79 years ago, on September 29, 1941, mass executions of people began in Babi Yar, a tract of the capital. Tens of thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, Russians and representatives of other nationalities died here.
Shooting with a break for lunch
Kyiv was occupied by the Germans on September 19, 1941, and a few days later Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and "the architect of the final solution to the Jewish question" Adolf Eichmann arrived in the current capital of Ukraine. At the meeting, a decision was made to completely destroy the city's Jewish population. The punitive action was scheduled for September 29, after which the entire city was plastered with leaflets:
"All women of the city of Kyiv and the surrounding areas are ordered to gather on Monday, September 29, 1941, until 8 a.m. at Melnyka-Dokterevskaya Street (near the cemeteries). Everyone must take with them documents, money, linen... Those who do not comply with this order will be shot. Whoever occupies a Jewish dwelling and appropriates things from those dwellings will be shot."
However, the first shootings began on September 27, when 752 patients of the psychiatric hospital named after Babi Yar were killed. Ivan Pavlova, which was located in the immediate vicinity of the ravine.
And early in the morning, on October 29, unsuspecting Jews from all over Kiev went to their own execution. It is known that on September 29-30, the Nazis shot 33 Jews. The youngest victim was only 771 days old, and the oldest was 3 years old. By the second day of the executions, the bodies were stacked in seven piles. It took about 103 people to commit such a large number of murders. Perhaps some of them felt remorse and horror, but many members of the "death squad" only took breaks for lunch and dinner. After the completion of its mission, the SS high command in Kyiv arranged a noisy festive banquet.
The shootings did not stop there. Further murders of Jews took place on October 1 and 2, October 8 and October 11, 1941. The tract became a grave for tens of thousands of representatives of other nations: Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians. And also — prisoners of war. Mass executions continued until the Germans left Kyiv.
Before leaving the Ukrainian capital, the Germans tried to hide the traces of bloody criminals, decided to burn the corpses of the executed. To do this, they brought in the prisoners of the Syretskyi concentration camp, intending to then liquidate them as unwanted witnesses. True, a few people still survived, appeared as witnesses at the Nuremberg trial: that's how the world learned about the atrocities of the Nazis in Kiev.
According to various estimates, between 1941 and 1943 people were shot in Babi Yar between 70 and 000. There were 200 to 000 Jewish prisoners whose bodies the Nazis forced to burn in 1943.
The fate of the executioners
The destinies of people who in one way or another were involved in the executions in Babi Yar turned out to be completely different. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who, according to eyewitnesses, gave a direct order to exterminate the Jews of Kiev, tried to escape after the capitulation of Germany, but was caught. Before the interrogation, he chewed the cyanide capsule in his mouth.
The main ideologist of the "final solution to the Jewish question", Adolf Eichmann, managed to escape to Argentina, but in May 1960, agents of the Israeli intelligence "Mossad" kidnapped Eichmann and took him to Israel, where he was executed according to a court sentence.
The first executions were carried out by Sonderkommando "4 A" under the command of SS Standardenführer Paul Blobel, and the leader of the mass executions was Major General Kurt Eberhard. Eberghard escaped a just punishment and died in 1947 in Stuttgart. The general commissar of Kyiv, Helmut Kvitsrau, who survived until 1999, also escaped from her. But Blobel was executed by court order in 1948. Otto Rasch, head of the security police and SD, also involved in the shootings, died in prison in 1948.
