People & Histories
29–30 September 1941

Babyn Yar

German SS and police units murder 33,771 Jews in a ravine on the edge of Kyiv in two days.

Well established wartrauma

German forces entered Kyiv on 19 September 1941. Of the city’s Jews (about 160,000 by USHMM’s estimate; the 1939 Soviet census had counted some 224,000), about 60,000 were still there, mostly women, children, the elderly and the sick, who could not or would not flee.

  • Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
  • All-Union Population Census of 1939: national composition of the population of Kyiv — Central Statistical Administration of the USSR, Soviet census returns (1939), as tabulated in later demographic publications (1939)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
Mines left by the retreating Soviets blew up buildings in the city centre, and the Germans used this as a pretext to murder the remaining Jews.
  • Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
  • A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (2nd ed.) — Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto Press (2010)
They were summoned to Babyn Yar, a ravine on the city’s edge. Over 29–30 September 1941, SS and police units of Einsatzgruppe C, helped by auxiliaries, shot 33,771 Jews, according to the killers’ own reports.
Ukrainian auxiliary police took part in the murder of Ukraine’s Jews, and here they helped drive the victims into the ravine. Ukrainian memory has had to face that fact.

The killing at Babyn Yar went on until 1943. Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and other civilians were also murdered there. Soviet investigators put the total at about 100,000.

After the war the Soviet authorities played down who the main victims had been. The monument finally built in 1976 did not mention Jews. A menorah was erected only in 1991, as the USSR was falling apart.

  • Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
  • Memory Crash: Politics of History in and around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s — Georgiy Kasianov, Central European University Press (2022)
On 1 March 2022 a Russian missile strike on the Kyiv TV tower, close to Babyn Yar, killed five people.

Why it matters today

Ukraine

Babyn Yar is where Ukraine confronts the Holocaust on its own soil, including the role of local collaborators and decades of Soviet silence about who the victims were. It is now a national site of memory, and a Russian missile struck beside it in 2022.