Babi Yar: The Massacre at the Ravine

On the morning of September 29, 1941, thousands of Jewish men, women, and children gathered at a street corner in Kyiv, Ukraine. They had been ordered to report there by posters plastered across the city two days earlier. The notices, written in Ukrainian, Russian, and German, instructed all Jews to bring their documents, warm clothing, and valuables. Many believed they were being resettled. They had no reason to think otherwise. The German army had occupied Kyiv only ten days before, and mass deportations were something that happened to Jews elsewhere — in Poland, in the west. Not here. Not yet.

They were marched through the streets to the city's edge, to a place called Babi Yar — a name meaning "grandmother's ravine" in Ukrainian. What awaited them there was not resettlement. Over the course of just two days, September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazi SS and their collaborators shot 33,771 Jewish people to death at the ravine's edge. It was, at the time, the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust — and it was only the beginning.

The Road to Babi Yar

Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in an operation code-named Barbarossa. From the first days of the campaign, the Nazis brought with them mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen — task forces assigned not to fight the Soviet army but to exterminate Jews, Soviet officials, and others deemed enemies of the Reich. The Einsatzgruppen followed in the wake of the German military advance, moving through towns and cities and carrying out mass shootings. By the time they reached Ukraine, these units had already murdered tens of thousands of people.

Kyiv fell to German forces on September 19, 1941. In the days that followed, a series of explosions rocked the city center. The blasts — set by Soviet secret police agents who had remained behind — destroyed buildings, killed German soldiers, and set off fires that burned for days. Nazi commanders used the bombings as a pretext to order the annihilation of Kyiv's entire Jewish population, which numbered around 160,000 before the war. The decision was made at a meeting on September 26 by the German military governor, Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, along with SS commanders Friedrich Jeckeln and Otto Rasch. The execution itself was entrusted to Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, commanded by SS officer Paul Blobel, supported by German Order Police battalions and members of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

The notices were posted on September 26. They gave Jews three days to report. Anyone who failed to comply, the notices warned, would be shot. Any non-Jew who occupied a Jewish home or took Jewish property would face the same fate. The instructions were designed to produce maximum compliance. They worked.

Two Days of Killing

The Jews who assembled at the corner of Melnikova and Dokhturivska Streets were marched in a column several kilometers to the ravine. As they walked, German and Ukrainian police stripped them of their luggage, their valuables, their coats, and finally their clothes. The victims were driven through a corridor of soldiers toward the edge of the ravine. There, in groups of ten, they were forced to lie face-down on top of those already shot, and killed with a bullet to the back of the neck.

A German truck driver named Hofer, who witnessed the killings, later testified about what he saw: "I watched what happened when the Jews — men, women and children — arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to give up their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear." He described a crowd so large, and so controlled by the surrounding soldiers, that most victims could not have known what was happening until they reached the edge of the pit.

The ravine was approximately 150 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 15 meters deep. By the end of the second day, it held the bodies of 33,771 people. The SS reported the figure precisely in its operational situation report filed on October 2, 1941 — a bureaucratic record of an act of mass murder treated as routine administrative business. German forces then blew in the walls of the ravine, burying the dead under layers of earth.

At least 29 survivors are known. One of them, Dina Pronicheva, an actress at the Kyiv Puppet Theatre, jumped into the pit before being shot and lay still among the bodies, pretending to be dead. She survived as the Nazis covered the pit with soil, eventually clawing her way to the surface after dark and escaping through a forest. Her testimony, documented by the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, is among the most detailed accounts of what happened inside the ravine.

The Killing Continued

The two-day massacre in September 1941 was the first and most documented of many killings at Babi Yar. Over the following two years, the site became an ongoing execution ground. Soviet prisoners of war were shot there. Romani people — five separate encampments — were brought to the ravine and murdered. Patients from a psychiatric hospital were killed. Ukrainian activists, suspected partisans, and ordinary civilians were executed at the site on a continuous basis. Historians estimate that the total number of people killed at Babi Yar during the German occupation was between 100,000 and 150,000.

The Syrets concentration camp was also established in the area near Babi Yar, and its prisoners were subject to extreme cruelty. Three players from the Dynamo Kyiv football club, who had played in what became known as the "Death Match" against a German team in 1942, were later killed at the camp.

As Soviet forces advanced in the summer and autumn of 1943, the Nazi command issued orders to conceal evidence of the mass murders committed in the east. Paul Blobel — the same officer who had commanded the Sonderkommando 4a during the original massacre — was placed in charge of the operation at Babi Yar. Prisoners from Syrets were forced to exhume tens of thousands of bodies and burn them on funeral pyres built atop gravestones stolen from a nearby Jewish cemetery. The operation took forty days. When it was over, the prisoners were themselves killed. A small number managed to escape and later testified about what they had witnessed and been forced to do.

Silence and Reckoning

When Soviet forces liberated Kyiv in November 1943, Western journalists were brought to Babi Yar. Bill Downs of CBS and Bill Lawrence of the New York Times were among those who reported on the site and interviewed survivors. Their accounts reached audiences in the United States and Britain. And yet for years, the site received almost no official acknowledgment — and what little commemoration existed deliberately avoided naming the Jewish victims.

The Soviet Union preferred to remember the victims of Babi Yar as "peaceful Soviet citizens" or "victims of fascism" rather than acknowledging the specifically Jewish character of the September 1941 massacre. A proposed monument to the Jewish dead was blocked for decades. In 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem that began: "Over Babi Yar there are no monuments." The poem became the text for the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, which caused significant controversy with Soviet authorities. The line was not only a literal description of what was then true — it was an indictment.

A memorial to the Jewish victims of Babi Yar was finally erected in 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the massacre — after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It takes the form of a large menorah. Additional memorials have been added in subsequent years, including a monument to the children killed at the site and a symbolic synagogue called the "Place for Thinking." Work on a comprehensive Holocaust memorial center at Babi Yar has been ongoing, though it has been complicated by political disputes and, since 2022, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, a Russian missile strike near the Kyiv TV Tower killed at least five people and damaged the Babi Yar memorial site — a second act of destruction at a place that had already witnessed so much.

Accountability and Memory

Several of the commanders responsible for the Babi Yar massacre faced postwar trials. Paul Blobel was convicted at the Einsatzgruppen Trial — one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials — and executed in 1951. Friedrich Jeckeln was tried by a Soviet military tribunal and hanged in Riga in January 1946. Otto Rasch, indicted at Nuremberg, died in custody before judgment. Kurt Eberhard, the German military governor of Kyiv, killed himself in American custody in 1947. But the vast majority of those who participated in the killings — the individual officers, the policemen, the local collaborators — were never tried.

In the decades after the war, additional prosecutions took place in West Germany: a 1968 trial in Darmstadt resulted in convictions for seven men, with sentences ranging from four to fifteen years. But justice, when it came, was partial and incomplete. Most perpetrators lived out their lives without ever being held accountable.

In September 2025, on the 84th anniversary of the massacre, researchers using newly opened Ukrainian archives added 1,031 previously unknown names to the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center's database of victims — bringing the confirmed total of identified victims to 33,771. Their names were read aloud alongside the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. It was a reminder that even now, more than eight decades later, the work of identifying the dead and restoring their names continues. The victims of Babi Yar were not anonymous. They were people with names, families, and lives. The effort to remember each of them, one by one, is itself an act of resistance against forgetting.