This Day in History: 29 September 2020
29 September 1941
79 years ago, today, the Babi Yar massacre began in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, on the outskirts of Kiev. The city had been taken ten days prior by the German army, and special SS forces began to prepare to carry out Adolf Hitler's orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found in the area. More than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine in the north of the city, were ordered to strip naked, then machine-gunned into the ravine. The next day, the massacre ended, and the dead and wounded were covered over with dirt and rock. The massacre has been called the 'largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust'.
Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Russian prisoners of war and Soviet officials were executed at the Babi Yar ravine in a similar manner. It is estimated that during the German occupation, between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed at Babi Yar. As the German army retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide the evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in pyres. However, many eyewitnesses and other evidence verified the atrocities committed at Babi Yar, and thus became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.
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