"Babyn Yar: History and Memory" — Chapter 3
The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter was founded in 2008 with the goal of building stronger relations between Ukrainians and Jews, two peoples who, for centuries, lived side by side on the territory of what is modern-day Ukraine. Since then, in keeping with its motto, "Our stories are incomplete without each other," UJE has sponsored conferences, round-table discussions and research, as well as translations and publication of works the organization anticipates will promote a deeper understanding between the two peoples and an appreciation of their respective cultures.
We offer for the first time the book Babyn Yar: History and Memory in eBook format.
A ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941, was witness to one of the great atrocities of the Holocaust. There, over a two-day period, nearly 34,000 Kyiv Jews were shot to death in one of the first major events that has become known as the “Holocaust by Bullets”.
With deep compassion and understanding, a group of internationally-renowned scholars discuss the treatment of Babyn Yar in culture, music, and the arts from Stalinist times to our own. Beyond the detailed and harrowing accounts of what took place in Kyiv in late September 1941, the essays in this volume realize the importance of preserving Babyn Yar as a symbol of the Holocaust and other tragedies of the twentieth century.
Babyn Yar: History and Memory was edited by Paul Robert Magocsi, Professor Emeritus of history and political science at the University of Toronto, where from 1980 to 2025 he held the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and Vladislav Hrynevych, Leading Scholar at the Kuras Institute for Political and Ethnic Studies, Ukraine.
The book (Ukrainian version) was published in conjunction with a series of events sponsored by UJE to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Babyn Yar. Published in 2016 by Dukh i Litra.
Publication of the English version (2023) was made possible by the generous support of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, Toronto, Canada. Distributed by the University of Toronto Press for the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto,
(The editors appreciate the support of the sponsor and acknowledge that the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.)
Chapter 3
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Ukraine under Nazi rule
Karel C. Berkhoff
Ukraine was very important in Nazi plans, for it belonged to the Lebensraum (living space) that the Germans supposedly needed in order to survive. Ukraine's fertile lands would enable them to revitalize their agrarian roots and thus regenerate themselves as a Germanic "race". Moreover, the produce from there would foster the Third Reich's economic independence. Except for the ethnic Germans, not just Jews but the entire native population, sooner or later, would have to be removed from an "East" where ultimately only people of "pure German blood" would live. What was the result of an invasion driven by such an ideology?
At the time of the German invasion that began on 22, June 1941, the Soviet Union had recently expanded the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic through annexation from Poland and Romania of western Volhynia, eastern Galicia, northern Bukovina, and southern Bessarabia. After an initial period of military rule, the largest German territorial unit became the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, headquartered in Rivne and led by Reich Commissar Erich Koch. It had five large districts: Volhynia-Podolia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and a "partial district" called Taurida. In the north, the Reichskommissariat included regions that today are part of Belarus. Meanwhile, the city of Lviv and the rest of eastern Galicia was made part of the Galicia District within a German territory called the Generalgouvernement Polen (Government General). The Galicia District was subdivided into counties and under Governor Karl Lasch and then Otto Wächter. Germany's Rear Army Area South, in the far eastern military zone of occupation, was ruled by Karl von Roques and Erich Friderici. Finally, Subcarpathian Rus', or Transcarpathia, continued to be ruled by Hungary, which had annexed it in 1939.
Life and death under Nazi rule were brutal and full of fear. Terror took many forms: plunder; evictions from homes; deportations; and above all, the mass murder of Jews, Roma, psychiatric patients, prisoners of war, Communists, Soviet activists, and other suspects. The killings were often carried out for everyone to see. A wide range of German "security" units amply used their unbridled license to kill. These units included commandos of two large task forces of the Security Police and Security Service, the Einsatzgruppe C and Einsatzgruppe D. But besides these mobile killing squads, later turned into local offices of the Security Police and Security Service, there were also nine battalions of the regular German Order Police, the 1st SS Infantry Brigade of the Waffen-SS, and three army security divisions. Numerous camps were created, such as Syrets in Kyiv and Janowska in Lviv.
Never before in the history of Ukraine, with the time of the Great Famine of 1933 as a possible exception, did so many social and ethnic groups suffer so much during one period. For most inhabitants of the new Reichskommissariat Ukraine, conditions were far worse than anywhere in western Europe, and also far worse than in the Generalgouvernement. That said, Galicia was also littered with new corpses and mass graves. So was Rear Army Area South, to which the Donbas (Donets Basin) and Crimea belonged, and which did not have a German civilian administration. In fact, no military occupation regime in European history had ever been as brutal as this one. The German armed forces in the military zone of occupation were responsible for mass crimes, mainly because the Wehrmacht had become thoroughly nazified and its leaders largely shared Hitler's views on Jews and Slavs.
Two southern Ukrainian regions were fully rejoined with the Romanian state: northern Bukovina (with Chernivtsi) and the Bessabarian south of the current Odesa oblast. Other southwestern Ukrainian regions between the Southern Buh and Dniester rivers, including the city of Odesa, became part of Transnistria. Formally separate from the Romanian state, this entity had thirteen districts or counties and a governor, Gheorghe Alexianu. Transnistria had about two hundred ghettos, concentration camps, and penal labor camps. The most lethal of these, where Romanians and Ukrainian and ethnic German policemen carried out mass shootings of Jews, were in the Holta district at Akhmechetka, Bohdanivka, and Domanivka.
Jews, Roma, and psychiatric patients
The victims of Nazi murder were mainly Jews, Roma, psychiatric patients, and prisoners of war. On the eve of the Second World War, about five percent of Soviet Ukraine's population was of Jewish descent. By the middle of 1941, there were about 2.7 million Jews within present-day Ukraine's borders (those internationally recognized as of 2016). During the German-led war against the Soviet Union, a stunning proportion of them, some 1.5 million, died at the hands of Germans as well as Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and others. About 60 percent of the pre-war Jewish population was murdered. Some 900,000 Jews had fled or were evacuated to the east in time, mostly from the industrialized eastern Dnieper bend and the Donbas. But in Ukraine's western regions, the Jewish communities of Galicia, Volhynia, and Podolia were exterminated almost in full. In eastern Galicia, just a few percent of the Jews survived; in Volhynia, even less. Overall, only about 100,000 Jews survived in Ukraine while it was under Nazi rule.
Soon after the invasion that began in late June 1941, ever greater proportions of Jews were murdered. This process included able-bodied men (early July); Jews among the prisoners of war (middle of July); and then also women and children (late August). Although some individual SS officers had begun shooting Jewish women and children, the expansion of the shootings was driven from the top, mainly by the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln. It is a little-known fact that Romania initially acted even more radically. Hence, from the very start, while Germans were focusing on Jewish men, in little-known Bukovinian and Bessarabian places the Romanian invaders shot not only Jewish men but also women and children.
Pogroms may be defined as spontaneous or seemingly spontaneous acts of anti-Jewish violence by locals. They erupted in June and July 1941, soon after the start of the German invasion, in regions of western Ukraine that less than two years before had recently been occupied by the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were killed in pogroms in numerous localities, including the cities of Lviv and Ternopil. Principal responsibility remained with the invaders, who wanted and encouraged such pogroms. Nevertheless, radical Ukrainian nationalists were involved, if only because of their own propaganda. For instance, when Germans occupied Lviv on June 30, 1941, supporters of Stepan Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists told the people in a proclamation that "Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, the Jews are your enemies. Destroy them." [1] The next day, a pogrom by all kinds of perpetrators began and climaxed in the German shooting of hundreds of Jews.
After the pogroms, there were in Ukraine some two thousand German murder actions that took the form of shootings of large and small groups of Jews. The transition toward mass shootings took place at a breathtaking speed. An important watershed event, which established that Germans would murder entire Jewish communities, was the mass shooting of 23,600 Jews in Kamianets-Podilskyi, a town near the pre-1939 border between Poland and Romania.
Kyiv became the first large city anywhere in Europe where virtually all its Jewish inhabitants were murdered in one stroke, mainly on 29 and 30 September 1941. Less than a week later, mines that were deliberately placed by the departing NKVD and Red Army engineers exploded, setting off a fire that demolished most of the city center. Analogously, the Romanian occupiers killed about 25,000 of the about 90,000 Jews in Odesa in two days in October 1941, after a Soviet mine there killed a Romanian general and sixty officers and soldiers.
In the second half of 1942, a second and final wave of mass shootings began and moved from eastern to western Ukraine, murdering the remaining Jews. Here eastern Galicia stood out in the sense that mass shootings also occurred there late in the war and that its Jews were also deported and gassed in the death camp of Bełżec.
Ukraine had Jewish ghettos, places where Jews were concentrated with restrictions on entry and departure. Mostly existing in eastern Galicia and Volhynia, and mostly set up by the German Army, they were meant to fully isolate and then kill the inmates. Besides the ghettos there were numerous forced labor camps; those around Transit Highway 4 first held local Jews and then Jewish deportees from Transnistria.
Growing international awareness of the shootings and the diminishing prospects for a German victory in the war prompted a Nazi effort to destroy the evidence; that is the corpses of the dead. A Special Commando 1005 forced prisoners to unearth the mass graves with the Jewish (and non-Jewish) victims.
Ukraine's Roma were also exterminated for racist reasons. Little is known about that history, which largely remains to be written. In southern Ukraine, including Crimea, sedentary Roma were shot already from the fall of 1941, without differentiating them from the so-called itinerant Gyspsies being killed by the Nazis in other regions. Merging of the treatment of all Roma with that of the Jews was the personal initiative of Otto Ohlendorf, the leader of Einsatzgruppe D.
Psychiatric patients were also systematically murdered. In Kyiv, for instance, starting with the Jews among them, almost eight hundred were shot or gassed in four waves, and buried in or near Babyn Yar.
Prisoners of war
The other large group killed in the German massacres were the Soviet prisoners of war, a term which can be misleading. Some of these prisoners did not consider themselves "Soviet," and they actually included many who were not formally soldiers but NKVD troops, the People's Levy, railroad workers, and civilians building fortifications.
French, British, American, and Canadian military men in German captivity, even if they were of Jewish descent, were very likely to survive World War II. In stark contrast, between 2.8 and 3 million persons considered to be Soviet POWs died in German captivity in Ukraine and beyond, and about a third did so while near the frontline. (The number specifically for Ukraine is difficult to establish.)
Almost always, Jews among the prisoners were immediately shot. Meanwhile, from the Nazi perspective, the inferior Slavs could be useful. That was why POWs identified as Ukrainian often were released, especially in 1941. Unofficial Ukrainian Red Cross societies played an important role in these releases. But many soldiers in the Wehrmacht evidently assumed that Bolshevism, the vicious ideology and political party supposedly created by "Jewry," had irreversibly "infected" all soldiers whom they called Russian, regardless of their actual ethnic background. In this nazified frame of mind, such "Russians" were either superfluous or positively dangerous.
Therefore, not only guidelines and orders — such as the "Commissar Order," a death verdict on military commissars issued even before the invasion — but also racism created an unmistakable scenario: the deliberate destruction of most of the POWs. The starvation, abuse, and shooting of the "Russian" POWs was not solely due to racism. But that factor did make it possible to embark on the abuse and murder in the first place.
After initial shootings, the prisoners were marched westward via transit camps toward permanent camps, often for very long distances. These are best described as death marches, for German (and Hungarian) army escorts shot on sight fugitives and stragglers, and mostly prevented locals from giving the prisoners food or water. Because the harvest of 1941 was excellent, the German authorities and the native population had plenty of food to spare. The latter tried hard to pass some of it on, but German policy makers wanted most of the prisoners to die, and so they deliberately starved the numerous POWs who could not work. Feeding non-working POWs was even proclaimed "wrongheaded humanity." [2]
Camp guards often shot at civilians who tried to save lives. Had those civilians not been obstructed, and had the escorts and camp guards behaved in a more humane fashion, hundreds of thousands of lives could and would have been saved. Unless prisoners got out through release or escape, their only chance for survival was to be selected for daytime work outside the camp. Flight attempts by Soviet POWs were a daily event, whether during the marches, in the camps, and at the work sites. The escapes were often facilitated by outsiders.
Peasants and city dwellers
Peasants who had not been members of a Soviet collective farm had to join its German successor, the "communal" farm, and all members had to actually work there, even — unlike before 1941 — the women with small children. Regulations on the duration of that labor became more and more strict. Machine-Tractor Stations often became bases for supervision of the farms. The supervisors — Germans, Dutch, and apparently also natives — tended to be ruthless and to force peasants to work even on important holidays. Worst of all, Germans abused the peasants for the smallest things, such as not saying a proper greeting, failing to do so at once, or having one's hands in one's pockets.
Many peasants had on average more food at their disposal in the two to three years of German rule than they used to have under Soviet rule, mainly because they worked their gardens well and because for a long time the German system of supervision and requisition was less efficient than its Soviet predecessor. But the main problem for the peasants was that collective farming remained and eventually became what they considered full-blown serfdom. The ever-increasing abuse and violence were why, eventually, most peasants feared for their lives whenever a German was around. Moreover, girls and women knew they could be arrested and locked up somewhere in an army brothel.
Terror and food shortages were the key elements of everyday city life. In the cities, passers-by could be forced to watch public hangings of those labeled saboteurs or Jews. [see Plate XII] Inhabitants of large cities also saw gas vans speeding by. They called them mobile gas-chambers, each of which could hold fifty prisoners. They were the dushehubka — destroyers of the soul. Shots resounded from many killing sites down to the very end of Nazi rule. And that included Babyn Yar. City dwellers also constantly encountered overt racism. Germans never stood in line and always could claim a seat in trams. There came insults ("Russian pig!") and widespread and official physical abuse, even for misunderstanding something. Making ends meet was hard, particularly for intellectuals. For instance, in early 1942, all institutes of higher education in the Reichskommissariat were closed.
In the winter of 1941–1942, there was a major famine in Crimea, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians and prisoners of war starved to death. In Kyiv and Kharkiv, meanwhile, large numbers starved to death in artificial famines deliberately created by the German authorities in order to get rid of human beings considered useless or dangerous. There was plenty of food around these cities, even late in 1941; consequently, peasants were eager to barter with the proceeds of their rich harvest. But police cordons were set up with the express purpose of confiscating "surplus" food. Everything was confiscated unless a large bribe was paid. If not, peasants and city dwellers were blocked from venturing into or out of urban centers. In July 1942, for instance, General Commissar Waldemar Magunia banned "free" or "illicit" food trade in Kyiv. [3] Although the blockades were not total, they nonetheless cost many lives.
Ten thousand may approach the number of famine deaths in Kyiv. But famine was not the only reason for the drop in the city's population in less than two years, from an estimated 400,000 in October to 300,000 in 1943. Flight, deportation to Germany, and Nazi shootings also played their part in the precipitous drop of numbers.
For a long time, the frontline remained only fifty kilometers away from the eastern city of Kharkiv. Although it was the largest Soviet city ever occupied by the Germans, the number of inhabitants was less than 500,000. While the Germans ruled Kharkiv from October 1941 to August 1943 (except for four weeks early in 1943), the city commander demanded "extreme harshness" toward the locals and he had, as he wrote to other Germans, "no interest whatsoever" in feeding them. [4]
At least 30,000 Kharkivans starved to death. This figure is the minimum because of unclarity about the famine deaths far beyond the city: emaciated Kharkivans who were deported and died from exhaustion on their way to the Reich, or soon after arriving there. It is clear, however, that in no other city in Europe occupied by the German armed forces did so many who were not Jewish suffer and die from famine.
Deportations to Germany
Early in 1942, in the wake of many mass shootings of Ukraine's Jews and Roma and a winter of hunger for prisoners and city-dwellers, the German authorities launched a campaign to obtain laborers for factories and farms in the Reich. They had not anticipated such a campaign before the war, but now felt the need to alleviate the unexpected labor shortages in Greater Germany. Some financial assistance was provided to the family members of the Ostarbeiter (Eastern Workers), as they were called in the Reich. [see Plate XII] After news about the bad working conditions in Germany spread, many Ukrainians became terrified of being sent there. In order to be disqualified, many people in Ukraine mutilated themselves. Some were convinced that they would die in Germany, whether from famine or Allied bombs. They also started to doubt that Germans were only murdering Jews and Roma. Contemporary songs and sayings about the deportations expressed profound sadness.
When there were no more volunteers, the Germans sent out commissions to carry out the deportations. Local administrators in Ukraine were threatened with death if they could not supply the assigned total of "recruits." Sometime in late 1942, native officials no longer had to supply a certain number of people, but simply all people of a certain age. Hence, it was not just German policemen, but raion leaders, city mayors, and auxiliary policemen who started to arrest people for deportation. Roundups became a frequent phenomenon at city markets. Those who tried to escape were shot at. In the countryside, the police simply went from house to house.
Still frustrated, the regime took even harsher action, ordering for instance, in the Volhynia-Podolia General District, the burning of the homes of those who refused to go, and confining relatives to labor camps as hostages. Entire villages went up in flames. The boarding of the deportation trains also produced highly violent and emotional scenes. Soon more and more auxiliary policemen, realizing that Germany was losing the war, began issuing warnings of upcoming roundups, and sometimes helping people to escape.
One in every forty inhabitants of the Reichskommissariat and Rear Army Area South combined was deported by August 1943. Ultimately, 1,500,000 people from these two Ukrainian regions ended up in Germany's Third Reich. They were mostly from villages, but the deportations affected almost every family in Ukraine.
Auxiliaries
Particularly in the Reichskommissariat, the "Ukrainian auxiliary administration," as it was collectively called, consisted of city administrations each headed by a mayor, raion administrations each headed by a raion chief, and village administrations each headed by a village elder (starosta). These figures played an important role in Nazi rule, if only because the invader initially lacked detailed knowledge of local affairs. But there was no one body representing the Ukrainian populace as a whole. In that sense, Ukrainians in Galicia were better off, having a local branch of the Cracow-based Ukrainian Central Committee, led by Volodymyr Kubijovyč.
The earliest local police formations, particularly in western Ukraine, appeared as militias with little or no German involvement right after the invasion started. After a while the Einsatzgruppen or the German military reduced the size of these militias, not least by expelling many OUN members. In the Reichskommissariat alone, there were eventually about 80,000 police auxiliaries — four times as many as German policemen.
The police auxiliaries played a key role in intimidating, abusing, robbing, arresting, guarding, and sometimes even personally murdering Jews. They also transported Jews from the countryside to major cities for questioning, which was generally followed by murder. Wherever ghettos were formed, these policemen tended to plunder and guard them. The sad climax of their participation in the Holocaust came during the second half of 1942, when they drove the victims and stood guard at the shooting pits.
The level of involvement in these actions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, be it the faction led by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B) or the faction led by Andrii Melnyk (OUN-M), remains problematic and is far from a "case closed." A good example is the large Bukovinian Battalion. This unit was comprised of thousands of Ukrainians of the OUN Melnyk faction, which in early August 1941 left Bukovina for Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Some writers say that they have established beyond doubt that the men and women of the Bukovinian Battalion were not in Kyiv during the Babyn Yar massacre — and therefore could have been involved in it in any way. On the other hand, some Ukrainian emigrés (among them Yaroslav Haivas) have recalled that thousands of nationalists [5] were in nearby Zhytomyr for an important funeral in late August 1941, and that "as soon as Kyiv was liberated from the Bolsheviks, everyone wanted to be there and at once. They were unstoppable." [6] Indeed, Bukovinians did arrive in Kyiv while the Khreshchatyk "was burning," [7] and one Jewish survivor (Viktor Stadnik) recalled seeing them in the city center in September. The question, then, is whether one can rule out the arrival of all of the Bukovinians in that month.
The relationship between the Germans and the Ukrainian nationalist activists deteriorated quickly. First, in the summer of 1941, the OUN-B began to be persecuted, mainly because that faction refused to annul its declaration of Ukrainian statehood made in Lviv on the day (June 30, 1941) that the German Army arrived in the city. The OUN-M, which was particularly active in Kyiv, was suppressed as well. Nevertheless, it generally remained open to the possibility of collaboration with Germany.
Partisans
The OUN-B mostly broke with Germany in early 1943, in particular after it set up in central and southern Volhynia a large Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Historians generally agree that, like so many other partisan forces in Europe during World War II, the UPA perpetrated massacres of innocent civilians, in this case mainly Poles. The Soviet partisans also made a big impact on everyday life. They engaged in sabotage, distributed leaflets and newspapers, but at least as high on their agenda was killing, and not just of Germans. Ukraine's NKVD had as its official goal systematically to "exterminate" the "fascist" regime that was set up in Ukraine. The Soviet partisans seemingly paid little or no attention to the consequences of their actions for locals.
The predominant German reaction to partisan activity was to kill and burn, with careful planning and horrible precision, some 50,000 people. This often happened in the wake of village burnings, especially in northern Ukraine, where sustained partisan activity was made possible by protection from the abundance of forests. Nevertheless, the Germans destroyed over three hundred villages fully or in part. One of the earliest casualties of these assaults in the Reichskommissariat became the village of Kortelisy near Ratne in the Polissia region. On 23 September 1943, auxiliary policemen and a German police company based in Brest-Litovsk (with mainly policemen from Nuremberg) surrounded the village. After ordering everyone, including all the children, to assemble, they shot nearly 2,900 inhabitants with submachine guns and pistols, or drowned them, or bayonetted them to death.
In February 1943, Soviet partisans led by Oleksii Fedorov attacked the garrison in the small town of Koriukivka in the Chernihiv region, in an attempt to liberate hostages. The garrison consisted of German soldiers, Hungarians, and auxiliary policemen. In the terrible revenge that followed, on 1 and 2 March, the entire town was annihilated. Survivors were finished off on 9 March. Koriukivka had become an ash heap filled with the remains of thousands of people. This was just one group among the many who lost their lives as direct or indirect result of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.
Notes
[1] "Ukraïns’kyi Narode!," poster, available in fascimile and in English translation at https://training.ehri-project.eu/a04-nationalist-placard-posted-lviv-30-june-1941-incites-pogroms [last accessed June 3, 2021].
[2] Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 100.
[3] Karel C. Berkhoff, "‘Wir sollen verhungern, damit Platz für die Deutschen geschaffen wird’: Hungersnöte in den ukrainischen Städten im Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Jörg Morré and Babette Quinkert, eds., Deutsche Besatzung in der Sowjetunion. Vernichtungskrieg. Reaktionen. Erinnerung (Paderbron: Vlg. Ferdinand Schöningh), p. 61.
[4] Berkhoff, "‘Wir sollen verhungeren’," p. 58.
[5] Iaroslav Haivas, "V roky nadii i beznadiï (Zustrichi i rozmovy z O. Ol’zhychem v rokakh 1939–1944)," in Kalendar-al’manakh Novoho Shliakhu 1977 (Toronto, Ontario: Drukom i nakladom "Novoho Shliakhu," [n.d.]), p. 108.
[6] Iaroslav Haivas, Koly kinchalasia epokha (Chicago: Українсько-Американськa Видавничa Спілкa, 1964), p. 59.
[7] Petro Voinovs’kyi, Moie naivyshche shchastia (Kyiv: Vyd-vo im. Oleny Telihy, 1999), p. 254.
