Syrets concentration camp

Syrets concentration camp
Syrets concentration camp. Barbwire fence
Also known as	Syrez or Syrezky
Location	Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine (nowadays inside the city)
Incident type	Imprisonment without due process, starvation, forced labor
Perpetrators	Erich Ehrlinger, Paul Radomski, Paul Blobel, and others
Organizations	Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, Ukrainian Auxiliary Police

Syrets concentration camp (also: Syretskij concentration camp) was a Nazi concentration camp established in 1942 in Kiev's western neighborhood of Syrets (Syretsk, Сирець ()), part of Kiev since 1799. The toponym was derived from a local small river. Some 327 inmates of the KZ Syrets (among them 100 Jews) were forced to remove all traces of mass murder at Babi Yar.

The concentration camp was established in 1942 at the former summer camp of the Kiev garrison on the northern edge of the city of Kiev, a few hundred meters from the Babi Yar ravine, which had been the scene of enormous massacres in late September 1941 and later. Syrets was intended to be a subsidiary of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. About 3,000 people were imprisoned at Syrets, guarded by Ukrainian policemen and German SS. Paul Otto Radomski was the camp commandant.

The camp was built in June 1942 at the request of Hans Schumacher, a Nazi police official (see Auschwitz Trial), which he made to his superior Erich Ehrlinger. The camp was intended to house prisoners perceived as opponents of the Nazi regime, mainly Jews. Once a person was arrested, only skilled craftsmen would survive, to be used as forced labor. All others were shot or murdered by gas van.

The prisoners (women and men) were housed in wooden barracks and in dug-outs with doors and stairs leading down from the ground level to prevent them from freezing up in winter. The inmates were underfed and many starved to death, with daily mortality of around 10–15 people. Sturmbannführer Radomski ran a terror regime in the camp with the aid of Kommandant Anton Prokupek and a company of Sotniks. For the smallest misdemeanours he imposed heavy punishments and often struck the prisoners with the whip.

In the course of the occupation, the Syrets concentration camp was set up in Babi Yar. Interned communists, Soviet POWs, and captured Soviet Partisans were murdered there. On February 18, 1943 three Dynamo Kyiv football players who took part in the Match of Death with the German Luftwaffe team were also murdered in the camp. It is estimated that about 25,000 people died in the Syrets camp.