushenko's poem, see Symphony No. 13 (Shostakovich). For the Babi Yar Memorial Park in Denver, Colorado, USA, see #Other memorials.
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Babi Yar (Ukrainian: Бабин яр, Babyn yar; Russian: Бабий яр, Babiy yar) is a ravine in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It is located at the juncture of today's Kurenivka, Lukianivka and Syrets raions, between Frunze, Melnykov and Olena Teliha streets and St. Cyril's Monastery.

In the course of two days, September 29-30, 1941, a special team of German SS troops supported by other German units, local collaborators and Ukrainian police murdered 33,771 Jewish civilians after taking them to the ravine.[1][2] The Babi Yar massacre is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust".[3]

In the months that followed, thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians, of whom a significant number were Jews, were murdered by the Nazis there during World War II.[1][4]

Contents

Historical background

The Babi Yar ravine was first mentioned in historical accounts in 1401, in connection with its sale by "baba" (an old woman), the cantiniere, to the Dominican Monastery.[5] In the course of several centuries the site had been used for various purposes including military camps and at least two cemeteries, among them an Orthodox Christian cemetery and a Jewish Cemetery. The latter was officially closed in 1937.

Nazi occupation

Main articles: History of Kiev#World War II, Battle of Kiev (1941), and Battle of Kiev (1943)

After the 45-day battle for the city of Kiev, Nazi forces entered the city on September 19, 1941. The occupation of Kiev lasted until November 6, 1943.

The massacres of September 29-30, 1941

Public announcement of September 28, 1941 in Russian, Ukrainian and German.
Paul Blobel. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, March, 1948.

The decision to kill all the Jews of Kiev was made on September 26, as retaliation for the attacks against Germans, by the military governor, Maj. Gen. Friedrich Georg Eberhardt and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader at Rear Headquarters Army Group South. Einsatzgruppe C carried out the Babi Yar massacre and a number of other mass atrocities in Ukraine during the summer and fall of 1941, and its commander SS-Brigadefuhrer Dr. Otto Rasch and the officer commanding Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Standartenfuhrer Paul Blobel were at the meeting as well.

The implementation of the decision was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by Blobel, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln.[6] This unit consisted of SD and Sipo, the third company of the Special Duties Waffen-SS battalion, and a platoon of the 9th police battalion. The unit was reinforced by police battalions 45 and 305 and by units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Police Battalion 45, commanded by Major Besser, carried out the massacre, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion. Units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, were used to round up and direct the Jews to the location.[4]

On September 28, leaflets in Russian, Ukrainian and German languages were posted in Kiev. The Russian announcement read:

All Jews of the city of Kiev and its environs must appear on Monday, September 29, 1941, by 8:00 AM on the corner of Melnіkov and Dokterivsky streets (near the cemetery). You are to take your documents, money, valuables, warm clothes, linen etc. Whoever of the Jews does not fulfill this order and is found in another place, shall be shot. Any citizen who enters the apartments that have been left and takes ownership of items will be shot

– translated from the Russian version[7]

More than thirty thousand Kievan Jews gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains for deportation. The commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later:

Because of 'our special talent of organisation', the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being murdered that indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled.

– Einsatzgruppe's Report[8]

Victims were then ordered to undress, beaten if they resisted. According to the testimony of truck driver Hofer:

I watched what happened when the Jews - men, women, and children - arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians to keep them moving.

– Statement of Truck-Driver Hofer describing the murder of Jews at Babi Yar[9]

All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot at the edge of the Babi Yar gorge. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the gunfire, there was no chance to escape. In the evening, the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the people under the thick layers of earth.[8]

According to the Einsatzgruppe's Operational Situation Report, 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire at Babi Yar on September 29 and September 30, 1941.[10]

Survivors

One of the most often-cited parts of Kuznetsov's documentary novel is the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of Kiev Puppet Theater. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine, forced to undress, and then shot. Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies, she played dead in a pile of corpses. She held perfectly still while the Nazis continued to shoot the wounded or gasping victims. Although the SS had covered the mass grave with earth, she eventually managed to climb through the soil and escape. Since it was dark, she avoided the flashlights of the Nazis finishing off the remaining people alive, wounded, gasping, in the grave. She was one of the very few survivors of the massacre; she later related her horrifying story to Kuznetsov.[11]

Further executions

See also: List of victims of the Babi Yar massacre

Mass executions in the ravine continued. Roma people were also rounded up and murdered at Babi Yar. Patients of the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were gassed and then dumped into the ravine. Thousands of other civilians were killed at Babi Yar.[12]

Among those murdered were 621 members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha and her husband, renowned bandurist Mykhailo Teliha, were murdered there on February 21 1942.[13]

Syrets concentration camp

In the course of the occupation, the Syrets concentration camp was set up in Babi Yar. There, interned communists, Soviet POWs, and captured Soviet Partisans were murdered. On February 18 1943 three Dynamo Kyiv football players who took part in the Match of Death with the German Luftwaffe team were also murdered in the camp. It is estimated that 25,000 people died in the camp.

Cover-up attempts and inmate revolt

Before the Nazis retreated from Kiev, they attempted to cover up their atrocities. Paul Blobel, who was in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 eliminating its traces.

For six weeks from August to September 1943, more than 300 chained prisoners were forced to exhume and burn the corpses (using headstones put up by locals as bricks with which to build ovens) and scatter the ashes on farmland in the vicinity (to this day many Ukranians will not eat cabbage grown on those local farms.). During the exhumations, a group of prisoners secretly armed themselves with tools and scraps of metal they managed to find and conceal. They picked the locks with keys they found on victims' bodies. Martin Gilbert quotes historian Reuben Ainsztein:

... in those half-naked men who reeked of putrefying flesh, whose bodies were eaten by scabies and covered with a layer of mud and soot, and of whose physical strength so little remained, there survived a spirit that defied everything that the Nazis' New Order had done or could do to them. In the men whom the SS men saw only as walking corpses, there matured a determination that at least one of them must survive to tell the world about what happened in Babi Yar.[14]

On the night of September 29, 1943, as the camp was being dismantled, an inmate revolt broke out. The prisoners overpowered the guards using their bare hands, hammers and screw drivers. Fifteen people managed to escape. Among them was Vladimir Davіdov, who later served as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials.[15] Among other escapees were Fyodor Zavertanny, Jacob Kaper, Filip Vilkis, Leonid Kharash, I. Brodskiy, Leonid Kadomskiy, David Budnik, Fyodor Yershov, Jakov Steiuk, Semyon Berland, Vladimir Kotlyar.[4] Once Nazi control was re-established in the camp, the remaining 311 inmates were murdered.

Number of people murdered

Estimates of the total number of dead at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation vary. In 1946, the Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov at the Nuremberg Trials claimed that there were approximately 100,000 corpses lying in Babi Yar, using materials of the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия) set out by the Soviets to investigate Nazi crimes after the liberation of Kiev in 1943.[4][16]

According to testimonies of workers forced to burn the bodies, the numbers range from 70,000 to 120,000.

In a recently published letter to the Israeli journalist, writer, and translator Shlomo Even-Shoshan dated May 17, 1965, Anatoli Kuznetsov commented on the Babi Yar tragedy:

In the two years that followed, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and people of all nationalities were murdered in Babyn Yar. The belief that Babyn Yar is an exclusively Jewish grave is wrong. [...] It is an international grave. Nobody will ever determine how many and what nationalities are buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, their ashes scattered in ravines and fields.[17]

For his war crimes Paul Blobel was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial and was hanged in June 1951.

After liberation

Babi Yar, 1944. Soviet investigators (at left) inspect an opened grave

When the Red Army took control of the city on November 6, 1943, the Syrets Concentration Camp was converted into a Soviet internment camp for German POWs and operated until 1946. The camp was subsequently demolished and in the 1950s and 1960s urban development began in the area, which included an apartment complex and a park. The construction of a dam nearby also saw the ravine filled with industrial pulp. The dam collapsed in 1961, leading to the mudslide with numerous fatalities.

Remembrance

Soviet leadership discouraged placing any emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the Babi Yar tragedy; instead, presenting these events as crimes committed against the Soviet people in general and the inhabitants of Kiev. The first draft report of the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия), dated December 25 1943 was officially censored in February 1944 as follows:[18]

Draft version Published version
"The Hitlerist bandits committed mass murder of the Jewish population. They announced that on September 29 1941, all the Jews were required to arrive to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets and bring their documents, money and valuables. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them."

"The Hitlerist bandits brought thousands of civilians to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them."

In his 1961 book Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited, Joseph Schechtman provided an account of the Babi Yar tragedy. In 1966, Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was published in censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost. Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents and eyewitnesses testimonies. He managed to smuggle 35 mm photographic film containing the uncensored manuscript when he defected and the book was published in the West in 1970.

In 1985, a documentary film Babiy Yar: Lessons of History by Vitaly Korotich was made to mark the tragedy.

The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar has inspired a number of creative ventures. A poem was written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; this in turn was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13. An oratorio was composed by the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych to the text of Dmytro Pavlychko (2006). A number of films and television productions have also marked the tragic events at Babi Yar, and D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel uses the massacre's anonymity and violence as a counterpoint to the intimate and complex nature of the human psyche.

Monuments Built Near Babi Yar

Monument to Soviet citizens and POW's shot at Babi Yar (1976)

Several attempts were made to erect a memorial at Babi Yar to commemorate the fate of the Jewish victims. All attempts were overruled. An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976. This remembrance is still complicated in the great numbers and many sorts of persons murdered there. [19]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Ukrainian government allowed a separate memorial specifically identifying the Jewish victims.

The monuments to commemorate the numerous events associated with Babi Yar tragedy includes:

(This list is not comprehensive).

Also, there was a proposal to mark the thousands of Roma (Gypsies) killed at Babi Yar by building a monument designed as a Gypsy wagon. However, this plan has not yet gathered a sufficient financial and administrative support.[20]

Desecration of the memorial complex (July 2006)

On the night of July 16, 2006, the memorial dedicated to the Jewish victims was vandalized. Several gravestones, the foundation of the commemorative sledge-stone, and several steps leading to the Menorah memorial were damaged.[21] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine issued a statement condemning the act of vandalism.[22]

Other memorials

United States

The President of the Babi Yar Park Foundation Alan G. Gass stated:

We built a memorial park to the Babi Yar massacre in Denver, Colorado. It was dedicated in 1982, with an inscribed black granite entrance gateway, a "People Place" amphi-theatre, a "Forest that Remembers" with a spring flowing all year in the middle, and a high-walled, narrow black bridge over a ravine, all at three points of a Magen David carved out of the native prairie grasses. It is owned and maintained by the City & County of Denver. The park is used by the recently arrived immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union as a place of remembrance during the year and with a special ceremony on 29 September each year.[4]

Israel

Main article: Yad Vashem

There is a memorial to the victims of Babi Yar at the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery in Givatayim. There is annual ceremony on Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day.[4]

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Kiev and Babi Yar," Holocaust Encyclopedia.
  2. ↑ A Community of Violence: The SiPo/SD and Its Role in the Nazi Terror System in Generalbezirk Kiew by Alexander V. Prusin. Holocaust Genocide Studies, Spring 2007; 21: 1 - 30.
  3. ↑ From Berlin to Babi Yar. The Nazi War Against the Jews, 1941-1944 by Wendy Morgan Lower, Towson University. Journal of Religion & Society, Volume 9 (2007). The Kripke Center IS.S.N 1522-5658
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Shmuel Spector, "Babi Yar," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, editor in chief, Yad Vashem, Sifriat Hapoalim, New York: Macmillan, 1990. 4 volumes. ISBN 0-02-896090-4. An excerpt of the article is available at Ada Holtzman, "Babi Yar: Killing Ravine of Kiev Jewry – WWII", We Remember! Shalom!.
  5. ↑ Anatoliy Kudrytsky, editor-in-chiev, "Vulytsi Kyeva" (The Streets of Kiev), Ukrainska Entsyklopediya (1995), ISBN 5885000700
  6. ↑ 1941: Mass Murder The Holocaust Chronicle. p. 270
  7. ↑ Тhe Russian version uses an ethnic slur for "Jews".The text is available at "Обращение германского командования к жителям Киева., Проект Холокост. The Ukrainian version of this document is somewhat different from the Russian one:

    It is ordered that all Jews living in the city of Kiev and its environs are to report on Monday, September 29, 1941, by 8:00 AM to the corner of Melnyk (sic) and Dokterivsky Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, underwear, etc. All who do not heed these instruction will be shot. Anyone entering apartments evacuated by Jews and stealing property from those apartments will be shot.

  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Martin Gilbert (1985): The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 0030624169: 202.
  9. ↑ Statement of Truck-Driver Hofer describing the murder of Jews at Babi Yar cited in Berenbaum, Michael: Witness to the Holocaust. New York: Harper-Collins. 1997. pp. 138-139
  10. ↑ Operational Situation Report No. 101 (einsatzgruppenarchives.com)
  11. ↑ "A Survivor of the Babi Yar Massacre," Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (PBS). Gilbert (1985): 204-205.
  12. ↑ Babi Yar (Page 2) by Jennifer Rosenberg (about.com)
  13. ↑ Ludmyla Yurchenko, "Life is not to be sold for a few pieces of silver: The life of Olena Teliha", Ukrainian Youth Association.
  14. ↑ Gilbert (1985): pp. Also quoted online in The Berdichev Revival.
  15. ↑ Gilbert (1985): 613. 1943 September 30, Sonderkommando Babi Yar Revolt
  16. ↑ Materials of the Nuremberg Trial in Russian: Нюрнбергский процесс, т. III. M., 1958. с. 220-221. Бабий Яр - сентябрь 1941 Иосиф Кременецкий. Из Сообщения Чрезвычайной Государственной (Babi Yar - September 1941 by Iosif Kremenetsky. (shoa.com.ua) Комиссии о Разрушениях и зверствах, Совершенных Немецко - Фашистскими Захватчиками в Городе Киеве. Нюрнбергский Процесс. Документ СССР-9.
  17. ↑ Yury Shapoval, "The Defection of Anatoly Kuznetsov", День, January 18, 2005.
  18. ↑ "Page 14 of a draft report by the Commission for Crimes Committed by the Nazis in Kiev from February 1944", Beyond the Pale: The Hisotry of Jews in Russia. It shows changes made by G. F. Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
  19. ↑ Jean-Marie Chauvier, "Ukraine’s past horrors: Babi Yar," Le Monde Diplomatic, August 11, 2007.
  20. ↑ Vladimir Platonov, "Babi Yar: A tragedy about the tragedy, Zerkalo Nedeli No. 39 (156), 1997 (in Russian).
  21. ↑ "Babiy Yar Profaned by Vandals," MIGnews.com.ua., July 17, 2006. "Unknown Persons Defiled Menorah in Babiy Yar," Interfax, July 19, 2006.
  22. ↑ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, "Answer of the Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine to the question of journalists relating to the incident in Babyn Yar," July 21, 2006

References

See also

External links

Resources

Documents and testimonials

Literary works

Monuments, directions and commemorations