Status: 10/6/2021 3:22 a.m.
80 years ago, SS units shot and killed more than 33,000 Jews in a ravine near Kiev in less than 36 hours. Today Federal President Steinmeier will commemorate the victims in Ukraine. Meanwhile there is a dispute over a museum.
When talking about the Holocaust, explains Ruslan Kawatsjuk from the Babyn Yar Memorial Center, most people would think of concentration camps. To extermination camps like Auschwitz.
Unfortunately, it is hardly known that half of the victims of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe did not die in camps, but directly at their place of residence. They were shot, like in Babyn Yar.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, the SS shot 33,771 Jews in the gorge near Kiev within 36 hours. Women, men, children, old people. Meticulously counted – and recorded in reports. A Holocaust by bullets – perfidiously disguised as resettlement. A monstrously and efficiently planned crime that few in Germany know about. One of many blind spots in German public remembrance culture.
Steinmeier wants to draw attention to the war of extermination
“Or who knows about Korjukiwka, in northern Ukraine, where within two days over 6,700 women, men and children fell victim to the largest and most brutal punitive action of the Second World War?” Asked Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in his speech on the 80th anniversary of the attack on the Soviet Union.
With his visit to Koryukivka and Babyn Yar today, he wants to draw attention to the inhumane war of extermination of the Germans in the East, which can hardly be put into words. To the 27 million victims that the peoples of the Soviet Union had to mourn. Among them 14 million civilians. Historians estimate that around 100,000 people were executed in the Babyn Yar ravine over the years: Jews, Sinti and Roma, prisoners of war, the mentally ill and priests. In order to remove the traces of the mass executions, the Nazis had the bodies excavated and cremated before they withdrew.
Prescribed forgetting
The cover-up was followed by prescribed oblivion. The Soviet leadership decided to pour mud from neighboring brickworks into the ravine to level it. To make room for the growing city. For apartment blocks and a culture and recreation park.
Today around three dozen memorials commemorate the victims of Babyn Yar. Including a seven-armed candlestick, a Roma wagon and a little girl. Monumental alongside modern art installations. Fragmented remembrance that acts like a symbol for the difficult search for a culture of remembrance.
“We have no right to forget and are not forgotten, we remember the victims. It is extremely important for Ukraine to honor all victims of this tragedy with dignity and at the highest level,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj at a conference in July stressed again.
Dispute over memorial
But the question of what is worthy and appropriate continues to be heated debates. Because a lot is based on the national self-image and has long been geopolitically charged. Which is why the construction of a long-planned museum in Babyn Yar has still not begun. A memorial that should actually have been opened on the 80th anniversary.
All of that should take a back seat tonight. The central memorial ceremony, in which President Selenskyj, Israeli President Herzog and Federal President Steinmeier take part, will focus on the essentials: the memory of the victims of monstrous crimes by German special forces and soldiers in World War II.