On the morning of September 29, 1941, columns of people began moving through the streets of Kiev toward the corner of Melnikova and Doktorivska streets. They carried documents, valuables, and warm clothes, as the notices posted across the city had instructed. The announcements, appearing in the final days of September, ordered all Jews of the Ukrainian capital to gather at that designated point. For disobedience, there was the threat of immediate execution.
The German authorities had already taken a further step to ensure compliance. The SS arrested nine leading rabbis of Kiev and forced them to make a statement: after sanitation, the Jews and their children would be transported to safe places. The so-called safe place was Babi Yar, a ravine on the northern edge of the city. This was not the first killing at Babi Yar, nor would it be the last.
On September 27, two days before the mass gathering, 752 patients from a nearby psychiatric clinic were shot and buried there. The Nazis, who regarded the mentally ill as human garbage, had begun their work in the ravine before the larger operation even started. The decision to seize Kiev had come from the highest levels of the German command. In mid-July 1941, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht made a strategic decision to further develop the offensive against Soviet territory.
On July 19, Hitler issued Directive Number 33, ordering a change in the main objectives of the campaign. Before the onset of winter, German forces were to take the Donbas and the Crimea in the south, and Leningrad, present-day Saint Petersburg, in the north, while joining with the Finns. The directive noted that the active actions and freedom of maneuver of the northern flank of Army Group South were constrained by the fortifications of Kiev and by the actions in the rear of the Fifth Soviet Army. The Wehrmacht paid special attention to the capture of the Ukrainian capital, seeking to take the city even by means of total destruction.
The ideologists of fascism were preparing another crime alongside the military campaign. Before the war, about fifty thousand Jews lived in Kiev. With the outbreak of hostilities on Soviet territory, many fled the city to the east, inland. Others went to the front.
Most of those who remained were scheduled to be shot. The hunt for Jews began as soon as the Nazis took Kiev. Jews were caught in the streets and courtyards and beaten. Special Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, were formed under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the security police and the SD.
Each group consisted of about eight hundred to twelve hundred men. Officers were mainly selected from the Gestapo, the SD, the SS, and the criminal police. Men were drawn from the Waffen-SS, the Gestapo, the order police, and the local police. In the field, the Einsatzgruppen were allowed to request personnel assistance from the Wehrmacht, which invariably provided the necessary men upon request.
At Babi Yar, the ditches and ravines made everything easier for the executioners. They did not have to dig deep graves for thousands of corpses. The place was distant from the center of the city, easy to hide from curious people, and the shots could not be heard. When the columns of doomed inhabitants arrived, they were led to the edge of the huge grave.
Of the total number of persons destined for execution, fifteen were led each time to the edge. There they knelt with their faces looking into the grave. At that time, clothes and valuables were not yet collected; that changed later. The firing platoons consisted of Sonderkommando 4A, the militia, and the police.
When people were ready for the execution, one of the leaders in charge of the firing squad would give the order to shoot. As they knelt at the edge of the mass grave, the victims usually fell immediately into it. It was a vertical conveyor of death. The Einsatzgruppe C, reporting on its operations in Kiev until October 12, 1941, stated that Sonderkommando 4A had reached a total of more than 51,000 executions, number 3155.
The massacre at Babi Yar continued until the end of the occupation of Kiev in November 1943. Hostages, underground fighters, and partisans were shot there. Prisoners of the nearby Syretsky concentration camp were killed. Gypsies were shot.
On January 10, 1942, about a hundred captured sailors of the Dnieper Detachment of the Pinsk military flotilla were killed. And on February 18, 1943, participating in the famous Death Match, players of the Kiev soccer club Dynamo, Nikolai Trusevich, Ivan Kuzmenko, and Alexei Klimenko, were executed. The man who commanded the killings at Babi Yar was Wilhelm Hermann Paul Blobel, a Nazi German officer, an SS-Standartenführer, and commander of Sonderkommando 4A, part of Einsatzgruppe C. He later testified about the nature of his unit.
Sonderkommando 4A of the Einsatzgruppen were originally created as death squads. Not every mentally healthy person would be able to endure hours of executions accompanied by the horrific screams of dying people. If earlier mass shootings were carried out not only by the SS and security officers but also by ordinary German police officers, civilian representatives, officers, and soldiers of the Wehrmacht, then after Babi Yar only executioners absolutely indifferent to the suffering of others remained in Sonderkommando. Only a criminal of the highest caliber could command this refined collection of executioners and sadists.
Blobel became a product of fascism, its beastly grin. Bricklayer, carpenter, architect, these were the main professions of the average young German who later gravitated toward the ideas of National Socialism. Blobel joined the NSDAP in 1931, party card number 844662. He became a member of the SS in early 1932, SS number 29100.
His Nazi career skyrocketed from ordinary clerk in the municipality of Solingen to head of the SS in Düsseldorf in just two years. As coordinator of the looting and collection of valuables from the ruined synagogues in Solingen, Wuppertal, and Remscheid, Blobel showed his abilities in looting and brutal treatment of the Jews. No wonder that by the beginning of the war it was exactly he who became commander of Sonderkommando 4A. The assignment of the special SS unit was determined precisely: the extermination of the Jewish population.
The former architect in charge of the assassins meticulously reported on all acts of extermination of the Jews, stating the number of those executed. According to documents of the international tribunal, Blobel’s team was responsible for the deaths of over sixty thousand people. Blobel recounted his crimes in a bland and monotonous manner as a defendant. He testified that his firing squads always aimed at the heads of the victims.
If, as he explained, the victim was not hit, then a member of the firing squad would approach with the rifle at a distance of three paces and shoot. The scene of the victim looking at the executor approaching with his rifle, pointing at him and firing at him from three paces, is a horror for which there are no words. Much later, the International Military Tribunal in its decision of October 1, 1946, declared that the Einsatzgruppen and the security police were responsible for the murder of two million defenseless people. Blobel’s cynicism and indifference to the fate of others astounded even the judges involved in the Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947-1948.
When the executioner of Babi Yar was shown documentary evidence of his involvement in the deaths of sixty thousand people, the former SS man cynically declared that his guilt was determined by somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand people shot. He added to his justification that faith and discipline led him to the gallows. The pathetic attempts to avoid the deserved punishment did not help. The commander of Sonderkommando 4A, part of Einsatzgruppe C, who had carried out the mass shootings at Babi Yar, was found guilty on all counts.
The sentence was pronounced on April 10, 1948. For several more years, Blobel was held in solitary confinement, living with the fear of his death. On June 7, 1951, a sergeant of the Allied Army carried out the sentence.
