Babi Yar: Holocaust or War Tragedy?

Babyn Yar (also known as Babі Yar) – National Historical and Memorial Reserve.
A place of tragedy that has become a symbol of the Holocaust. An indescribable pain for all humanity and a reminder of the value of human life.

September 29, 1941, marks the starting point of the mass shootings of the peaceful population in Babyn Yar. In total, hundreds of thousands lost their lives, and hundreds of witnesses remembered the horrifying details of this bloody tragedy, with one place — Babyn Yar — forever reminding the world of the consequences of war.

Babyn Yar is a memorial to the terrible aftermath of World War II, where mass shootings of the city's peaceful residents took place in the autumn of 1941. Here, over the course of two years, more than one hundred thousand people of various nationalities were exterminated by the German occupiers, including Ukrainians, Jews, Roma, and Russians.

The victims of the shootings were targeted for their ethnic background, as well as for their political and partisan activities.

On September 24, 1941, Soviet saboteurs blew up buildings on Khreshchatyk that housed representatives of the occupying authorities. The explosions and fires continued in the following days, destroying about 940 large residential and administrative buildings. A report from the representative of the Imperial Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories dated October 5, 1941, stated that the fire spread over an area of 2,000 square meters, leaving around 50,000 people homeless. The Nazis blamed the Jews for the fires and explosions, using this as a pretext for the extermination of the Jewish population.

At the end of September 1941, the Einsatzkommando captured nine prominent rabbis of Kyiv and ordered them to make an announcement: "After sanitary processing, all Jews and their children, as an elite nation, will be transported to safe places..."

The shootings in Nazi-occupied Kyiv began in Babyn Yar on September 29, 1941. Over the course of two days, approximately 33,000 Jews were killed (not including children under three years old, who were also shot but not counted).

On the morning of September 29, more than 30,000 Jews arrived at the northern outskirts of Kyiv in small groups. As people were herded into the ravine, machine-gun fire was drowned out by music and the noise of an airplane circling overhead. Jews were shot in groups of 30 to 40 and dumped into the ravine. Once it was filled with two to three layers of bodies, the dead were covered with dirt.

Over the two days at Babyn Yar, Sonderkommando 4a, commanded by Standartenführer Paul Blobel and supported by two units of the 'South' police regiment, executed 33,771 people. The youngest victim was three days old, while the oldest was 103 years old.

Between 1941 and 1943, 621 members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were shot in Babyn Yar, along with 100 sailors from the Dnipro detachment of the Pinsk military flotilla, and five Roma camps were destroyed. It is estimated that over three years, between 70,000 and 200,000 people were shot in Babyn Yar. Additionally, at the Syrets concentration camp, where former communist activists, partisans, and prisoners of war were held, more than 25,000 people died during the war.

In August and September 1943, as they retreated, the Germans effectively destroyed part of the evidence of the mass shootings: they dug up and burned tens of thousands of bodies in open 'furnaces', ground bones using machines brought from Germany, and scattered the ashes around the vicinity of Babyn Yar.
Various publications provide different figures for the total number of people killed in Babyn Yar. However, any number of lost lives is a horrific tragedy.
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🕒 Timecode:
00:00 - Intro
01:37 - Monument to Victims of Nazism
02:34 - Markus Tetyana Memorial
04:53 - Memorial for the 60th anniversary of the mass killing of Jews at Babyn Yar
05:26 - Olena Teliha Memorial
06:09 - Dorohozhychi Metro Station
06:51 - National Historical Memorial Area 'Babyn Yar'
07:37 - The monument dedicated to the children executed at Babi Yar
09:15 - Alley of the Tragic History of Babyn Yar
14:08 - Mound of Memory
15:01 - In memory of the Roma who were shot in Babyn Yar
16:18 - Audiovisual installation 'Mirror Field'
20:25 - The Crystal Wall of Crying
22:04 - Menorah
22:38 - Symbolic Synagogue 'Place for Reflection'
24:27 - The Kachkovsky Family Mausoleum
25:28 - Babyn Yar
27:26 - An installation for the 60th anniversary of the Kurenev tragedy
29:14 - Aftermath of the Russian missile strike
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🌍 Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/S13GV6i5EYpkj...
The material is dedicated to the 83rd anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy.


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