On September 29, 1941, units of Einsatzgruppe C, with the Waffen-SS and Ukrainian auxiliaries, began shooting the Jews of Kiev at Babi Yar, a ravine on the northwestern edge of the city, and killed 33,771 people over the 29th and 30th. The figure comes from the German operational situation report, . The Germans said so. It was the largest single massacre of the war up to that date.
Kiev had fallen on September 19, after a defensive battle in which the Red Army had destroyed most of its own forces. About 60,000 Jews remained, most of the rest having fled or been evacuated. On September 26 or 27 a notice was posted in Russian, Ukrainian and German ordering all Jews of the city to assemble on September 29 at seven in the morning, at the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivskaya streets, with documents, money, valuables and warm clothing, on pain of death.
They came. They came in numbers the killers had not expected. The column moved down Melnikova street to the ravine, where they were forced to undress, were separated into groups, and were shot at the edge with machine pistols, falling into the gully. The shooting went on for two days and continued after dark with searchlights.
The decision had been made by the military administration rather than by the Einsatzgruppen alone. The SS and police leader for the region, Friedrich Jeckeln, and the commander of Sonderkommando 4a, Paul Blobel, ran the operation, and the killing was done by about 300 men. The Reich's policy in the Soviet Union by September 1941 was the shooting of Jewish men, and within weeks it had become the shooting of Jewish women and children as well.
The site was used again. Babi Yar took Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, psychiatric patients and anyone else the occupiers wanted to kill, and the total is generally estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000. In August and September 1943, with the Red Army approaching, the Germans opened the graves and burned about 100,000 bodies, and Sonderaktion 1005 had about 300 prisoners do it and then shot them.
The aftermath is history. Soviet policy was to commemorate the dead as Soviet citizens rather than as Jews, and a memorial to the victims of fascism was put up in 1976 with no mention of Jews. Yevtushenko's poem of 1961, which begins Over Babi Yar there are no monuments, was written against that. Full commemoration began after 1991, and a memorial complex has been built since.