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The record · Battle of Kursk, 1943
Sonderkommando 1005
Sonderkommando 1005 was not a fighting unit. Its task was to make the victims of the Einsatzgruppen disappear. It appears in this collection because it came to the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev five weeks after Operation Citadel was called off, and because the prisoners it forced to do the work escaped and told what had been done.
Illustration A neutral marker made for this site, not a unit emblem.
Babi Yar, 29–30 September 1941
German troops entered Kiev on 19 September 1941. On the 24th, mines and charges left by the retreating Soviet NKVD began to destroy the buildings on the Khreshchatyk, the main street, where the occupiers had set up their offices. On 26 September the military governor, Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln and Otto Rasch of Einsatzgruppe C agreed to kill the Jews of Kiev, using the explosions as a pretext. Notices in Russian, Ukrainian and German ordered all Jews of the city to assemble on the morning of 29 September near the cemeteries on its northwestern edge, with documents, money and warm clothing. Many believed they were to be resettled (USHMM; Rhodes).
From the assembly point the columns were led to the ravine of Babi Yar, made to give up their belongings and clothing, and taken in groups to the edge, where they were shot. The shooting was done by men of Sonderkommando 4a under Paul Blobel and of Police Battalion 45, with Police Battalion 303 guarding the perimeter, a company of a Waffen-SS special-duties battalion and a platoon of Police Battalion 9 in support, Ukrainian auxiliary police in the roundup and cordon, and the army providing logistics. Einsatzgruppe C’s own count, in Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101, was 33,771 Jews killed in two days (Chapter 8).
The ravine remained a killing site until 1943. Jews found in hiding, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, Communist officials, Ukrainian nationalists who fell foul of the Germans, among them the poet Olena Teliha in February 1942, hostages and prisoners of the nearby Syrets camp were killed and buried there. Estimates of all the victims at Babi Yar range from about 100,000 to 150,000. Because most of the bodies were later burned, the exact number can never be known (USHMM; Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center).
A witness from the ravine
Dina Pronicheva was a Jewish actress at the Kiev Puppet Theater, married to a non-Jewish husband, with two small children, when the order of 29 September came. She went with her parents to the assembly point. At the ravine, by her own later testimony, she told a Ukrainian policeman that she was not Jewish and was set aside; when the shooting reached her group, she threw herself into the ravine before she was hit, lay among the dead and dying while the killers walked over the bodies and covered them with earth, and after dark dug herself out and climbed the side. She told the story several times over three decades, and accounts of the details differ (Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center; Kuznetsov).
She survived the occupation in hiding. On 24 January 1946 she was the only Babi Yar survivor to testify at the Kiev trial of 15 German police officials, 12 of whom were hanged in the city on 29 January. Her account became the core of Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel Babi Yar (1966), and in 1967 she was questioned again for the West German prosecutors preparing the Darmstadt trial of former members of Sonderkommando 4a. She died in Kiev in 1977 (Chapter 8).
Sonderaktion 1005
By the spring of 1942 the SS leadership knew that the mass graves of the East were evidence and could be found. In March 1942 Reinhard Heydrich chose Blobel, relieved of Sonderkommando 4a in January, to destroy the traces. After Heydrich’s assassination Blobel’s orders came from Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo; the operation was so secret that most of its orders were given orally. At the Chełmno death camp in 1942 Blobel experimented with burning bodies, first with incendiary bombs, which set the forest alight, then with pyres of corpses and wood stacked on iron rails. Bone fragments were ground in a mill and the ashes scattered or buried. From the summer of 1942 the method was used at the death camps of Operation Reinhard. In 1943, as the Red Army advanced, Blobel’s commandos turned back to the shooting sites in the occupied Soviet Union (Hilberg; Spector).
Babi Yar, August–September 1943
A detachment of Sonderkommando 1005 reached Kiev in mid-August 1943, while the Soviet offensives that followed Kursk were driving on Kharkov. About 100 Soviet prisoners of war were brought to the ravine, and on 18 or 19 August they were ordered to begin digging up the bodies. The labor force grew to about 300 prisoners from the Syrets camp, about 100 of them Jews. They were shackled in leg irons and held in a bunker dug into the side of the ravine. They dug out the bodies in layers, searched them for gold teeth and valuables, and stacked them on pyres built on iron rails and on gravestones taken from the neighboring Jewish cemetery. Each pyre held, by the account of the prisoner Efim Vilkis, about 1,500 bodies and burned for two nights and a day. Bones that did not burn were crushed; the ashes were sifted and spread over the ground. The work went on day and night for about six weeks (USHMM; Chapter 8).
The prisoners knew they would be killed when the work was done, as the labor details at other sites had been. On the night of 28–29 September 1943, almost exactly two years after the massacre, they broke out. By survivors’ accounts they had found among the possessions of the dead a key that fitted their leg irons and had prepared for weeks. Most were shot down by the guards as they ran. About 15 escaped and survived to reach the Red Army or to hide until Kiev was liberated on 6 November. Among the names in the record are Vladimir Davydov, Yakov Kaper, Leonid Kadomsky and Fyodor Yershov; accounts differ on some details, including the number of prisoners and of survivors.
After Babi Yar the commandos worked through the killing sites of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Poland, among them Ponary near Vilnius, the Ninth Fort at Kaunas and the Janowska camp at Lviv, until the Red Army overran the last of them in 1944. They did not succeed. Escapes from the labor details at Lviv in November 1943 and at Ponary in April 1944 brought out more witnesses, and the Germans were driven out of most regions before the work was done (Spector; Hilberg).
The evidence
In November 1943, soon after the liberation of Kiev, Soviet authorities took Western correspondents to Babi Yar. Bill Downs of CBS and Newsweek interviewed Vilkis about the exhumations and reported his account; others, looking at a ravine where little could be seen but ash and disturbed earth, were cautious, and the New York Times stressed that the correspondents could not verify the Soviet claims (Lipstadt). Without bodies, the testimony of the escaped prisoners and the people of the district was the evidence. It was confirmed when the killers’ own records were found.
In the spring of 1946 a team working in Berlin for Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, the U.S. chief of counsel for the later Nuremberg trials, found a nearly complete set of the Einsatzgruppen’s Operational Situation Reports in Gestapo files. The investigator who saw what they were and added up the numbers was Benjamin Ferencz, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had begun his Army service as a typist at Camp Davis, North Carolina. He offered to prosecute the case himself.
Judgment at Nuremberg
United States v. Otto Ohlendorf et al., the Einsatzgruppen case, opened before Military Tribunal II-A on 29 September 1947, six years to the day after the first shootings at Babi Yar. Ferencz, 27 years old and in his first case, rested the prosecution in two days. He called no witnesses; the documents were enough. Blobel disputed the figures reported for his commando, though his own affidavit admitted 10,000 to 15,000 killings. The tribunal rejected the defense of superior orders, finding that no defendant had shown he faced death for refusing (Trials of War Criminals, vol. IV; Earl).
It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.
On 8–9 April 1948 the tribunal found all 22 remaining defendants guilty, and on 10 April it sentenced 14 to death, Blobel among them. In January 1951 the U.S. High Commissioner, John J. McCloy, confirmed four death sentences and commuted the rest. Blobel, Ohlendorf, Werner Braune and Erich Naumann were hanged at Landsberg prison shortly after midnight on 7 June 1951. By 1958 all the other convicted men had been released. Ferencz spent the rest of his life working for an international criminal court and died in 2023, aged 103, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor (Chapter 8).
Timeline
- Babi Yar: Sonderkommando 4a and police battalions shoot 33,771 Jews of Kiev.
- Heydrich chooses Paul Blobel to destroy the traces of the mass shootings.
- Prisoners at Babi Yar are forced to begin exhuming and burning the bodies.
- A Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft photographs the ravine.
- The prisoners break out; about 15 survive.
- Kiev is liberated; Western correspondents visit the ravine that month.
- Dina Pronicheva testifies at the Kiev trial of 15 German police officials.
- Benjamin Ferencz opens the Einsatzgruppen case at Nuremberg.
- Fourteen defendants, Blobel among them, are sentenced to death.
- Blobel, Ohlendorf, Braune and Naumann are hanged at Landsberg.
Witnesses and the court
Read the full story
- Chapter 8: Behind the Front: The Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Occupied East
- Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory of Kursk
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The record of Sonderkommando 1005 by the numbers
The prisoners of the ravine, 1943
The labor force Sonderkommando 1005 held at Babi Yar, August–September 1943. Approximate figures from survivors’ accounts, which differ on some details
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia; Chapter 8
Judgment
What became of the accused in two of the trials for the crimes at Babi Yar and the shootings in the East
Source: Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, vol. IV (1950); Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial (2009); Chapter 8
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, vol. IV, “The Einsatzgruppen Case” (1950), including Ferencz’s opening statement of 29 September 1947 and the judgment of 8–9 April 1948; Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 (Cambridge, 2009).
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia articles on Kiev and Babi Yar, the Einsatzgruppen and Aktion 1005; USHMM photo archives (aerial photograph of 26 September 1943).
- Shmuel Spector, “Aktion 1005: Effacing the Murder of Millions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5 (1990); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (2003); Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death (2002).
- Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv; Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (uncensored edition, 1970).
- Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (1986).
- Wikipedia, “Babi Yar,” “Dina Pronicheva,” “Syrets concentration camp” (citing survivor Efim Vilkis), “Sonderaktion 1005,” “Paul Blobel,” “Einsatzgruppen trial” and “Ben Ferencz,” as used in Chapter 8 of this collection.