Babyn Yar in History and Memory

The story of the murders in 1941-1943 at the ravine of Babyn Yar (Kiev, Ukraine) and the postwar obliteration of the killing and burial ground.

Report

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Runtime

2011-2026

**Foto:** Mannen graven het grootste massagraf met slachtoffers van de nazi's in Oekraïne.
Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, Bild 008,016 (PK-Fotograf Johannnes Hähle)

On September 29 and 30, 1941, on the western outskirts of Kiev at Babyn Yar, the largest single Nazi shooting of Jews in the Soviet Union took place.

Babyn Yar also is Ukraine’s largest mass grave of victims of the Nazis - for, after the main massacre of September 1941, the SS and German police, as long as they were there, never stopped killing there. Almost all of the Soviet Communist officials who returned in November 1943 disrespected the human remains interred at Babyn Yar, and they refused to state that the victims of the main massacre perpetrated there had been Jews, killed simply because they were Jews. Today the site is largely covered with a park, apartments, and traffic.

The book will describe and analyze:

How the murders were organized and perpetrated.
How the victims and others nearby responded
How the murders were reported - secretly and publicly; by Germans, Soviet intelligence, and others; both at the time and in subsequent years.
How the terrain was treated by the Nazis, the Soviet regime, and Ukraine’s post-Soviet authorities.