hideous Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine 1941

Layer after layer of dead bodies filled

the Babi Yar Ravine, 1941

With Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Germany’s attack on the Sov­iet Union, the mobile killing units of the Einsatz­gruppen op­erated ov­er Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Einsatzgruppen di­visions, all und­er Hey­drich's general command, operated behind the advanc­ing German troops, eliminating political criminals, Russian gov­ernment officials, Roma and Jews by mass shooting.

In Sept 1941, the Germans captured Kiev in Nazi-occupied Ukraine where special SS squads prep­ared to carry out Adolf Hitler’s ex­termination ord­ers. With­in a week, buildings occupied by the German military were blown up by the Russians and in retaliation, the Germans moved to kill all Kiev Jews. An order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian: Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday 29th Sept you are to appear by 7 AM with your possessions, mon­ey, documents, valuables and warm clot­h­­ing, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.

On 29th Sept 1941 the Jews were marched in small groups from the cemet­ery to Babi Yar Ravine, 4ks from central Kiev. Historian Abram Sachar described the horror: The Jews of the ghetto were brought to the ravine where men, women and children were system­at­ic­ally machine-gunned in a 2-day orgy of exec­ution. The Jews in their thous­ands, with whatever pathetic bel­ong­ings they could carry, were herded into barbed-wire areas at the top of the ravine, guard­ed by Ukrainian col­laborators. There they were strip­ped of their clothes and beaten, then led in irregular squads down the side of the ravine. They were forced to lie on the ground, face down and were machine-gunned in a steady volley.

The bodies were covered with layers of earth and the next groups were ordered to lie over them, to be similarly dispatched. To carry out the murders in the space of two days could not assure that all the victims had died. Hence there were a few who survived and, badly wound­ed, craw­­led from under the corpses and sought a hiding place at night.

Over the following months, Babi Yar remained in use as an execution site for gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war. Russian accounts after the war speak of 100,000 dead but the exact figure may be unknowable.

In Aug 1943, as the German armies ret­reat­ed from the USSR, the Nazis had to hide evidence of the mass­acres. Paul Blobel, Commander of Sond­er­­ok­mmando whose troops had sl­aughtered Kiev’s Jews, returned to Babi Yar; for a mon­th his men, and inmates taken from a con­cent­ration camp, dug up the bodies. They used bull­dozers to reopen the mounds and mass­ive bone-crushing mach­inery, then piled the bodies on wooden logs, doused with gas and ignited them in large pyres. When they finished, the con­cen­t­ration camp labourers were killed except for 25 who esc­ap­ed. In any case, eyewitnesses had already confirmed Babi Yar’s atrocities.

Despite efforts to suppress the massacre, the general Russian public learned of the murders post-war, through newspapers and official rep­orts. In 1947, Ehrenburg’s novel The Storm described the mass kil­l­ing drama­tically. Preparations were made for a mem­orial monument at Babi Yar, designed by architect AV Vlasov.

Babi Yar Symbolic Synagogue
opened up

Memorial menorah

But then a decision was made to eliminate ALL references to Babi Yar, removing it from Jewish consciousness. Even after Stal­in’s 1953 death, Babi Yar seemed lost to history. Only in 1959 did no­velist Viktor Nekrasov write of a mem­or­ial at Babi Yar in Literat­ur­naya Gaz­eta. Plus the poem Babi Yar written by Yev­geni Yevtush­enko, published in a journal in Sept 1961. With its open attack upon anti-Semitism, the poet exerted a profound imp­act on Russians.

The poet was publicly denounced by Premier Khrushchev in Pra­v­da in Mar 1963 where “specific” Jewish martyrdom was con­demn­ed. But Babi Yar again surfaced in 1966 in a novel written by Anatoly Kuznetsov. That year the Ukrainian Archit­ects Club in Kiev exhibited 200+ pro­jects and c30 large-scale plans for a mem­orial, al­though the inscript­ions in the proposed plans didn't ment­ioned Jewish martyrdom. Only later did the new Ukrainian government acknow­ledge the specif­ic Jewish nature of the site.

For many years, this site has had no proper memorial… until the 2000s when plans were under­way to create a Jewish Comm­unity Centre and mem­orial on the site. So the first st­ructure had to be a place for quiet introsp­ect­ion, to help visitors re­late to unth­in­k­­able mass-murder. The Babi Yar Symbolic Synagogue had to have succ­es­s­ful cultural emblems to remember the German Einsatz­gruppen and their Ukrainian collaborators.

When closed, the synagogue was a flat structure. Designed by German ar­chitect Manuel Herz, this 11m-tall pop up structure opened from a frame to become a 3-dimensional synagogue. When opened, see the read­ing platform, benches and balcony made from old Uk­rainian oak wood, referencing the old Ukrainian wooden syn­ag­ogues. The ceiling had sym­bols copying the star con­s­t­ellation over Kiev in Sept 1941.

The synagogue was important be­c­ause the last generation of wit­nesses was disappearing; future ge­n­erations wouldn't have the chance to hear about 1941-3. Kiev Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich and 9 other rab­bis led the ceremony.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attending a ceremony 

at the monument to Jewish victims of Nazi massacres 

As well as the religious-spiritual cen­tre, a range of build­ings was planned for Babi Yar’s me­morial complex:

1. museum to com­m­em­orate the Holo­caust of Ukrainian and Eastern Euro­p­ean Jewry tog­et­h­er;
2. structure depicting the names of victims;
3. educational and scientific research cen­tre;
4. multimedia cent­re;
5. children’s learning and recreational space; and
6. conference centre.