Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426802
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Babi Yar

Kiev fell on 19 September 1941.

“Hold it at all costs,” Stalin had ordered Budënny. The dull-witted marshal had positioned more than a half million men in trenches and dugouts in its suburbs to defend it. But the Luftwaffe had dominated the air, and the Wehrmacht had beaten its way past Uman, wheeled von Kleist’s Panzergruppe around from the south, wheeled Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe down from the north and encircled the city on its bluff above the Dnieper with a deadly ring of steel. Bombs and artillery barrages had destroyed its suburbs. “The whole horizon had been lit up by flashes and fire,” twelve-year-old Anatoli Kuznetsov saw from his family’s house on the western outskirts of the city. Then silence had replaced the din of cannons and air-raid sirens and the boy had noticed “the men of the Red Army in their faded khaki uniforms . . . running in twos and threes through the courtyards and across the back gardens.” The Wehrmacht took Kiev itself largely intact, a city twelve centuries old graced with Parisian boulevards and gilded onion-domed churches, luxurious with chestnut and linden trees glowing yellow in the gathering autumn.

Truckloads of German troops rolled into the city, columns of soldiers riding bicycles, teams of bay draft horses pulling artillery. Officers lounged at ease in open motorcars. The Germans dragooned men and women to clear away the barricades that blocked the broad avenues. They moved into the offices and hotels along the Kreshchatik, Kiev’s fashionable main street, formed out of one of the many wide ravines, or yars, that centuries of runoff had cut down through the right bank of the Dnieper. Since the departing NKVD had blown up the power stations and water treatment plant, the Germans parked generator sets along the Kreshchatik for electricity and brought up tanker trucks filled with water from the river.

The first building to explode, on 20 September 1941, was the citadel where the Wehrmacht artillery staff was quartered. The artillery commanding general and his chief of staff were killed in the explosion. The Germans thought a delayed-action fuse had set off the explosives, but four days later the headquarters of the Wehrmacht field commander at the corner of Kreshchatik and Proreznaya exploded with such force that windows were blown out blocks away. The explosion set the building afire. As the Germans were seizing and beating anyone they happened to find in the vicinity, a second large explosion reduced the structure to rubble and dusted the Kreshchatik white. A third explosion blew up the offices across the street and started panic.

Explosions up and down the Kreshchatik continued throughout the night and intermittently for several days. The Soviets had stored crates of Molotov cocktails in the upper stories of buildings to defend the city and left them behind when they abandoned it; the explosions shattered the glass bottles and spilled jellied gasoline across the floors that ignited and poured down stairwells to fuel raging fires. “The Germans cordoned off the whole of the center of the city,” Kuznetsov remembers.

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