The Germans shoot 33,771 Jews in two days at a ravine outside Kyiv
What happened
Days after German forces captured Kyiv, SS and police units murdered most of the city's remaining Jews at Babyn Yar, a ravine on its outskirts. Victims were summoned to the site, forced to undress, and driven into the ravine, where a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C under SS officer Paul Blobel shot them in small groups over two days, 29 and 30 September 1941. According to the killers' own reports sent up the chain to Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were murdered in that span alone. The site stayed in use afterward: killings there continued until late 1943, and an estimated 100,000 people in total, Jews and non-Jews, were murdered at Babyn Yar under the German occupation.
Why it matters
This is one of the single largest massacres of the entire Holocaust, and its scale fixed the pattern of the genocide's first phase: before any death camp existed, Jews were murdered near their own homes, in the open, by mobile shooting squads moving from city to city behind the advancing front. That the killers themselves counted their victims and reported the precise total up the chain to Berlin, like any other administrative statistic, is exactly why the figure is known down to the individual today.
How we know
The two-day death toll comes directly from the perpetrators' own operational reports, sent to Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin and later recovered as documentary evidence; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia names the responsible unit and commander and documents that killings at the site continued for two more years.
Sources
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Kyiv and Babyn Yar · Reputable sourceencyclopedia.ushmm.org · The domain "encyclopedia.ushmm.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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