Masters of Death (34 page)

In a more extensive report a week later Blobel would acknowledge that “there exists in Kiev a Red sabotage battalion as well as numerous members of the NKVD and of the Communist Party who have orders to commit continuous acts of sabotage,” but inevitably he found it convenient to blame the mining of the Kreshchatik on the Jews: “As has been proved, Jews played a preeminent part. Allegedly 150,000 Jews living here. Verification of these statements has not been possible yet. During the first action, 1,600 arrests were made and measures undertaken for the arrest of all the Jews. Execution of at least 50,000 Jews is anticipated.”

Historians, crediting Blobel’s claims, have presented the executions that followed in Kiev as retaliatory. The justification was nothing more than the usual window dressing; the Jews of Kiev would have been murdered anyway. Jeckeln’s massacre of 23,600 refugees at Kamenets-Podolsky was a month old, and Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D was busy slaughtering 22,467 “Jews and Communists” in the Nikolayev area, near Odessa, 250 miles south of Kiev, even as Blobel was radioing his report.

Anatoli Kuznetsov saw the notice, “printed on cheap gray wrapping paper,” posted throughout Kiev on 28 September 1941, and checked its wording, years later, in the Central State Archives in Moscow. As a twelve-year-old it made him shudder:

All Yids living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o’clock on the morning of Monday, 29 September 1941, at the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets
³²
(near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc.

Any Yid not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot.

Any civilian entering apartments evacuated by Yids and stealing property will be shot.

“This summons was posted all over town by members of the newly-organized Ukrainian militia,” Blobel reported to Berlin. “At the same time it was passed around by word of mouth that all the Jews in Kiev were to be resettled.”

“They started arriving while it was still dark,” Kuznetsov remembers of that cold, windy Monday morning, “to be in good time to get seats in the train.” The ordinary Jews of Kiev believed that the Germans intended to deport them, especially since the assembly point was near the Lukyanovka railway freight yards. Word of the massacres to the west and in Poland had not reached many of them; the Soviet government had suppressed information about the Nazi treatment of the Jews during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the confusion of war had limited communications after Barbarossa. Most of the people young Kuznetsov saw were poor, old, invalid—“sick and unfortunate,” he says; many women and children walked to the assembly point unaccompanied. Able-bodied Jewish men had been drafted into the Red Army and anyone with money or influence had been evacuated eastward. People carried “bundles roughly tied together with string, worn-out cases made from plywood, woven baskets, boxes of carpenters’ tools. . . . Some elderly women were wearing strings of onions hung around their necks like gigantic necklaces — food supplies for the journey.”

“Families baked bread for the journey,” Soviet journalist Lev Ozerov writes, summarizing eyewitness testimony, “sewed knapsacks, rented wagons and two-wheeled carts. Old men and women supported each other while mothers carried their babies in their arms or pushed baby carriages. People were carrying sacks, packages, suitcases, boxes.” Some of them sang, moving through the streets in the brisk early morning. Russians and Ukrainians, friends and relatives, saw their neighbors off, waved from windows. “There were plenty of people on Turgenyev Street,” an eyewitness told Kuznetsov, “and Artem Street was completely jammed. People with bundles, with prams, all sorts of trolleys and carts and even trucks — all standing there, then moving forward a little, then standing still again.” They flowed in crowds from their neighborhoods into Melnikov Street on what had been the old Zhitomir road.

Melnikov led past a Jewish cemetery in northwest Kiev, and immediately beyond the Jewish cemetery a mile-long ravine, a yawning pit, dropped away northeastward down to the Dnieper: Babi Yar. The Einsatzgruppen had become expert at picking killing sites; Babi Yar could have swallowed the entire population of Kiev.

Babi Yar —“babushka ravine,” “grandmother ravine”—ran through Kuznetsov’s neighborhood and had been his childhood playground:

The ravine was enormous, you might even say majestic: deep and wide, like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted you would scarcely be heard on the other.

It is situated between three districts of Kiev — Lukyanovka, Kurenyovka and Syrets—surrounded by cemeteries, woods and [garden] allotments. Down at the bottom ran a little stream with clear water. The sides of the ravine were steep, even overhanging in places; landslides were frequent at Babi Yar.

The explosions and fires had driven Sonderkommando 4a out of its quarters in downtown Kiev. The commando had moved to a stadium near the river, then into the main NKVD building. “The police regiments of the regular police,” Blobel would testify, “as well as the militia units of the Higher SS and Police Leader and of the town commandant, had marched in and were used in combating the fire, and also had to remove Russian explosives and road mines. There were thousands of mines on the roads, even in the city itself. The streets were just filled with mines.” While Blobel was preoccupied with these problems, Jeckeln had planned the Babi Yar
Aktion
along the same basic lines as the Kamenets-Podolsky massacre
.
When the first Jews approached the Jewish cemetery on the morning of 29 September 1941, Sonderkommando 4a, two commandos of Police Regiment South and Ukrainian militia were waiting for them.

Coming up Melnikov Street after their two-mile walk from central Kiev, the victims would begin passing the long brick wall of the cemetery. “At that point,” Kuznetsov writes, “there was a barbed-wire barrier across the street and anti-tank obstacles, with a passage left between them, and there were rows of Germans wearing badges on their chests as well as Ukrainian police in black uniforms with gray cuffs.” A tall Ukrainian in an embroidered shirt with a Cossack mustache gave instructions. A crowd grew in the street before the barrier: people milling, talking, craning to see, children crying, dogs barking somewhere and distant bursts of machine-gun fire. Armed Ukrainians counted out thirty or forty people at a time, watched while they deposited their belongings on the growing pile at streetside and led them through the passage and farther up the street. There, Ozerov reports, “an entire office operation with desks had been set up in an open area.” The headquarters staff of Einsatzgruppe C manned the desks, collecting valuables and documents. “The documents were immediately thrown to the ground,” Ozerov adds, “and witnesses have testified that the square was covered with a thick layer of discarded papers, torn passports and union identification cards.”

Beyond the desks waited a further gauntlet of soldiers with dogs. Kuznetsov describes it as one of the few survivors, Dina Mironovna Pronicheva, a young mother who was an actress with the Kiev Children’s Theater, saw it that day:

It was very narrow—some four or five feet across. The soldiers were lined up shoulder to shoulder with their sleeves rolled up, each of them brandishing a truncheon or a club.

Blows rained down on the people as they passed through.

There was no question of being able to dodge or get away. Brutal blows, immediately drawing blood, descended on their heads, backs and shoulders from left and right. The soldiers kept shouting: “ Schnell, schnell!”
³³
laughing happily, as if they were watching a circus act. . . .

Everybody started shouting and the women began to scream. It was like a scene in a film; for one brief moment Dina caught sight of a young man she knew from her street, an intelligent, well-dressed boy, sobbing his eyes out.

She saw people falling to the ground. The dogs were immediately set on them. One man managed to pick himself up with a shout, but others remained on the ground while people pressed forward behind them and the crowd carried on, walking on the bodies and trampling them into the ground.

From this funnel into hell they debouched into an open field cordoned by Ukrainian militia — “not local people but from the western Ukraine,” says Kuznetsov — piled with separated clothing. The militiamen rushed them. “Get your clothes off! Now! Hurry!” Brutally they ripped the clothes off anyone who hesitated, and kicked and beat them with brass knuckles or clubs. A truck driver named Höfer who was loading clothes saw the disrobing process. “I don’t think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked,” he testified. “Most people put up a fight when they had to undress and there was a lot of screaming and shouting.” Kuznetsov thinks “all this was obviously being done so that the great mass of people should not come to their senses. There were many naked people covered in blood.”

Beyond the disrobing area, Babi Yar dropped down steeply from the plateau of the green field to the sandy bed of the stream that had eroded the ravine. The Germans had cut entrances into the
yar
side canyons so the victims could descend toward the central channel, which was as wide as a two-lane road. Höfer, the truck driver, describes the killing process, an elaboration of Jeckeln’s
Sardinenpackung:

Once undressed, the Jews were led into [Babi Yar]. Two or three narrow entrances led to this ravine through which the Jews were channeled. When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei
³⁴
and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. This all happened very quickly.

The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun at the spot where he was lying. When the Jews reached the ravine they were so shocked by the horrifying scene that they completely lost their will. It may even have been that the Jews themselves lay down in rows to wait to be shot. . . .

The moment one Jew had been killed, the marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him. It went on this way uninterruptedly, with no distinction being made between men, women and children. The children were kept with their mothers and shot with them.

I only saw this scene briefly. When I got to the bottom of the ravine I was so shocked by the terrible sight that I could not bear to look for long. In the hollow I saw that there were already three rows of bodies lined up over a distance of about two hundred feet. How many layers of bodies there were on top of each other I could not see. I was so astonished and dazed by the sight of the twitching blood-smeared bodies that I could not properly register the details. . . . There was a “packer” at either entrance to the ravine. These “packers” were Schutzpolizisten whose job it was to lay the victim on top of the other corpses so that all the marksman had to do as he passed was fire a shot.

When the victims came along the paths to the ravine and at the last moment saw the terrible scene they cried out in terror. But at the very next moment they were already being knocked over by the “packers” and being made to lie down with the others. The next group of people could not see this terrible scene because it took place round a corner.

Höfer saw only two “marksmen” working. The level of bodies and piles of clothes suggest that he saw a late stage of the massacre. Kurt Werner, a member of Sonderkommando 4a, worked the killing floor on the first morning, even before the entrance paths had been cut, and more accurately testifies to the killing system Blobel had organized:

As soon as I arrived at the execution area I was sent down to the bottom of the ravine with some of the other men. It was not long before the first Jews were brought to us over the side of the ravine. The Jews had to lie face down on the earth by the ravine walls. There were three groups of marksmen down at the bottom of the ravine, each made up of about twelve men. Groups of Jews were sent down to each of these execution squads simultaneously. Each successive group of Jews had to lie down on top of the bodies of those that had already been shot. The marksmen stood behind the Jews and killed them with a Genickschüss. I still recall today the complete terror of the Jews when they first caught sight of the bodies as they reached the top edge of the ravine. Many Jews cried out in terror. It’s almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there. It was horrible. . . .

I had to spend the whole morning down in the ravine. For some of the time I had to shoot continuously. Then I was given the job of loading submachine-gun magazines with ammunition. While I was doing that, other comrades were assigned to shooting duty. Towards midday we were called away from the ravine and in the afternoon I, with some of the others up at the top, had to lead the Jews to the ravine. While we were doing this there were other men shooting down in the ravine. The Jews were led by us up to the edge of the ravine and from there they walked down the slope on their own.

When Dina Pronicheva, whose husband was Russian, had reached the disrobing area and realized what was happening at Babi Yar she had shredded her identity card and told a Ukrainian militiaman she had been caught up by accident while seeing someone off. Her Russian name on her other papers convinced the man — she “didn’t look at all Jewish,” Kuznetsov says ironically or innocently—and the militiaman had moved her aside to wait among a small group of similar unfortunates. They waited all day, watching the bloodied, panicked people emerge from the gauntlet, undress and disappear into the
yar.
Pronicheva especially noticed what the Germans did when mothers tried to hold back with their children: grab the child, drag it screaming to the bluff and throw it over the edge.