The massacre On 19 September 1941, the German Wehrmacht captured the encircled city of Kyiv, which at the time was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR. Directly after the start of the occupation the Sonderkommando 4a of the security police task force and of the security service of the Reichsfuehrers SS began to comb the city. During the first days of the occupation 1600 Jewish men and women were murdered along with Roma and members of the Red Army. The Germans conducted the shootings in a sandy area on the north-western periphery of the city, known in Ukrainian Babyn Yar (Women's Ravine). The narrow, deeply incised, and branching erosion gorges offered the perpetrators ideal conditions for the massacres on 29 and 30 September 1941, as they made it unnecessary to dig mass graves. By telling the Jewish population still in the city - women, children and old men, the able-bodied men had been drafted by the Red Army - that they were going to be resettled, the occupiers were able to move them to Babyn Yar. In the space of two days with the help of members of the Wehrmacht, police units and Ukrainian assistants the SS murdered a total of 33,771 people, the number was precisely and zealously reported to Berlin; this was the biggest single massacre during the Second World War. The commanders then had the edges of the slope blown up to cover the dead but continued to use Babyn Yar as a place of execution. Historians disagree about the number of further victims; the figure varies between 35,000 and 100,000. To cover up their deeds before they withdrew from the East, in August 1943 the Germans ordered concentration camp prisoners to exhume the corpses, which were then burned on railway sleepers that had been soaked with petrol. The last victims were those who were forced to conduct this work.
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