Holocaust of Bullets : Babi Yar

An order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian:  "Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death." From the cemetery, the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine only two miles from the center of the city. A truck driver at the scene described what he saw:

"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 another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly … I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked…. Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him."  Jewish Virtual Library

Aftermath of the Babi-Yar massacre.  At least 34,000 Jews died here in late September 1941.

In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a non-aggression pact. Each prepared to divide to themselves as spoils of war, territories in eastern Europe. Russia carved up Poland and already dominated Ukraine as its own territory. And then, the pact that was meant to last a decade ended with Soviet Russia finding itself invaded by German forces in 1941. Code-named Operation Barbarossa, Soviet forces were taken completely off guard. A rapid German advance across a wide front encircled Kyiv, trapping four Soviet armies, killing or capturing over 600,000 Soviet soldiers.

German forces were followed by Einsatzgruppen into Kyiv, home to roughly 150,000 pre-war Polish Jews. Prior to the Nazi advance many Jews fled. There were mostly women, children the elderly and the infirm who remained in Kyiv. Heinrich Himmler had formed the Einsatzgruppen as specialized units tasked to eradicate tens of thousands of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters in Poland. Once in Kyiv they launched a bloody slaughter, diligent in prosecuting the task for which they were trained.

Over a two-day period setting out on September 29, 1941, Kyiv's Jews were ordered to present themselves to be ushered to a ravine located just north of the city. There, their valuables were taken, they were stripped bare, and shot to death. According to files by SS units, 33,771 Jews were stripped of their lives. SS units continued to kill tens of thousands more people at Babi Yar; Jews, Roma, Communist Party officials and Soviet prisoners. 

A view of a symbolic synagogue, in the form of a collapsible wooden structure, commemorating the victims of Babyn Yar (Babiy Yar), one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, during the opening ceremony, in Kyiv, Ukraine May 14, 2021. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

This event, and others like them, both large and small, taking place in villages and towns throughout Europe, eradicated the nuisance presence of Jews, a high priority for Nazi Germany, accompanying the prosecution of a world-wide war. As an initial stage to a more ambitious project, to exterminate the entirety of European Jewry, the engineers of genocidal slaughter found the means being used much, much too slow. They were concerned as well over the impact of German soldiers' trauma in taking part of these atrocities.

And so they devised newer methods of disposing far more efficiently of Jews. Operating across Eastern Europe from Poland to Azerbaijan the Einsatzgruppen shot and buried, mostly dead, some still living people numbering over two million. Jews were assured as they were lured to slaughter points, that they would be deported to Palestine at a time when Palestinians referred to Jews living in traditional Judaean heritage geography. An inheritance from the time millennia earlier when the Roman Empire ruled the Middle East.

Because it was seen as far too inefficient to merely shoot Jews, Henrich Himmler had the Einsatzgruppen test gas units mounted on trucks where victims were murdered with deadly carbon monoxide. That too was simply not as efficient as the zealous genocidaires demanded. By November of 1941, two months following the Babi Yar slaughter, an industrialized extermination camp -- Belzec -- began construction. It would be the first killing centre devoted to the mass murder of Jews.

"In the months following the massacre, German authorities stationed at Kiev killed thousands more Jews at Babi Yar, as well as non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies), Communist officials, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet civilians. It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar."

"The Soviet army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943. In January 1946, proceedings in Kiev tried 15 members of the German police for the crimes at Babi Yar, with actress Dina Pronicheva, one of 29 survivors of the September massacre, testifying before the Soviet court."

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum