Starting in September of 1941, the Nazis marched tens of thousands of Jews to the edge of the Babyn Yar Ravine in Ukraine. There they stripped the townspeople, shot and pushed them in.

Babyn Yar is the name of a ravine in the northwestern section of Kyiv. A. Anatoli described the ravine as "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."


Once the Jews were lined up, the Nazis used a machine-gun to shoot them. When shot, they fell into the ravine. Then the next were brought along the edge and shot. According to the Einsatzgruppe Operational Situation Report No. 101, 33,771 Jews were killed at Babyn Yar on September 29 and 30.

But this was not the end of the killing at Babyn Yar. The Nazis next rounded up Gypsies and killed them. Patients of the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were gassed and then dumped into the ravine. Soviet prisoners of war were brought to the ravine and shot. Thousands of other civilians were killed at Babyn Yar for trivial reasons, such as a mass shooting in retaliation for just one or two people breaking a Nazi order. The killing continued for months. It is estimated that possibly up to 100,000 people were murdered there.

The Babyn Yar massacre is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust."