The massacre at Babi Yar unfolded in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, when Nazi Germany launched its vast assault on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Following the Wehrmacht were the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS death squads tasked explicitly with eliminating Jews, political commissars, Roma, and others deemed enemies of the Reich. Their operations marked a decisive escalation in the transition from persecution to systematic mass murder. After German forces captured Kyiv on September 19, 1941, tensi