There aren’t many sources in English on this atrocity, so this is going to be a short post today.

Quoting Prit Buttar’s Retribution: The Soviet Reconquest of Central Ukraine, 1943, page 200:

In an attempt to speed up the process the commander of the SS group, Standartenführer Paul Blobel, made use of modified vans. Up to 50 people at a time were loaded into the vans, which then drove slowly around Kharkov; the exhaust fumes were channelled back into the vans, killing those in the cargo compartment through a mixture of carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation.

Most of the dead were dumped in Drobytsky Yar; in an attempt to save ammunition, the SS frequently threw children into the ravine whilst still alive, calculating that the winter cold and starvation would kill them. Anastasia Zakharovna Osmachlo, a non‐Jewish Ukrainian woman, witnessed the massacre and was inadvertently caught up in the killings:

When I learned of the murder of Soviet citizens […] I went to see what was happening there together with my son Vladimir, aged 12, and another 11 people from the village. In the valley [Drobytsky Yar] we discovered a pit several tens of metres long, ten metres wide and several metres deep. Many bodies of those who had been shot were piled up in the pit. When we had looked at the bodies we decided to go home.

But we had not yet had time to leave the valley when three trucks arrived carrying [Axis] soldiers. The soldiers stopped us. They took us to the pit and one of them began to shoot at us with a machine‐gun. When my son fell I fainted and fell into the pit. When I recovered I found myself lying on dead bodies. Later I heard the cries of women and children whom the [Fascists] were bringing to the pit and shooting. The bodies of those who were shot fell into the pit where I lay.

I was in the pit from morning until 4 or 5pm and saw how, throughout the day, the [anticommunists] kept bringing groups of people to the pit and killing them. Before my eyes several thousand people were shot. Were they Jews? […] When the [anticommunists] had finished the slaughter they left the place. From among the corpses groans and cries went up from the living wounded. About half an hour after the [Axis] soldiers had left the place I crawled out of the pit and ran home. My son and the other people who had come with me from the village had been shot.²⁹

By early 1942, it is estimated that there were over 30,000 corpses in the ravine and the ‘ghetto’ that had been established near the tractor factory had ceased to exist by the middle of January.³⁰

(Emphasis added.)

The Axis, or specifically SS‐Sonderkommando 4a (a unit of Einsatzgruppe C) along with Orp Battalion 314, exterminated at least twelve thousand Kharkiv Jews from December to January, though the actual number might have been as high as twenty‐three thousand. The remainder were gentiles (who were possibly trying to help Jews).

Feel free to have a moment of silence for the thousands of victims… and, if you have the resources to spare, make a donation to Gazans on their behalf. Do it for them, and the people of Palestine.