On February 24 of last year, the first day of the war in Ukraine, ABC recounted the long night of bombing that took place in Kiev, with thousands of residential buildings damaged and serious damage to infrastructure. Also the intense hand-to-hand combat that took place in the streets of the capital, with intense shootings in the vicinity of the buildings of the Ukrainian Presidency, the Government and the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament). The invasion ordered that day by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was experienced as a nightmare among the Ukrainians, which must have reminded the elderly of those days in September 1941 when Hitler’s troops entered the city to destroy everything.
It is curious, because the same day that Russia began its invasion a year ago, the Government of Ukraine published in your Twitter account an image that quickly went viral. It was a cartoon illustration in which Hitler appeared caressing Putin with the following message: “This is not a meme, but ours and your reality right now.” But what happened that day, within the tragedy, was far from what happened on September 16, 1941, where a disastrous record was broken that has never been surpassed: Hitler took 660,000 Soviet prisoners in a single day, the number highest in all of World War II.
Jesús Hernández recounts in ‘That was not in my book on World War II’ (Almuzara, 2018) that Hitler had failed in his attempt to subdue the British and that, at the end of 1940, he focused his attention on what he considered his real enemy: the Soviet Union. The time had come to face what would be the great duel of the Second World War, with which the Nazi dictation wanted to fulfill its dream of turning Germany into a continental empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals. On March 30, 1931, he announced to his generals his intention to attack the communist giant, in an operation that he called Barbarossa and which began on June 22, when the telephone at the Leningrad military district headquarters rang in the middle of the night. early morning.
It was not normal for Moscow to request an “urgent” meeting with the head of the city at that time, so it was obvious that something serious was happening. Signal operator Mikhail Neishtadt alerted the chief of staff, who arrived forty minutes later in a foul mood. “I hope it’s important,” he growled, and he handed him a telegram: “German troops have crossed the border of the Soviet Union.” “It was like a nightmare. We wanted to wake up and everything would be back to normal,” he said, who soon realized that this was not a dream, but a colossal assault of three million soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks and planes that were already advancing for a 2,500 km front from the Black Sea to the Baltic.
Target: Kiev
As explained by Michael Jones in ‘The siege of Leningrad: 1941-1944’ (Criticism, 2016), the operation planned a triple assault: Army Center Group would conquer Minsk, Smolensk and Moscow; the Northern Group would break through the Baltic region and take Leningrad, while the Southern Group would attack the Ukraine bound for kyiv. The latter was under the command of Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who traversed Poland, passed Lviv and reached the Donbass basin and Odesa in September after a series of landslide victories. Erich von Manstein was the one who managed to conquer this last port city after a hard siege.
The offensive on Ukraine turned out to be a succession of defeats for the Soviet Army that led to the final fall of kyiv on September 26, 1941, when the last defenders surrendered. By mid-August, Stalin had amassed around the city nearly 700,000 soldiers, a thousand tanks, and more than three thousand guns. Several of his generals warned him, albeit fearfully, that the troops might be surrounded by the Germans. The only one who showed some forcefulness was Gueorgui Zhukov, who was replaced after the Soviet dictator gave the order not to back down.
At first, the armored vehicles of the Third Reich cornered the defenders to the south and north of the city. To do this, they had the support of Group II of Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Division, which covered 200 kilometers at full speed with its tanks to help in the pincers on the 23rd of the same month. On September 5, Stalin realized his mistake and allowed the withdrawal, but it was too late to flee. The vast majority of the 700,000 Soviet soldiers did not have time to flee. Little by little, the encirclement closed, until on the 16th when Group II of Guderian’s Division managed to contact Group I.
The Babi Yar massacre by the Nazis killed 33,000 Jews in kyiv
the unfortunate record
According to the diary of Hans Roth, a soldier of the 299th Battalion of the German Sixth Army Infantry Division, the heaviest fighting occurred between 17 and 19 September. The Russians defended themselves with Molotov cocktails, the famous Katyusha rockets, and even bomb dogs, as well as leaving mines all over the city. Stalin’s tactic, however, turned out to be suicidal, since most of his soldiers were bagged and imprisoned after the fall of the city on the 26th when the last defenders surrendered. That same day, in just 24 hours, 660,000 soldiers were arrested by the Nazi Army, breaking the unfortunate record for the highest number of prisoners taken in a single day since World War II.
The worst, however, was yet to come. On the 28th, the Nazis distributed leaflets throughout the capital warning: “All Jews residing in and around Kiev must report to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov streets tomorrow, Monday, at eight o’clock in the morning. They must carry their documents, money, valuables and also warm clothes. Any Jew who does not comply with these instructions and is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian who enters the properties evacuated by the Jews and steals his belongings will be shot.”
The next day the executions of all of them began, whether they were Russians or Ukrainians. The Nazis had no time to lose and these occurred at breakneck speed. As they arrived, the guards led them to the exact point where they were going to be killed. First, they were ordered to undress in order to confiscate their clothes and check that they were not carrying money or other valuables. Once at the edge of the ravine, with music at full volume and a plane flying overhead to hide the screams, they were shot in the head.
Ukrainian Jews digging their own graves in Storow, Ukraine. July 4, 1941
Babi Yar
Grossman wrote in his book that the famous Babi Yar massacre, as it is known because of the ravine in which it took place on the outskirts of Kiev, was the coming-out of genocide by bullets, which was later expanded. with the use of gas. In this sense, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen, the group of roving execution squads made up of members of the SS, many of whom did their duty drunk, were key. In just 48 hours, German soldiers killed 33,771 Jews who, until the last moment, held out the hope that they would be deported.
The youngest victim the Ukrainian Babi Yar Memorial Center was able to identify was a two-day-old baby. In his book ‘A Document in the Form of a Novel’, published in 1966, Anatoly Kuznetsov recalls the testimony of a Jewish woman who was able to escape: «She looked down and felt dizzy. She had the feeling of being very high. Beneath her was a sea of bodies covered in blood.