Kiev – Pavlov Hospital

On September 19, 1941, the Germans occupied Kiev and, according to Nazi racial ideology, mentally and physically handicapped people wasn’t worth life. In mid-October 1941, Nazi killing units murdered about 300 Jewish patients from the hospital’s psychiatry department. The bodies were buried near Babi Yar, where the much larger and more famous murder of Kiev’s Jewish population had taken place about two weeks earlier. In addition to Jewish patients, there were also other patients spared initially, and these sought the hospital’s doctors to protect by either discharged them or moving them to other hospitals. On three occasions in 1942, another 500 patients were murdered. These were murdered in gas wagons, trucks with a hermetically sealed cargo space in which the truck’s engine exhaust was led in through a hose. More than 800 patients were killed in the hospital.