Babyn Yar: Germany remembers victims

2016/9/29 22:56:19

He [Gauck] told an evening ceremony marking the 75th anniversary on the outskirts of Kyiv, that Germany's then-Wehrmacht army "played the largest role in this mass murder" that caused "inexpressible suffering."


KYIV, Sep 29, 2016 (UBO) - President Joachim Gauck has visited Babyn Yar, a 1941 Nazi massacre site in Ukraine, saying generations later Germany will continue owning up to its past, Deutsche Welle reported today. More than 33,000 Jews were murdered in a ravine outside Kyiv.

 

Gauck, who is close to ending his four-year term as German head of state, made his eighth foreign trip to past sites of Nazi atrocities on Thursday by visiting the ravine where Nazi troops, including SS commandos, shot dead 33,771 Jews, including children, in just two days.

 

He told an evening ceremony marking the 75th anniversary on the outskirts of Kyiv, that Germany's then-Wehrmacht army "played the largest role in this mass murder" that caused "inexpressible suffering."

 

On September 29 and 30, 1941 - just weeks after Hitler-ruled Germany began an disastrous invasion of Stalin's Soviet Union, German troops herded Kyiv Jewish residents to the ravine where they were shot dead, row after row.

 

Just 29 people escaped execution.

 

In the past, President Gauck (pictured center, to the left of Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko ) has visited Nazi atrocity sites in Italy and Greece.

 

'Unique scene of horror'

 

At Babyn Yar victims were forced to undress and then shot dead in pits, Gauck said, adding that the "unique scene of horror" was further used by Nazi forces until 1943 to also execute Sinti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian partisans, and the medically ill.

 

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http://dw.com/p/2QkJ7

 

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