Babi Yar Completed: 33,771 Jews Murdered in Two Days

Over two days in late September 1941, German soldiers and police marched 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children to the edge of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev and shot every one of them. The massacre at Babi Yar, completed on September 30, 1941, was the largest single mass shooting of the Holocaust and one of the most horrific acts of the entire war. The killings were carried out by Einsatzgruppe C, a mobile killing squad of the SS, supported by members of Police Battalion 45 and local Ukrainian auxiliary police. Wehrmacht units provided logistical support and sealed the area. The operation was commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel under the overall authority of Einsatzgruppe C commander Otto Rasch. On September 28, notices were posted throughout Kiev ordering all Jews to report the next morning at the intersection of Melnikova and Dokhturov streets, bringing documents, money, and warm clothes. Most believed they were being resettled. An estimated 33,771 people, according to the Einsatzgruppen's own meticulous reports, arrived on September 29. They were marched in groups through a corridor of soldiers to the edge of the ravine, forced to strip naked, and machine-gunned in rows. Those who did not die immediately were buried alive under the next layer of bodies. The shooting continued for 36 hours straight, from September 29 through September 30. Truck engines were run at full throttle nearby to muffle the sound of gunfire and screaming. Babi Yar was not an isolated act of fury but a bureaucratic operation planned with administrative precision. The Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 101, filed on October 2, recorded the number of victims with the clinical language of an inventory report. Similar massacres were carried out across Ukraine and the occupied Soviet territories throughout 1941 and 1942, killing over a million Jews before the construction of the extermination camps. The Soviet government suppressed the specifically Jewish character of the massacre for decades, describing the victims only as "Soviet citizens." The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko challenged this erasure with his 1961 poem "Babi Yar," and Dmitri Shostakovich set it to music in his Thirteenth Symphony. A memorial was finally erected at the site in 1991, fifty years after the killing.