Fifty-seven years ago this week, Kyiv suffered its worst destruction since it was sacked and razed by the Mongols in the 13th century. Almost all of the major buildings along Khreshchatyk and its adjoining streets were blown up with mines and dynamite and set on fire with incendiary devices.
The destruction was carried out not by foreign invaders, but by the agents of the Soviet government that had ruled Ukraine since 1921. The Soviet state never admitted to the operation or published any documents on it. The only available evidence on the Kyiv inferno in the public domain comes from the internal communications of the Nazi German occupying forces, on which this account is based.
The Nazis were meticulous record keepers, frankly recording even their most gruesome deeds – apparently expecting to be glorified for them after the war. Those records make clear the Germans were caught by surprise by the destruction of downtown Kyiv, and lost many men in the bombings.
The Germans move in
The German Army's first assault on Kyiv took place only three weeks after its invasion of the USSR. On July 10, 1941, the Panzer tank divisions of the German 6th Army broke through the Soviet line of defenses and approached the outskirts of Kyiv.
However, the first German attack on Kyiv failed, as did many more. The outskirts of Kyiv were defended by a massive Soviet armed force totaling over 800,000 men under the command of Lieutenant General Mikhail Kirponos. Of its five armies, the most powerful was the 37th, commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, who after he was captured served the Nazis as the commander of the Russian Army of Liberation.
On Sept. 11, the more mobile German forces encircled Kyiv's defenders. Only 151,000 Soviet troops succeeded in breaking through the encirclement. The bulk of the defenders, some 677,000 men, were captured. The 6th Army finally captured Kyiv on Sept. 19, 1941, sustaining heavy losses in men and equipment in the process.
On retreating, the Soviet Army blew water-pumping and electricity stations and removed large stocks of food. They also stripped or sabotaged 197 factories in Kyiv and evacuated most of their employees, as well as the staffs of 32 secondary schools and institutions of higher learning. In total, some 335,000 people were evacuated to the east, including the whole Soviet elite and their children.
Literally all the males between the ages of 14 and 50 were either evacuated or drafted into the army. However, many of those drafted found themselves captured by the Germans after the encirclement of Kyiv.
Despite the Soviets' best efforts, there were still large supplies of goods left behind. The SD, the intelligence service of the SS, reported: 'The Wehrmacht first of all systematically secured public buildings, factories and stocks of the scarcest goods, so that no large plunder occurred either by members of the Wehrmacht or by the population.'
The Germans found that Kyiv's pre-war population of 850,000 had shrunk by half, and was mostly composed of women, children and the elderly. The German census of April 1, 1942, counted 352,000 people in Kyiv. That census did not include at least 50,000 Jews, mostly women, children and the elderly, who were in Kyiv when it fell and later were murdered by the SS.
Before the occupation of Kyiv, the SS worried that Stepan Bandera's wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) might attempt to seize power in Kyiv as it had in Lviv on June 30, 1941. But the SS liquidated that threat with numerous arrests of OUN-B partisans, and by the time Kyiv was occupied, the most the OUN-B managed in Kyiv was to clandestinely distribute leaflets.
But the SS's intelligence service greatly underestimated the threat posed by the NKVD – the Political National Commissariat for Internal Affairs, forerunner to the KGB. Before the German occupation, the NKVD had planted explosives with timers in almost all of the major buildings of downtown Kyiv, and left agents behind to detonate the explosives. The German conquerors proved to be easy victims.
An NKVD welcome
After three months fighting and sleeping in the fields, the officers of the 6th Army and German Army South Group looked forward to billeting in apartment buildings and hotels, especially along Kyiv's main downtown thoroughfare, Khreshchatyk Street.
The city was relatively untouched by fighting. The front lines were well away from it and the Germans carried out little aerial bombardment. The German Army command for Kyiv took over the Children's World building, located on the Passazh between Horodetska and Luteranska. The staff of the German Army Southern Group selected the Hotel Continental. The Soviet House of Doctors became a social center for German officers. The SS set up its headquarters appropriately in the former NKVD building, where the Kino Palace is today. The 6th Army Artillery Staff took over Kyiv's Citadel, a complex of military fortifications and buildings from the 18th and 19th century, located across from the Pecherska Lavra.
From the first day of the occupation, the SS heard rumors that mines and other explosives were planted in the major buildings. But those reports were not taken seriously, as even the Nazis didn't expect the 'Bolsheviks' to blow up their own city.
The first major explosion went off in the Citadel on Sept. 20, the second day of the occupation. As reported by the SS to its headquarters in Berlin, a delayed-action mine wounded and killed a number of German artillery officers, but not the general of the 6th Army's artillery division, Walther von Seydlitz. (Later, after the 6th Army was annihilated at Stalingrad, von Seydlitz led the Soviets' 'Free Germany' contingent of Germans fighting for the Russian side.)
Yet the German Army and SS intelligence failed to see the significance of the explosion. After a four-day interval of quiet, the city center was hit by a tidal wave of explosions. On Sept. 24, massive explosions blew apart the buildings along Khreshchatyk and its adjoining streets. Incendiary devices accompanied the explosions, causing spectacular fires.
The SS intelligence office in Berlin reported on Oct. 7, 1941: 'On Sept. 24, 1941, an explosion occurred in the offices of the German Rear Area Military Headquarters, which developed during the day into a large fire, particularly through the lack of water. A large part of the city center and several large buildings in the suburbs were destroyed by further explosions and resulting fires.'
The fires spread from Khreshchatyk to adjoining streets, causing the German authorities to evacuate even more apartment buildings and blow some of them up to stop the fires from spreading. An explosion in the former NKVD building caused the SS's Eisensatz Group C to evacuate it and partially blow it up to prevent the fire from engulfing the whole complex, which initially was a castle, later a boarding school for girls and for several years, the office for the NKVD.
'In order to control the fire, the Wehrmacht was forced to blow up more buildings to prevent the fire from spreading to other buildings.
As a result, the offices of the [SS] group staff and of the [special SS commando unit] Sonderkommando 4a had to be evacuated, among others. The office building of the [SS commando] group staff suffered considerably from the explosions. The clearing away of the rubble and repair work will require some time.'
Following massive arrests, the SS found a Soviet mine-laying plan with instructions to place explosives in all public buildings and squares of Kyiv. German army sappers defused 670 explosives in Kyiv. In the NKVD office building, Sonderkommando 4a came across 'approximately 75 so-called 'Molotov cocktails' and rendered them harmless.' At the Lenin Museum, 'the search group of the armed forces found about 70 centner [nearly 4 tons] of explosives … which were to be detonated by a short wave transmitter.'
However, many explosives were undetected and continued to go off. The last explosions took place on Sept. 28, 1941, but the fires continued until Sept. 30.
Long-buried secrets
The inferno left the city center in ruins. The buildings along Khreshchatyk, including the four major hotels – the Continental, the Grand, the International and the Spartak – were burned out shells, as were many buildings along the adjoining streets:
'The fire spread and burned also the parallel streets Pushkin and Meringa, and the cross-roads Prorizna, Institutska, Karl Marx (Horodetska), Fredrick Engels (Luteranska), Passazh.'
The dislocation of people was massive. An SS document reported:
'As a result of the destruction of buildings in particular and of the evacuation of the endangered districts by the authorities, approximately 25,000 persons were deprived of shelter and had to spend the first few days of the occupation outdoors. The inconvenienes resulting from this were accepted by the population with calm. No serious incidents or panic occurred.'
The destruction of Kyiv by the Soviets was unique. No other government in Europe responded to the invasion of the Nazis by destroying one of its own major cities.
Historian Anatoly Kusnetsov collected all of the documents and testimonies on what happened in Kyiv during the Nazi occupation that were available during the Soviet period. In his book Babi Yar, he wrote:
'This was probably the first time in history that an action of this scale and dimension was planned and executed. … Not one capital of Europe met Hitler like Kyiv.'
Imagine the Czechoslovak or French governments ordering the blowing up of Prague's or Paris's city center just because the Nazis were to occupy it. The Soviet government never took any responsibility for the operation, or for the misery and deaths it caused its own civilian population. After the war, it cowardly blamed the destruction of Kyiv's center on the Nazis.
For example, official Soviet historian A. V. Kudrytsky wrote: 'Fascists transformed to ruins the best streets of the city, destroying the most valuable monuments of history and culture. Like real barbarians, they burned and ruined the center of Kyiv, Khreshchatyk and the adjoining streets of Sverdlov, Karl Marx, Engels, October Revolution and others, and blew up the world famous 11th-century monument, the Uspensky Sobor at Kyiv's Pecherska Monastery, burned down the university, the conservatory, and so on.'
It still is not known who gave the orders and who carried them out. Another Soviet secret is yet to be discovered.
The outrage by the Soviet authorities left the civilian population at the mercy of the Nazi occupiers. They took their revenge by organizing a 'gross aktion' (a great action) – a carefully planned murder of Kyiv's Jews, mostly mothers with their children and the elderly, at the Babi Yar ravine on Sept. 29-30.
That part of this story will be told in next Friday's issue of the Post.
