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This is a 1944 file photo of a part of the Babi Yar ravine at the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine where the advancing Red Army unearthed the bodies of 14,000 civilians killed by fleeing Nazis
© AP Photo
"We walked into Kiev with the first Soviet units. The city was still ablaze…. We arrived at Babyn Yar and froze. Huge deep ditches…. We saw the unfathomable: like a geological deposit of death - between the layers of earth, a compressed monolith of human remains…. I have not seen anything more horrific in the entire war. Then there was Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald…. But the most terrible, incomprehensible was there, in Babyn Yar”. So reads one of the first testimonies given by Boris Polevoi, a frontline correspondent for Pravda and a participant in the Nuremberg Trials. For the first time, the figure of 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar was publicly announced at Nuremberg. It was quoted by Lev Smirnov, assistant to the chief prosecutor for the USSR, on the basis of the acts of the Extraordinary State Commission, which investigated Nazi crimes in all the liberated territories.
What is there to forgive? In Babyn Yar, they shot the mentally ill, communists, sailors, Kiev factory workers and members of Dynamo Kiev football club. They slaughtered the inhabitants of five Roma camps. But the main objective was to exterminate all the Jews accused of blowing up and setting fire to the city. They were ordered to gather on 29 September at 8am on the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivska streets, carrying their documents, valuables and warm clothes. The rumour was that they would be evacuated. If they refused to come, they would be shot. Those who had gathered were driven to the ravine.