Babi Yar: September 29-30, 1941
Originally Published October 1, 2023
Nothing I can write or say will ever convey the magnitude of horror and sadistic brutality that took place 82 years ago at Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, Ukraine.
Once the Nazi army occupied Kiev in September of 1941, its SS death squads perpetrated one of the most unfathomable and sadistic acts of mass murder in human history.
In just two days 34,000 people, including infants and elderly, were stripped naked, robbed, bludgeoned, shot, and thrown down a 100 foot ravine. Infants where brutally murdered in front of their mothers. Young girls were dragged away to be raped and murdered. Old men were beaten and had their gold teeth pulled out before being bludgeoned to death.
The living, the wounded, and the dead would end up piled on top of each other at the bottom of the ravine.
Many were buried alive. Some lucky few managed to crawl their way out from under the corpses in the night to later bare witness to what was done to them.
The killings at the ravine continued for two years with estimated 100,000-150,000 Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and others ending up mass murdered by German occupiers and their Western Ukrainian collaborators.
The full extent of the horror that took place and reported by survivors is impossible to fully convey to the modern generation that is so far removed from WW2 and the mass murder of 27-40 million people in the Soviet Union by the Nazis.
The SS mobile extermination squad Einsatzgruppen C was responsible for the mass murder of virtually all Jews in Kiev in September of 1941. Babi Yar was one of thousands of Nazi mass murder sites of Slavs and Jews.
In addition to numerous eye witness accounts, the 34,000 victims were documented by Nazi SS’s own detailed records and reports to Berlin.
Twenty two Einsatzgruppen mobile death squad leaders were prosecuted at Nuremberg for murdering two million people in Soviet Union, with over a million victims detailed in Nazi’s own documents.
The young American prosecutor, Benajamin Ferencz, described the case against the Nazis as a “slam dunk” due to their own well documented personal accounting reports.
The commander of Einsatzgruppen C which conducted the Babi Yar massacre, Otto Rasch, was terminally ill during the trial. Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz had him brought to court on a stretcher before he died.
Presently in September of 2023, 82 years to the month of the Babi Yar massacre, Canada’s House of Commons, Prime Minister Justine Trudeau, and Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi regime head Vladimir Zelensky gave a standing ovations to a 98 year old Waffen SS Nazi who was part of a Western Ukrainian division committing mass murder and crimes against humanity during WW2.
What was allowed to be done to people of the Soviet Union by German, Romanian, and Western Ukrainian Nazis while much of Europe allied itself with Hitler must never be forgotten, and never be white washed.
Anyone questioning what Nazi Germans did to millions of Slavs and Jews with the help of brutal Western Ukrainian Nationalists and other collaborators needs to study what was done in Kiev before the Red Army finally liberated Ukraine in 1943.
Failure to learn true history and its lessons misleads new generations to rationalize wars, crimes against humanity, demonization of history’s heroes, and glorification of history’s monsters.
© Vladek Filler
zero bodies, not one, plenty of emotive words though