Thank you for the visit, it is on my bucket list. My Dad's outfit (Thunderbirds) helped liberate Dachau in 1945 but I believe that a bucket list should have some lows as well as highs. Here is a flat picture of the monument! Yom Tov.
Posted on 09/29/2020 12:11:46 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
In 1941, German soldiers murdered more than 30,000 Jews from Kiev within one and a half days. What took place at the Babi Yar gorge was one of the most horrific massacres of all time.
Berlin, September 29th, 2020 (The Berlin Spectator) — Eight decades ago, the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s army, was busy attacking and conquering the better part of Europe while murdering millions of Jews and members of other minorities in its death camps, forced labor camps and in massacres on streets, in woods and at other locations. Can it get any worse than shooting people on the street, just because they are Jews, Roma or homosexuals? Apparently, the answer is yes.
Incomprehensible Crime
The massacre of Babi Yar outclassed most, if not all, local murder campaigns the Germans were responsible for during World War II. What happened at the Babi Yar gorge, located just outside the city of Kiev, is too terrible to comprehend or to describe.
In September of 1941, Field Marshal Walter Karl Ernst August von Reichenau commanded the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army which conquered Kiev in cooperation with Task Force C. The latter was part of Hitler’s ‘Schutzstaffel’ known as ‘SS’. After the invasion, several explosions rocked the city, in which some residents and German soldiers were killed.
Disguised as Evacuation
About 150,000 Jews who had lived in Kiev had already fled, before the Germans came. When von Reichenau and his men decided to kill all remaining Jews, 50,000 were still in Kiev. Most of them were mothers with their children and elderly people. The Nazis justified the murder campaign as revenge action for those explosions, and they disguised it as the ‘evacuation of all Jews’ in the city.
On September 28th, 1941, the Nazi murderers posted notifications on walls all over Kiev. They said that all Jews needed to assemble on September 29th, 1941, exactly 79 years ago today, close to the train station. They should wear warm clothing and bring their documents, valuables and money, it read. Whoever did not follow the order would be shot.
Thirty-Six Hours
The notification did not say that all Jews who adhered to the orders would be taken to the Babi Yar gorge and murdered in cold blood, including babies, children of all ages, their parents, grandparents and everyone else. Nor did it say that this was going to be one of the worst massacres to be committed by Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht in the ongoing war.
Once on site, the Jews were ordered to take all of their clothes off. Dina Pronicheva was one of the few survivors. Her account of the events at Babi Yar describes the most terrible crime on Earth. No adjective could really do it justice: “They had to lie down on top of the other murdered people and wait for the shots from above. Then the next group came. For thirty-six hours, Jews came to die”, Dina Pronicheva was quoted saying after the war.
33,771 Victims in 36 Hours
“Some people died while thinking of others, like the mother of the beautiful, 15-year-old Sara who asked to be shot with her daughter. Until the last moment, she was worried. If she would see her daughter being shot, she would not have to watch her being raped. Another naked mother spent her last moments breastfeeding her baby. When the newborn was thrown into the gorge alive, she jumped after the child.”
According to the SS, which was proud of its “work”, 33,771 Jews were shot within 36 hours. The number was part of a filed ‘SS event report’. Jews who were not dead yet were buried alive when the Wehrmacht blew up the edges of the gorge.
The Babat Sisters
There were only a handful survivors like Dina Pronicheva. She played dead while the Germans shot everyone who was still moving. Then she managed to crawl out from under the bodies, and through the soil that was covering the tens of thousands of the victims.
Seventy-nine years after the massacre of Babi Yar, Nazi Germany’s successor state, namely the Federal Republic of Germany, is a free, democratic country that is still in the process of coming to terms with its horrific past. But there are those who demand to have “the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in the two world wars”, as Alexander Gauland of the ‘AfD’ did. Some eleven percent of all Germans support the extremist right-wing party.
Malvina Babat was four years old, her sister Polina was three (see main photo at top of page) when they were murdered. They became two of the 33,771 victims of the massacre of Babi Yar.
Great Article, thank you for posting.
So much for the Wehrmacht apologists. The Wehrmacht was neck deep in such atrocities. There was no in trouble finding plenty of willing Wehrmacht volunteers to do such things.
Great article.
Yep. Germans have always maintained their Army was morally superior to the Japanese units that perpetrated atrocities in Nanking. Utter nonsense.
BABI YAR
By Yevgeni Yevtushenko
Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, 10/96
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.
I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.
It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself. *1*
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.
I see myself a boy in Belostok *2*
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.
I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.
O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.
I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”
It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed – very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.
-“They come!”
-“No, fear not – those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!”
-“They break the door!”
-“No, river ice is breaking…”
Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.
And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.
No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring *3*
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.
There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!
My stomach feels like I’m missing the bottom of it, now.
Thank you for posting.
Wow.
It was this very issue at Babi Yar that forced Reinhard Heydrich to convene the Wannsee Conference to develop a better way for the “Final Solution.” The result was systematic, industrialized genocide system of death camps in Germany and occupied Poland.
There were accounts of the top soil moving as survivors tried to crawl to the surface. Nazis... Hashem yikom damam. (G-d take vengeance on them)
79 is not 8 decades, but a US Jew-Dem group is currently running ads equating the Trump era to the 1930s Nazis
In 1999, I visited Ukraine with a church group looking at churches which had hidden Jews during the war. We went to the Babi Yar monument and valley. The monument is the most emotionally painful thing I have ever seen in my life. It represent the people buried underground, focusing to push one mother and baby up above the ground. The back side of the monument is where you can see the other people writhing as they push upward.
Most of those who served with the Sixth Army did not return to Germany. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “they’re in the cold Soviet ground.”
As the Germans swept across Western Russia, the SS “special action” units came in right behind to murder as many Jews as they could find. They later decided this wasn’t getting the job done fast enough and they decided to build the death camps to commit murder on an industrial scale.
Mine’s knotted-up into a small ball, and my blood is boiling.
It is a true mark of evil when you can compare someone to the destruction wrought by the Mongols of the 13th Century. In a century following Genghis Khan’s uniting of the Mongol Clans in 1206, they stormed and slaughtered from China to Poland, ruling from the Baltic to the Yellow Sea. In that time they are estimated to have killed up to 40 million people or 11% of World population.
For a regime that didn’t get to real killing until the mid 1930s, the Nazis and their willing countrymen did do in a decade what the Mongols took a lot longer to do. Of course that is machines , gas and guns versus horses, bows and swords!
Goethe was right when he said of his fellow Germans that they were ‘’noble in the individual and wretched in the collective’’.
Thank you for the visit, it is on my bucket list. My Dad's outfit (Thunderbirds) helped liberate Dachau in 1945 but I believe that a bucket list should have some lows as well as highs. Here is a flat picture of the monument! Yom Tov.
I might might be mistaken but I believe ‘’babi yar’’ means ‘’place of the old woman’’.
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