when the Nazis shot and killed 30,000 Jews in a single day

German, Israeli and Ukrainian Presidents Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Isaac Herzog and Volodimir Zelensky together commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Baby Yar massacre on Wednesday, one of the worst dramas World War II, the day the Nazis slaughtered 33,000 Jews in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine and then one of the main cities in the European territory of the Soviet Union.

At the Babi Yar ravine, to one of the largest mass graves of the planet, lie the remains of more than 100,000 people. The majority of Jews but also Ukrainian nationalists, gypsies, Soviet soldiers taken prisoner and even patients in Kiev psychiatric hospitals. Anyone the Nazis considered inferior.

September 27, 1941. The Nazis had occupied Kiev ten days earlier. On this day they appear on the city walls occupier’s orders. All Jews in Kiev and the surrounding area must report on September 29, two days later, at eight in the morning, at the intersection of Melnikov and Degtyarev streets.

The newspaper explains that the Jews, who then numbered 120,000 of the city’s 900,000 inhabitants, must bring their documentation, money, your jewelry or other valuables and dresses for the winter. Some thought they were going to be kicked out. The text ends: “Those who do not obey this order and are found will be executed.”

The executions began on the same day, September 27, by units of the Nazi security police and the Einsatzgruppen of the SS with the murder of 752 patients hospitalized in psychiatry Ivan-Pavlov. It was a snack for the Nazis.

From September 29 to October 3, thousands of Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators. The executions continued during the two years that Kiev was under the Nazi boot. In total in Babi Yar more than 100,000 people were shot dead, 33,000 in a single day, this September 29.

The massacre is carnage. The German Nazis and their Ukrainian assistants bring the Jews into the ranks of the soldiers, who beat them. Immediately after, they are pushed towards the embankment which leads to the bottom of the ravine, where they are forced to undress for just after shoot them.

Many are forced to lie down, naked, on the bodies lying at the bottom and they are shot in the head or in the back. Some, injured, scream for hours. In the end, the Nazis cover these thousands of bodies with cal.

The massacre is organized over time after two days of blood and fire. From there they will take place twice a week.

A silent massacre

Babi Yar is one of the longest-silenced Nazi massacres. Commemorations began in Ukraine less than 20 years ago. The Soviet Union, which controlled present-day Ukraine and the site of the massacre, never gave it real importance that he had always minimized these facts so as not to recognize that most of the victims were Jewish.

It was even forbidden to commemorate the massacre and in the 1960s it was studied the construction of a football stadium on the site killings. Even in 2009, the Kyiv city council proposed the construction of a hotel to house supporters who would attend matches of the 2012 European Football Championship. These ideas were eventually abandoned.

In 1976, when the thaw of the Soviet Union began, a memorial was first built in memory of the victims, but nowhere did it speak of Jews, but of “Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.”

In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, a memorial was established menorah shaped (candelabra with seven branches). Trees have grown over the years and Babi Yar today it is a forest.

Brussels, special

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