What is Babi Yar, and how did the Holocaust unfold in Ukraine?

Babi Yar or, more properly in Ukrainian, Babyn Yar, was a ra­vine on the outskirts of Kyiv that the Nazis turned into a killing field and burial ground for the city's Jews. In just two days in late September 1941, German machine-gunners killed 33,771 Jews there.

On the eve of the Nazi invasion in June 1941, some three million Jews, or a fifth of the world's Jewish population, lived in the Ukrainian SSR. The traditional areas of Jewish settlement in Ukraine included the provinces west of the Dnipro, the birthplace of Hasidism, and also eastern Galicia, the latter having been annexed from Poland in 1939. These were also the first areas that the German army occupied after invading the Soviet Union. In the first days of the occupation of Galicia, the Germans incited the locals to organize Jewish pogroms, which they filmed for documentaries to be shown in Germany. Soon, however, a difference emerged between the ex­termination policies in Galicia (and other former Polish lands) and the rest of the Nazi-occupied Ukrainian SSR. In Galicia, which the Nazis included in the same administrative unit along with parts of Poland, Jews were herded into ghettos, which the Nazis sub­sequently emptied in waves of deportations to death camps and shootings carried out on location. In the Ukrainian lands further east, mobile SS execution groups usually shot the Jews immediately.

Hiding or assisting Jews in any way carried the punishment of death, yet as of 2015, Israel has recognized 2,515 Ukrainians with the honorary title of Righteous Among The Nations for saving Jews. This is the fourth greatest number of such heroes after Poland, France, and the Netherlands.⁹

The total number of Ukrainian Jews killed during the Holocaust is estimated at 900,000 to a million people. A significant number of Ukrainian Jews survived by retreating with the Soviets; many also fought in the ranks of the Red Army. Nevertheless, after the war Jews never again constituted such a notable share of Ukraine's pop­ulation, and they also left in large numbers when legal immigration to Israel and the West became possible.

Nazi occupation policies toward ethnic Ukrainians and other Slavs did not call for their immediate extermination, unless they could also be identified as communists or homosexuals. However, Hitler planned to turn Ukraine into an area of German agricultural colonization, which in the long run meant decimating the local Slavs and turning the survivors into a slave labor force. With this aim in mind, the German authorities abolished schooling beyond the fourth grade and denied medical care to Ukrainians. They blockaded the delivery of food supplies to major cities, causing famine in Kyiv. The Nazis also treated Red Army POWs inhumanely, with over half of them dying of malnutrition and disease. Scholars estimate the total losses of Ukraine's civilian population in World War II (in­cluding the victims of the Holocaust) at 5 million, with a further 1.5 million of the republic's residents killed in action while serving in the Red Army.