Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by German forces and local collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union.
The most notorious and the best documented of
these massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. The decision to kill all the Jews
in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C
Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD and SS Police Battalions backed by the local
police. The
massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its
collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the
history of the Holocaust" to that particular date, surpassed
only by the Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims, and the 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941,
committed by Romanian
troops.
Victims
of other massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Roma. It is estimated that between 100,000 and
150,000 people were killed at Babi Yar during the German occupation.
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