What was the Babi Yar massacre?
O Babi Yar Massacre it was a large mass shooting, conducted by the Nazi Germans, during the occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. This episode took place between September 29 and 30, 1941, and statistics show a result of 33,761|1| or 33,771|2| people killed in a short period of 36 hours.
What was the context of the Babi Yar massacre?
The massacre of Kiev's Jews took place during the Nazi occupation of this region, carried out with the Operation Barbarossa. This operation was responsible for organizing the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German armies on June 22, 1941. A total of 3.6 million German soldiers crossed the border with the aim of conquering Soviet territory.
The conquest of the Soviet Union had been planned by adolf hitler, which aimed at the following objectives:
- Ensure the destruction of Soviet Bolshevism, an ideology opposed to and opposed to the Nazi ideology;
- Ensure the expansion of the German Empire and form the “living space”, through the occupation of lands that would be colonized by the Aryans at the expense of enslaving the Slavs;
- Ensure control over important resources that the Soviet Union had in abundance: minerals, oil and food.
With these goals in mind, the German army was organized into three large groups, each with a different target. Hitler had been instructed by his generals to concentrate German forces against just one target, but the Nazi leader chose to split them up and send them to the following regions:
- Northern Army Group: sent to Leningrad;
- Army Group Center: sent to the Moscow region;
- Army Group of the South: sent to the direction of Kiev and then Stalingrad.
The city of Kiev, where the massacre took place, was conquered by the Germans in late September 1941 by Army Group South with the assistance of Army Group Center.
Performance of extermination groups
The massacre of the Jews in Kiev was one of the episodes of what became known as Holocaust, or the genocide committed against Jews during World War II. O anti-Semitism it was a feature of Nazi ideology and, during the war, members of the Nazi Party appropriated these ideas and formulated what became known as “Final Solution”.
The “Final Solution” basically consisted of the plan that outlined the death of millions of Jews. The objective was to carry out the gradual extermination of all the Jews that existed in Europe. This plan, conceived by HeinrichHimmler and ReinhardHeydrich, stipulates the enslavement of Jews in good health and the immediate execution of those unable to work.
The Holocaust was carried out in different stages, which can be called “shoah by the bullets" and "shoah by gas,” and was responsible for the deaths of six of the nine million Jews who lived in Europe before the war. The first phase of this extermination project was the carrying out of mass shootings, and for this the Nazis had designated the Einsatzgruppen, also called groupsinextermination.
For this purpose, the Einsatzgruppen they operated in the Nazi-occupied zones of Eastern Europe, just behind the lines of the armies leading the invasion of the Soviet Union. The main extermination groups acted in the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. In the Ukrainian case, massacres against Jews were conducted by the Einsatzgruppen Ç.
How did the massacre in Kiev take place?
The Babi Yar Massacre took place on September 29 and 30, 1941, in retaliation for an attack suffered by the Germans in the city of Kiev. Shortly before the invasion, this Ukrainian city was inhabited by about 200,000 Jews, which made up approximately 20% of the local population. With the advances of the Germans by the Soviet Union, most of this population moved to the east.
The Jews who remained in Kiev became targets of the Nazi genocide, which was determined in retaliation for bomb attacks against buildings used by the Germans in that city. Even though this attack was carried out by members of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, the Nazis blamed the Jews and spread the following message throughout Kiev:
All Jews residing in Kiev and its vicinity are ordered to appear at the corner of Melnyk and Dokterivsky, at 8 am on Monday, September 29, 1941, carrying documents, money, underwear, etc. Those who do not attend will be shot. Those who enter houses evacuated by Jews and steal belongings from these houses will be shot|3|.
According to historian Antony Beevor, the Nazi command expected less than seventhousand Jews, however, attended more than 33,000 at the stipulated place|4|. The Germans then proceeded with one of the biggest massacres ever committed in the war. Over 36 hours, the Jews were being taken to the Babi Yar ravine and systematically shot.
Reports say that the Jews were forced to undress and were aggressively led to the mass graves, where they lay on the corpses and were then shot. The bodies deposited in these mass graves were later exhumed by the Nazis to hide evidence of the crimes committed.
Other massacres of this type were carried out by the Nazis in different places in Eastern Europe, such as in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The Soviet Union never recognized that the crime committed by the Germans had been a crime with anti-Semitic characteristics, that is, against the Jewish people. This recognition only took place with the independence of Ukraine in 1991.
|1| SNYDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood: Europe between Stalin and Hitler. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2012, p. 253.
|2| BEEVOR, Anthony. The Second World War. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2015, p. 246.
|3| The Babi Yar Massacre. To access, click on here.
|4| BEEVOR, Anthony. The Second World War. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2015, p. 246.
*Image credits: Arkady Mazor and Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
Graduated in History
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/historia/o-que-foi-massacre-babi-yar.htm