Babi Yar
-Jason
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Babi Yar, a ravine located near Kiev, has once again has been called the attention of the world due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Babi Yar is a combination of Russian and Turkish words roughly translated the “old woman’s ravine, old woman’s gully.” This rather innocent sounding natural feature is the mass grave of an estimated 150,000 people murdered during World War II.
Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union beginning on 22 June 1941, in one of the largest military operations in history, it was codenamed Operation Barbarossa. The goal of the conflict was the destruction of the Soviet government and people as well as the annexation of territory into the German Reich. Ukraine was a vital part of planned annexation as its rich soil and abundant mineral wealth would be used to support Hitler’s 1000-Year Reich.
While the land and natural resources were valued, the people living in Ukraine were not necessary for the German annexation. The racist ideologies of the Nazi Party maintained that Slavs, Jews, and other groups deemed undesirable were subhuman and must be exterminated if the Germans were to thrive. The thousands of Russian Jews in Kiev and the Ukrainian hinterland were marked for destruction. Once the war and subsequent mass murder were over, German settlers would leave Western Europe and settle in the newly conquered East.
Before the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, plans were created between the German military, the SS (Protection Squad) and Waffen SS (the Fighting Protection Squad), the SD (the SS Security Service, responsible for intelligence), and the SiPo (Security Police) regarding the decapitation of the resistance and extermination of ethnic enemies. The German army would help by providing security and transporting those to be murdered and the SS and Reserve Police Battalions would conduct the executions.
Four mobile special units, called Eisatzgruppen, were organized to conduct the arrests and murders. The Einsatzgruppen followed behind the main armies as they advanced into Soviet territory and entered newly conquered villages and towns. They had lists of teachers, politicians, priests, and rabbis, as well as other members of the intelligentsia, to be rounded up. The victims were placed in temporary confinement and then taken into forests and executed by gunshots. Each area the Einsatgruppen entered was scrupulously searched until the area was declared “cleared.”
The first months of the Operation Barbarossa contained stunning victories for the Germans; vast tracts of the western Soviet Union were captured by the Germans and their allies. The Einsatzgruppen mercilessly hunted down, arrested, and murdered tens of thousands of Jewish victims by the end of 1941. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had most of their Jewish populations destroyed in these opening months. As German forces penetrated deeper into the Soviet Union, their potential victims fled before them.
German forces pushed deep into Ukraine and between 27 and 28 August and conducted one of the first major massacres of Jews in the region. Hungary had allied itself with Germany before Operation Barbarossa was launched. Its government had expelled thousands of Polish and Russian Jews who had sought refuge with them. These refugees fled into the Soviet Union before the invasion commenced and were now caught with nowhere else to flee. German Army Group South and the attached Einsatzgruppe C pushed their victims to the city of Kamenets-Podolsk. Once there, SS General Friedrich Jeckeln and Einsatzgruppe C conducted the massacre of 23,600 people, from both foreign and local Jewish populations, between 27 and 28 August.
By mid-September 1941, the German Army Group South had conquered most of western and central Ukraine and was settling in to occupy Kiev. Soviet saboteurs denotated a series of explosions throughout the city between 20 and 28 September. These acts of sabotage were seen by the German commanders as the perfect excuse to conduct the massacre of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews in Kiev.
On 26 September, Major General Kurt Eberhard, the German military governor, and SS General Freidrich Jeckeln met at Army Group South’s headquarters to discuss the operation. Also present at the meeting were SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, commander of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, and his superior, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C. The German army would provide a security screen around the site of the executions to ensure no unauthorized people got in, and no prisoners escaped. Einsatzgruppe C would provide the shooters who would murder 33,771 victims.
After the meeting was concluded, an order was posted throughout Kiev demanding that the Jewish population to collect their documents, belongings, clothes, and supplies, and to gather at designated area. The time to assemble was 8 am on Monday, 28 September and the location was near a cemetery. Any Jews who refused to obey the order were to be shot. Between 29 and 30 September, the Germans murdered 33,771 Jews by taking them to the Babi Yar Ravine. The victims were summoned to the site, forced to undress, and then compelled to enter the ravine before being shot by machine guns. The massacre at Babi Yar was one of the largest mass shootings in World War II.
Despite the brutality of the executioners, not every victim attacked perished in the ravine. Some were wounded by the bullets and pretended to be dead as more and more people were brought in and shot. Others pretended to be hit by bullets and fell into the growing pile of bodies. These survivors waited until nightfall to pull themselves from the mounds of the dead and the dying and sought refuge in the forests. By the evening of the second night, the Germans began undermining one of the ravine’s walls to bury the bodies of their victims.
The horror of Babi Yar did not end with the massacre conducted in September of 1941; rather, the ravine served the Germans as a convenient place for more killings. The Germans executed 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war during their occupation of city. As Soviet forces counterattacked and pushed the Germans back during 1943 and 1944, the Nazis were desperate to hide the scale of their murders. Slave laborers, guarded by Germans, dug up as many of the bodies as possible and then burned them to attempt to hide the evidence. The slave laborers were then themselves murdered. The operation lasted forty days but could not destroy everything the Germans wanted gone. The survivors of the German occupation easily pointed out the sites of mass graves of their friends and family members.
After the German surrender in May 1945, evidence and witnesses were gathered to prosecute Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity. The Nuremburg Trials took place between December 1946 and April 1949 for this purpose. Paul Blobel, the overall commander of the SS unit responsible for the massacre, was sentenced to death in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged on 7 June 1951 at Landsberg Prison. Otto Rasch was also indicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, but his case was discontinued for health reasons, and he died in prison in 1948. Friedrich Jeckeln was convicted of war crimes by a Soviet military tribunal in the Riga Trial, sentenced to death, and hanged on 3 February 1946.
Soviet leadership discouraged placing any emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the Babi Yar tragedy; instead, it presented these atrocities as crimes committed against the Soviet people in general and the inhabitants of Kiev in particular. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that memorials commemorating the massacre were erected. President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine hosted a major commemoration of the 65th anniversary in 2006 along with various dignitaries, including Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau from Tel Aviv. Rabbi Lau pointed out that if the world had reacted to the massacre of Babi Yar, perhaps the Holocaust might never have happened. Implying that this impunity emboldened Hitler, he speculated:
Maybe, say, this Babi Yar was also a test for Hitler. If on 29 September and 30 September 1941 Babi Yar may happen and the world did not react seriously, dramatically, abnormally, maybe this was a good test for him. So, a few weeks later in January 1942, near Berlin in Wannsee, a convention can be held with a decision, a final solution to the Jewish problem ... Maybe if the very action had been a serious one, a dramatic one, in September 1941 here in Ukraine, the Wannsee Conference would have come to a different end, maybe.
The tragedy of the Babi Yar Massacre has been brought to the world’s attention again in the modern world. The Russian invasion of Ukraine starting in February 2022 witnessed a Russian missile damaging the Babi Yar Memorial Complex and killing five people. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the atrocities of the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine as propaganda, and an excuse for his “de-Nazification of the Ukraine” in his current illegal invasion. Is it not strange how the memorial dedicated to the victims of Nazi aggression has been targeted and damaged by a new fascist aggressor in the twenty-first century?