| Syrets concentration camp | |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Syrez or Syrezky |
| Location | Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine (nowadays inside the city) |
| Incident type | Imprisonment without due process, starvation, forced labor |
| Perpetrators | Erich Ehrlinger, Paul Radomski, Paul Blobel, and others |
| Organizations | Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, Ukrainian Auxiliary Police |
Syrets was the name of a Nazi concentration camp that was erected in 1942 near Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, which was then a part of the Soviet Union.
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The concentration camp was established in 1942 at a location on the northern edge of the city of Kiev, only few hundred meters from Babi Yar, a ravine which had been the scene of enormous massacres in late September 1941 and later. Syrets was intended to be a subsidiary of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. About 3,000 people were imprisoned at Syrets. Paul Radomski was the camp commandant.
The camp was built in June 1942 at the suggestion of Dr. Hans Schmacher, a Nazi police official in Kiev, which he made to his superior. Erich Ehrlinger. The camp was intended to house persons perceived as opponents of the Nazis, mainly Jews.
Once a person was arrested, only skilled craftsmen would survive, to be used as forced labor. All others were shot or murdered by gas van.
The prisoners (women and men) were housed in holes dug into the earth. Most were underfed and some starved to death. Radomski ran a terror regime in the camp. For the smallest misdemeanours he invented heavy punishments and often struck the prisoners with the whip.
In the course of the occupation, the Syrets concentration camp was set up in Babi Yar. Interned communists, Soviet POWs, and captured Soviet Partisans were murdered there. 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 about 25,000 people died in the Syrets camp.
Before the Nazis retreated from Kiev, they attempted to conceal the many atrocities they had committed at Babi Yar. Paul Blobel, who was in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 in 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 local headstones as bricks to build ovens) and scattered the ashes on farmland in the vicinity (to this day many Ukrainians will not eat cabbage grown on those farms).
During the Sonderkommando 1005 exhumations, a group of prisoners secretly armed themselves with tools and scraps of metal they managed to find and conceal. They picked 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.[1]
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.[2] 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.[3] Once Nazi control was re-established in the camp, the remaining 311 inmates were executed.
When the Red Army took control of the city of Kiev on November 6, 1943, the Syrets Concentration Camp was converted into a Soviet 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.
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