Object 5 depicts one of the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi Regime during their reign, the Babi Yar massacre. When the German army would capture vast amounts of land such as in the 1941 German Offensives into the Soviet Union, the S.S. would often not have the time or resources to organize every Jew in a major city and prepare them for deportation, thus they would resort to other means to enact their final solution. Thus in 1941 Kiev, the S.S. had tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews walk a short distance out of the city to a shallow ravine dubbed Babi Yar. They then forced them to unknowingly dig their own graves by expanding the ravine, before executing them on the spot, allowing their bodies to fill the ravine. Over the course of two days, over 34,000 [5] Ukrainian Jews were murdered and left to rot in the ravine, one of the most appalling displays of a lack of humanity in history. Jews and Slavs were the primary targets of  Nazi ideology, despite having done nothing to provoke such insanity, and if one happened to share both of these identities, a future under Nazi Germany was grim.

​

​

​

​

[5] “Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1939.” yadvashem.org. Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, n.d. Accessed September 25, 2020. https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/nazi-germany-1933-39.html.