Today in History: Sept. 30
The massacre of Kievan Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, Ukraine, concluded on this date 75 years ago. When the slaughter was over, 33,771 men, women, and children, civilians all, had been machine-gunned by the Nazi Sonderkommando soldiers in only two days. It set a record for speed combined with bloodthirstiness: other massacres resulted in more dead, but few took so little time to accomplish.
The ravine, a beautiful piece of Ukrainian countryside inside the city of Kiev, was a popular killing spot for the Nazis and collaborators. Later massacres of Soviet prisoners of war, and then of those accused of being communist, and then of the Roma population, followed; historians estimate that as many as 100,000 people were slaughtered on this one piece of otherwise quiet land during World War II.
It was not quiet 75 years ago today. The order had gone out to the Jewish population of Kiev on September 26 that each Jew was to report, with papers, to a specific street corner on September 29 at 8:00 a.m. and that any who failed to show up would be shot and killed on sight. The Jews in Kiev complied because the Holocaust was not yet a rumor (mass slaughters were starting to happen, but not in a seemingly organized fashion) and resettlement away from the war zone was what the Nazi government always promised. The Nazis always came through, just in the worst way possible.
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