September 29, 1941

Babi Yar

German forces begin the two-day mass murder of Kyiv's Jews at Babyn Yar

The posted notice told families to bring documents, money, valuables and clothing — the look of a resettlement, funnelling them toward a ravine.

29 September 1941: assemble with your documents

On 29 September 1941, Jewish men, women, children, elderly people and sick people obeyed posted orders to assemble near Kyiv's cemeteries with documents, money, valuables and clothing, under threat of execution for noncompliance. Two thousand wall posters had been prepared for the roundup.

German military police and Order Police directed the column toward Babyn Yar, confiscated belongings, drove victims through a gauntlet and forced them to undress before they reached the ravine.

The operation began on the eve of Yom Kippur.

In the ravine, and then overnight

Sonderkommando 4a under Paul Blobel, Einsatzgruppe C personnel and units of German Police Regiment South shot the victims in groups inside the ravine. People were made to lie on bodies before being shot, and the dead and wounded were covered with soil and other material.

When darkness fell, Jews not yet shot were confined in garages overnight. The killing resumed on 30 September.

The number the killers reported to Berlin

A contemporary Einsatzgruppen report recorded that Sonderkommando 4a, the Einsatzgruppe staff and two Police Regiment South commands killed 33,771 Jews on 29–30 September. Ammunition supplied shortly beforehand included 5,000 pistol or rifle rounds and as many as 100,000 machine-gun rounds.

This was not spontaneous retaliation for the Soviet-planted explosions and fires in occupied Kyiv. German authorities used those as a pretext and convened SS, police and Wehrmacht officials — including the city's military governor, Kurt Eberhard — to organise the killing.

Local auxiliaries helped post notices, guard and route people and handle stolen property, but scholarship cautions that the identities and precise functions of Ukrainian-speaking personnel at the ravine are not fully established.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The event began September 29 and continued through September 30; the ISO date records its first day.
The figure 33,771 comes from the perpetrators' contemporary report and is exceptionally well documented, but historians cannot independently identify every victim or establish a perfectly exact count.
German SS and Order Police units carried out the shootings. Local auxiliaries undeniably supported the roundup and aftermath, but scholarship cautions that the identities and precise functions of Ukrainian-speaking personnel at the ravine are not fully established; some may have been Ukraine-born ethnic Germans.