On this day: the Babi Yar massacre - The Jewish Chronicle

At an event to mark the 65th anniversary of the massacre, a speaker said that at Babi Yar the seeds of the Holocaust were sown.

The German army entered Kiev on September 19. At the time, the Jewish population of the city numbered 160,000; by the time the Germans invaded many had already fled.

Over just a few days, 33,000 Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi’s mobile killing squads. Men, women and children were taken from the ghetto to a ravine near the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, forced to strip and then systematically executed by machine gun. Bodies were buried, alive or dead, under dirt and mud.

The horrors of Babi Yar did not end there. The Nazis continued to use the site as a killing field for three more years, bringing groups of Jews and non-Jews there to be shot. Overall, an estimated 100,000 people were murdered at the site.