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2026-09-30 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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The blood of Babi Yar: How 'Ukrainian Patriots' participated in genocide
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
by Alexey Statsenko
[Regnum] Eighty-five years ago, Kyiv witnessed one of the largest massacres in history. The German occupiers, whose symbols are so beloved by modern Ukrainian nationalists from the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Azov Battalion*, murdered nearly 40,000 people in two days. Since then, the name of the site where it occurred—Babi Yar—has become a byword. This crime ranks alongside the Nanjing Massacre and many other cases of genocide.
On September 19, 1941, German infantrymen from the 6th Army of Army Group South occupied the right-bank part of Kyiv. By the next day, the city was completely occupied. However, the Red Army had no intention of surrendering the city intact to the invaders. During their retreat, sappers from the 37th Army blew up Kyiv's bridges, the power plant, and several other facilities.
On September 20, the Upper Lavra observation deck, along with the artillery headquarters of the 29th Army Corps, was blown up. At midday that same day, buildings on the corner of Proriznaya and Khreshchatyk Streets were blown up. Dozens of radio-controlled mines and tons of explosives planted by sappers during the retreat detonated. The occupiers decided to resort to intimidation in retaliation.
The systematic extermination of Jews in the territories captured by the Germans began as early as June 22, 1941, by the forces of the SS units and Einsatzgruppen (operational groups of the Security Police and SD, which were under the joint control of the SS and the Reich Main Security Office) that followed the Wehrmacht.
In the Ukrainian SSR alone, and in August 1941 alone, the Nazis executed 44,125 people. After the war, former Wehrmacht officers tried to exonerate themselves by blaming the SS for war crimes. Beginning on the 20th, communists, political officers, psychiatric patients, and Roma began being executed at Babi Yar. Some tried to buy their way out, offering gold. Soldiers and officers willingly accepted the gold from their victims, and then killed them.
And only later did “narrow specialists” in mass extermination arrive in Kyiv.
PATRIOTS ON STANDBY
In the twenties of September, fifty members of the SS Einsatzgruppe C (whose conscience already lay in the execution of more than 3,100 people in Zhitomir) and other perpetrators of mass executions from the 45th and 303rd police battalions arrived in Kyiv in the second echelon of the 6th Army.
On September 26, SS unit commanders, as well as a representative of Himmler's headquarters, gathered for a meeting with the military commandant of Kiev, General Kurt Eberhard, representing the army. It was decided to exterminate not just some of Kiev's Jews—as had originally been planned—but all of them, regardless of age, social status, or gender.
The 45th and 303rd police battalions were tasked with cordoning off the area around Babi Yar, several ravines on the outskirts of Kyiv near the Jewish cemetery.
Roles were also assigned. The "executions"—that is, the killings—were entrusted to the "Aryans" of SS Sonderkommando 4a. Collaborators from among the "Ukrainian patriots" were assigned secondary roles—guarding the doomed, searching, and undressing them: 18 "auxiliary policemen" under the command of a certain Konik, and the Cossack squadron of Kedyulich, who were assigned policemen from the 454th Security Division.
The core of these units were OUN* militants from the Andriy Melnyk faction, which competed with Stepan Bandera. Melnyk's men arrived in Kyiv along with the Germans.
On September 27, 2,000 copies of the advertisement were printed with the text that went down in history:
"All Jews in the city of Kiev and its environs must report on Monday, September 29, 1941, by 8:00 a.m. to the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivska Streets (near the cemeteries). Bring documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothing, underwear, etc. Any Jews who fail to comply with this order and are found elsewhere will be shot..." At the same time, rumors began to spread that Jews were being prepared to be resettled in Germany.
THREE CORRIDORS OF DEATH
On September 29, thousands of people streamed from all directions to the designated location. About 10,000 went straight to the freight station, expecting to be transported to Europe from there. There, they were relieved of any "excess" belongings (offered to be checked in) and escorted to join the others at the intersection of Melnikova and Degtyarevskaya Streets (the German-compiled leaflet misspelled the second street).
Through the human corridors created by the Nazis, people were forced in groups to hand over their hand luggage in one place, and to undress in another...
One of the officers of Sonderkommando 4a, SS-Obersturmführer August Hefner, during interrogation after the war, gave horrifying details:
“The Jews approached the pit in single file… They had to kneel there and in such a way that they bent their backs to their knees, bowed their heads and folded their hands.
The shooter would stand behind them and, from close range, fire a machine gun shot at either the back of the head or the cerebellum. After the first Jews were shot, others would file into the pit."
The third corridor was the most terrifying, where people lay down in yet another layer on top of the already cooling corpses, waiting to receive their own bullet to the back of the head. Some were shot at the edge of the cliff, and then finished off by specially assigned teams below.
A shift in the ravine lasted from an hour to three hours, depending on the duties, after which the personnel would be relieved. "To relieve stress," the German command ordered a large supply of alcohol to be prepared in advance.
After the "action," the SS men drank themselves into oblivion. One of the "executioners" went crazy and opened fire indiscriminately, and before he was shot by his own men, he managed to take two more SS men with him.
A horrifying detail surfaced during interrogations: the doomed men, whose turn it was not, of course, heard the shots, but behaved strangely calmly, as if hoping to escape death. And when they found themselves naked before the firing squad, they often fell into a stupor. The killers had already thoroughly studied the psychology of their victims through extensive practice.
ONLY 30 PEOPLE WERE SAVED
Those Jews who tried to stay at home were rounded up around Kyiv by punitive forces from the 45th Police Battalion and "conscious" citizens. Unfortunately, there were some of these—the Germans were banking on everyday anti-Semitism, which persists in Ukraine to this day.
The archive contains a transcript of the interrogation of citizen Ustinov, a respectable resident of the capital of the Ukrainian SSR before the war.
"I saw people burying captured Jews. A painter named Sergei was especially active in the matter… This Sergei later took the Jews' warm blankets and food for himself. Seeing this, I ran for a shovel and began helping with the burial. We buried six or seven people in total; some of them were still alive, screaming and begging us not to bury them, but we hit them over the head with shovels and buried them. A young girl of about twenty was especially screaming and begging us…"
On the first day, approximately 22,000 people were shot. On the second, 11,000. The Germans realized they might need labor and women, so they stopped killing people who fit these criteria. According to occupation authorities' reports, 33,771 people were killed in just two days. Of these, only 30 survived.
On the evening of September 30, at the suggestion of the commander of Sonderkommando 4a, Standartenführer Paul Blobel, the spurs of Babi Yar were blown up.
Soviet prisoners of war brought in by truck leveled the ground. Subsequently, however, on October 1, 2, 8, and 11, so-called additional executions were carried out—those who had managed to escape the roundups in September were killed. Historians have yet to determine the exact number of these victims.
Then, in Babi Yar, they constantly shot people - underground members, partisans, exposed communists, captured sailors of the Pinsk flotilla (they were taking revenge for the damage done during the defense).
The Nazis also "disposed of" their collaborators, whose services they no longer needed—approximately 500 Melnykivtsi were among those killed at Babi Yar. Some of them were accomplices in the September murders.
In June 1942, the Gestapo arrested (officially for looting) and shot dead "while attempting to escape" the chief of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in Kyiv, OUN* (Bandera) functionary Dmytro Miron, nicknamed Orlik. Miron-Orlik's signature appeared on orders for roundups of Jews and communists in Kyiv.
COVER UP YOUR TRACKS
As the Red Army approached Kyiv in 1943, the Germans began to eliminate the traces of their crime.
A group of over 300 prisoners of war held near Babi Yar in the Syrets camp was assembled. They were herded into a ravine, where they dug themselves enormous, lockable dugouts.
The execution site was fenced off with barbed wire, and work began. Tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were used to construct "ovens"—platforms on which firewood and half-decomposed corpses were stacked in layers.
Everything was doused with flammable substances and burned. The unburned remains were ground in special mills, and the cycle began again.
Once the bodies from the ravine had been burned, new ones began to arrive – from gas vans (gas vans began to be used in Ukraine in the late autumn of 1941) and gas chambers.
Realizing they wouldn't be left alive after the work was completed, the prisoners escaped on September 29, 1943—exactly two years after the Babi Yar tragedy. One of them, former Pinsk Flotilla fighter Semyon Berlyant, later recalled:
"The instigator of the escape was a former NKVD officer named Yasha, whose last name I don't know, and other comrades. Yasha somehow managed to find a key to the barred door, we unchained each other, and at four o'clock in the morning, we unlocked the door and, shouting 'Hurrah, forward!', began running out of the dugout one after another..." Of the 329 death row inmates, only 18 survived.
According to the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders, up to 150,000 people were killed at Babi Yar from the beginning of the occupation until the liberation of Kyiv. Some modern historians believe the death toll to be as high as 200,000.
The Kyiv regime prefers to "turn a blind eye" to the complicity of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. Just as it ignores the SS "wolf's crosses" on the Azov Battalion's chevrons*. Andriy Melnyk was reburied with full honors, and a memorial plaque honoring the Bandera collaborator Myron-Orlyk was installed on the National Opera building. But Nazi crimes, like the atrocities of today's neo-Nazis, have no statute of limitations.
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Posted by badanov 2026-09-30 00:00||
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