The mass murder of Jews at Babyn Yar in Kyiv during World War II started Nazi Germany on the path that ultimately led to the Holocaust’s gas chambers.
The massacre, in which almost 34,000 Jews were murdered on Sept. 28-29, 1941, alone, was carried out by German soldiers with the help of local citizens in Kyiv. The killings convinced the Nazis that the “Jewish question” could be answered by mass slaughter, U.S. historian and Yale University professor Timothy Snyder said during a news conference at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center in Kyiv on Sept. 27.
From 1941-1945, Adolf Hitler and the German forces he commanded were responsible for the murder of six million Jews.
The massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar in the two-day period in 1941 was conducted by goups of German soldiers with the help of locals. The Babyn Yar massacre, and other similar events throughout occupied Eastern Europe, established a method of killing for the Germans – mass shooting – through which they killed 2.4 million Jews, according to Snyder. The number of Nazi German victims killed in Babyn Yar later grew to 100,000, two thirds of whom were Jews.
When the Nazis invaded Ukraine and the Soviet Union in 1941 they had yet to come up with their “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” According to Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, one of Hitler’s previous plan had been to deport Europe’s Jews to Madagascar.
“The decision to exterminate the Jews came to him (Hitler) only when he invaded Ukraine,” Hrytsak said on Ukraine’s Espresso TV television channel on Sept. 26.
By the end of September 1941, the Germans had settled on the method of mass murder, according to which their troops shot the Jews, and local Soviet citizens – Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians – helped them round up their victims.
“Using this model, the Germans would kill 95 percent (2.4 million) of the Jews who came under their control in the occupied Soviet Union,” Snyder said at the news conference at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center. The event was entitled “Remembering the Holocaust, and the Future of Europe.”
Snyder said that the Holocaust had not started with the gas chambers at Poland’s Auschwitz concentration camp, but with the mass shootings in Ukraine. It was only later that the Nazis started to carry out murder on an industrial scale, using gas chambers.
“In the West, and even to some extent in the East, when we think of the Holocaust, we think of Auschwitz, but Auschwitz comes later,” Snyder said.
Hrytsak suggested the Babyn Yar massacre should be seen as being at the same level of atrocity as the later Nazi crimes at Auschwitz.
According to Snyder, there were three major causes for the massacre in Kyiv. The first was Hitler’s desire for “lebensraum,” or “living space” for his “Aryan master race” of Germans.
“The purpose of Hitler’s war was to conquer Ukraine,” Snyder said. Although Nazi Germany first went to war with Britain, France and the rest of Europe, Hitler’s main goal had been to attack and conquer the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, he said.
“Without that idea, and without that war, Babyn Yar could not have happened,” Snyder said.
The second reason Babyn Yar happened, Snyder said, was one of ideology. For Hitler, the Jews were not only racially inferior, like Ukrainians, but the people behind ideas that would prevent Germany from dominating the world, such as capitalism and communism.
“Any set of rules, ethics, laws, Hitler thought, came from the Jews,” Snyder said, adding that this belief had motivated Hitler to attempt to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population.
The third factor causing the Holocaust was the lawlessness brought by the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union. In these conditions, Nazi soldiers did not even acknowledge the murder of the Jews as being a crime. “In order to kill the Jews, they had to be separated from the law,” Snyder said.
Before Ukraine’s independence, the facts of the Babyn Yar tragedy were distorted and hidden from the public, first by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets, Snyder said. He added that commemorations of the massacre, such as the ones planned for the 75th anniversary of the killings, wouldn’t have been possible in 1993 when he visited Ukraine for the first time.
In 2016, commemorations of the Holocaust victims of Babyn Yar are taking place during the week up to Sept. 30. They follow the opening of the Synagogue Memorial in Lviv, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in the Lviv ghetto and concentration camps.
According to Snyder, this remembrance of the Holocaust will help Ukrainians form their nation.
“If Ukrainians do not understand what the place (Babyn Yar) is, the Ukrainian nation has no chance of understanding itself,” Snyder said in an interview on Sept. 27 with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty television.
