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This is what Babi Yar looks like today. It is the scene of the largest single mass shooting murder in history. Over a few hours on Monday 29 September and Tuesday 30 September 1941, 33,771 people were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The site you see here is completely different to what the site looked like in 1941. Then it was a deep ravine but the topography has completely changed since then due to a number of factors including blowing up parts of the walls of the ravine to hide the crime, digging up the bodies that were buried there almost two years later, industrial development, a major mud slide and finally landscaping to form the park that you see in this video. Unlike most Holocaust related sites, Babi Yar is within a large city and it is easily accessible via public transport. In my opinion, a city park, with its memorials and references to Jewish life before the Holocaust is a fitting reminder of what happened here. Paul Blobel commanded Einsatzkommando 4a, part of Einsatzgruppe C which followed the Sixth Army in Ukraine and southern Russia. He was directly responsible for murdering around 60,000 people in 1941. As he explained under interrogation and at his trial after the war, police and auxiliary units would round up the people to be killed, graves would be dug and the victims would be brought to the killing site and murdered. He used a method of killing whereby the victims would be brought to the killing spot in groups of around ten to fifteen people. They would kneel at the edge of the grave and be shot by firing squad. The first killings for which he was responsible took place near the Polish town of Łuck on 27 June 1941. His murder spree then continued for the next few months. Kiev had been captured only a few days earlier in what in my opinion was the greatest military victory of all time – 650,000 Soviet prisoners were taken in a huge enveloping action. The army was followed on 19 September 1941 by an advance detachment of the EK 4a, led by the two Obersturmfuhrers August Häfner and Adolf Janssen, demonstrating that the plan was to kill the Jews of the city very quickly. The excuse they used was that Red Army engineers had had the time to booby trap a number of buildings in Kiev which led to a number of deaths both amongst local civilians and German personnel. One of the explosions hit the headquarters of Army Group South on 24 September. On 26 September 1941, General Kurt Eberhard, the designated Kyiv city commander met with with Blobel, the SS and Police Leader SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the commander of the Einsatzgruppe C , Otto Rasch , and other SS functionaries such as SS-Obersturmfuhrer August Häfner who gave an account of the meeting after the war. This meeting took place at the same Army Group South rear headquarters that had been bombed only two days earlier. There, they decided that they would kill the Jews of Kiev and arranged how the killings would take place. As Blobel did not have enough men, he was to be aided by others under the command of Rasch as well as various German police battalions. It was probably agreed here that the method of killing would be different from that usually used by Blobel. At Babi Yar, the victims were forced to lie down on top of people who had already been shot and then they were killed individually. The victims were not rounded up but were ordered to gather. On 28 September 1941, around 200 posters went up around Kiev ordering Jews to report at a specific location near the train station giving the idea that people would be moved out by rail. 33,771 people responded to this call and they were murdered over the following two days. Once the killing was complete, Wehrmacht engineers blew up the sides of the walls of the ravine to hide traces of the crime. Some time later, Blobel was driving past the site when disturbances in the ground were noted, probably caused by the decomposition of so many people in one location. Blobel made a joke up about that being his Jews. Blobel was relieved of his command in January 1942. It appears as though he spoke to Reinhard Heydrich who was in charge of the Reich Security Head Office. Heydrich then referred him to Heinrich Muller who was head of the Gestapo. Either Heydrich or Muller ordered him to find a way of disposing of the corpses of the murdered people. This was called Akton 1005 or Sonderaktion 1005 and those units that carried out the work were known as Kommando 1005 or Sonderkommando 1005. The first record that we have of it, is correspondence between Muller and Martin Luther of the German Foreign Office dated 28 February 1942. In the summer of 1943, Sonderkommando 1005A was set up in Kyiv and a second unit was set up in Dnepropetrovsk by Hans Sohns, who was to co-ordinate the destruction of corpses in Ukraine. Because of the number of corpses at Babi Yar, both units had to come together in Kyiv.
