On Sunday, Mayor Michael Hancock and others will gather at Babi Yar Park, in southeast Denver. They’ll mark the 70th anniversary of one of the most horrific events of World War II: the Babi Yar Massacre. In September 1941, Nazi forces slaughtered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine near the Ukrainian city of Kiev. Many more would die in similar massacres throughout the Soviet Union before the war ended in 1945. Yet, for many years, Soviet authorities tried to suppress the memory of such atrocities. And even today, Babi Yar isn’t nearly as well known as the Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Ryan Warner talks to University of Colorado history professor David Shneer, who has written extensively about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. He’s the keynote speaker at Sunday’s Babi Yar memorial.
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