Babi Yar Massacre (1941): The Mass Murder of Kyiv's Jews

The Babi Yar massacre was the mass shooting of 33,771 Jews at a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on 29 and 30 September 1941, ten days after German forces captured the city. Carried out by SS and police units with the help of the German army and local auxiliaries, it was one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) has since become the best-known symbol of the “Holocaust by bullets” in the occupied Soviet Union.

Background: war and occupation in Ukraine

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. Behind the advancing armies came the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units of the SS and Security Police. Their orders were to murder Communist officials and “undesirable elements”, and in practice they quickly moved to killing entire Jewish communities, including women and children.

Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, fell on 19 September 1941 after the huge encirclement battle described in Battle of Kiev (1941). Before the war the city had a Jewish population of more than 200,000, but many had been evacuated or had fled east, and many men were serving in the Red Army. Those who remained were mostly elderly people, women and children.

On 24 September a series of explosions shook the city centre around the main street, Khreshchatyk. The blasts had been prepared by the Soviet NKVD before its retreat, using remote-controlled mines. Fires burned for days and killed German soldiers and civilians alike. The German authorities blamed the Jews and used the explosions as a pretext for a mass killing they had probably already intended.

The order to assemble

On 26 September German leaders in Kyiv agreed to murder the city’s remaining Jews. Those involved included Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader for southern Russia; Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C; and Paul Blobel, commander of its Sonderkommando 4a. The military governor of the city and the local army command took part in the planning.

Around 2,000 notices were printed and posted in Russian, Ukrainian and German. They ordered all Jews of Kyiv and its surroundings to report by 8 a.m. on Monday 29 September at a street corner near the Jewish and Orthodox cemeteries. They were to bring documents, money, valuables and warm clothing. Anyone who disobeyed, and any non-Jew who sheltered Jews, was threatened with death.

Many people believed they were going to be deported. The assembly point was close to the railway freight station, which made a resettlement story seem plausible. Some families arrived early to secure a place on a train.

What happened on 29–30 September

The crowds were led out of the city towards the ravine at Babi Yar. As they approached, they passed through a cordon of German soldiers and police and Ukrainian auxiliaries. There they were forced to hand over their belongings and undress, often under blows.

Small groups were then driven to the edge of the ravine and shot with machine guns and pistols. Victims were made to lie on top of those already killed before being shot in turn. The killings continued throughout the day and the next. Afterwards the walls of the ravine were partly blasted to cover the bodies.

In its Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101, dated 2 October 1941, the Einsatzgruppe recorded that Sonderkommando 4a, with two units of Police Regiment South, had executed 33,771 Jews in Kyiv on 29 and 30 September. This figure, written by the perpetrators themselves, is the one most historians accept for the two-day massacre.

Key people

• Paul Blobel – commander of Sonderkommando 4a, which carried out the shootings. He later directed the destruction of the evidence. He was sentenced to death in the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg and hanged in 1951.
• Otto Rasch – commander of Einsatzgruppe C. He was indicted at Nuremberg but his case was dropped because of ill health, and he died in 1948.
• Friedrich Jeckeln – Higher SS and Police Leader who helped plan the operation. He was tried by a Soviet court and hanged in Riga in 1946.
• Dina Pronicheva – a Jewish actress from Kyiv who survived by falling into the ravine before the shots hit her and pretending to be dead. Her testimony at the Kyiv war crimes trial of 1946 became a key account of the massacre.

A killing site until 1943

Babi Yar did not stop being used after September 1941. Over the next two years German forces shot tens of thousands more people there. The victims included Jews found in hiding, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, patients of a Kyiv psychiatric hospital, and people suspected of resistance.

Members of the Ukrainian nationalist movement who fell out with the Germans were also killed there, among them the poet Olena Teliha in February 1942. A concentration camp, Syrets, was set up nearby. Estimates of the total number of people killed at Babi Yar during the occupation usually range from about 70,000 to 100,000, and some estimates are higher.

Destroying the evidence

As the Red Army advanced in 1943, the SS tried to erase traces of its crimes across the occupied East in an operation known as Aktion 1005. Blobel was put in charge. In August and September 1943 prisoners from the Syrets camp were forced to dig up the bodies at Babi Yar and burn them on huge pyres of wood and rails.

On 29 September 1943, two years to the day after the massacre began, the prisoners realised they were about to be killed and attempted a breakout. Most were shot, but a small number, usually given as around 15, escaped and later testified. Soviet forces recaptured Kyiv on 6 November 1943.

Consequences and memory

After the war the Soviet authorities described the victims of Babi Yar as “peaceful Soviet citizens” and avoided naming the Jews as the main target. In the 1950s parts of the ravine were filled with waste from nearby brickworks. In March 1961 a dam holding back this liquid waste collapsed and a mudslide engulfed the Kurenivka district; the official death toll was 145, but later estimates are considerably higher.

In 1961 the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem “Babi Yar”, which protested at the absence of any memorial and at antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Dmitri Shostakovich set it to music in his Symphony No. 13 (1962). Anatoly Kuznetsov, who grew up near the ravine, published a documentary novel, Babi Yar, in censored form in 1966 and in full after he left the USSR.

A Soviet monument was finally unveiled in 1976, still without mention of the Jewish victims. After Ukrainian independence a bronze Menorah memorial was dedicated in 1991, on the 50th anniversary. Several other memorials now stand on the site, including ones for Roma and for children, and a Holocaust memorial centre has been developed there since 2016.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1941, 22 June: Germany invades the Soviet Union.
• 1941, 19 September: German troops enter Kyiv.
• 1941, 24 September: Soviet mines explode in central Kyiv, starting large fires.
• 1941, 26 September: German leaders decide to murder Kyiv’s Jews; notices are printed.
• 1941, 29–30 September: 33,771 Jews are shot at the Babi Yar ravine.
• 1943, August–September: Prisoners are forced to exhume and burn the bodies.
• 1943, 29 September: Prisoners attempt a breakout; a few escape.
• 1943, 6 November: Soviet forces recapture Kyiv.
• 1991, October: The Menorah memorial is dedicated on the 50th anniversary.

Why it matters

Babi Yar showed how quickly the Nazi campaign against the Jews became outright genocide once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, months before the death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau began mass gassing. It also illustrates how memory itself can be contested: for decades the identity of the victims was blurred. Today the ravine is a place of remembrance for all who were murdered there.