Babi Yar

German forces took Kyiv on 19 September 1941. After explosions set off by the retreating Soviets destroyed parts of the city centre, the occupiers blamed the Jews and posted notices ordering all Jews to assemble on 29 September with documents and valuables. They were marched to the ravine of Babi Yar on the city's edge, made to undress and shot in groups. In two days, 29 and 30 September, Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C under Paul Blobel, with German police battalions and local auxiliary police, murdered 33,771 Jews, according to their own report. It was one of the largest single massacres of the Shoah.

In the following two years tens of thousands more, Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others, were killed there, and in 1943 the Germans had the bodies burned to hide the crime. For decades the Soviet Union did not name the Jewish victims; Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar" (1961) broke that silence. A menorah monument was raised at the site in 1991.