Did the Nazis have a chance to leave Babi Yar?

Question

I vaguely recall learning in a German history class that the commanding officer at Babi Yar told his men that if they weren't comfortable killing women and children, they could be dismissed with absolutely no penalties. Not a single person left. Is this true? Is there a source for this?

Answer 1

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine situated just outside the city of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine.

Where the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen: Special Task Forces (mobile killing units) were hard core paramilitary units killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Non Jew's in the name of the racial or political cleansing.

"Yes" they were ask the question; if they were comfortable killing men, women, and children as it was a volunteer group. Most said yes out of hatred of Jews, while a small number did it out of fear of being rebutted.

But 15 people escaped and survived!

To this day unfortunately there are people whom do not believe it happened, But it did.

You can Yahoo or Google search: Babi Yar or Einsatzgruppen the amounts of site you will see is staggering.

Here are some links that might help!

Answer 2

Goldhagen wrote a book called 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' in which he made claims about soldiers being offered the option of killing civilians or not and very few, if any refused the duty.

Brown and others, in books such as 'Willing Executioners' point out the conditions under which soldiers serve and that in any war, it is difficult to identify points where they refuse 'requests' which are in fact orders.

This is not an attempt to excuse the actions of the soldiers but points out that in war, for a soldier, everything is in fact an order, not a request. The UN War Crimes Tribunal ruled, after the war, that there was still a duty of conscience for a soldier and that all civilians were non-combatants and should not be killed or ill treated by soldiers.

Of course, the casualty rates amongst civilians since 1945 shows that this has had no effect. One need only view a news program on how a nation is 'fighting terrorists, insurgents, social misfits' to see how these arguments affect our judgement today.

Answer 3

Christopher Browning wrote about an incident in which an officer explicitly told his men they could refuse to take part in the killing in his book Ordinary Men and Daniel Goldhagen wrote about the same case in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, and they have a source for this which is cited in the books. You can read about it and look it up in one of the books if you're really interested. But as far as I remember the incident described in these books was not related to Babi Yar, but other massacres. There were many of them, in every town and village in the Soviet Union where Jews lived and which was conquered by the German army. The one in Babi Yar was a very big one where about 34 000 people were killed in two days, but altogether about a million Jews in the Soviet Union were killed in this way in many different places.

The ones who executed these massacres were mostly not German soldiers, but SS men and policemen. As far as I know soldiers or SS men were not allowed to refuse any orders and in fact many soldiers were killed for disobediance, but we know that the policemen could refuse to take part in the killings and were not punished. I have heard that also from other sources than Browning and Goldhagen. There is a book written by a German social psychologist (Harald Welzer) about these police bataillons, it's in German and the translation of the title would be "Perpetrators - How ordinary people become mass murderers", unfortunately it's not available in English. I once took part in a seminar led by one of his PhD students and we read protocols from trials in Germany in the 1960s in which these men were under examination in court. I remember one in which a man said that after shooting 100 Jews, he stopped because of the blood of his victims that bespattered his face and "the penetrant smell of blood" that made him feel nauseous. So he left the ditch in which the mass murder took place and regurgitated. His superior called him a coward, but that was the only consequence and when he was asked if he had to shoot Jews again after this he said: "No, because I failed the first time." I was really shocked to read all this, how he showed no moral remorse but only physical disgust and how he called it a "failure" not to be able to proceed with the mass murder.
The woman who led the seminar writes her PhD thesis about this and read really a lot of these protocols and studied all this a lot and she said that we know that most of the policemen knew they could refuse to kill without any negative consequences for them and that still only very few refused it and these ones were not punished. We don't know a single case that a policeman was punished for refusing to kill Jews.

Answer 4

This sort of thing caused stress among some of the soldiers and it was one of the main reason that the Nazis industrialised the process by building extermination camps.

Answer 5

im not sure if it is true but it is really mean that they didnt leave