Berlin, September 29th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – On September 29th and 30th, 1941, the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s army, was busy attacking and conquering the better part of Europe while German soldiers murdered millions of Jews and members of other minorities in death camps, forced labor camps and by committing massacres. Can it get any worse than shooting people on the street, just because they are Jews, Roma or homosexuals? Apparently, the answer is yes.
The massacre of Babi Yar outclassed most, if not all, local murder campaigns the Germans were responsible for during World War II. What happened at the Babi Yar gorge, located just outside the city of Kyiv, is too terrible to comprehend or to describe.
In September of 1941, Field Marshal Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau commanded the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army which conquered Kyiv in cooperation with Task Force C. The unit was part of Hitler’s ‘Schutzstaffel’ known as ‘SS’. After the invasion, several explosions rocked the city. Some residents and German soldiers were killed.
Disguised as Evacuation
About 150,000 Jews from Kyiv had already fled before the Germans came. Von Reichenau and his men decided to kill all remaining Jews. 50,000 of them were still in Kyiv. Most of them were mothers with their children and elderly people. The Nazis justified the murder campaign as a revenge action for those explosions, and they disguised it as the “evacuation of all Jews” in the city.
On September 28th, 1941, the Nazi murderers posted notifications on walls all over Kyiv. They said that all Jews needed to assemble on September 29th, 1941, close to the train station. They should wear warm clothing and bring their documents, valuables and money, it read. Whoever did not follow the order would be shot.
Thirty-Six Hours
The notification did not say that all Jews who adhered to the orders would be taken to the Babi Yar gorge and murdered in cold blood, including babies, children of all ages, their parents, grandparents and everyone else. Nor did it say that this was going to be one of the worst massacres to be committed by Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht.
Once on site, the Jews were ordered to take off all of their clothes. Dina Pronicheva was one of the few survivors. Her account of the events at Babi Yar describes the most terrible crime on Earth. No adjective could really do it justice: “They had to lie down on top of the other murdered people and wait for the shots from above. Then the next group came. For thirty-six hours, Jews came to die”, Dina Pronicheva was quoted as saying after the war.
“Some people died while thinking of others, like the mother of the beautiful 15-year-old Sara who asked to be shot with her daughter. Until the last moment, she was worried. If she saw her daughter being shot, she would not have to watch her being raped. Another mother spent her last moments breastfeeding her baby. When the newborn was thrown into the gorge alive, she jumped after the child.”
33,771 Victims
According to the SS, which was proud of its “work”, 33,771 Jews were shot within 36 hours. The number was part of a filed “SS event report”. Jews who were not dead yet were buried alive when the Wehrmacht blew up the edges of the gorge.
There were only a handful of survivors like Dina Pronicheva. She played dead while the Germans shot everyone who was still moving. Then she managed to crawl out from under the bodies, and through the soil that was covering the tens of thousands of the victims.
Eighty-five years after the massacre of Babi Yar, Nazi Germany’s successor state, namely the Federal Republic of Germany, is a free, democratic country. But this democracy is in danger. The spreading antisemitism is a symptom. Today, Jews in Germany are confronted with hatred from the far-right, the far-left and from Islamists. Extremists just won elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Hither Pomerania and Berlin. In two cases, the far-right AfD became the strongest party, while the radical left “Die Linke”, which harbors Jew haters as well, is working on setting up a government coalition for the federal city state of Berlin.
The children in the photo at the top of this page are two of the 33,771 victims of the Babi Yar massacre. Malvina Babat was four years old, her sister Polina was three when they were murdered by the Nazis.
