80 years after Babyn Yar, lawyer seeks trial for last perpetrator

• Author: CNAAN LIPHSHIZ/JTA
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

For two days at the end of September 1941, Ukrainian collaborators brought more than 33,000 Jews to the hills of Kyiv's Babyn Yar ravine, where soldiers in Adolf Hitler's army executed group after group of defenseless victims — children, as well as women and men of all ages.

The victims were shot with machine guns into pits. After none remained standing, the perpetrators would jump into the pit with their victims to finish off the dying and those pretending to be dead. Then the bodies were buried and a new group of victims brought to stand atop the fresh, thin layer of earth covering their brethren.

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The 80th anniversary of the massacre, the first mass shooting in what is known today as the "Holocaust of bullets," is eliciting a wave of commemorations, including a ceremony in Israel to honor a survivor and a memorial coin in Ukraine, where Nazi collaborators are increasingly being celebrated alongside their victims.

It is also reinvigorating a German lawyer's mission to bring to justice a man he says may be the last Babyn Yar perpetrator alive, a 99-year-old German man named Herbert Waller.

For Hans Brehm and his partners, the attempt to indict Waller is a symbolic, last-ditch effort to correct decades of what they see as inaction by German authorities against almost all the people responsible for the largest single pogrom of Jews during the entire Holocaust. Of an estimated 700 participants, only 10 have ever been convicted of a crime.

Last week, Brehm traveled to Kyiv to speak with relatives of victims of Babi Yar victims. That's because under German law, parties affected by major crimes may initiate criminal proceedings against defendants even if prosecutors decide not to indict.

"I want to have the man dragged in front of a judge," Brehm told Der Spiegel this week. He is aware there is little chance of the court punishing such an elderly defendant, he said. Brehm said he only wants to see Waller indicted, and if found guilty convicted.

"This is about atonement, about late justice," Brehm said.

Waller's name in 2014 was first flagged to Germany's Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in a list of 80 names given to them by Efraim Zuroff, the famed "Nazi hunter" of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The men were members of the Einsatzgruppen: German army death...